THE HERON. 
147 
rising from the heath, guided me to the spot. The locality is at the 
sea-ward top of a bank varied by rock, greensward, and heath, and 
rising somewhat precipitously to the height of perhaps eighty feet above 
a beautifully secluded little inlet of the sea. The nests are built on 
the ground about the roots of large plants of heath, and are formed 
of pieces of light stick. Three of them are about two and a-half yards 
distant from each other. They are all perfectly accessible to any 
person walking over the ground ; but fortunately the l)irds are not 
disturbed when breeding. There is a profusion of low natural wood, 
chiefly birch and hazel, quite contiguous ; the birch twelve to fifteen 
feet high, and some alder trees of twenty feet are near at hand. A 
quarter of a mile distant is a hill side covered with indigenous trees of 
larger size ; twenty to twenty-five feet in height. Yet. this is the heron’s 
only breeding place on the eastern quarter of the island. The birds 
are said to frequent the site on stormy days throughout the year, flying 
to it when the wind blows strong upon the neighbouring shore.* 
I was told of a similar heronry in the grounds at Islay House, and 
went to see it ; but found instead, that the nests were all in trees ; 
larch, ash, &c. about twenty feet high; the nests themselves being 
from twelve to fourteen feet above the ground. There are perhaps a 
dozen of them. This heronry adjoins a small rookery, the inhabitants 
of which are often seen to attack and drive them off, the herons flying 
before them without resistance. The proximity of the breeding places 
of the two species is singular in this instance, as there is a great extent 
of continuous plantation precisely similar as to species and size of 
trees, as well as other features. The rooks are said to have commenced 
building there before the herons. This and the heronry already noticed 
are stated to be the only two breeding places of the species in Islay. 
Although it certainly is not friendship for each other that brings the 
two species together, yet in the summers of 1847 and 1848, at 
Coolmore near Cork, two pair of rooks and a pair of herons built 
* Since the preceding was written, Mr. St. John has published the following 
note : — “ 1 was told of a singular heronry situated on a lake between the Oykel and 
the inn at Altnagalcanach, where the herons breed in great numbers on the ground 
in an island on the loch .” — Tour in Sutherlandshire, vol. i, p. 15 (1849.) 
Though the heron is common everywhere in Sutherlandshire, this is the only heronry 
of which the author had heard, (p. 138.) Mr. St. John, in his former work — ‘ Wild 
Sports of the Highlands,’ describes a heronry on the high cliffs near Cromarty, 
where some of the nests are “ built in the clusters of ivy, and others on the hare 
shelves of rocks,” p. 123. 
