Heronry and Ornithology Field Trip

We have a heronry — a community of great blue heron nests — on the Susquehanna River not far from us. My husband and the girls and I have visited a couple of times this week.

From a distance, it looks like this:

I count around 30 nests — dark blobs in the sycamores, across the river from where we’re standing. But through the zoom lens, you can see that it’s abuzz with activity.

It’s a combination tenement and helipad. They live on top of one another, sometimes standing and stretching, sometimes nesting, sometimes taking off or coming in for a landing. Sometimes they engage in conjugal activities in plain view. These birds “do community” with intensity.

One evening last week, we passed a plowed field with a number of herons on it, not far away from the heronry. Older Daughter remembered reading in Longlegs the Heron that herons will eat meadow mice, as well as aquatic creatures. I suppose they must have been hunting.

We stopped to look at the heronry Saturday en route to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for a family field trip. I’ll write more about that tomorrow. But it seems to fit with this post to mention that while there, we observed the heron nest on which they have their cameras and scopes trained these days, on the pond just outside the lab.

In contrast to the busy heronry we observed on the way there, this nest has a lonely look, and the heron looks a little dejected. Much though I enjoy tuning in to the nest cam from time to time, I found myself feeling a little ambivalent about it when I saw the peering camera directly over the heron’s head as he sat on the nest.

It was still neat to see it, and to see the hawks featured in the nest cam as well. I’ll post about that tomorrow. Meantime, here are a few of the other sights from around Cornell’s lab.

I’ll restrain myself from posting all the pics I took. :-) Suffice it to say that it was a perfect day — we couldn’t have asked for better weather, better sights, or better time together.