Creating and scripting a prefab with multiple animation clips

I'm trying to emulate the behavior of the heron in the island demo. That prefab has underneath it an animation node, HeronAnimated, which in turn has a list of animation clips. This note has an icon identical to the prefab one, but one level below in the hierarchy.

When I create an empty prefab and then try to drag animation clips into it, only the first works. The second time I try to drag in a clip, I get a warning dialog about a "possible unwanted prefab replacement" Also, I cannot seem to create a new "animation" (Assets->Create->Animation interface actually creates an animation clip at top level, not an animation node under the prefab).

I can manually add animation clips to the prefab animation object in the inspector by upping the size count and then pointing to other animation clips.

However, when I try from script to reference any of the animations, I get a null reference exception.

I am new to Unity. I have tried both the character and scripting tutorials to no avail...

Your GameObject should have 1 Animation component on it and in the Animations array (through Inspector) you add all the animations you need to use.

In the code you activate the animations using the name shown in the inspector (case sensitive). So for example if you have an animation Run you can activate it with something like:

animation.CrossFade("Run");