Wading birds, I've
seen my share.
I carry the
glasses, the new small lightweight ones, in my hand and am ready to see a heron
pop out of the marsh grass just around the bend in the path where he's sprung and surprised me, winging gracefully and disappearing remarkably swiftly, the last few times I've gone looking for him. Of course, now that I'm ready none
does.
I stand on
the trail and work on focusing the glasses. I put them down and there he is,
only much farther away this time, over toward the little wooded rise called Callahan
Park. Looking all the world like the classic Great Blue Heron, he flies only a little ways, then drops into some grass tall
enough to hide him. I try to focus the glasses on the place where I saw him
drop and immediately the bird lifts up again and flies directly into the eye of my
glasses. He flies another hundred feet before dropping again into greater
concealment. No reason for him to come out again until I'm gone.
So this is
my amusement for today, I think. A brief, tantalizing turn on the stage of salt marsh.
I walk on
to the new works-of-man osprey nesting platform. It's big -- and rather absurdly close to my path. So far no bird has
gone near it. I spy, however, a vertical lumpish sort of shape behind it, possibly a creature sitting on a rock. I'm getting good at identifying heron postures with the
naked eye. When I look with the glasses though I can't find it. However while
I'm looking that way, I'm distracted by the arrival of the first heron (at least some heron) flying directly across my naked-eye field of vision. I lift the glasses to follow his flight
and am surprised once more when he drops into the shallow end of the nearby
body of marsh grass-bounded low water (locally called a "creek") and takes up a classical wading
bird position -- not far, as I am surprised yet again to see, from a Great White Egret, a heron of another color.
OK, are
these two hanging out together now?
Is this a
mixed marriage? The dashing dark-feathered great blue and the elegant all-white
egret?
After
watching them do their thing, the heron thing of standing in the water being very
still so a fish will mistake their legs for grass, I turn the glasses back to that lump on a stone behind the osprey
platform, find it this time, and discover there a highly condensed heron, squatting down in its
crouched, sitting-tight position: Nothing much to do; I'll just wait here until
I am mysteriously moved to do something else. It's hard to see the markings on this
bird. I wonder if its squatness signifies some other species, a Night Heron
maybe. Not a blue, then? Grayish, its neck doubled down to the shoulders. My world is thrown
into doubt.
And then I
notice, right behind this figure, another white egret.
So are
these guys species swapping?
I put the
glasses back on the heron in the water and as I observe him a very small white egret --
yet another egret, probably one of this year's newbies -- walks up to the tall dark
heron and pauses. Then the tall one thrusts his beak down to the small one: the
class bird-parent feeding gesture. I'm not sure if it was real feeding or just a gesture.
Possibly he is just standing there holding a tiny fish, or something, in his long
beak waiting for a babe to walk by.
I'm seeing
more white smalls over by the squat heron side of things now too. And then a line of
small water fowl -- ducks! What are ducks doing here? Is this a parliament of
fowls?
I am
wholly uncertain. Doubt weakens all my judgments
That
so-called "first heron" has no visible crest feather slanting rakishly off his head. Could he actually be
some kind of ibis (the which I have never seen here)?
Only one
thing seems certain. The only kind of big bird I am (almost) sure I have not
seen hanging around the osprey nest platform is an osprey.
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