Finally, to the protecting influences of a love for seclusion and darkness must be added the unusual position assumed by the proprietor of the land, who will not permit any one to kill the birds, and, stranger still, does not kill them himself! Thus it happens that any day in May or June, the months during which the Herons are at home, one may leave the crowded streets of New York and within an hour or so enter an equally crowded but quite different kind of town. If after leaving the train you secure the same guide it was my good fortune to have, your way will lead over shaded roads, pleasant fields, and quiet woodland paths, and, if the sun is well up in the trees, you may enter the outskirts of the rookery and be wholly unaware, unless you approach from the leeward, that between two and three thousand Herons are within a few hundred yards of you. One may gain a far better idea of Heron life, however, by visiting the rookery while the foliage is still glistening with dew. Then, from a distance, a chorus of croaks may be heard from the young birds as they receive what, in effect, is their supper. Old birds are still returning from fishing trips, and the froglike monotone of the young is broken by the sudden _quawks_ of their parents. The rookery is in a low part of the woods which evidently is flooded early in the year, a fact which may have influenced the Herons in their selection of the locality as a nesting site. At the time of our visit the swamp maples, in which the nests are placed, were densely undergrown with ferns, and as we approached the whitened vegetation, which clearly marked the limits of the rookery, a number of Herons with squawks of alarm left the vicinity of their nests, and soon the rookery was in an uproar. The common _quawk_ note was often heard, but many of the calls were distinctly galline in character and conveyed the impression that we had invaded a henroost. The trees in which the nests were placed are very tall and slender, mere poles some of them, with a single nest where the branches fork; while those more heavily limbed had four, five,^{38} and even six of the platforms of sticks, which with Herons serve as nests, but in only a single instance was one nest placed directly below another. A conservative count yielded a total of five hundred and twenty-five nests, all within a circle about one hundred yards in diameter, nearly every suitable tree holding one or more, the lowest being about thirty feet from the ground, the highest at least eighty feet above it.