Photograph by Johnathan Esper
We used to see a great blue heron now and then around the stream that runs near our cabin. After Tropical Storm Irene hit the Northeast in 2011, the bird seemed to have decided there were better hunting grounds. No surprise. Not only did Irene wash away three houses downstream from us, it ravaged and remade the streambed, silting up some fishing pools and eliminating others.
Then, the summer before last, we saw a heron again. And last summer we spotted one several times. I take it as a sign that the stream is recovering and the fish population growing. I don’t really believe Nature cares about me one way or another, but great blue herons do feel like an extravagant gift to all bird lovers.
They can grow to four feet tall with as much as a seven-foot wingspan. They are predators as fierce as leopards, but you don’t need to book a safari to see them. Every pond, marsh, river and lake shore is home to herons that you can watch stalk, stab and swallow fish, frogs and whatever else catches their attention. They will eat, or try to eat, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals and other birds as big as grebes, a duck-sized water bird. Chris Elphick, an ornithologist and conservation biologist at the University of Connecticut, said, “if they can grab it and get it in their mouth, they’ll eat it.”
The birds are usually solo hunters, but they gather in numbers in winter when California rice farmers flood their fields. Mice and rats flee the water, while blackbirds come to eat rice grains that float to the surface. “You just get this big convergence of blackbirds feeding on the grain and herons grabbing rats and grabbing mice,” Elphick said. “And if a black bird that’s feeding on the grain gets too close, they’ll grab a black bird and they’ll just choke it down.” Quite a surprise for the watcher, not to mention the blackbird.
Sometimes, however, they overdo it. A 1989 report described two dead herons that had tried to swallow Pacific lampreys. They apparently got stuck on the way down. In 1938 a naturalist reported finding the entangled bodies of a great blue heron and a nearly four-foot-long water snake. He wrote, “the snake in its struggle to escape, made a complete halfhitch around the bird’s neck and a coil entirely around the right wing. This action resulted in so kinking the bird’s neck as to break it and at the same time forced the bird’s bill through the head of the snake.” It’s a tale worthy of mythology.
Even though they hunt alone, great blues like togetherness in nesting. In the U.S., ornithologists call these nesting colonies rookeries, and they can have just a few nests, or hundreds. In past years surveys have counted nearly 500 such rookeries in New York. One of the largest, with nests in the hundreds, is in the Adirondack Park, on Lake Champlain’s Valcour Island.
Smaller rookeries are numerous. In Lewis, one of the more picturesque rookeries, with about a dozen nests, rises high above a swampy bulge in Phelps Brook. Looking to the west from Route 9 just north of Elizabethtown, the nests appear etched against the skyline of the Jay Mountain Wilderness Area and the Sentinel Range. About that word, “rookery,” though. Elphick points out that in his native England, only rooks have rookeries. Herons nest in heronries.
You would think that so many giant birds with pick-ax beaks would discourage predators. And herons can certainly be aggressive. But a rookery also offers a smorgasbord of eggs or chicks that some predators can’t resist. Julie Hart, project coordinator for the New York Breeding Bird Atlas III, a citizen science project now working to produce its third report, said, “I’ve seen a raccoon climb up into the middle of the rookery, and it will go around and start eating the eggs, and the herons don’t attack it. They just kind of stand off to the side and squawk. It’s pretty disturbing.” Sometimes bigger predators climb the tall trees to heron nests. USA Today took note of the sighting of a bear in a heron rookery a few years ago. Yes, there are photos.
Rookeries offer a less brutal buffet for bird lovers, the chance to see mating displays and chicks. In the spring, as early as March in some areas, herons return to their rookery and start their version of Tinder, which involves some spectacular courtship dances. Pick a rookery to watch, Hart said, and “start keeping an eye out for those first herons to come back.” They don’t pair off for life, but they do stick together for the season to raise the chicks. “You can watch them throughout the summer, and see them bringing sticks to the nest, sitting on their eggs and then feeding the young.”
The third breeding bird atlas is still being compiled and at press time Hart didn’t have information on whether there had been any significant population changes in New York, but she said that recent government reports for the U.S. and Canada show that waterfowl and waterbirds are an exception to a general decline in bird populations, probably because of decades-long work on conserving wetlands. Some waterbirds are also moving north because of climate change.
This spring I’m looking forward to the return of the heron, and the herons. We aren’t far from Lewis, and I plan to check regularly on how those nests are doing. I doubt that I can tell one heron from another, but I might try. It would be a thrill to see young heron chicks growing on fish from the stream I see every day.
James Gorman, a former reporter and editor at The New York Times, is the author of seven books, on subjects ranging from dinosaurs to penguins to the oddly humorous aspects of science, medicine and technology.
