Great Blue Herons: ‘The Ascending Ones’

By Curtiss Clark

The bullheads lolling in the muddy shallows of Connecticut ponds aren’t big on concepts. They aren’t the thinking sort. These catfish don’t contemplate the arc of their lives, the way we do. They just spawn, eat, and die, never once leaving the sensate stream of right now.

So it was left up to me to wonder about the last few moments of a particular bullhead’s life last Friday morning. I had pulled over on my way to work to watch a great blue heron go about its early morning routine at a roadside pond. The heron claimed the pond as his own early this summer and seemed to favor the watery vegetated margins of the west side of the pond, which is where he was standing, stock still, that morning.

From the bullhead’s perspective, the long reedy heron legs rising from the muck looked rather ordinary against the cattail backdrop. They may have been the last ordinary sight he saw. The heron’s S-curved neck lunged like a lightening bolt, and its spear-of-a-bill lanced the unsuspecting catfish, jerked him up into the air, and after skillfully juggling the fish into position, swallowed him whole. If there were bullhead philosophers, I imagine they would fashion some fantastic end-of-life myths from this common scenario.

Great blue herons have the look of mythological birds, probably because we have seen them portrayed glyphically by the ancient Egyptians, who represented the mythological phoenix or benu, “the ascending one,” as a heron. In the floodplain of the Nile, the bird was associated with the sun as it would glide over the waters, or roost high up in the trees. Thus it became connected in spirit to the sun god Ra and was revered. It was created in the fire of a holy burning tree, according to the myth.

Even when it is stripped of its mythological trappings, the great blue heron is an impressive bird. It has a six-foot wingspan. Its long legs give it a competitive advantage over other wading birds, allowing it to venture into deeper water for feeding. It can stand 3½ feet tall, even when knee deep in water. And those knees bend backward, adding an exotic gait to its overall mystique. Its long slender neck can accommodate outsized frogs and trophy fish when it has to, and in flight the neck retracts into an aerodynamic S. (Superman would approve.)

These herons are solitary birds, except in their early spring mating season. As happens with so many species (sometimes even our own) the mating ritual starts off with a measure of crankiness that can escalate into a battle of the sexes. But in time the awkward thrashing around settles into a beautiful mating dance in which the herons point their bills to the sky, sway their long necks as if they were reeds in the wind, and cry softly. Finally, they lift their feathers and bow down their heads and mate.

Great blue herons produce two to seven eggs per year, with far fewer actually hatching, fledging, or surviving into adulthood. Fewer than half will survive their first year, when eggs and hatchlings are most vulnerable to crows, owls, hawks, eagles, and raccoons. The predations of these agents of death are modest, however, when compared to efficient killing skills of the herons themselves.

Great blue herons can wipe out a lot of fish in very short order, as a heron-hating friend of mine can attest. He spent a lot of time and money cultivating impressive schools of expensive koi in various serene pools and ponds around his yard. More than once he has chased great blue herons from his ponds only to find that he was too late; hundreds of dollars worth of prized koi had been swallowed whole and had taken wing in the belly of the fugitive. In this instance, the words that followed “the ascending one” into the sky were not so reverent. He now stocks his ponds with goldfish.

Love them or not, great blue herons command attention, except from the hapless bullheads lolling in the muddy shallows of Connecticut ponds. They don’t give them a thought — until it’s too late.