Gone Fishing

By Nick Kotula, JRA Guest Contributor

There’s more than one way to catch a fish.  You could make like a human and buy a reel and some worms and sit for a few hours.  You could pretend to be an eagle or osprey and fly above the river looking for the first sign of a fish and dive head first after it.  Or you could be a Great Blue Heron (which lacks the keen eyesight of the raptors, and does not have opposable thumbs or an understanding of economics) and stand in the middle of the river waiting until something swims by.  Egrets do the same thing, despite what watching this guy soar around made me think.

Herons are especially well adapted to these aquatic adventures.  Like the beginning of a film noir movie, herons have legs that just won’t quit.  Much as a giraffe’s neck gives them access to leaves that other animals can’t reach, a heron’s legs (now I have a ZZ Top song stuck in my head) allow them to wade into deeper areas than most birds can get to.  This heron was so busy hunting that it let me get extremely close.  Notice that she (I have no way of actually knowing, but she felt like a she) is making full use of those legs to keep the majority of her body out of the water. 

If half of a heron is leg, a significant portion of the remaining half is neck.  Herons use their long necks to deliver a quick dive into the water that will either spear an animal with their long, sharp bills or simply catch them to swallow whole.  If you look along the neck and the back of the heron you will notice that some of their feathers are longer and thinner.  These are powder down feathers and are designed to break apart during preening.   (Of course there is a fancy term for when birds clean themselves, did you expect anything else?)  This powder helps wipe of any slime or dirt that can occur when you routinely dunk your head into a river looking to catch a fish in your mouth.

Last but not least are their feet.  Unlike a lot of birds that spend so much time in the water, they only have partially webbed feet.  The webbing found between their front two toes help prevent them from sinking into the mud while wading, while the non-webbed feet allow them to grasp rocks and branches.

On my last visit there were at least ten herons in the water actively hunting at any given time.  It is truly an interesting sight to watch these niche feeders patiently waiting/wading through the James.