Quality Time with a Heron

Let me talk a bit about this bird. It’s a Great Blue Heron.

Because it’s the middle of summer, meaning it’s hot, the light is glary and contrasty, and in general, it’s just a terrible time for photography, I only got out once in July, right at the end of the month, on a day where we finally had cooler temperatures and some overcast. I went out to a place I visit where last visit I realized it had good possibilities for photographing hunting swallows. On this day, of course, I saw none but that’s okay.

So I sat myself down near the dock, intending to spend an hour or two seeing what might appear. After sitting down, I looked to my left, and maybe 15 feet away is this bird. I am, frankly, way too close for that bird to be comfortable with me. It did what herons do in this situation: it froze, trying to figure out if I was a threat or not.

And it stood there, not moving a muscle (I never even saw it blink) for a solid ten minutes. I spent that time trying to not be a threat to it; I took a few pictures, but after that, I shifted so I was looking away from it and tried to actively ignore the poor thing. And it just stood there, frozen in place. It pretended to be a statue so well I finally convinced myself it was a decoy; a really, really well done decoy.

And then it spied a minnow, and suddenly, it grabbed and ate a fish. So, no decoy. But it was an amazing display of stillness, which is, honestly, something herons and egrets excel at.

I continued to try not act like a threat and ignore the bird, and after about 25 minutes, it finally felt safe enough to move, and I watched it slowly start walking away from me. It moved about 5 feet, where it had gone past a bush, and then slowly walked behind the bush and out of my sight, where it settled in and went back to fishing.

Most birds when you invade their safety perimeter tend to fly away. Herons sometimes do, but sometimes, especially if you surprise them and get really close, tend to play statue instead. It’s a fun little behavior tied to both their hunting practices, which use this extreme stillness as well, and their size, where flying away is a slower process. I know from experience if I’d gotten up and started moving around, I’d have likely flushed it into flying. By staying still and not giving it reason to see me as a threat, it ended up moving enough further away to feel safe, but without expending all of the calories a fast flight would have entailed.

If I’d seen the bird prior to sitting down, I would have moved further away. Since I didn’t, to me, the best practice was to minimize my disruption of it and allow it the time and space to make itself comfortable again without forcing it away from what seemed to be a favorite fishing spot. And I got to sit and watch it from close by for a while, so we all won.