Little Green Heron 
259 
a stump or snag among the sedges and bushes 
by the waterside, so dark and still is he. Herons 
are accused of the tropical vice of laziness ; but 
surely a bird that travels from northern Canada 
to the tropics and back again every year to 
earn its living, as the little green heron does, 
is not altogether lazy. Startle him, and he 
springs into the air with a loud squawk, flap- 
ping his broad wings and trailing his greenish- 
yellow legs behind him, like the storks you see 
painted on Japanese fans. 
He and his mate have long, dark-green crests 
on their odd-shaped, receding heads and some 
lengthened, pointed feathers between the shoul- 
ders of their green or grayish-green hunched 
backs. Their figures are rather queer. The 
reddish-chestnut colour on their necks fades 
into the brownish-ash of their under parts, 
divided by a line of dark spots on the white 
throat that widen on the breast. Although 
the little green heron is the smallest member of 
this tribe of large birds that we see in the 
Northern States and Canada, it is about a foot 
and a half long, larger than any bird, except 
one of its own cousins, that you are likely to 
see in its marshy haunts. 
Unlike many of their kind a pair of these 
herons prefer to build their rickety nests apart 
by themselves rather in one of those large, 
sociable, noisy and noisome colonies which we 
