Heron Diet Surprise

I saw an amazing thing today. Sitting on the grass at El Dorado park, reading a book, I was amid a group of seven large herons within a fifty yard radius of me. Five whites, two blues. They’re doing their regular thing: standing immobile, occasionally walking in their stately slow-motion fashion. I ponder what they eat while they’re out here at the park. Insects, I guess. Usually I see them perched on rocks in the San Gabriel River adjacent to the bike trail. I’m reading a Joe Kurtz novel by Dan Simmons. Toughest hard-boiled P.I. there is, bar none. I glance up, and there’s a great blue heron about thirty feet from me. I watch him. He’s beautiful. Magnificent. He crouches down, and I assume he’s making himself smaller because I’m so close.

Suddenly, he whips his head forward, jabs his head in the grass, and comes up with a field mouse in his beak. A little mouse about four inches long. In a few seconds he has gulped it down, and I could see the big bulge in his neck. I was dumbfounded. “Holy shit,” I whispered, a big smile on my face. So that’s what they eat. I was sorry my father-in-law Philip wasn’t there to witness this little slice of the natural world. He’s the birder, not me. And I wished I had my camera, to capture the image of the bloated throat.

Photo by Stephen Pinker