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.
Coots congregate in large numbers at Ridgefield during the winter and often stay close together. Come mating season however this camaraderie gets tested, the fights are usually short-lived but this tussle on Rest Lake went on and on. The coots try to hold each other under the water with their legs, at one point the losing coot had disappeared for so long that I thought perhaps it had drowned, but it finally surfaced a long ways away and swimming as fast as it could in the opposite direction.
I was rewarded several times for staying at Ridgefield on Mother’s Day and persevering through the partly sunny skies. One reward was this male yellow-headed blackbird, one of the birds I’m most anxious to see when they arrive in the spring. They usually don’t come in this close to the road, they are larger than the red-winged blackbirds and seem to get the choice nesting locations in the interior of the marsh that are both further from human disturbance and over deeper water.
This was my only chance at a yellow-head this close all spring, and to my surprise it was not in South Quigley Lake or Long Lake but Rest Lake. I don’t usually see them at this part of the refuge, and he only stuck around for a couple of weeks, but I was on the lookout for him every time I went by.
Finally I got my chance in nice soft light, not for long, but long enough. I was thankful for the overcast light as otherwise it is difficult to preserve details in both his black and yellow feathers. If you look in his eye in the picture below you can see the sun starting to peek out from the clouds, I had to work quickly since neither the bird nor the light were going to stay for long.
