Closer Longer

During the past decade, the Great Blue Herons have become less tolerant of our presence, it seems, quicker to fly as we go about our normal routines of feeding and gathering cattle, or irrigating. In the 1950s, their rookery was in a stand of sycamores along Dry Creek, located a mile south of where we now live. It was not uncommon to ride beneath their rookery and not have them fly. The closest residence was three miles away.

Sometime in the 70s, they moved downstream two miles to another stand of sycamores along the creek between our irrigated pastures and closer to the recently abandoned gravel pits below Terminus Dam and Lake Kaweah. At that time, the Great Egrets began to appear on the ranch, but maintained their rookery elsewhere.

The Great Blues moved again in the mid-2000s to somewhere within the abandoned gravel pit area, about 100 acres of thick riparian at the confluence of Dry Creek and the Kaweah River, a ‘no-man’s land’ and home to deer and feral pigs, diverse raptors including Osprey, among other things.

I have encountered the heron above two or three times a week along the shore of our irrigation pond since spring. The comfortable space between us has decreased to about 100 yards now, down from 400 when our irrigating began. Whether thinking it was hidden in the cattails or getting used to me, this photograph with my Olympus point & shoot was closer longer.