Heron watch

IT’S all happening in the heronry, and birds are already sitting on eggs.

I’ve found three nests in the woodland below my house, and six in a wood near Timoleague in West Cork. The nests, 80 feet up in the still-leafless trees, sway precariously when the wind blows, although sited in the more sheltered corners of the wood.

Some are alarmingly flimsy, especially those built by birds breeding for the first time, and it is easy to see how a chick could topple over the edge. This was the fate of ‘our’ heron, the fledgling we found, flightless and abandoned, under a tree two years ago. We reared it as a wild bird, never handling it beyond the first few weeks, but it still comes to visit us regularly.

I can’t say I’d care to be a fledgling heron sitting with two or three large siblings 80 feet above the forest floor. Yet that is the destiny of the youngsters until, having grown flight feathers and practiced wing-flapping on the nest edge, they at last leap into space and, with untried navigation skills, flop onto an adjacent tree. Day by day they gain balance and fly farther until, at last, they can join the parent birds fishing on the shallow shores of the bay. However, parent birds don’t tolerate their offspring for long so they must quickly learn to fend for themselves.

Meanwhile, the reason I’ve been straining my neck to focus on the nests is to try to determine, through binoculars, if our heron is amongst those nesting in the trees below the house. I have reason to think it is. That it should do so would be a modest triumph for my family, its surrogate parents. It is now two years old, the age at which herons first breed. It is resplendent in breeding colours, long aigrettes (thin, black feathers, like pigtails) descending from the crown and all the feathers, black, white and grey, suddenly vivid — even the beak, which has become a bright orange-red.

It is “dressed up for a dance” one might say, and mating herons do, indeed, dance around one another. Also, while previously it came to the garden most days to be fed a few small fish, bycatch from local trawlers, it recently absents itself for as much as three days and nights at a time. It has other business to attend to, love-making, egg-laying, hatching the eggs. And, of course, reciprocating the attentions of a mate.

On the evening of Mar 12, walking through these nearby woods, I saw a heron in each of the three nests, one standing on the edge and two sitting, presumably on eggs. I had just arrived back home when our heron flew in, planing down on its six-foot wide wingspan, daintily alighting by the pond, then making a bee-line for the French windows of my workroom, where it could see the electric light — it was almost dark, around 5.30pm.

Giving it three small fish, just enough to keep it waiting around for more, I rushed down to the wood, binoculars in hand. Sure enough, one nest was vacant, and when I got back at the house, ‘our’ bird was still there. I fed it more fish and, had not darkness arrived, I might have gone to the wood and waited to see if it would return. However, even now, with business elsewhere, it hangs about the pond for an hour, digesting the fish before fying off. It would stay most of the day, before.

We will probably never know the sex of our bird. The plumage of both sexes is the same and males and females both sit the eggs. Recently, I read that the female is the nest builder and I then recalled that when our bird first began to fly, it would carry sticks back to where it lived in a fish-box on our balcony, and would arrange them carefully. I concluded that it must, therefore, be a female.

Then, I read that it is the male that carries the sticks to the nesting site and was again confounded.