In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

Both of our cars are getting up there in years, and while they have low miles for their age, I’ve started thinking about what we should do when it comes time to replace them. I haven’t paid attention to the car scene in well over a decade, so my wife and I went to the Portland Auto Show a while back to get acclimated to the current state of the automobile. I had done a little research beforehand and so much since that sometimes I feel like I both know a lot more and a lot less than when I started.

The problem is that the car I want doesn’t exist. If you could take Toyota’s hybrid system and merge it with the new Subaru Impreza, you’d have my ideal car. I’d have a nice quiet car for Ridgefield to minimize the disturbance to my favorite subjects like this lovely great blue heron. Plus good gas mileage for commuting to work, with enough power for the ascent up the Sunset Highway, and Subaru’s lovely all-wheel drive system for when the weather turns wet or white. Not to mention the safety improvements compared to our current lineup.

Alas Subaru is keeping mum on any plans for hybrids so my dream car remains a dream. Not that we’ll do anything in the short term since no car made a clear claim to the crown, but at least I have an idea of what we might do if we had to replace one of the cars in a hurry.

The Impreza in hatchback form is still the frontrunner to replace my Civic, and perhaps even the Outback, but a handful of other contenders caught my eye at the show. Will this Impreza one day grace our driveway? Or will it be the …

I laughed while editing this picture when I realized I spent more time with this young great blue heron during the winter and spring than any other being not living in my house. Alas it wasn’t true, I spent much more time with my friends at work, but true enough.

It’s rare that I get to know a particular bird, even visiting Ridgefield so consistently it is difficult to be sure a bird I see one day is the same one I saw in the same location previously. But this juvenile never strayed far from Horse and Long Lakes during the winter and spring. It was fun to see it learn the ropes, avoiding the territory of the older herons, fleeing the madness and mayhem that wandering too close to a red-winged blackbird nest brings.

Sometimes I just watched rather than take pictures, these lakes can draw a crowd as they sit at the start of the auto tour. And bringing out the big lens can attract even more attention, too much of which might cause the heron to take flight. But on this early morning in late February we were alone, the young blue heron in the soft blue light, giving me a look I had long hoped for.

I didn’t grow up around herons so they were always a bit of a novelty to me, I’d occasionally get a glimpse while hiking but they were shy and distant and easily spooked. Then I spent a summer working in Florida and was stunned to see herons that would let you walk right past them.

Whenever I saw a picture of a heron eating a fish, it was always a large fish, or a large eel or snake. Some photography leaders even bring along large fish for their attendants to toss to tolerant herons so their students can get pictures of herons with a large catch.

When we moved to the Northwest I was pleased to see how common herons were in the Willamette Valley, but their behavior surprised me on two accounts. The first was how often they hunted on land for prey like the Townsend’s vole. The second was that, when they did hunt in the water, they caught the expected prey like large bullfrogs but spent most of their time catching small invertebrates like salamanders and tiny fish.

I wanted to photograph these behaviors to show off how my herons eat and live, and I’ve done alright on the vole front but always struggled with the small invertebrates. With a bird as large as a heron, a tiny little fish at the tip of its bill was barely even visible in the picture.

I saw this hunting heron in Horse Lake and parked my car with the hopes it would eventually come my way. And eventually it did, catching little invertebrates all the way, and then I was blessed with this shot when it flipped one tiny little creature into its mouth.

Appearing to do its best cranky old man impersonation, this heron was just yawning on a cold winter morning. You can see frost on its shoulder and the frozen waters of Rest Lake behind it.

Compare the head of a juvenile heron (top) and an adult (below) and you’ll notice that the adult has a lot more white coloring, both on the top of its head and in the face behind the eyes, as well as dark plumes extending out the back of its head. You can ignore the brown and red coloring on the adult’s bill compared to the youngster, as the brown mud is from hunting for voles, and the red blood is from hunting for voles successfully.

I love the many shapes herons take and with this hunting heron, I especially liked the lines and curves of the damp display feathers on a rainy winter’s day. I like photographing in the rain (a good thing here in the Northwest) and Ridgefield’s auto tour even lets me stay relatively dry while I do it.

No no, little vole, stay hidden if you want to live to see the sun rise!

This whimsical portrait of a juvenile great blue heron on the hunt is my favorite picture from the Christmas break. I always love arriving early to Ridgefield and finding a good frost on the ground, although I didn’t have many of those opportunities during this warm winter.

If you’re wondering, the vole won this round.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do this winter is take pictures at Ridgefield that tell the story of the refuge and the animals that live there. And one of those stories is the fog that often envelops the refuge on an early winter morning.

My original idea was to photograph the heron upright against the fog so its silhouette would be instantly recognizable — and I did take some pictures like that — but when the heron dropped into a horizontal hunting pose I loved the subtlety of the picture. Peaceful and tranquil yet a reminder that, visible or not, the life-and-death struggle never ends.

A subtle picture like this loses much of its charm when I look at it on my laptop display, I much prefer it on my desktop monitor.

