Identifier: birdcraftfield00wrig (find matches)
Title: Birdcraft : a field book of two hundred song, game, and water birds
Year: 1897 (1890s)
Authors: Wright, Mabel Osgood, 1859-1934 Fuertes, Louis Agassiz, 1874-1927
Subjects: Birds -- United States
Publisher: New York : Macmillan Co.
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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Text Appearing Before Image:
anner in treetops,usually in communities. JEggs: 3-4, pale sea-green. Bange : America, from the British Provinces southward to the Falk-land Islands, including part of the West Indies. Another common Heron, only second to the Green, inabundance. Here it frequents inland ponds in preferenceto the salt-marshes, and, though I have not found its nests,I have seen the birds all the way from Mill River to Bed-ding under circumstances that point to their breeding insingle pairs. They are nocturnal, as the name indicates, and whenyou come upon them in their roosts by daylight they aredazed and sleepy, and use an effort to pull themselves to-gether, but at twilight their heavy, dark bodies may beseen flying overhead, identified beyond question by the cry, quok-quok, uttered at regular intervals. The sound is muchlike that emitted by the kid bellows of a childs toy rooster,and is the gazoo of the night orchestra. The skirl andboom of the Nighthawk have an eery sound, and the Whip- 254 PLATE 70.
Text Appearing After Image:
BLACK-CROWNED NIGHT HERON. SWIMMING BIRDS. Ducka poor-wills cry is filled with vague foreboding; the NightHerons merely suggests that he has half swallowed aparticularly unappetizing frog, and wishes to unswallow it. This is the most gregarious of all the Herons. Dr. Woodtells of a swamp some miles from East Windsor, Conn.,which was the breeding-place of thousands. Samuels knewof a Heronry near Dedham, Mass., where a hundred pairswere collected in the space of an acre, and he at oncerealized the force of Wilsons comment on a like congrega-tion, that, The noise of the old and the young would almostinduce one to suppose that two or three hundred Indianswere throttling each other. As the birds resort, year after year, to the same crowdedbreeding-grounds, it can be easily imagined that theseHeronries are not the most attractive places for ornitho-logical research. I had very much doubted the present existence of suchextensive colonies in populous regions, but Mr. Chapman inhis Guide to th

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