[MASSBIRD] Brown Creeper, Great Blue Heron Fishing (again), Photos, Great Meadows, Concord, 1/3/11
Michael Kolodny
I was at Great Meadows in Concord on 1/3/11 and photographed the birds
listed below. The photos are at: http://o10cpcs.wordpress.com (The archive
index is in the right margin.)
Brown Creeper
Great Blue Heron Fishing - (Warning: some of these photos are gruesome.)
Seen but no photos posted:
Coyotes (2) - One had caught a muskrat, but it was too dark at the time to
get a photograph. Muskrat - This is in addition to the one the coyotes had.
Be warned that some of the photographs of the great blue heron fishing are a
bit gruesome because they show the heron with a fish speared on its bill.
(When I've seen herons spearing fish it is usually the larger ones. With
smaller prey, they usually grasp it between their upper and lower bills.)
The heron was fishing beyond the northern end of the lower impoundment near
the spillway between the impoundment and the concord river. When the water
level in the river goes down, sometimes fish are unable to get back to the
main channel of the river and get stranded in pools that form in this area.
The heron took advantage of this and caught four fish while I was taking
pictures. I only posted photos of two catches but there are still a lot of
photos posted so I split them up into four posts, parts I through IV.
Part I shows the heron tracks in the snow that told me there was a heron
near by. When I saw the tracks the heron was hiding in the reeds on the
other side of the path. After a short while it came out, crossed the path,
and walked into the area where fish were stranded.
Parts II and III each show the heron catching a fish. In some pictures,
fallen leaves are stuck to the fish because the water is shallow and this
area is wooded. In the photos you can see that the heron sometimes puts the
fish back down to try to get a better grip on it or to wash off the leaves.
In one case the heron put the fish down to get a better grip and came up
with a mess of leaves stuck to the fish. In the photographs, you can also
see the bulge caused by the fish as they travel down the heron's neck when
they are swallowed. I've seen this several times but I still think it is
amazing that heron's neck, which normally seems so narrow, can stretch so
much to allow a large fish to go down. These two posts are very long because
I wanted to try to convey the fact that a heron often spends a lot of time,
after it catches its prey, manipulating it in it's bill, putting it down,
and picking it back up before it finally swallows it.
Part IV shows a case where the heron struck out at a fish but didn't catch
one, and it includes a few pictures of the heron waiting between fishes.
When I was just about ready to leave the refuge, I noticed a brown creeper
landed on a tree trunk and I took a number of photographs which are also
posted.
Michael Kolodny
Framingham, MA
m_ko...@phreego.com
My other nature photography blog is at: http://o3cpcs.blogspot.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sightings_blog