The sozlet and I went for a walk along the river today and saw all kinds of good stuff -- goslings, grasshoppers, and the usual ducks and grown-up geese. (We saw the goslings from about 4 feet away -- really cute and fluffy.)
I thought I saw a great blue heron across the river, but it was hard to see. It just sat there, immobile. I realized my scale was wrong and it was way too small to be a great blue -- it was smaller (but not by much) than the mallards paddling nearby. It was standing on a log, and I realized when I walked along a bit and saw it from a different angle that its legs weren't very long. I briefly thought it might even be a hawk from the overall shape of its body, but the beak was all wrong for that -- much too long and pointy. Kingfisher crossed my mind, but it didn't have a crest.
I squinted at that thing for a very long time, and it was so immobile I wondered if maybe it was just a plastic bag or something that had draped itself in a particularly bird-like way. So I threw a big rock in its direction (nowhere near actually hitting it) and it started a bit but didn't fly away. So this thing was a bird, I'm just trying to figure out what kind of a bird.
I looked in my bird book under gray birds, and the
green heron was shaped exactly right but the colors were wrong. I thought it might be an
immature green heron from the description in the book, but when I found the picture it was much too stripey and strongly colored. This bird was almost entirely blue-gray, almost dove-gray, and possibly had a darker stripe down its back.
Any ideas?
)
I'll figure it out eventually. I'm thinking green heron with glare from the river washing it out, at this point, but I don't actually believe it. It was blue-gray, I tells ya.
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace
