Black-crowned Night-Heron

WHEN YOU PHOTOGRAPH birds, or just enjoy watching them, it’s hard to hold a grudge. Flickers that incessantly drum on your metal chimney are annoying, but who could truly hate such a gorgeous woodpecker? Still, for a long time I carried a silly grudge against a single species: the Black-crowned Night Heron. It began one evening some years ago. A large group of these herons swarmed the swimming pool of a coastal California motel where I was staying. Just outside my room, they screeched at each other for hours, and they do not have a voice that is pleasant to the human ear. I don’t know whether they were fighting over food or mates, or just holding a regional convention, but the cacophony kept me up most of the night. The next day, at a meeting with some professors at UC Santa Barbara, I kept jolting myself awake.

MY GRUDGE first softened on a canoe trip in the Wood River Wetland in southern Oregon. A single Black-crowned Night Heron had perched on the branch of a fallen tree in the river, grooming itself as we floated by. That red eye! A close-up of the heron appeared in my book, Year of the Birds. A further softening occurred a few years later in the Arcata Marsh, in northern California, where I spent a p couple of hours watching a roost of these herons hopping among the trees that line that coastal wetland.

THE FINAL BLOW to my foolish grudge occurred at year ago, in the Hanalei Valley on the island of Kauai. Along the river, fields of taro comprise a native Hawaiian heritage site that attracts hundreds of birds—rare Hawaiian Stilts, Cattle Egrets and cardinals, an endemic and endangered goose called the Nēnē, and many others. Olivier, my brother-in-law, and I had been photographing all morning along the irrigation channels and submerged fields when we spotted a Black-crowned Night Heron flying into a tree. We soon realized that the bird was flying back and forth across a small field to collect small branches for a nest it was building. The two of us watched this rhythmic activity for quite a while, working to catch the bird in mid-flight. At one point, a beautiful orange Barn Owl leapt from one of the trees and I swirled around to catch it with my camera. But I got my best shot when the heron landed on a branch alongside the water and repeatedly pulled at a twig until it broke off. The bird then raised up its wings and carried it off.

Nikon D500, 500mm, 1/1000th second @ f8, ISO 1100