They wade and they wait, their necks coiled and compressed, and then they lunge and strike with beaks like daggers. They are not shorebirds: they rarely run as many shorebirds do, nor do they fly with the agility and swift turns of the wind birds. Herons and egrets take off clumsily, slowly settling their gangling limbs into a steady rhythm. Once that rhythm is established, they can fly a long way – hundreds of miles if needed – but here in the Bay Area few favor long migrations. Most haunt our wetlands all year round, pale and silent figures stalking fish, at home in both summer sun and the low light of winter.
The heron family, Ardeidae, broadly speaking, contains the birds we know as herons, egrets, and bitterns. These three names are traditional, established hundreds of years ago before our modern lines of genera were struck, and rely more on superficial visual characteristics than strict closeness of evolutionary relatedness. Our two white egrets, for instance, belong to two different genera, with the larger Great Egret being more closely related to the Great Blue Heron than its smaller cousin in pearly achromaticism, the snowy egret. But they are both white, and so they go by the name of egret. Blues and greens and grays and assorted colors receive the label “heron.” And a few birds of streaky brown receive the name of bittern, a name that is more accurately representative of a distinct evolutionary lineage.
Here we have six regularly-occurring members of the family:
- Great Blue Herons are the largest local heron, standing some 4 ft. tall and weighing over 5 lbs. They aren’t not exactly strikingly blue, but rather more of a blue gray, with a predominantly white face adorned with black plumes. This large size allows their diet to encompass an impressive array of creatures, from fish up to terrestrial mammals of gopher-size or so. They are typically solitary and also hunt at dusk and into night, so they are encountered less frequently than the abundant, diurnal, and social white egrets.
Many closely related pairs of birds get nomenclaturally divided by the highly uncreative denomination of a “greater” and a “lesser” species. Greater and lesser yellowlegs, greater and lesser scaup, and so on. I prefer how we simply call great blue herons and great egrets “great,” suggesting an appropriate admiration of their impressive stature. Likewise, their smaller cousins are the little blue heron and the snowy egret, which has at times been known as the little white egret. “Little blue” and “little white” – so much more convivial than the dry, slightly pejorative “lesser”! I continue to enjoy thinking of these two pairs of birds in terms of magnificent greatness and affectionately diminutive littleness.
Big Blue has some other nice traditional names worth mentioning: Major (presumably for his military authoritativeness – cf. The Warden), gopher crane (historically among Central Valley farmers), and kelp heron (by coastal dwellers). All are fitting appellations. Go out to the ocean where kelp beds float offshore and you can indeed see herons seemingly standing on the water a quarter-mile from land. I get a kick out of that too.
But my favorite great blue heron name? It’s gotta be “Big Cranky.”
- Great Egrets, as mentioned above, are actually more closely related to great blue herons than their smaller white cousins the snowy egrets (there is in fact a “great white heron,” a white color morph of the great blue which is seen in the southeast and which makes this relationship clear). They are significantly smaller than great blues, closer to 3 ft. tall and typically weighing less than 2 lbs. Their bill is yellow; their legs are black.
Great and snowy egrets – Emilie Chen - Snowy Egrets are our most abundant members of the family, frequently forming large loose flocks which may feature a smattering of larger great egrets. These smaller white egrets (2 ft. tall, less than a pound in weight) can be distinguished from greats even at a distance by their reversal of colors on the extremities: their bill is dark (except for yellow lores on the face) and their feet are yellow (“golden slippers” underneath dark legs – though juveniles have legs that are almost all yellow-green).
- Black-crowned Night-Herons may be my favorite members of the family. Those big red staring eyes. Those magnificent quaarks at sunset as they fly out to the mudflats. Their relative abundance makes them easy to find once you know where they hang out, but their secretive demeanor and inexhaustible strangeness still makes a meeting feel like a rather special encounter. Night-herons hide in groups in trees during the day, well enough to escape the notice of most humans going blithely about their business, but not well enough to seriously escape detection if you actually go looking for them. Novato’s Bahia neighborhood is a local hotspot, along with Pacheco Pond and Las Gallinas.
Night-heron is a perfectly decent name, but they have also been known as night squawks, which if you have the good fortune to live in night-heron country you may well understand: you may not always be looking skyward as the sun fades away, but your ears will usually be open enough to hear that punctual announcement of dusk: quuuaark!
- Green Herons are similar to night-herons in their compact, stocky size, but are significantly smaller. “Green” may not be the immediate obvious color that comes to mind when you spot one – they have a very dark green back and crown, and an attractive chestnut color on the neck. They are the least frequently seen of these first five birds, solitary and somewhat secretive, usually hunting along the immediate shoreline of vegetated ponds. Scan the edges at Las Gallinas, Pacheco Pond, and freshwater seeps of Rush Creek.
