WILD THINGS: KUNG FU HERONS & THEIR PLACE IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS

A great white heron seen in Key West recently. MARK HEDDEN/Keys Weekly

It was the third year that Ellen Westbrook and I had done the morning part of the Christmas Bird Count by bike, which officially made it a tradition. Our territory was Old Town Key West, everything west of White Street. 

It was a bit blowy, which was mostly fine, except for the few times Ellen, who is much skinnier than me, had to stand on her pedals to keep going in a headwind. The wind meant our songbird numbers would likely be lower than most years, as they tend to hunker down and make themselves hard to find when branches start waving in the breeze. We persevered, though, and worked our way around the island, counting every pigeon, dove, gull, tern, pelican, mockingbird and chicken we saw. 

At Fort Zach we sat on a picnic table bench and counted the gray mass of laughing gulls, backlit by a glittering sea, that covered one of the rock piles. By some miracle we both counted exactly 310.

At Mallory Square, we saw our one and only white-crowned pigeon of the morning, and our first 78 black skimmers. 

We parked our bikes at the racks in the shadow of the A&B Lobster House sign and walked to the end of the boardwalk at Ocean Key House, counting the young brown pelicans napping on the floating docks along the way. (There were five.)

We watched as a huge manatee, tail the size of a card table, stuck his nose above the surface to catch his breath, then submerged again and slowly swam under the boats. 

I didn’t pay much attention to the great white heron standing on the floating jet ski dock. It was the sixth one I’d seen that day. After we counted the 29 pelicans out on the granite riprap seawall that protects Key West Bight, I started scanning the dock lines for green herons, which sometimes like to use them for fishing perches.

After a few minutes the great white heron took off. I thought about lifting my camera for a flight shot, but knew I would only get a picture of a bird’s departing butt, and I have a lot of those. 

Also, the great white did not fly away. Instead he dropped face first, wings outstretched, down into the water, like an osprey, like Cato from the Pink Panther movies. 

The bird was only in the water for a second, maybe two. Immediately he started flapping, lifting slowly, then quickly, out of the water, returning to the exact same spot on the floating jet ski dock in the exact same posture, as if someone had rewound a film.

“Did you see that?” I asked Ellen.

She had not. Self-doubt started to creep in. I would have wondered if I had imagined it, except the bird left a floating after-image on the surface of the water, kind of an inverse shadow, a pale, large heron-sized, dissipating Rorschach blot that slowly drifted in the direction the manatee had gone.

Herons have a thing called powder down, also sometimes called feather dust, which is a talcum-like substance that comes from the worn feathers. It helps keep their feathers healthy and orderly, like a sort of dry conditioner. So I figured the after-image was that. But Ellen, who handles a lot of birds when she volunteers at the Key West Wildlife Center, was pretty sure there was a healthy dose of feather lice in there, too.

I had never noticed the after-image phenomenon before, but the behavior was unfamiliar as well, and to me more surprising.

Great white herons are wading birds. Their standard modus operandi is to stand in a few inches of water and wait for an unsuspecting fish to swim by, and then to grab it with an ultra-quick stab of the bill. Sometimes they’ll stand on the edge of the water – in the mud or sand or on a log or rock – and do this. Sometimes they’ll wade into belly-deep water. Sometimes they nab a snake or the occasional smaller bird or still-growing chick. 

I had never seen a great white heron, or really any type of heron, do a full-on aquatic body slam. No doubt it did it in an attempt to catch a fish, but with all the flailing body parts needed for the bird to regain purchase on the air and lift itself back out of the water, it was impossible to say whether he gulped something down quickly or not. 

It was the kind of behavior I would like to read more about, but I suspected there wouldn’t be a great deal of easy-to-find information about the varied hunting tactics of great white herons, which turned out to be the case.

Part of the problem is the great white heron’s taxonomic status. Not much has been written about its behavior because it is not currently considered a species.

The great white heron breeds almost exclusively in the Florida Keys and the Everglades. It’s our hometown hero(n), the one truly endemic form of a bird we have. It was first described for science by John James Audubon when he visited the Keys in 1832, and for 141 years it was considered a full species. Then, in 1973, the American Ornithologists’ Union’s Check-list Committee, in an era of lumping, lumped it in as a subspecies of the great blue heron, and later, simply a color morph of the great blue heron. 

Since that time, most of the consideration and study of the great white heron has centered on its taxonomic status as opposed to its behaviors or other aspects of life histories.

In recent years, though, the pendulum has begun to swing back toward full species status for the great white heron, driven largely by recent DNA analysis, as well as a few scathing takedowns of the original decision to reclassify it as a subspecies. 

In 2020, the American Ornithological Society’s North American Classification Committee (the organization and the committee were both renamed since 1973) declined to reclassify the great white heron, but only by a 5-4 vote. 

There are rumors the committee will reconsider its status in the next year or two, and I hope so. Then maybe someone can help shed some light on what the bird I saw dive into the water was up to.

Mark Hedden
Mark Hedden is a photographer, writer, and semi-professional birdwatcher. He has lived in Key West for more than 25 years and may no longer be employable in the real world. He is also executive director of the Florida Keys Audubon Society.