Blue Herons

Most of what you see outside is small. Well... those things that actively move about anyways. Birds scoot through the brush around me; rabbits occasionally bounce across the road ahead; mice... slugs... beetles... small things. There are a few things that are bigger than me out there, and I have seen them on occasion, however, of the bigger things that appear, the blue herons are by far the most common. They,

like me, are crotchety old things and don't take kindly to being interrupted. Unlike me, they are also beautiful.

I found a Blue Heron's flight feather once when I was canoeing through a marsh. It was about a foot and a half long, and steel blue-grey. Really beautiful. These are big birds. And they are killing machines. This morning, as I walked by a man fishing unsuccessfully in the park, there was a Heron, about fifty feet away having the opposite experience. It is no wonder that these Herons are so common. They stilt themselves above the water on poles and wait for whatever is unlucky enough to swim below them to come by. Then, with a swift thrust of their rapier like beak, they stab the thing

through and swallow it whole. They eat frog and fish and snakes and all of those things that are so common in wetlands. They have it down to such a science ,that it is a wonder that there aren't a bunch of overweight waterbirds lounging around our swamps.



They are graceful things in movement and appearance only. Their call is something akin to a Buick crashing into a garbage truck. It is metallic and grating. I bet the dinosaurs sounded like Blue Herons before they ate things. They don't generally stay long when I walk past them. This one stayed just long enough to catch and eat a catfish ( I wonder how they deal with their barbs?). I do love to see them, especially in their nesting places. They build massive nests in the tops of dead trees in wetlands. The overall effect is something out of

science fiction. Long spindly towers holding bulbous shaped houses at the top with stooped shouldered, thin legged beings astride them. It seems like they are even more abundant now than ever and I rarely walk without seeing them fly away from me at their first sight of my moving down the road.

db