In a little bend of the San Joaquin River, where the current,
attempting to straighten its course, has left a bank a few feet wide,
there is a small grove of tall cottonwood trees, perhaps a dozen in
number, whose branches lean far over the stream and whose tops reach
almost to the level of the bluff or rather the floor of the valley 250
feet above, for this swift river has, in the course of ages, cut thus
deep a channel for itself.
The place is not easy of access, for the shore narrows above and below
the bend to a few inches where one with difficulty keeps from crumbling
away the sand with his feet and falling into the water, and the cliff
is so nearly perpendicular that in many places it is inaccessible to a
climber, being of soft sand whose different stratas are clearly defined
where they have been sliced off by the cutting stream.
The valley above is a vast grainfield out almost to the edge of the
bluff, and along the edge and face of the bluff, wherever root can
cling or tendril hold, grow beautiful wild flowers in the early spring
days--their last refuge between the cultivation and the deep sea, or
rather, river.
In the tops of the cottonwoods live a number of baronial families in
castles huge, gray and ugly, overlooking the sweep of the stream. They
are the Great Blue Herons whose Latin title, (Ardea herodias), gives
one some idea of their ancient lineage. They claim to be older than the
storks of Egypt, and indeed, they look older as they stand humpbacked
and sleepy on one leg by the side of their nests, the long fringe of
light-speckled neck feathers underneath looking like a long gray beard
sweeping over their recurved neck and breast. There is a wise look
about them, too, for the black markings of the head sweep back over the
eye and prolong into the appearance of a quill extending behind their
ears.
Though they are almost four feet long and spread their wings to six
feet and over, the herons' large blue-grey bodies are often almost
indistinguishable from the bark of the cottonwood branches and the
blue of the sky against which they are silhouetted so oddly. One's
eyes open with astonishment when these sticks or excrescences of the
tree-tops slowly unfold an enormous sweep of sail and, extending their
long stilts behind them, flap off across the stream with a creaking
sound like the pulleys of a vessel when the halliards are running
through them. Standing or flapping they are not handsome birds and
one who comes suddenly upon a large heron for the first time as he
stands in the shallow water of the brookside, will be convulsed with
laughter, for if there is an utterly clumsy and awkward form or motion
in bird-life it belongs to this heron.
Their homes are big baskets of nests made of twigs as large as a man's
finger, closely intermeshed. From year to year they use the same nest
or build over it until it has two or three stories or more and is
bigger than a bushel basket. There are probably two dozen nests in the
dozen cottonwood trees, some of the larger trees having three or four
or even six away up in their tops where the branches seem scarcely
strong enough to bear such heavy burdens. From the top of the bluff one
can look down into the nests and in early March see the big blue eggs,
almost as large as hens' eggs, reposing like amethysts in their rough
brown setting. Some authors state that not over three eggs are laid,
but I have seen four about as often as three and, on one occasion,
five in a nest.
From their high-placed towers the herons watch the small fry in the
river below and make forays among the young trout, pike and catfish and
the frogs. They listen to the complaining voices in the twilight and in
the morning give them cause for still further complainings. They keep
in terror the big wood rats whose homes in the clumps of elder berries
below surpass in size those of the herons. And the gophers and field
mice of the grain fields never know at what moment an ungainly shadow
shall fall upon them and end their harvestings. There was a conceited
young frog who sang loud and shrill at sunset on the edge of the river
and who had an ambition to be, not an ox like the one in the fable, but
a Patti. And she had her wish after a fashion, for that connoisseur,
the heron who dwelt on the farthest branch over the water, attracted by
her vocal abilities, sought her out, and the little herons thought her
the nicest _paté de foie gras_ they had ever eaten.
There they dwell, this ancient race of high-born philosophers, stalking
the shallows of sunny baylets, or dreaming in the breeze of the
tree-tops of traditions old as the sequoias. What an authority would
you and I be if we could read the unwritten history of their race!
Charles Elmer Jenny.
* * * * *
Boughs are daily rifled
By the gusty thieves,
And the Book of Nature
Getteth short of leaves.
--Hood, "The Seasons."
[Illustration: PRONG-HORNED ANTELOPE.
(Antilocapra americana.)
Greatly reduced.
FROM COL. CHI. ACAD. SCIENCES.
COPYRIGHT 1900, BY
A. W. MUMFORD, CHICAGO.]