“The stake-driver is at it in his favorite meadow,” he writes in his journal, in 1852. “I followed the sound, and at last got within two rods, it seeming always to recede, and drawing you, like a will-o’-the-wisp, farther away into the meadows. When thus near, I heard some lower sounds at the beginning like striking on a stump or a stake, a dry, hard sound, and then followed the gurgling, pumping notes fit to come from a meadow.
“This was just within the blueberry and other bushes, and when the bird flew up, alarmed, I went to the place, but could see no water, which makes me doubt if water is necessary to it in making the sound. Perhaps it thrusts its bill so deep as to reach water where it is dry on the surface.”
This notion that water is employed in the production of the bittern’s notes has been generally entertained. The notes themselves are of a character to suggest such an hypothesis, and at least one witness has borne circumstantial testimony to its truth. In Thoreau’s essay on the “Natural History of Massachusetts,” he says:—
“On one occasion, the bird has been seen by one of my neighbors to thrust its bill into the water, and suck up as much as it could hold; then, raising its head, it pumped it out again with four or five heaves of the neck, throwing it two or three feet, and making the sound each time.”
Similar statements have been made as to the corresponding notes of the European bittern. None of our systematic writers upon American ornithology have ever witnessed the performance, as far as appears, and being too honest to draw upon their imaginations, they have left the matter a mystery. Now, on this auspicious May afternoon, if we learned nothing else, we could at all events make quite sure whether or not the bittern did really spout water from his beak.
My readers will have guessed already that our bird, at least, did nothing of the sort. His bill was never within reach of water. The operation is a queer one, hard to describe.
The bittern has been standing motionless, perhaps in the humpbacked attitude in which the artists, following Audubon’s plate, have commonly represented him; or quite as likely, he has been making a stick or a soldier of himself, standing bolt upright at full stretch, his long neck and bill pointed straight at the zenith.
Suddenly he lowers his head, and instantly raises it again and throws it forward with a quick, convulsive jerk. This movement is attended by an opening and shutting of the bill, which in turn is accompanied by a sound which has been well compared to a violent hiccough. The hiccough—with which, I think, the click of the big mandibles may sometimes be heard—is repeated a few times, each time a little louder than before; and then succeed the real pumping or stake-driving noises.
These are in sets of three syllables each, of which the first syllable is the longest, and somewhat separated from the others. The accent is strongly upon the middle syllable, and the whole, as oftenest heard, is an exact reproduction of the sound of a wooden pump, as I have already said, the voice having that peculiar hollow quality which is produced, not by the flow of the water, but by the suction of the air in the tube when the pump begins to work.
But the looker-on is likely to be quite as much impressed by what he sees as by what he hears. During the whole performance, but especially during the latter part of it, the bird is engaged in the most violent contortions, suggestive of nothing but a patient suffering from uncontrollable nausea. Moreover, as soon as the preliminary hiccoughs begin, the lower throat or breast is seen to be swelling; the dilatation grows larger and larger till the pumping is well under way, and so far as my companion and I could detect, does not subside in the least until the noises have ceased altogether.