Herons on the Rocks

 

Great Blue Heron

Herons should be in marshy places where their enormous feet can support them like snowshoes, their long legs elevate them above water and vegetation, their patient posture and whip-like necks ready to ambush prey. A heron airborne on languid wingbeats contradicts its giraffe-like standing pose and seems to confound the solid-liquid-gas-gravity physics of matter.

Heron and cormorant

When herons occasionally come to Halibut Point's coast in search of food they have to contend with turbulent water and rocky shorelines.

Herons and gull

Some other species generally adapt to these conditions more easily than herons. But when schools of small fish are driven into the shallows by predatory species like mackerel and striped bass, they present herons with an opportunity 'like shooting fish in a barrel'.

Black-crowned Night-heron

Such circumstances recently brought this Black-crowned Night-heron to the shoreline  in broad daylight.

Heron, surrounded by gulls

The nocturnally inclined bird stayed up late into the morning to join gulls searching out little fish trapped in pools by the receding tide.

Food was so plentiful that the gulls were uncharacteristically not fighting one another for it.

Well satisfied with their trip to our granite edge of the continent the herons lifted off to return to the shelter of interior wetlands.