Fascinating dining habits of heron

AS I look out my workroom window the sun comes and goes in the yard.

Sometimes, it shines so brightly through the window panes I have to draw the curtains.

But 15 minutes later, the room is dark and I reach to turn on the light before remembering that it is only midday.

The world outside is grey, with bruised clouds overhead. Sometimes, downpours of great intensity follow. The pond is hammered with raindrops splashing inches high, and drops bigger than seed pearls beat at my window. Minutes later, the cloudburst stops and all is still, but for two beech leaves chasing one another in circles as if they were alive. Only for the wet paving stones one wouldn’t believe that rain had come and gone.

I raked a wheelbarrow-full of leaves from our small pond, and a second barrow-full still cover the bottom. Sometimes, I’m tempted to throw one of the heron’s breakfast fish into the water just to see it plunge in and retrieve it in the blink of an eye.

It is so fast in taking food that often, when I drop a fish — six inches long and fat — into the shallow stream that feeds the pond, it seizes it before it hits the water, raises its head and slips it down. There is no hesitation. If the fish is caught by the tail, it is quickly and expertly spun around to be ingested head-first and, always, quickly.

The heron still comes to our ‘diner’ almost every day.

Sometimes, as we breakfast in the living room on the first floor of our upside-down house, we see it eyeing us with gimlet stare from the pergola above the balcony; the French windows opening on the balcony are ten feet tall, and the crossbeam of the pergola on which it sits is not much higher.

This morning, when I stepped outside, it came swooping down from the leafless top branches of a beech tree below the house and flew straight toward me. What a photo opportunity — but I didn’t have the camera, of course.

A few days ago, when it flew into the field opposite our yard to confront a grey crow — which I think it mistook for an invading heron; it lost interest as soon as it alighted nearby — it spotted me on the balcony and came winging towards me between the trees. I had the camera but wasn’t ready, and so missed a spectacular shot.

From these reports, a reader will gather that the heron is very much at home in the environs of our house, its ‘territory’. It sleeps near other herons, probably its siblings and parents, on tall pine trees between our house and the sea. I can’t imagine what its companions think (if, indeed, herons do much thinking) of its well-kept plumage and well-fed looks. Do they notice that it doesn’t spend hours each day standing thigh-high in the cold sea, as they do?

When we are away, a neighbour, Beth Hanly, looks after “Ron”, as he/she (gender still unknown) was dubbed when we first encountered him, a flightless fledgling, under the tree-top nest from which he fell. Beth says she greatly enjoys doing so and has established excellent relations with the bird. She walks the 80 yards from her home each morning to see if he is in the yard and requires feeding. He invariably is, and does.

One day recently, when she came through her back garden to cross to our drive, she found him standing on the road — happily, little used — waiting for her. Smart bird: perched on the high-tops, he’d noted her daily route.

He trotted up the driveway after her and waited outside the annex where his rations of by-catch fish, supplied by the O’Donovan brothers from their trawler, fill two drawers of our freezer (they also fill two of Beth’s.) While Ron would happily put away 12 ounces of fish daily, we feed him less so as to encourage him to fare for himself.

The adaptation of herons’ beaks for fishing and their ability to allow for refraction in the water as they fish are amongst the many subjects interestingly treated in Fresh-Water Birds of Ireland (see Richard Collins above). It would make a fine Christmas gift for birdwatchers or fresh-water anglers. The photographs by Mark Carmody are superb.