Abstract
IN Eudora Welty's short story A Still Moment, first published in I942, the appearance of a snowy heron momentarily transfixes the evangelist Lorenzo Dow, the outlaw John Murrell, and the ornithologist John James Audubon. Scholars have written a good deal about the materials Welty used to create these characters and their still moment: the journals of Dow and Audubon, The Dying Confession of Joseph Hare, and The Outlaw Years by Robert M. Coates.' It seems, however, that at least one of Welty's sources remains to be discussed. Herbert Ravenel Sass's In the Haunts of the Heron describes an encounter with a snowy egret, a bird known to the historical Audubon as a snowy heron, and this encounter closely parallels the central event of A Still Moment. Sass, an amateur naturalist writing for the National Audubon Society's journal Bird-Lore, records an experience which begins with awe and ends with detachment. He first depicts the arrival of a single snowy egret at a salt-water pool near which a number of Willets were nesting:
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