Wood folk at school

by William J. Long

Such wisdom, if wisdom it were and not chance, is gained only by experience. It took at least one brood of young herons, sacrificed to the appetite of lucivee or fisher, to teach Quoskh the advantage of that decoy nest to tempt hungry prowlers upon the bare tree hole where she could have a clear field to spear them with her powerful bill and beat them down with her great wings before they should discover their mistake.

By watching the birds through my glass as they came to the young, I could generally tell what kind of game was afoot for their following. Once a long snake hung from the mother bird’s bill; once it was a bird of some kind; twice she brought small animals, whose species I could not make out in the brief moment of alighting on the nest’s edge,—all these besides the regular fare of fish and frogs, of which I took no account. And then, one day while I lay in my hiding, I saw the mother heron slide swiftly down from the nest, make a sharp wheel over the lake, and plunge into the fringe of berry bushes on the shore after some animal that her keen eyes had caught moving. There was a swift rustling in the bushes, a blow of her wing to head off a runaway, two or three lightning thrusts of her javelin beak; then she rose heavily, taking a leveret with her; and I saw her pulling it to pieces awkwardly on the nest to feed her hungry little ones.

It was partly to see these little herons, the thought of which had fascinated me ever since I had seen Quoskh taking home what I thought, at first glance, was a rag doll for them to play with, and partly to find out more of Quoskh’s hunting habits by seeing what he brought home, that led me at last to undertake the difficult task of climbing the huge tree to the nest. One day when the mother had brought home some unknown small animal—a mink, I thought—I came suddenly out of my hiding and crossed over to the nest. It had always fascinated me. Under it, at twilight, I had heard the mother heron croaking softly to her little ones—a husky lullaby, but sweet enough to them—and then, as I paddled away, I would see the nest dark against the sunset with Mother Quoskh standing over it, a tall, graceful silhouette against the glory of twilight, keeping sentinel watch over her little ones. Now I would solve the mystery of the high nest by looking into it.

The mother, alarmed by my sudden appearance,—she had no idea that she had been watched,—shot silently away, hoping I would not notice her home through the dense screen of branches. I climbed up with difficulty; but not till I was within ten feet could I make out the mass of sticks above me. The surroundings were getting filthy and evil-smelling by this time; for Quoskh teaches the young herons to keep their nest perfectly clean by throwing all refuse over the sides of the great home. A dozen times I had watched the mother birds of the colony push their little ones to the edge of the nest to teach them this rule of cleanliness, so different from most other birds.

As I hesitated about pushing through the filth-laden branches, something bright on the edge of the nest caught my attention. It was a young heron’s eye looking down at me over a long bill, watching my approach with a keenness that was but thinly disguised by the half-drawn eyelids. I had to go round the tree at this point for a standing on a larger branch; and when I looked up, there was another eye watching down over another long bill. So, however I turned, they watched me closely getting nearer and nearer, till I reached up my hand to touch the nest. Then there was a harsh croak. Three long necks reached down suddenly over the edge of the nest on the side where I was; three long bills opened wide just over my head; and three young herons grew suddenly seasick, as if they had swallowed ipecac.

I never saw the inside of that home. At the moment I was in too much of a hurry to get down and wash in the lake;

and after that, so large were the young birds, so keen and powerful the beaks, that no man or beast might expect to look over the edge of the nest, with hands or paws engaged in holding on, and keep his eyes for a single instant. It is more dangerous to climb for young herons than for young eagles. A heron always strikes for the eye, and his blow means blindness or death, unless you watch like a cat and ward it off.

When I saw the young again they were taking their first lessons. A dismal croaking in the tree-tops attracted me, and I came over cautiously to see what my herons were doing. The young were standing up on the big nest, stretching necks and wings, and croaking hungrily; while the mother stood on a tree-top some distance away, showing them food and telling them plainly, in heron language, to come and get it. They tried it after much coaxing and croaking; but their long, awkward toes missed their hold upon the slender branch on which she was balancing delicately—just as she expected it to happen. As they fell, flapping lustily, she shot down ahead of them and led them in a long, curving slant to an open spot on the shore. There she fed them with the morsels she held in her beak; brought more food from a tuft of grass where she had hidden it, near at hand; praised them with gurgling croaks till they felt some confidence on their awkward legs; then the whole family started up the shore on their first frogging expedition.

It was intensely interesting for a man who, as a small boy, had often gone a-frogging himself—to catch big ones for a woodsy corn roast, or little ones for pickerel bait—to sit now on a bog and watch the little herons try their luck. Mother Quoskh went ahead cautiously, searching the lily pads; the young trailed behind her awkwardly, lifting their feet like a Shanghai rooster and setting them down with a splash to scare every frog within hearing, exactly where the mother’s foot had rested a moment before. So they went on, the mother’s head swinging like a weather-vane to look far ahead, the little ones stretching their necks so as to peek by her on either side, full of wonder at the new world, full of hunger for things that grew there, till a startled young frog said K'tung! from behind a lily bud, where they did not see him, and dove headlong into the mud, leaving a long, crinkly, brown trail to tell exactly how far he had gone.