Great Blue Heron Returns

With the roof of our garden room just below my office window I’m used to visits from crows and scrub jays using it as a landing strip, or squirrels climbing in search of food. Daisy spends her days camped out on a perch she cleared on my crafts bench to watch the neighbors’ hens and other critters through the window. Imagine Daisy’s excitement when this bird-much-larger-than the usual crow cruised right past her to land on the garden room roof!

Great Blues are the largest heron, adults can stand four feet tall. It stayed there surveying our pond long enough for me call to George (in my excitement I said it was an egret) and to grab my camera for several photos.

Great Blue Herons have patches on their shoulder of varying colors; I was close enough to get an adequate photo of this one’s “epaulets” of very dark and reddish feathers.

And then away it flew … until next time!

If you want to see my blog posts about our other GBH visits, click here to see the first, which happened in March 2012 and the second, which was last July.

 

 

George’s Garden Pond

In deciding to buy our house, one of the main attractions was the garden pond. It’s a testament to George’s imagination that he saw the potential, because it was far from a real pond at the time. It was full of dirt and rotting vegetation, riddled with cracks, and woefully overgrown and underloved. Over the years he has nurtured it into an amazing, flourishing pond filled with aquatic flowers and plants, a haven for mosquito fish, goldfish and a couple of koi.  He even loves taking an annual dip into the pond to clean it out. I took a photo of him a few years back climbing out. Since he was not fully clothed at the time, I had to do some artsy work to make it family-friendly.

Another day I took a photo of his reflection as he peered into the pond.

The water lilies have been blooming for weeks. I took this photo a couple of days ago of a red water lily among lily pads.

If you look closely in the lower right corner, you can see one of the large goldfish gliding by. Do you have a garden pond? What kind of flowers and plants grow in it?

Great Blue Heron visits the garden

A creek runs behind our house. During drought years it trickles, but recent rains have brought torrents of water rushing through the channel. We think a Great Blue Heron (GBH) that visited us the other day may have flown to us by following the creek, which goes underground for a bit just past our property.  We also have a small garden pond with some fish, and it could be that the heron had heard tell of tasty treats in a pair of backyard ponds – our next door neighbors also have one. And yes, some of the fancy koi that we had in past years were eaten by marauding herons and egrets, so now we stick to less costly goldfish and mosquito fish. George saw the GBH circling above the garden. Although George was sitting quite still, perhaps the heron spotted him and decided not to try for the pond. I was inside the house, and after grabbing my camera I quickly scanned and saw that it had landed on our neighbor’s roof.

It strode across and perched at the highest point to survey the possibilities.

Patiently looked in all directions.

Gave me a final shot at its gorgeous profile.

And finally turned and flew away over the rooftops, perhaps to find a garden pond without a guardian.