THE AUK: 
A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF 
ORNITHOLOGY. 
vol. vi. January, 1889. 
No. 1 . 
THE ‘BOOMING’ OF THE BITTERN. 
BY BRADFORD TORREY. 
On the 30th of May last Mr. Walter Faxon and I spent the 
afternoon in some large meadows in Wayland, Massachusetts 
where we had the good fortune to witness the musical performances 
of Botaurus lentiginosus under peculiarly favorable conditions. 
These performances, highly curious in themselves, are not de¬ 
scribed, so far as I know, in any of our standard ornithological 
works. Audubon had never even heard them ; and neither 
Wilson, Nuttall, Brewer, nor Coues,—-nor any of their corres¬ 
pondents,—appears ever to have seen them. Clearly the Bittern’s 
reputation as a recluse—a “shady character,” as Dr. Coues calls 
him—is well deserved. Yet even he, it would seem, feels now 
and then an impulse to make a show. On the present occasion, 
at all events, he may fairly be said to have taken the platform ; 
coming forth from his hiding-place amid the tall meadow grass, 
and whether he knew it or not, offering to a pair of inquisitive 
Yankees as protracted and open a view as they could have desired 
of his most intimate mysteries. 
Our first bird, and principal performer, was a pumper, not a 
stake-driver; that is to say, his notes resembled precisely the 
noise of an old-fashioned wooden pump. We were on the railway, 
which runs through the meadow at an elevation of perhaps seven 
feet above it, and after listening to the bird for some time, and 
discussing between ourselves his probable distance from us, we 
walked up the track, hoping to locate the sound more definitely. 
