User:Rogiet/sandbox

Because of their secretive and skulking natures, it was unclear exactly how the bittern produced its distinctive booming call. One medieval theory held that the bittern thrust its beak into the boggy ground of the marsh in which it lived, and the consequent echo gave volume to the sound. A reference to this theory appears in Chaucer's Wife Of Bath's Tale, lines 972-73: "And, as a bitore bombleth in the myre, She leyde hir mouth un-to the water doun..."

Sir Thomas Browne disputed this claim in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Book III, Ch.27: "That a Bittor maketh that mugient noise, or as we term it Bumping, by putting its bill into a reed as most believe, or as Bellonius and Aldrovandus conceive, by putting the same in water or mud, and after a while retaining the air by suddenly excluding it again, is not so easily made out. For my own part, though after diligent enquiry, I could never behold them in this motion..."

Browne is said to have kept a bittern in his study, in an attempt to discover how the 'boom' was produced.