An elegant group

When I was a kid, before I got the bug to know all I could about the birds in my area, I was only vaguely aware of avian diversity. I had no idea how many birds there were, let alone the official names of the few that I had noticed.

Growing up in Oregon, I always knew of the robin, but didn’t know that it was the American robin. I was certainly aware of “sea” gulls, but had no idea that someday I’d be able to identify and name seven species on a winter’s afternoon without ever going near the coast.

I probably had my closest bird encounters with a pair of red-tailed hawks as they nested on my grandfather’s farm. At that time in my life, red-tailed was simply descriptive of the tail of the beast as it flew low over us, screaming its warning to stay away.

What caused me the greatest confusion as I began to note particular bird species and apply a name to them was the “crane” that my grandfather had often referred to on the farm. I indistinctly recall that it was a long-legged bird we often saw either down by the river or out in the grass fields.

It seems to me that we usually disturbed one down by our fishing pond and that it would give out with an awful squawk as it took flight. Amazing to us as kids was the huge jet of white liquid that it would shoot out its back end as it voiced its disgust at our intrusion. It’s odd what kids notice. I couldn’t tell you anything else about Grandpa’s crane.

I discovered later, though, that there are only two species of cranes in the United States. One is the nearly extinct whooping crane, and the other is the fairly common Sandhill crane. The Sandhill is a species I have frequently seen nesting at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon and on migration through central Washington.

There are not, however, cranes in the Willamette Valley, the location of Grandpa’s old farm. So, what was he calling a crane, and why was he so wrong? He may not have known the subtleties of warbler identification, but he knew the general names for most groups of birds such as jays, woodpeckers, goldfinches and the likes.

Many of you who are reading this article may have had a similar introduction to the great blue heron. It’s such a common problem of nomenclature that many of the field guides will include a statement such as “sometimes confused with cranes” in their description of the great blue heron. Thus had Grandpa gone astray.

Actually, as far as names go, great blue crane would have been pretty good – crane somehow sounds more exciting than heron, at least to me. But great blue heron has still always spoken to me of elegance. And words such as elegant, ornate and even garish are often used to describe the group of birds I know now as the herons and egrets.

As is the case with the family of cranes, the heron and egret family is composed mainly of long-legged, long-necked, long-billed birds whose massive bodies fly by with an amazing ease and grace. Whether standing for long periods as patiently as a lawn flamingo, walking stately in murky water up to their knees (tibia-tarsals, actually), or effortlessly flapping along with necks curved and retracted into an anatomically impossible S-shape, these herons and egrets have often become the symbol of what is best in nature.

Within this family of wading birds – other families of wading birds include the ibises, spoonbills, storks and nonplastic flamingos – the family referred to by ornithologists as the unpronounceable Ardeidae, there are 12 species that breed in the United States. There are four herons, mostly dark-plumaged birds; four egrets, the spectacularly plumaged white birds; two night-herons, the odd and stubby nocturnal herons; and two bitterns, the smallest and most invisible of the herons.

The egrets are just too showy in their white lace, I guess, to also be called herons. Most of these species are adorned with various plumes that are so fancy that they were once prized as hat ornaments by ladies of fashion. With these poor egrets, it turned out that fashion so disliked having to share the feathers with the birds that we were almost left with no egrets.

Now, however, herons and egrets alike are abundant in most parts of the country. And although you can find all 12 species in Florida at various times of the year – and what an incredible sight they are in their huge roosting flocks, or while out feeding on some tropical bay – we can only expect two species in our part of North Idaho. These are the very common great blue heron, and the less common and highly secretive American bittern.

This situation seems to be changing, however. In the past several years there has been an increasing number of sightings of both common egrets and cattle egrets in our area.

Despite the lack of diversity in the types of herons we have here, there are plenty of amazing things about our elegant and stately great blue heron to satisfy most birders. For one thing, it’s amazing to find a bird with three names.

