150 
AllDEIDiE. 
Herons are not to be trusted where j-oung fowl of any kind are 
accessible to them. One correspondent reports several young wild- 
ducks to have been killed and eaten -another mentions a young- 
heron which, though regularly well fed, killed and ate at different 
times some chickens three weeks old. This bird, about two hours 
after having fed on the entrails of a couple of fowls, attacked a 
young turkey a month old, which it endeavoured to swallow whole, but 
in vain. A servant having witnessed the assault hastened to the tur- 
key’s rescue ; in endeavouring to save which, he dislocated the neck 
of its assailant, thereby causing the heron’s death. Its intended prey, 
owing to the injury received, lived only two weeks after the attack. 
This heron struck viciously with its bill at dogs, hens, or any living ob- 
jects, except man himself, that came within its reach. It one day con- 
sumed, though not at a single meal, a haddock of 4 lbs. weight. 
Another bird has eaten three or four full grown rats successively 
Indeed the heron proves sometimes useful in captivity by killing these 
animals, and is often serviceable as a mouser, watching, more patiently 
than a cat, at a mouse-hole until the animal appears, when it is seized 
and swallowed on the instant. 
Three young herons, taken from a nest in Hillsborough park in 1848, 
came under my notice.* The nest contained a few young perch about 
four inches in length ; eels much larger were in another nest, doubtless 
in both instances as food for the young, though these were but a few 
days out of the shell. The nestlings had the irides of a yellow colour, 
though not just so bright as those of the adult bird. In this respect 
they differ from such native gulls as have yellow irides, these birds 
having them dark in youth ; towards maturity they become gradually 
lighter. When any person disturbed the large basket in which these 
lierons were kept, they pecked fiercely at him, uttering at the same 
time a loud and angry cry, which instantly, on any food being offered^ 
was changed to a kind of soft clicking note.f Tish and flesh-meat 
were given to them ; and when three weeks old they would swallow, at 
one gulp, a full-sized pollan — a fish as large as a herring — which was 
* Four eggs are generally laid. The young of the first brood here were out on 
the branches, and nearly as large as their parents at the end of May. 
t A friend describes the cry of the heron in its breeding haunts to resemble in 
part the word clatter gutturally uttered. 