- American Bitterns are by far the least frequently seen of these six birds, and in some respects a separate branch from the bulk of the heron and egret family. They are distinctive in their cryptic, camouflaged coloration and their loud, unusual vocalizations, which make them more often heard than seen. Due to their relative rarity of encounter, I won’t talk about them too much here, except to let you hear their unusual gurgling song, which gave them the wonderful traditional name of Thunder Pump. Such an appellation is rivaled only by their other folk name of Plumgudgeon.
I don’t know what that means, but if I ever get a puppy, that’s what I’m calling it.
Egrets and People: Death and Poetry
Extinction Averted
As is obvious throughout these pages, I am a great aficionado of the old-time bird writers of America, from the 19th century up into the 40s or so. In reading these authors, one circumstance looms gigantic and inescapable over all their reflections on egrets: the calamitous decline in their numbers due to hunting for their feathers, primarily to serve the women’s hat market.
As we look back today on the banning of DDT as a modern victory that rescued us from a self-created world without bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and brown pelicans, such was the attitude of bird conservationists of the 20s and 30s looking back on the legislation that made it illegal to deal in wild bird feathers. These laws persist today: sometimes people wonder why it is technically illegal to keep wild bird feathers, because they are fortunate to live in a world where this threat to the very existence of egrets is scarcely conceivable.
The largest colony in the West formerly nested at Malheur Lake in central-eastern Oregon, but the plume-hunters reduced this from countless thousands to a pitiful remnant of six or eight pairs, which the Federal authorities are carefully nursing back into life. By their success in this regard we shall be able to measure the degree of culture which western civilization has finally attained.
– Dawson, The Birds of California, 1923
We no longer slaughter egrets for the wholesale market, driving them to the point of extinction, a feat we accomplished with the Carolina parakeet and the passenger pigeon. That is indeed a real and significant step towards western civilization, that notion that Gandhi famously conceded was “a very good idea,” the realization of which he looked forward to witnessing. We had a so-called market “demand” which was driving us towards the irreversible destruction of a notable piece of the beauty of the world and we, through a functioning democracy of legislators pushed by the people to defend the public good, said “this must stop, and it must stop now.” And it did.
G.K. Chesterton, in his essay on Nicholas Nickleby, made a congruent reflection on how straightforward political situations and their remedies used to be: our forefathers may have lacked subtlety, may have disregarded nuance, may not have had some of our modern insights into the complex context of a given situation, but sometimes what needs to be done is to simply take a stand and say “no more.”
But when they saw something which in their eyes, such as they were, really violated their morality, such as it was, then they did not cry “Investigate!” They did not cry “Educate!” They did not cry “Improve!” They did not cry “Evolve!” Like Nicholas Nickleby they cried “Stop!” And it did stop.
Today, we are faced by similar problems of market “demands” colliding with the broader public good. So far, political solutions have utterly failed us in dealing with the greatest of these threats, climate change, which stems from not a single, isolated trade in fashion, but from the great majority of human consumption. For my whole life, we have seen this problem, been advised of the consequences by our scientists, talked about it in our political discourse, and continued to talk and talk and talk. But too few in a position to do anything about it have taken a stand in the manner of Nickleby defending Smike at Dotheboys hall, who seized the whip from Mr. Squeers’ hands, and cried “Stop!” in a voice that made the rafters ring:
‘This must not go on…’
‘I say must not,’ repeated Nicholas, nothing daunted; ‘shall not. I will prevent it… Touch him at your peril! I will not stand by and see it done. My blood is up, and I have the strength of ten such men as you. Look to yourself, for by Heaven I will not spare you, if you drive me on!’
‘Stand back,’ cried Squeers, brandishing his weapon.
‘I have a long series of insults to avenge,’ said Nicholas, flushed with passion; ‘and my indignation is aggravated by the dastardly cruelties practised on helpless infancy in this foul den. Have a care; for if you do raise the devil within me, the consequences shall fall heavily upon your own head!’
(Nicholas did then indeed “beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.”)
We did it to save the egrets, a beautiful piece of our national heritage. Will we do it to save the climate, the basic condition for the world’s flourishing?
The Broad Perspective: Egrets in the East
That tale dominates the American history of egrets and civilization: we looked upon the lovely white plumes of egrets, certain enterprising titans of fashion saw in them a resource to exploit, and we slaughtered them to the edge of extinction before pulling ourselves back from the brink. It’s both a cautionary tale (we can easily do severe damage to the natural world) and a story about how we can turn things around – if we choose to.
