who would pull a trigger upon a heron. The admiration of Nature is very sincere in the educated Englishmen of to-day, and by far the greater number of them would rather see the beautiful creature making their estate its home than kill it. It is, indeed, the very genius of beautiful solitude, and by its mere presence raises the commonplace to the picturesque.
Take a secluded bend of any stream, with its alders and willows, its wild flowers stealing down to the water’s edge to see their faces in the glass, and yellow flags boldly wading out by their companies and battalions into mid-stream. The dragon-flies poise upon the tips of the reeds, or with rustling wings dart and wheel upon the water, puzzling the coot’s flotilla of puff-balls paddling about among the water-daisies. The scene is sweetly pretty, and when on a sudden a kingfisher on sapphire wings comes flashing past, enhancing every charm by its transient brilliance, the pretty becomes lovely, and the little common reach of water catches a glimpse of fairyland possibilities, and of beauties something rarer than of every day. Then let a heron on its broad slow-moving wings come up the stream, and lo! the whole scene changes. It becomes at once unfamiliar, of another world, exotic. The heron’s long legs are dropped down, the long neck stretched out and, almost as a spectre might appear, there stands “the bird so gaunt,” its crest-feathers slightly raised, its eyes scrutinising the banks. Silent as the great bird is, you must keep more silent still. For it is watching and listening as only the bird can do that fishes by sound as well as by sight. If it is satisfied, the aigrette, “fit for the turban of a king,” droops flat to its head, the neck is retracted, the wings comfortably closed, and the heron relapses into that beautiful attitude of patient watchfulness that Art delights in. And as it stands there, motionless in misty grey, in the utter silence of the tranquil corner, it looks like one of the jinns of Arabian tales, for its being there seems to bewitch the place and the stream becomes haunted.
So I remember once how when I was in India lying down in the jungle waiting for a bear to be driven, a sambhur-stag with splendid antlers came spectrally into the open space that my rifle covered. An instant before it was empty. Not a leaf stirred, and yet there, on the sudden, stood the great-horned stag, only a few paces from me, listening to the distant voices of the beaters. An instant later, and it stepped into the jungle again and vanished as silently, completely, as a ghost. And I rubbed my eyes and blinked, but I know that it came and that it went.
And where, to come back to our heron, is the fisher now? A minute ago it seemed as if it would never move: a statue in feathers set up there among the forget-me-nots for the stream-folk to worship. But while your eye has been following that fat perch loitering by the side of its shadow, as if they were company for each other, in that little clear patch of water by the bank which a shaft of sunlight pierces to the pebbled floor, the heron, with half a dozen stately, noiseless steps has changed its ground, and passing behind that thick spray of willow that droops “aslant the stream,” is out of sight. Come away, yourself, as quietly as you can: the poor heron is not often left in peace by those who see it. Be, then, one of the few who treat the noble bird with courtesy.
It is not given to many to see a large heronry at breeding time, but should the opportunity offer, it is well worth your while. The size of the birds alone makes them interesting, and the spectacle of so many flying to and fro at once and the grotesque nestlings flopping about on their nests or standing grimly but with uncertain foothold at the edges, their half-humorous, half-wicked looks and gestures, will keep your glasses to your eyes as long as friends will wait for you. The noises that proceed from old and young alike are both solemn and comical, disconcerted fragments of croaks and squeaks, mingled with such discordant scraps of sound as a child trying to blow a coach-horn might produce. The young ones too keep falling off their perches, probably because the instinct to try and stand on one leg is too strong for their prudence and their thin knee-joints. They manage, as a rule, to scramble and flap themselves on to other standpoints, but very often, failing to make good their foothold, they fall to the ground, when the parents seem to lose all further interest in them. To these accidents probably is due the superstition alluded to by Marvel:
“The heron from the ash’s top,
The eldest of its young lets drop,
As if it, stork-like, did pretend
That tribute to its lord to send.”
In the old cruel days when falconry was for a time so “fashionable,” the heron—or rather the heronsewe, hornsea, hornsey or hernshaw, for these are the older names of the bird we call heron and hern—was the fowl chiefly flown at with the largest and fiercest falcons, and the penalties for killing the bird, except with hawks or the long-bow, were very severe. But modern falconers, whose sport is now as humane as sport can ever be, have to be content with water-fowl for their prime flights. For the heron is annually becoming rarer as a wild bird, and before long will probably only be seen in the vicinity of private heronries, where the courtesies of country neighbourhood protect it from wilful molestation, and suffice to preserve for all lovers of Nature the charming sight of these birds, by some hill-bound tarn, “sole-sitting on the shores of old romance,” seated aloft on “the pines, the heron’s ancient home,” or, like the spirit of tranquil solitude, beautifying the pleasant reaches of a river.