We would draw special attention to the great length of the feathers on the neck, which, when the bird is excited, are extended on either side to form an enormous feather shield. This is admirably shown in the photograph below, which represents a bittern preparing to strike. It is a curious fact that, when extended, the hind part of the neck is protected only by a thin coat of down. When the excitement has passed, the elongated feathers fall again, and, curling round the unprotected area, give the bird the appearance of having a perfectly normally clothed neck.
A wounded bittern will strike at either man or dog, and is extremely dangerous, owing to the sharpness of its dagger-like bill. If a dog advances on one not entirely disabled, the bird immediately turns itself upon its back, and fights with beak and claws, after the fashion of a wounded hawk or owl. Owing to the way in which the neck can be tucked up, by throwing it into a series of curves, and then suddenly extended, great danger attends the approach of the unwary.
The bittern is by no means particular in its choice of food, small mammals, birds, lizards, frogs, fishes, and beetles being alike palatable. The writer remembers taking from the gullet and stomach of one of these birds no less than four water-voles, three of which had apparently been killed only just before it was shot, for the process of digestion had hardly begun.
On migration these birds appear to travel in flocks of considerable size, since Captain Kelham reports having seen as many as fifty together high up in the air, when between Alexandria and Cairo. Curiously enough, they flew like "a gaggle" of geese—in the form of a V; but every now and then he noticed they, for some reason or other, got into great confusion.
At one time the flesh of the bittern was much esteemed as food for the table, being likened in taste and colour to the leveret, with some of the flavour of wild-fowl. Sir Thomas Browne, who flourished during the middle of the seventeenth century, says that young bitterns were considered better eating than young herons.
Photo by J. L. Bonhote, Esq.
COMMON BITTERN.
Preparing to attack (side view).
In the fourteenth century it bred in considerable numbers in the fens of Cambridgeshire, and was so highly esteemed as a bird for the table that the taking of its eggs was forbidden. At a court-baron of the Bishop of Ely, according to Mr. J. E. Harting, held at Littleport in the eleventh year of the reign of Edward II., several people were fined for taking the eggs of the bittern and carrying them out of the fen, to the great destruction of the birds. Decreasing steadily in numbers, the bittern continued to breed in Britain till the middle of the nineteenth century, one of the last nests being taken in Norfolk in 1868.