This isn’t just a blue heron, it’s a great blue heron. However, with greatness often comes the need to abbreviate. Presidents’ names get condensed in the headlines to things such as JFK, LBJ or W. Similarly, in my field notebook the “great blue heron” becomes “GBH.” It’s obviously a compliment, and also a whole lot easier to write.

It’s also amazing how such a large and conspicuous bird can seem so oblivious to the human activity that so often surrounds it. While fishermen stand on the bank casting forth, this fisher bird will stand close by, patiently waiting for the fish to come to it.

Then, other herons may be out fishing so deep that their tails and wing tips will be submerged and, again, so still that a passing canoeist may not notice. May not notice, that is, until the deep, hoarse, and according to one reference, prehistoric honk of the heron, as it slowing lifts out of the water and into flight, almost puts the canoeist in the water.

One of the most amazing things about the GBH is its nesting and roosting habits. This large bird – 5 pounds, 4 feet tall, 7-foot wingspan – that looks so stately on the ground or in the water, looks rather ridiculous and positively out-of-place perched on a spindly branch at the top of some brittle-looking conifer.

And as if that weren’t enough of a high-wire act, this totally inadequate-looking tree will form a heron rookery, or “heronry.” A typical heronry may house several dozen nests and the accompanying pairs of parents all balanced precariously among the branches.

To go along with the ungainly appearance of these out-of-place birds, their nests are large stick platforms that look as if one misstep or one good breeze would send nest and birds alike to the ground. But amazingly, year after year, these nests are added to and packed down to form untidy disks 3 feet or more in diameter.

It’s truly amazing that in this dizzy atmosphere of height, amid the constant squawks and croaks of the colony inhabitants, heron young spend their first four months as eggs, chicks and fledglings. It’s no wonder that adult herons during the off-season are so solitary. They need the other eight months to recover from the experience.

And it can be pretty hard on the trees, too. Often after many years at the same heronry, a flock will suddenly up and move a short distance away. At times this may be due to an excess of disturbance – humans and eagles have both been documented as disrupting colonies. But often it is the end result of years of heron abuse visited upon the trees.

After untold hits by those white jets of thick liquid that I mentioned earlier, foliage begins to die and the heronry begins to loose its appeal. It’s an odd irony that a species that can be such an important indicator of the ecological health of an area – herons are at the top of the food chain, and as environmental quality degrades, herons disappear – can so totally destroy its own micro-environment that it has to pull up stakes and move on.

Below the GBH, both physically as well as on the food chain, it is also amazing how many prey items there are that herons will eat. No doubt their favored food is fish, small fish – glutinous dead herons have been found that were attempting to swallow fish 2 feet long. However, they will successfully take any moving animal up to about a foot long. That includes frogs and turtles, small birds and mammals, and even large insects.

Those herons, Grandpa’s cranes, that we so often saw out in the stubble fields were hunting mice as effectively as the local coyotes, foxes and barnyard cats. Herons will also hunt fish wherever and whenever they can, day or night. Not long ago I had a neighbor in Post Falls who finally gave up stocking her small backyard fountain with fish because as soon as she did a GBH would come and remove them.

Heron’s are not only thorough but they are amazing in how highly skilled they are in their hunting. They have stealth and patience to begin with. And then they have a 5-inch dagger that they use to stab and hold their victims. Their bill is sharp enough to penetrate a large turtle’s shell, or a would-be rescuer’s hand. Wildlife rehabilitators are drilled, so to speak, in the dangers of getting their faces too close to a heron’s.

A heron’s skull is another eight inches long, and this wicked weapon is attached to the long, S-shaped neck that you use to identify herons in flight. The unique anatomy of this neck allows the heron to strike with the speed of a snake. Actually, their speed is faster than that of a snake, as they will often eat snakes, too.

From his many years of experience as a pioneer, as a logger and a farmer who depended on a team of horses, and finally as a sheep rancher, Grandpa, at least in my eyes, didn’t get many things wrong. And actually, I guess that he wasn’t all that off on his “crane” identification either. I found one old reference to the GBH with a name that Grandpa would have been comfortable with. It was the “Oregon blue crane.”