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Volume VIII 
Marcb-.A.pril 1906 
Number 2 
BY WILLIAM L. FINLEY 
WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BA - HERMAN T. BOH EM AN 
F IFTEEN miles below Portland, Oregon, in the heart of the fir forest, is a 
village of two hundred houses. It has an area of about three acres. Every 
home is a sky-scraper. Not a single house is less than a hundred and 
thirty feet up, and some are a hundred and sixty feet high. The inhabitants are 
feathered fishers. They hunt the waterways of the Columbia and the Willamette 
for miles. Each owns his own claim, and there’s never a dispute as to possession. 
It takes the biggest reserve of nerve and muscle to reach this village, but one 
may sit on the wooded hillside far below and watch the life there in full swing. 
From two to five brush-heap houses, the size of a waslitub, are carefully balanced 
and securely fastened on the top limbs of each tree. Gaunt, long-legged citizens 
stand about the airy doorways and gossip in hoarse croaks. Residents are con- 
tinually coming and going, some flapping in from the feeding ground with a craw 
full of fish and frogs, others sweeping down the avenues between the pointed firs 
with a departing guttural squawk. This is the home of a colony of great blue 
herons. 
The great blue heron or “crane” is one of the picturesque sights of every fish 
pond and along the bank of every river and lake in the country. I look for him, 
along the shallow sandbars and sloping banks as I look for the background of green 
trees. He is always the solitary fisher. He is the bit of life that draws the 
whole to a focus. Watch him, and he stands as motionless as a stick. He is 
patient. A minnow or frog swims past and there is a lightning Hash of that 
pointed bill as he pins it a foot below the surface. Disturb him, and he deliber- 
ately spreads a pair of wings that fans six feet of air, and dangles his long legs to the 
next stand just out of range. 