I was off for a couple of weeks over Christmas break at the end of 2009 and spent nearly every day at Ridgefield. That hadn’t been my plan, I hoped to do some hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, but each day at the refuge brought something new and I was always curious to see what the next new thing would be.

This day’s surprise came after I had settled in for a while to watch a young heron hunt in a meadow. It suddenly dropped to the earth and lay prone on the ground, I didn’t understand why until I looked up and saw two adult herons flying nearby. The young heron won this round of hide-and-seek as the adults left it alone and it resumed the hunt, but a while later one of the adults did come back and chase it away.

When I noticed a juvenile heron hanging out at the end of the auto tour at Ridgefield during the Christmas break of 2009, I made an effort to photograph it every chance I could. One thing in particular I wanted to photograph was the most distinctive differences between juvenile and adult herons: the lack of white on top of their heads. On this day, though, the young heron had plenty of white on top.

You win this round, Mother Nature.

You only thought this hairstyle died out with the 60′s! The heron was scratching its right eye with its clawed foot and ended up with a poofy do.

I have mixed feelings watching herons hunt for voles, on the one hand I’m fascinated by the patience and then swiftness of their attack. But my soft heart feels for the little mammals when I see their struggle and hear their panicked shrieks in the last desperate moments of their lives. And even though the ordeal lasts but a few seconds, in pictures their stares and cries haunt me in perpetuity.

In consolation, from what I’ve read voles don’t usually live more than a year anyway, so perhaps the herons aren’t shortening their lives that much. At least it helps me sleep at night. ;)

Many people seem shocked by the idea that birds might have descended from a line of dinosaurs that didn’t die out with the rise of the little furry mammals. Spend some time watching herons take their revenge on those little furry mammals and the idea doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

This great blue heron had the most efficient hunting streak I’ve ever seen, I saw it strike the ground six times and catch something every time. Three times it caught a Townsend’s vole like the one it’s swallowing here, three times Pacific treefrogs. The little treefrogs hardly seemed worth the effort but I’ve seen herons catch them many times.

As the heron slowly stalked its prey through the tall brown grasses, mostly obscured from sight, it paused and stood upright for a moment. When it glanced over in my direction, a gust of wind blew out its neck feathers and I had my picture.

A great blue heron stands alone in a meadow recently vacated by a large flock of Canada geese at Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge. The flock noisily took to the air en masse, leaving behind a bunch of white feathers, droppings, and one lonely heron. This environmental portrait has remained one of my favorite heron pictures, a little bit comical and a little bit sad.

A heron perches on a downed tree as its shadow is cast over the green water. Even though it was actively scanning and listening for movement in the water below, its perch seemed too high to have a chance at capturing any frogs or fish, so it may have been in reconnaissance mode. It eventually started hunting closer to the water.

The first time the heron caught this vole it didn’t get a great grip. The vole struggled and eventually the heron dropped it, but the second strike snared the vole for good. The vole wasn’t fighting nearly so much anymore, and a few seconds later the heron had flipped the vole into its mouth and swallowed it whole.

Can you guess who owns this feathery back? No cheating by looking at the tags below.

I took the picture of the feathers while the heron hunted for fish in the shallows of Rest Lake, then focused on its face when it wheeled around to listen for voles in the grasses on the shoreline.

This is a re-edit of a picture that’s already been online for years, taken in the first week of January of 2001. In fact, it was one of my earliest pictures from when I switched to digital in Christmas of 2000.

It was near sunset at Baskett Slough as I waited to see if black-tailed deer would emerge into the golden light, but none were forthcoming so I headed back to the car to try my luck at one of the ponds before the light slipped away. By the time I got there, I was disappointed to see that the direct light was already blocked from the pond and thought my chances of getting a good picture were over. Then I noticed this great blue heron against the brilliant orange reflection of the sunset and shot a whole sequence as he slowly moved around.

Townsend’s voles live in the fields at Ridgefield, and I suspect you could track the natural ebb and flow of their population by the number of hunters out looking for them. It isn’t just herons that work these fields, as egrets, hawks, owls, harriers, kestrels, and coyotes all feed on the voles and mice here.

This particular heron seemed to be rather lackadaisical in its hunting and I figured it wouldn’t catch anything. But I was in a quiet mood and enjoying watching it, so I decided to just sit still for a while. After making a few half-hearted stabs at the ground, it wandered into the taller grasses where it was mostly obscured as it hunted low to the ground.

Suddenly it froze and began wiggling its neck, so I knew it wasn’t just goofing around and got my camera ready. I was confronted with the classic problem, do I shoot the picture as a horizontal or a vertical? There’s no way of knowing the best composition ahead of time since you don’t know what the heron’s going to do when after it strikes, but I went for the vertical since if it stayed low it would be completely obscured by the grass.

The heron found its mark and popped up vertically before swallowing the little vole, and I love the way the taller grasses in front envelop the heron in a sea of green. I got lucky on that morning but can’t say the same for the unfortunate vole.