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Great Blue Heron — Part 2
Images coming soon.
Herons are by no means hermits always. Colonies of ten or fifteen pairs return year after year at the nesting season to ancestral rookeries, each couple simply relining with fresh twigs the platform of sticks in a tree top that has served a previous brood or generation as a nest. The three or four dull bluish green eggs that are a little larger than a hen's very rarely tumble out of the rickety lattice, however. Both the crudeness of the nest and the elliptical form of the egg indicate, among other signs, that the heron is one of the low forms of bird life, not far removed, as scientists reckon space, from the reptiles. Sometimes nests are found directly on the ground or on the tops of rocks; but even then the fledgelings, that sit on their haunches in a state of helplessness, make no attempt to run about for two or three weeks.
The little Blue Heron, or Blue Egret (Ardea coerulea), less than half the size of its great cousin, casually wanders northward and beyond the Canadian border when its nesting duties are over in southern rookeries. Its home is also a platform of sticks, but it is placed, with a dozen or more like it, in bushes over the watery hunting ground, and not in the tops of tall cypresses or other trees. Such colonies are still found as far north as Pennsylvania and southern Illinois. A rich maroon brown head and neck set off its bluish slate plumage, which is adorned with lengthened pointed feathers on the breast and shoulders. Immature birds are more confusing. At first they are white, or white washed with slaty gray, the tips of the primaries always remaining bluish slate, however, which enables one to tell them, with the help of their greenish yellow legs, from the snowy herons or egrets so often confused with them. Happily, the little blue herons wear no aigrettes, or they would share the tragic fate of the beauty of their family.
"What does it cost, this garniture of death ?
It costs the life which God alone can give;
It costs dull silence where was music's breath;
It costs dead joy that foolish pride may live;
Ah, life and joy and song, depend upon it,
Are costly trimmings for a woman's bonnet!"
Only a generation ago the Snowy Heron (Ardea candidissima) was so abundant the southern marshes fairly glistened with flocks, as if piled with snow; but all the trace of this exquisite bird now left is in the aigrettes that, once worn as its wedding dress, to-day wave above the unthinking brows of foolish women. In some states there is a penalty attached to the shooting of this heron; but the plume hunters evade the law by cutting the flesh containing the aigrettes from the back of the living bird, that is left to die in agony. Countless thousands of the particularly helpless fledgelings, suddenly orphaned, have slowly starved to death, and so rapidly hastened the day when the extinction of the species must end the sinful folly.