I’ve seen bitterns catch a wide variety of animals, but even so I was caught by surprise when this one struck into the grass and emerged with a large earthworm. I knew some songbirds like robins ate worms but bitterns join egrets and kestrels as birds I was surprised to see hunting the wiggly worm.
First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them. Therefore pass these Sirens by, and stop your men’s ears with wax that none of them may hear; but if you like you can listen yourself, for you may get the men to bind you as you stand upright on a cross-piece half way up the mast, and they must lash the rope’s ends to the mast itself, that you may have the pleasure of listening.
Circe’s warning to Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey
I visit Ridgefield alone, intentionally alone, and have no men to lash me to the steering wheel that I might safely pass my Sirens, the bitterns that lurk at the edges of the marsh. Thus am I always compelled to stop, for seconds, minutes, even hours. A day may yet come when I have watched them enough, photographed them enough, that I can pass them by, but for now I am powerless to resist my Siren’s call.
I’m not a biologist, but if you’re a Townsend’s vole and find yourself in this situation, you’re not having a good day.
I thought the picture of the close-up of a bittern’s face would be my favorite bittern picture of the year, but a month and a half later I got my current favorite, this view of the varied patterns and colors of a bittern’s plumage. This is an evolution of an idea that I first got photographing the colors and textures and patterns of the Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone, then evolved through trees in the Olympic rain forests and later the redwoods, then in birds in the great blue heron, turkey, and finally, finally the bittern.
I’ve been hoping for a picture like this for a long time. I had to crop heavily and don’t have quite as much depth of field as I’d like given the need for the fastest shutter speed in the low light to minimize motion blur from the moving bittern. Even with a big telephoto lens, and even with all that cropping, I had to be really close to get a picture like this. If you look into the bittern’s eye you can see a reflection of my favorite camera mount — our Subaru Outback.