with a prepared meal. One ee fli feelings of his catch — : 
in the interest that arises in watching the deftness in which 
it is started down the yellowish bill and long, slender throat. 
— On moonlit nights near Lemolo, Washington, a heron 4 
has often been seen to take its stand on a point projecting 
into the narrows, where the tide rushes through, and if any 
-prowler on the sea or land approached, the lonely watchman 
~ announced that fact to the whole neighborhood. It was as ~ : 
comforting a noise as the bark of a watchdog, and a listener. 
could settle back into sleep mont alarm, knowing that the 
gentry was on guard. 
In their nesting habits, these birds Setar the lonely | 
life they seem to prefer at other times, and collect in flocks, — 
which makes them easy prey to cruel butchers, who hunt 
them for the purpose of getting the plumes for women to 4 
use on their hats. They have learned to place their 
“heronries,” as such roosts are called, usually in hidden 
places. Mr. Dawson in “Birds of Washington” says that 
these birds nest in forest trees, where their haunts are hard 
to find, on Puget Sound and possibly upon the ground in | | 
the Palouse and Big Bend country, and that a heronry, in | 
which there were about sixty pairs of herons, formerly 
existed near Tacoma in a grove of cedars. Mr. Bowles, an 
expert birdman, once counted there thirty-nine nests, as 
many as five in a single tree, anywhere from seventy-five to — 
one hundred fifty feet from the ground. A few people, how- _ 
ever, who have been initiated, know where to stand on the 
waterfront in Seattle, and look out to a “heronry” within 
that city’s limits. | 
A traveler having never seen a “roost” of these birds i in 
America, had once, instructed by her guide book, dropped 
off the train at a great city in Holland to see two famous 
pictures and the “heronry” which the canny Dutch care for 
in one of the city’s great parks. The photographs, which 
illustrate Dawson and Bowles’ book of these birds, and their 
queer ungainly nests might have been taken of the herons 
138 
