Great Blue Herons
Great Blue Heron Nests
Photo Credit – Louisa Cammidge
The above photo arrived a few days ago with the question, “To whom do these nests belong?” The location is Puget Sound on the northwest coast of the US state of Washington. The answer is Great Blue Herons. The species nests in colonies, heronries, or rookeries, and while I always thought rookeries were for Rooks (look like crows), in the United States the word is apparently used for a colony of more than one bird species. The photo was taken in September, six months after the Great Blue Herons started reproducing in large, ungainly nests of sticks.
Great Blue Heron
Photo Credit – Birdfact
The Great Blue Heron is an unmistakable large bird with bluish-grey, black, and white feathers, swatches of rufous on the wings and thighs and a large dagger-shaped bill. For a brief period in spring, the male grows ornamental plumes on its head, breast and wings to attract its mate.
Great Blue Heron Male Breeding Plumage
Photo Credit – Linda Murdock Photography
The species also has specialized feathers on the chest that continually grow and fray. Herons comb these feathers into a “powder down” to remove fish slime and oils from their feathers as they preen. Its yellow eyes, which can become reddish during breeding, provide three times more detailed vision than humans and have built-in zoom lenses and photoreceptors that improve night vision. In flight, the bird tucks its head back into its shoulders.
Great Blue Heron Range Map
The Great Blue Herons are a New World partial migrant species, widespread from Alaska through Central America into parts of South America. A sub-species is present in the Galapagos Islands. It is an occasional vagrant in Hawaii. In the eastern US, it is seen on the Chesapeake Bay, including around Baltimore and Richmond, and has become the name of a golf course near Williamsburg. In South Florida, a “Great White” Heron variety (a morph, not a subspecies) inhabits shallow marine water. The Great Blue Heron is a wader, not a swimmer.
Great Blue Heron White Morph
Photo Credit – BIRDSPIX.COM
The species has attracted the nickname Lady of the Water, and native Americans believe the bird symbolizes patience and good luck because of its behavior of waiting to catch its prey. The species is closely related to egrets rather than other herons, with the word egret derived from the French word “aigrette”, meaning silver heron. Estimating population size is challenging because of the dispersed nature of the birds, but a quarter of a million plus has been suggested.
Gray Heron
Photo Credit – Birdfact
My first sighting of a heron was in 1960 near York, England, where there were three heronries and widely scattered individual birds. The species was known simply as “the heron” and today as the Gray Heron. It is the Old World version of the Great Blue Heron, with the two species likely originating from the same ancestor a million-plus years ago. The Gray Heron is common across Europe, Asia, and Africa. It is smaller and slimmer than the Great Blue Heron, and the rufous coloring on the thighs and wings of the Great Blue is missing; its bill is slimmer. Curiously, the average life span of the Great Blue Heron is 15 years, but only five years for the Gray Heron.
Gray Heron Range Map
Photo Credit – Wikipedia
Light green – Breeding; dark green – Resident; blue – Non-breeding
Gray Herons nest in the same manner as the Great Blue Herons, share a similar diet and live in similar habitats. They experience the same predators. Falcons, especially peregrine falcons, catch them as food; in olden times, humans persecuted them. The British hunted them with falcons, roasted them, and served them at banquets during medieval times. They believed that those killed at the full moon would cure rheumatism. Today, Gray Herons have recovered, in numbers with estimates of one to four million globally, and in the UK, 11,000 breeding pairs and 50,000 individual birds in winter.
In North America, fishermen hated them, and hunters trapped them for their feathers to be used as adornments for women’s hats. As early as 1910, the New York State legislature introduced legislation that protected them from the plume industry.
Portland City Mural
Photo Credit – Tweets and Chirps
Today, there are no significant conservation threats for either species. The primary risks are habitat loss, decreased food supply, and lead fishing tackle. Beavers are the principal benefactor of Great Blue Herons in North America, constructing the ideal fishing environment. Humans appear to take them for granted, providing them with little recognition. No country has adopted them as their national bird, and no US state has used them to represent their natural landscape. I believe Lake County, close to where I live, is the only county in the United States to adopt them as the county bird, and Seattle and Portland have adopted the Great Blue Heron to represent their cities (as have other towns in Washington and Texas). This iconic, majestic, graceful, quiet, and unassuming bird justifies more public recognition.
