Tuesday, February 2, 2021

BIGGINS PARK GREAT BLUE HERONS

Since the virus disruption my globetrotting adventures were limited to forays to local areas.  This led to discovering the variety of birds at Biggins Park in Newport News, Virginia. Spent about 4 months during spring and early summer of 2020 there and was surprised by bald eagles visiting regularly to drink water (above) and the small colony of Great Blue Herons (GBH’s) nesting there.  Not to mention other regulars such as mockingbirds, robins, cardinals, ospreys, etc.

Biggins Park is a community park for all to enjoy such as families fishing/ picnicking or just doing sports in the open field.  But what are about 20 cats doing here?  If there would have been dogs instead, they would have been taken away.  Their stench is noticeable particularly along the fishing pier, the area where they are mostly fed. There is a couple that like clockwork, show every morning with a 5 gallon bucket of food pellets. I addressed this with the Newport News Park and their response was that they have a spaying and neutering program and as the cats die the issue will disappear. How long will this take and do they know that all were sterilized? What about new fecund feral cats moving into the park?  It appears that there is not a final solution. And the cat lovers; why don’t they adopt and give them a home?  It will be kinder for the felines, and environmentally enhance the safety of birdlife and the quality of life for the park visitors.

 One day in late February I observed a GBH regularly flying to a pine tree to the left of the fishing pier and discovered that there was a nest in construction (above).  This started my almost daily visit to document the whole nesting/ fledging/raising/ abandonment of the nest by the young ones.  This lake is ideal for nesting since the parents have close access to a supply of food (below image).

After hatching a parent took a glance and said “what I have here?--two little ones and raised its wings in celebration.  From this point on there was a difference in development speed and I named the dominant Bully and the smaller Lesser.  Bully was aggressive and got fed first and was always pecking at Lesser; the battle of the siblings.

Raising the chicks required numerous air deliveries and in the beginning was by both parents initially regurgitating food into the beaks of the hungry ones and usually Bully was first and Lesser just got the leftovers. As they grew larger the food deliveries changed to whole fish and at the nest, the adult will tear off pieces of morsels but later on the fish was left in the nest and it was up to the chicks to feed themselves.


I suspected that Lesser was not going to survive and would been thrown off the nest but it kept the fight and eventually survived leaving the nest last. Second image below is Bully that was initially about half the size of Lesser and was always calling to be fed when it saw the adult approaching the nest.


Images below are for size comparison of the siblings. Note in Bully the primary and secondary feather shafts developing and in the next image, 3 days later how the feathers shafts have shortened.  Also notice that marginal feathers are barely visible and in the first image are more developed in the second. These birds grow so fast that a point I could not differentiate them from adults.


Images below are for size comparison of the siblings. Note in Bully the primary and secondary feather shafts developing and in the next image, 3 days later how the feathers shafts have shortened.  Also notice that marginal feathers are barely visible and in the first image are more developed in the second. These birds grow so fast that a point I could not differentiate them from adults.


By the beginning of June Bully have left the nest but Lesser stayed and I thought that it was abandoned by the adults but I was wrong.  They visited irregularly mostly in the afternoon but brought no food for Lesser. By June 22 the nest was abandoned and I saw one of the young fishing in the lake…most of the time it struck for a fish it missed but eventually hit target.  Practice makes perfect.  

Since the best time to photograph the nest was in the late afternoon, I sat with the photo gear next to me under the death branches of a tree and was always conscious of the danger. Fortunately the branches fell when I was not there. Red markings show with an X my photo gear and I sat and the circle the location of the nest.  There is no color consistency among the images but this is mostly due to the change of lighting conditions during the day.  This is a small sampler of the 6476 images that I took during the time I monitored the nest.

Concurrently I also spent time with the fox dens in Fort Monroe but that is another story.