GREAT HERON. 
61 
mere degenerated species, were it not that the American is 
greatly superior in size and weight to the European species, the 
former measuring four feet four inches, and weighing upwards 
of seven pounds 5 the latter three feet three inches, and rarely 
weighing more than four pounds. Yet with the exception of 
size, and the rust coloured thighs of the present, they are ex- 
tremely alike. The common Heron of Europe, however, is not 
an inhabitant of the United States. 
The Great Heron does not receive his full plumage during 
the first season, nor until the Summer of the second. In the first 
season the young birds are entirely destitute of the white plu- 
mage of the crown, and the long pointed feathers of the back, 
shoulders, and breast. In this dress I have frequently shot them 
in Autumn. But in the third year, both males and females have 
assumed their complete dress, and, contrary to all the European 
accounts which I have met with, both are then so nearly alike 
in colour and markings, as scarcely to be distinguished from 
each other; both having the long flowing crest, and all the or- 
namental white pointed plumage of the back and breast. Indeed 
this sameness in the plumage of the males and females, when 
arrived at their perfect state, is a characteristic of the whole of 
the genus with which I am acquainted. Whether it be different 
with those of Europe, or that the young and imperfect birds 
have been hitherto mistaken for females I will not pretend to 
say, though I think the latter conjecture highly probable, as the 
Night Raven {Jlrdea Nycticorax) has been known in Europe 
for several centuries, and yet in all their accounts the sameness 
of the colours and plumage of the male and female of that bird 
is no where mentioned; on the contrary, the younger yearling 
bird has been universally described as the female. 
On the eighteenth of May I examined, both externally and 
by dissection, five specimens of the Great Heron, all in com- 
plete plumage, killed in a cedar swamp near thfe head of Tuck- 
ahoe river, in Cape May county, New Jersey In this case the 
females could not be mistaken, as some of the eggs were nearly 
ready for exclusion. 