But the history of herons, egrets, and humans of course goes back far longer than the brief American experiment. The heron family is found all around the world, and has been widely recognized for its quiet grace and beauty far beyond our borders and our modern centuries. My recounting of past appreciators of birds in these essays often focuses on those voices I can readily access, western voices who wrote in languages I can understand, but the case of egrets is one where admirers are found all around the world. Let me try to look a little wider.
Of course, it is true that to look across radically different cultures can be hard. When we find ourselves regularly encountering egrets in classical Tang dynasty poetry, for instance, it may seem impossibly difficult for us to transport ourselves into the time and society that framed the author’s conception of the world:
A pair of golden orioles sings in the green willows
A line of white egrets flies off in the blue sky
My window frames peaks covered with a thousand years of snow
My gate harbors boats from ten thousand miles downriver
– “Quatrain” by Du Fu, adapted from translation by Red Pine in Poems of the Masters
We can read the glosses of translators and editors, that orioles (of a different type than our New World orioles) were symbols of spring and egrets symbols of autumn, that such images were eloquent distillations in image and tone of the passing of time. We can conceptually note that the word for egret (lu) is a homophone for lu, a road or path, and therefore stands for a route away, a journey foreseen. We can study up on the biographical details: the poem was written in 764, when Du Fu was living by such mountains, by such a river, the year before he would head downstream in search of a new refuge in his old age. Adding all this together, we can painstakingly perceive some glimmers of how this poem is not simply a pleasant collection of scenery, but a meditation on the passage of time and the ceaseless travel of the world both animal and human.
We can also attempt to relish the basic and minimalist painting of a scene from a single line of seven characters:
一行白鷺上青天
yī háng bái lù shàng qīng tiān
One row white egrets on blue sky
(http://www.chinese-poems.com/d29t.html)
Much will be inaccessible to us. But I still find it remarkable to think how much we can access. Reading English poetry from 1600 – the time of Shakespeare – is hard enough for us: we need abundant lexical glosses and historical notes to make sense of our own language and the predominant inherited culture of our country. To think that we can cross the greater span of time to read, even in translation, the work of a Chinese poet from the 8th century, from a culture entirely separate from the traditions we know, speaking a language which developed in isolation from the entire Indo-European lineage, and find that they are speaking of a bird which is familiar to our eyes, to our real, personal, modern experience – to realize this underlying commonality points to the universality of both the human experience and much of the world of birds.
Those unmoving figures of immaculate white seem to know no mud; those egrets of our minds and pens are clear and unclouded images in any country. Throughout these essays, I focus alternately on both the particular traits of the birds we see right here, and on the long and wide heritage of birds that have formed part of the human experience throughout our recorded culture. I celebrate the local quirks and particularities, and encourage you to do the same, to appreciate the richness of diversity. But it should never be forgotten that birds also have a strong and fundamental universality – that being gifted with wings and flight they often spread more widely than other creatures, that birds crossed between cultures long before Marco Polo, and that they form a common ground and an entry point into worlds that are thousands of miles away and thousands of years behind.
Seeing Them Now
I believe that these two lessons from the past can enrich our experience of these birds. Remembering how we nearly obliterated snowy egrets from the continent through the cupidity of market fashion, but then turned back, invigorates an otherwise humdrum encounter with a seemingly ubiquitous bird into a precious opportunity that could easily have been lost. And thinking of how these elegant birds of white have been seen and admired around the world for millennia is a good reminder of the fundamental universality of the human experience: whatever modern window dressing our time and place in the world has laid upon our lives, we still listen to birds sing, stand in the shade of mountains, and watch white egrets fly through blue skies in much the same way here as in medieval China. But now let’s bring it back to the present day, to the watching itself. In the case of the egrets, the two white birds formally known as the snowy egret and the great egret, the immediate fact which immediately captures our attention is their stunning whiteness, the seemingly immaculate condition of their feathers despite their vocation of wading through mud and muck. The non-white herons, and really all birds and most animals, maintain a similarly impressive cleanliness of appearance, but it’s the whiteness that really sets this off in our minds.
Stillness and the Hunter
After pristine cleanliness, the next thing which usually strikes our attention when watching herons and egrets is their intensely patient and deliberative hunting style. Untrained human eyes often pass right over an unmoving egret without seeing it, even when it’s a bright white species and not some camouflaged purplish hominid. Holding still… walking slowly, slowly… then striking! They stalk prey like cats, creeping up right on top of fish, mammals, and birds, until you wonder how the victim could fail to see those looming white purveyors of their doom. It’s all in the slow, slow silence. We most often think of herons and egrets as fish eaters, and we do indeed often see them wading through shallow water or perched on the banks and channel edges (the edge-perching style is particularly favored by the shorter green herons and black-crowned night herons). But the longer-legged species can also work a range of terrestrial and semi-terrestrial habitats where they look for non-aquatic prey like reptiles and mammals. I mentioned earlier how the great blue heron has traditionally been known as the “gopher crane” in agricultural communities, as in the Central Valley. Here’s the proof of that name’s validity:
The great egret is really only a slightly smaller, lighter, and whiter relative of the great blue heron, and can do much the same. It was thanks (?) to a great egret that I owe my one and only actual sighting of an elusive black rail, a largely nocturnal, towhee-sized marsh-dweller that creeps around the muddy base of vegetation, invisible to human eyes. One day at high tide, I was watching a great egret stalk through the upland border to the marsh at Bahia, winding between the gumplants. Boom! It struck into the pickleweed and lifted its head, the splayed wings of a small blackish bird pinned between the twin-dagger chopsticks of its bill. I knew those rails were down in that marsh somewhere, but I sure couldn’t have plucked one out of there.
