In Fiction
Eurasian Bittern is proposed as a rational explanation behind the mythical creature drekavac in short story Brave Mita and drekavac from the pond by Branko Ćopić.
The species is mentioned in George Crabbe's 1810 narrative poem The Borough, to emphasise the ostracised, solitary life of the poem's villain, Peter Grimes:
"And the loud Bittern from the bull-rush home
Gave from the Salt-ditch side the bellowing boom:"
Thomas McDonagh the Irish poet executed for his part in the Easter Rising translated a famous Gaelic poem "The Yellow Bittern". His friend and fellow poet Francis Ledwidge wrote a celebrated "Lament for Thomas McDonagh" with the opening line He shall not hear the bittern cry.
In the Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the villain Stapleton proposes the boom of a Bittern as an explanation for the howl attributed to the mystical hound.
Read more about this topic: Eurasian Bittern
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