Watching the Bittern ' Pump ' BY BRADFORD TORREY IXCE I printed, in 'The Auk' (Vol. vi, p. i), a descrip- tion of the Bittern's vocal performances, I have wit- nessed a repetition of them on three occasions ; and the story of my successes, such as they are, may be en- couraging to the younger readers of Bird-Lore. The remarkable sounds, sometimes likened to those of an old-fashioned wooden pump, sometimes to those made by a man driving a stake in wet soil ( and the likeness is unmistakable, not to say perfect, in both cases), must have attracted attention, we may suppose, ever since the settlement of the country. The dullest person could not hear them, it would seem, without wondering how and by what they were produced. But up to the time of my -Auk' article, there was only one authentic record, so far as I am aware, that the bird had ever been seen in the act of uttering them. For my own part, having never lived near a meadow adapted to the Bittern's purposes, I had never so much as heard his famous 'boom,' though references to it here and there, in the writ- ings of Thoreau especially, had given me a lively desire to do so. It was a strange accident, surely, that the first Bittern I had ever heard should show himself so openly and for so long a time. Be- ginners' luck, we may call it, and be thankful that such providential encouragements are not so very uncommon. As the Scripture says, "The last shall be first." On the 2d of May, i88g, a year after the observations recorded in 'The Auk' article, I was lying upon a cliff on the edge of a cat- tail swamp, listening for Rail notes or a Least Bittern's coo, when a Bittern, very much to my surprise, pumped almost at my feet. By good luck a small wooded peninsula jutted into the swamp just at that point (the swamp, I regret to sa}^, has since been converted into a town reservoir), and, keeping in the shelter of rocks and trees, I stole out to its very tip unobserved. Two or three times the notes were repeated, but I could get no sight of the performer. Then, all in a flash, he stood before me — as no doubt he had been doing all the while — in full view, just across a narrow space of open water against a patch of cat-tails. He had taken no alarm, and pumped six or eight times while I stood, opera-glass in hand, watching his slightest motion. Then he stalked away into the reeds, pumped twice, — behind the scenes, as it were, — and fell silent. Two days later I went to the Wayland meadows, where I had (123)
