The American Bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus) is a wading bird of the heron family Ardeidae. New evidence has led the American Ornithologists' Union to move the heron family into the order Pelecaniformes (from Ciconiiformes).
Read more about American Bittern: Description, Protected Status
Famous quotes containing the words american and/or bittern:
“The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self- service populace, and all our specious comforts—the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria—are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)
“We need the tonic of wildness,—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)