Prehistoric pre-dawn Great Blue Heron

Great Blue Herons can look and sound like pterosaurs from Jurassic Park. Because they are common and approachable, they are favored photographic subjects. Depicted in every imaginable pose, flying, standing, wading, hunched down, stretched out, roosting, nesting... I had to think twice about putting more photos of them on these pages.

This one visited our lawn.



We saw another Great Blue Heron catch an exotic Plecostomus species in our back yard. I took the closeups through our back patio window. It flew across the lake and had it half-swallowed in a little more than five minutes. I was surprised how quickly the fish went down despite it poisonous spines.





My all-time favorite is this image of a Great Blue that caught another exotic fish (a Jaguar Guapote, native to Nicaragua), this time at Shark Valley in Everglades National Park.



Down the hatch!



Seen in Answers.com:

Q. Is a great blue heron a reptile?

A. i dont know but im sure the answer is yes

A. Look like a prehistoric bird to me

From the Birds and Blooms Blog:

Re: identify this prehistoric bird?

… and all of a sudden, this “thing” looking like a prehistoric pterodactyl made very loud wild noise as it flew down from a treetop straight at me!

Indeed, there is fossil evidence that herons have been around at least since the Miocene epoch. A 14 million year old specimen was recovered in the Observation Quarry in Nebraska, and Great Blue Heron fossils found in the Western Hemisphere date back 1.8 million years, to the Pleistocene epoch, about the same time when the first human fossils were discovered. (Reference: The Great Blue Heron, by Robert Butler, UBC Press, Jul 1, 1997).

This Great Blue chose a "goose roost."



Recently, I posted an image of a Great Blue Heron that suddenly decided to use the new duck decoy that floats the intake of our sprinkler system as a convenient fishing platform. Well, it's baaaaaack! There it was, in the pre-dawn semi-darkness, just outside our back patio door. I took several hand-held photos through the window, not expecting any to turn out very well. I was right!

The images were soft and badly back-lighted.



I stepped up the contrast and saturation and the bird was silhouetted against a background of living color.



The bird was so near that it did not fit into the frame unless it lowered its head.



I had to back up when it extended its neck.



Conveniently, a Pied-billed Grebe swam by, disturbing the still water.



Ken Schneider
Miramar, Florida and North Aurora, Illinois
ROSYFINCH RAMBLINGS