Great Blue Heron, I presume; since that’s what they say lives up this way.
We were sitting on the patio, and I saw the bird fly over. We heard something in a tree, and I assumed it was a crow or a squirrel or something. The heron’s flight path wasn’t going that way. The SO pointed it out to me (there was another tree in my eye-line). There it was, about 40 or 50 feet up a cedar.
You know, now that you linked it, I do recall seeing wading birds nesting in trees in various documentaries. I didn’t make the connection to local wading birds though. :smack:
In any case, it’s the first time I’ve seen one in a tree IRL.
Here in Topeka there is a small colony of yellow-crested night herons. They are at the northern end of their range, we in the Audobon Society were surprised when they established themselves. They are the biggest birds I’ve ever seen, with my own eyes, nesting in trees.
One woman who lives close by them hated them the first year, and I presume still does. Her goldfish pond in the back yard was like ringing a dinner bell. “They ate my $50 koi!”
The Wells Fargo across the street from my office has a little Koi pond with some huge fish. I remember watching a big white heron wading in it one day and wondering if it could even eat those huge fish.
Every once in a while, I’ll see a heron walking on a parked car downtown. They would make quite a stylish hood ornament.
There’s a colony of them that nest in the big trees a block from Lake Washington. They come back to the same nests every year. Their children too. Each year there are more and more nests. The trees are cottonwoods, and they nest before the leaves come on.
