Here's how you can tell I'm on Spring Break: when my daughter asks whether I want to visit a blue heron rookery on a weekday, I say "okay."
We felt a little like voyeurs as we watched dozens of great blue herons engaging in mating behavior. At a pull-off beside a busy road in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, we watched at least 30 herons in one tree and another 20 or more nearby. A male heron would fetch a stick and present it to a female to add to the nest. Occasionally a pair would do a little flirty fight-dance and then get down to the business of making sure the world has more baby herons.
Backlighting transformed the herons into silhouettes, like massive paper puppets pasted onto the sky. The scene before us looked positively primeval, even when traffic whizzed past behind our backs and I struggled to keep the power lines out of the pictures.
I wondered how so many people could drive right past all this drama taking place in plain sight, but the herons and the traffic seem happy to coexist. Near my son's workplace there's a heron rookery tucked in between a warehouse and a factory, alongside a railroad track and a busy highway. I'm sure many commuters drive past the rookery every day oblivious to the heron hi-jinks, and in a month or so the herons will feed and tend their nestlings without much concern for the bustling world across the railroad tracks.
The photos suggest a world far removed from everyday life, a place so exotic that we ought to have to trek for miles just to catch a glimpse. But no: all you have to do is pull off the road and look up. Given the wonders taking place in plain sight, it's a wonder the entire world doesn't come screeching to a halt.
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| Hard to see, but these two herons are mating |
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| So many nests on one tree! |
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| At another park, we saw a bald eagle. |
2 comments:
Inspired by your blog post, I looked up "heron rookery near me" and there is the next town over! YAY!! Going to try to go in the next week.
Thanks!
Hurrah! One thing I've found about birding people: they are always willing to help others enjoy birds. We have a very active local birding group that schedules excursions I can never attend because I'm teaching, but they also send out an email blast every time a member reports seeing an interesting bird, and they always provide very precise directions about how to find them. It's good to get hooked in with a group like that if you can find one.
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