Great Bird!

Driving to the the post office and grocery store today, I saw great blue herons everywhere. They come back from somewhere else more southerly in the late winter and make steady appearances at the side of roads and highways that border big, flat, usually formerly-planted agricultural fields, but if all you’ve got is a really big vacant lot, that’s okay, too. You might think that they drop into the fields to find food...small rodents? Insects? Old seeds? Don’t know. In any case, they don’t seem to be looking for anything in the field. They stand by the fields that border roads and highways so that they can watch the cars go by. At least that is how it appears to me. Regardless of how their bodies are oriented, their heads and eyes are pointed toward the cars. Perhaps they think of cars as some kind of disabled birds, even some kind of heron, who can go fast but just can’t get up off the ground. And they are hoping that, this time, they'll get enough uplift to soar.

They are a big, beautiful bird and we are lucky to have so many of them—as well as of bald eagles—around. All spring, they’re both a continual presence. Because I mostly see the herons on the ground and the eagles in the air, they feel like a very different kind of bird to me, but they are both really big, and that’s probably their most impressive birdness.

When we moved here, Point Roberts had one of the largest heron rookeries in the Northwest. They were located in an alder grove over on the northwest side of the peninsula. Ten years or so ago, a big resort/golf company was fixing to build a high-end golf course here on the Point. Problem was, the course bordered the heron rookery and it was a somewhat protected site. Enough protection that the golf course company couldn’t just do whatever it wanted. Over a couple of years, various groups negotiated with the company to try to find a middle way. I’m sure there were plenty of people here who preferred the ‘no golf course’ route, but big money, big business, what have you, has its way. Here it was, promising to provide a bunch of short-term and maybe a half-dozen long-term jobs in Point Roberts. What government could say ‘no’ to that? We don’t have our own government here but if we did, that government might have figured out how to say no. But the county and the state were the heavy hitters here, and they produced some research to justify the building of the golf course in such a way and at such a time that the herons wouldn’t mind. At least that was the idea.

I saw the rookery once, before the golf course came in. It’s not a fenced or prohibited area or anything, but it is also not advertised because the people who think heron rookeries ought to be really protected didn’t see any value in having pedestrians tromping through on a regular basis. The herons are only there in the rookery while they’ve got eggs/chicks in the nest. It was a lovely sight. I was surprised to find that they were nesting in alder trees, which are not very long-lived trees, and rookeries, they tell me, are usually long-term homes. These trees were showing their age: lots of breakage from winter wind storms, but there were also lots of visible nests, though the herons weren’t in them at the time. They came back that spring, though, and used those nests.

And then the golf course got built according to the plan, and a year or two later, the herons failed to return to the rookery. Didn’t like golf or golfers, I guess. Nobody seems to know where they went to make new nests, or if they know, they’re not discussing it. The herons are still around, of course, eating in the marshlands, spearing fish out of the eel grass, and watching the cars next to the highway. It’s just that they don’t do their nesting in Point Roberts anymore. I miss that.