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.