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June 09, 2006
herons in wyman park
Inspired by gribley (who is visiting this weekend and who takes some sweet pictures up in Boston), I spent my first morning of post-first-year-of-grad-school freedom attaching a pair of binoculars (bungee cord) and my digital camera (1/4” bolt) to a wooden plank and venturing into Wyman Park.
For the last few months, we’ve been keeping tabs on a few Yellow-Crowned Night Herons that have set up camp high in some locust trees in Wyman Park (formal info on the birds available at whatbird.com and Audubon). We first noticed a few of them in mid-April (the 18th, as some archived emails suggest) on an evening stroll — they were busy pulling twigs off of neighboring trees and bringing them back to where they were building the nests. Over the next few days we got to watch nest-building activities and flapping, breeding fun every night that we went down. One evening we saw five birds working on three separate nests, but we have not seen more than 5 adults at any one time since. There are now three nests within 100 meters of each other along the path that runs along the western side of the creek. In the first week or so there seemed to be a lot of activity — the nests went up pretty quickly and each time we went down we’d see three or four adults hanging out on nearby branches. It got boring for a few weeks as they incubated the eggs and each time we’d come down it’d just be the mom sitting on the nest.
But a few weeks ago (around the 13th or so of May), we noticed that the mothers had stopped sitting on the nests all the time. Although we couldn’t get a good angle to see into the nests, we were hoping for some baby herons to start poking their heads over. Indeed, over the past few weeks, the chicks have emerged and grown like crazy to the point where they are now taking over the nests. One nest has at least five and maybe six chicks in it (I call them chicks, but really, they’re about 2/3 or even 3/4 of the adult size now). The other nest that we can see into has two chicks. The last nest has been mostly obscured by foliage since the first weeks of sighting.
In the last few days we’ve been lucky enough to catch some feeding times (the first sighting of a second adult at the populous nest in a while — bringing food for all), and the little guys are clearly getting restless and wondering what these large feathered appendages are for. And this morning was the first time I’d been there when there was no adult watching over the populous nest — the teenagers were home alone. It probably won’t be long until they’re gone, so I got inspired today to snap some photos. Hence the Rube Goldberg camera contraption. And actually, it managed to take some decent pictures. Some are more fuzzy than others, but I think you’ll get the idea…
As an addendum — a google on “wyman park herons” turned up documented sightings of YCNHs nesting on the western side of Wyman Park in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003. The 2001 report said that no offspring were produced in 2000, so it looks like this has been a good year. Hopefully they’ll be back next spring too!
Posted by nick at June 9, 2006 12:59 PM
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