Colonies
We’re used to seeing those solitary hunters. Sometimes the snowy egrets will gather in flocks for more efficient herding of prey, or simply be drawn together by a concentration of opportunity. And night-herons will often roost together in trees. But one habit that applies across most of the herons and egrets (green herons excepted) is their preference for nesting communally in colonies or “rookeries” or “heronries” of various sizes and assemblages of species. There might be a handful of great blues; there might be several dozen snowy egrets; or you might have a mix of two or three species. There is strength in numbers, and there are eyes to watch out for each other. Some sites are long-lasting (there is a major four-species colony each year in Santa Rosa; there was for many years a famous large colony at Audubon Canyon Ranch on Bolinas Lagoon, now dispersed; our best local colony is currently in the trees bordering Pacheco Pond), while others may be smaller and used for only a few years.
You might easily overlook a silent, solitary heron, but it is harder to ignore an active colony of nesters. A few trees full of nesting night-herons caused a hubbub in Oakland a few years ago, when some tree trimmers tried to complete their assignment despite the herons’ precedence of position. People got upset, Audubon rallied them, art was drawn, and a small army of third-graders said “wow, that is a cool and quirky bird.” As a result, there is now an ongoing program in place to tempt the Lake Merritt night-herons to a preferred nesting area, as well as a broader awareness and pride in the Official Bird of the City.
Those Ridiculous Voices
Colonies are fun, interesting sites. No doubt about it. But my favorite element of the heron experience undoubtedly lies towards the less raucous end of the spectrum. Quietness is generally what herons do: it goes along with patient stillness as their default state. But that is what makes their calls, when they erupt, so wonderfully incongruous. Vocally, egrets – these most elegant of birds – are ineloquent in the extreme. Their calls are hoarse, choking croaks that shock people the first time they recognize the speaker: “Did that beautiful bird really make that horrible sound?” They sound like animals that have swallowed too many whole gophers and slimy things and are paying the price in damage to their pharynxes. Listen to the torture chamber that is a snowy egret colony:
Though they can also sound like Donald Duck:
Herons and egrets are heard most often when forced to fly, aroused to sudden disgruntlement and irritation. You made them move; it’s understandable they sound annoyed. But one in particular, the black-crowned night-heron, or as it was appropriately known in the days before taxonomic conformism, the “night squawk,” has a more regular vocal habit. I love to visit Bahia and other wetland edges at dusk to watch the night-herons fly out, leaving their concealment in the street trees for the broader concealment of night, putting the huge red orbs of their eyes to work looking for fish in the nocturnal pools like Gollum in the caverns of the Misty Mountains. And as they move out, one after another, wings beating heavily in the twilight, they utter the dependable chime of the marshland sunset: quuuaawk!
A heron flew over
With that remote ridiculous cry, “Quawk,” the cry
That seems to make silence more silent. A dozen
Flops of the wing, a drooping glide, at the end of the glide
The cry, and a dozen flops of the wing.
I watched him pass on the autumn-colored sky; beyond him
Jupiter shone for evening star.
The sea’s voice worked into my mood, I thought “No matter
What happens to men . . . the world’s well made though.”
– “Autumn Evening,” Robinson Jeffers
Header photo: Great Blue Heron by Mick Thompson
Love your posts, Jack.
Thanks Alice!
In Hawaii, the small white egrets are called “cattle egrets” and hunt in the grass. Is that merely another name for the same species?
Hi Susan, cattle egrets are actually another species, which we do have here in California as well. They were originally an old world species, but have spread through a combination of human introductions (the case in Hawaii) and their own expansive abilities. I didn’t talk about them in the article because they are quite uncommon in Marin, but you can see them not too far away: I believe they are regular breeders at the Santa Rosa rookery, and I see them in the Sacramento Valley preserves.
That gopher close-up: yikes!! ♥️ “Egrets in Snow” & your egret suit as a very young man! Thank you for another wonderful essay – your posts always so interesting & well-crafted.