Sensible people stay out of the muck. They don’t go tramping through bogs or marshes for perfectly sensible reasons. There are snakes, bugs, and who knows what, and likely there is muck aplenty. But people who hanker after certain birds will soon enough be hunkering down in some marsh or soggy bottom. Bog-sitting, as it is sometimes known, is the best way to see bog-dwelling birds, such as rails, gallinules, or bitterns. One of the best reasons to travel through the muck is the chance to come across an American Bittern.
     American Bitterns are secretive birds, sizable but difficult to see. More than two feet tall with a wing-span of 42 inches, bitterns are covered in bold vertical stripes of brown, cream, and tan — a pattern that renders them invisible in reedy habitats. Add to this a tendency, or talent if you will, to stand impossibly still, and you begin to see how even a bird as big as an American Bittern can effectively disappear.
     This bird is found across most of North America at one time or another, wintering in the south, summering in the north, and migrating between the two.
     Strictly carnivorous and generally found in wetlands, bitterns will also venture onto higher, drier ground for grasshoppers, frogs, and garter snakes. In the bogs where they’re most often found, they eat such things as catfish, crayfish, eels, and salamanders.
     There’s another bittern called the Least Bittern found in the eastern U.S. — half as big and with half the stripes of its American cousin. The bittern’s illustrious family includes herons, and in those stripy shades of tan and white, a bittern looks much like the young of other herons, like the Night-crowns and the Green. But it’s the bittern that stands with its beak pointed straight up, still as a fencepost,
using those vertical stripes in the neck to mimic the shapes and shadows of reeds and grass — completing the trip from visible to invisible.
     When it does move, a bittern moves no faster than a minute hand on a clock, a pace so deliberate its prey never sees it coming. One quick lunge and the deed is done.
     This clever hunting style may be what Thoreau was thinking when he called the American Bittern “the genius of the bog.” Or perhaps he referred to the truly remarkable sounds this bird can make — for American Bitterns are much more likely to be heard than seen, at least in mating season.
     People have bent over backwards trying to describe the American Bittern love song. These loud, guttural pumping notes have been compared to the sucking of an old-fashioned wooden pump, or to the sound of water going slowly down a drain. An old nickname for the bird is “Thunder-Pumper.”
     “Plooonk-a-looonk” is one interpretation — “plum-pudd’n” is another. But instead of putting words in its mouth, let’s allow the bittern to speak for itself.
     There’s an odd, acoustic property to that sound that makes distance and location difficult to estimate. And there’s a sharp note in the middle, like a hammer on a nail, that travels even farther than the pumping noises do — for this, the bird is also called the “stake-driver.”
     This is apparently not an easy sound to make, for the bittern pumps its head up and down convulsively, as though the poor bird was about to be sick. But what appears to be bittern distress is really bittern passion. Any bird capable of making such an incredible sound is worth seeing — even if you have to get down into the muck to find one.