330 
STRANGE DWELLINGS, 
of rats in the brook; but soon after the Herons had settled here 
to breed, the rats became exceedingly scarce, and now I rarely 
see one in the place where formerly I could observe numbers 
sitting on the stones at the mouth of their holes, as soon as 
the sun had gone below the horizon. ’ 
When the Heron flies to its nest from any great distance, it 
generally ascends to a considerable height, and is in the habit of 
uttering a curious and very harsh cry, which at once tells the 
naturalist that a Heron is on the wing. When a Heron passes 
immediately over the observer, the effect is very remarkable, 
the long, stretched-out legs and neck and slender body looking 
like a large knitting-needle supported on enormous wings. 
To see the Heron alight on its nest or on a branch is rather 
a curious sight. The bird descends, drops its long legs, places 
its feet on the branch, and then flaps its huge wings as if to get 
its balance before it settles down. The rustics have an idea that 
a Heron is obliged to allow its legs to dangle on either side of 
the nest while it sits on its eggs, and some will aver that a hole 
is made in the nest through which* the legs can be thrust. It is 
scarcely necessary to say that the construction of a bird’s legs 
prevents it from assuming such an attitude, and that the long 
Heron can sit as easily upon its pale green eggs as the short- 
limbed domestic fowl on her white eggs. 
Some of our common British birds build nests that can vie, 
in point of beauty and delicacy, with any nest made by birds 
of other lands. It is scarcely possible to conceive a nest which 
is more worthy of admiration than that of the Long-tailed Tit- 
mouse, which has already been described ; and in their own 
way, the houses erected by the Chaffinch and Goldfinch are 
quite as beautiful. As there are some points of similarity in 
the two nests, they will be mentioned in connection with each 
other. 
First, we will take the nest of the Chaffinch (Fringilla cNebs). 
Although the beautifully-spotted eggs are plentiful in the 
collection of every nest-hunting schoolboy, they do not come 
into his little museum for some time. The eggs of the black- 
