It's one of the showiest critters present at my principle worksite, but sometimes it's in a location in which it blends in beautifully... Here is our resident great blue heron (Ardea herodias) nicely camouflaged against a backdrop of rocks on the bank of our small onsite river/brook:
It's not so easy to make out this large, showy bird, is it? Normally extremely shy, this heron seems to be getting accustomed to the human presence. Typically, it would take off, squawking in desultory fashion, whenever I approached within twenty meters, but now it's not so shy. A couple of days ago, I sat about fifteen meters from it and watched it as it preened its feathers, showing no sign of imminent flight. I'd post pictures, but they show a prominent feature of my worksite in the background, and I'm a bit circumspect about identifying my location.
I wonder if this great blue heron is getting less shy because it's not cool with the black-crowned night heron grabbing the prime fishing spot on the premises.
2 comments:
Don't tell anyone the location. About 5 years ago we had a group of them. There were 8 or 9 big stick nests up in the cottonwood trees. How long had they been there?
They became famous in a low key kind of way.
The next year the property owner and/or the city cut down the trees. It was only a matter of time. They are big birds and hard to not see.
Many people were upset. I went to check on the nests daily, and that one day the trees were gone. I left and came back a few hours later. I thought maybe i was wrong in the head that day, maybe i was having a bad dream, maybe it didn't happen.
This is a small community and our
balancing act is complicated.
We all know who did it, and we know why. But there is no option, unless we want to go to war, which of course is not an option. It was so ignorant, and so typical.
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