HEEOtf. 
77 
attitudes imaginable; they appear to suffer also from frost 
and cold.’ If taken young, Herons may be easily reared, but 
not otherwise. Two Herons have been known to fight so 
desperately, that one of them allowed itself to be taken with 
the hand. 
The flight of the Heron, in which the wings are much 
arched, and the neck doubled back, is slow and heavy, and 
the long legs are carried straight out, projecting behind as if 
a tail: the legs are drooped before alighting. They are able 
to swim, but perform the operation slowly. Though generally 
speaking of an awkward and ungainly appearance, yet the 
different curvatures assumed by this bird in its positions 
give it a line of beauty which the ornithologist at all events 
can appreciate and admire. 
Herons are very voracious birds, and always seem hungry. 
Their usual food consists of trout, flounders, eels, carp, and 
other fish, which they swallow head foremost; water-lizards, 
snakes, toads, frogs, rats (both land and water,) and mice; 
the young of other birds, beetles, and other insects, shell-fish, 
shrimps, and the roots and blossoms of plants: a trout has 
been seen taken about four pounds weight. A curious cir¬ 
cumstance is recorded in ‘The Naturalist,’ vol. i, page 61, by 
Mr. Mc’Intosh, as related to him by an eye-witness, who, 
having shot a Snipe, it was pounced upon by a Heron, not 
previously observed by him, and shaken by it in his bill 
till satisfied that it was quite dead. Another has been 
known to quit the water to kill or disable an eel which it 
had caught by beating it against the ground; and again 
another, a tame one, to swim out ten or a dozen feet to 
try to seize the brood of a Moorhen on a fallen tree. 
The hair, feathers, and bones of their prey are cast up in 
pellets, after the manner of the Owls. ‘It is perhaps worth 
remarking, that when the Herons drop any of the food which 
they bring to their young among the trees of the Heronry, 
they make no attempt to recover it, but, probably from a 
consciousness of their inability to rise from the ground in a 
confined space, allow it to remain where it falls.’ The result 
is often beneficial to the neighbours, and a good pannier of 
fish may often be collected under a large Heronry. The prey 
is brought from a distance, it may be, of two miles or more 
to the young, and much ado with snapping and chuckling 
the latter make on the bringing home of each fresh supply. 
They feed ordinarily in the mornings and evenings, but 
