Little Green Herons and Bucks in Velvet

Every day I take a few hours to be good to my spirit. Sometimes I take a whole day. July 25 was just such a day. It was to be beautiful. And my friend David, who with his wife Mary Jane turned me onto North Bend State Park in Harrisville, WV, emailed me around 11 pm on the 24th to ask if I wanted to meet them there in the morning. Oh, there's nothing I'd rather do than float around with you two sharp-eyed, attuned naturalists and dear friends!

But my car was in the shop for a mysterious Subaru gas tank weirdness! I fussed about that for awhile, then asked to borrow Bill's van. So the next morning he stuffed my canoe into the van and I rode into town with him, dropped him at Bird Watcher's Digest, and headed to the lake.

The red-headed woodpeckers were calling, churring and kwirking, as I got out of the car at the boat launch. Two, teed up on a snag where I parked. Three more whirling around on the lake. A couple of newly fledged youngun's begging.  It was cool and sunny with puffy white summer clouds. I was so glad to be there.

Little did I know that it was to be Green Heron Day at North Bend State Park. A veritable Festival of Green Herons. Now, I've been there lots of times, and the most I've ever gotten is a few rotten looks at a supershy green heron flying away. Today would be a whole 'nother thing. 

I couldn't tell until I uploaded this photo that this is a newly fledged youngun. See the white down on its crown, and the pale feather edgings on its wing coverts? 

This is another young bird, stepping carefully along a submerged log. It has just a trace of down on the crown, but mostly the heavily streaked sideneck, the pale edgings on wing coverts, and the greenish (not bright orange-yellow) legs give it away.  There are many such floating logs at North Bend. They're the remains of the standing timber that houses the red-headed woodpeckers. It's falling, falling...and the place is changing right before my eyes.

Green herons are shape-shifters, going from football

to croquet mallet in the wink of a hard yellow eye.

Not only that, they have some fabulous James Brown hair when they're excited.



This is the bird my Iowa-born father called a shitepoke. If you don't know the derivation of that word, you may benefit by my having wondered about it for 50 years, and finally having figured it out. Read "How Do You Spell Shitepoke?" 

Well, that was a bit of hyperbole. I probably started wondering about it when I was six. But still. I was delighted to see these young green herons stepping carefully through the shallows of North Bend. It seemed to me a change for the better. This little heron isn't doing so well throughout its range, and it was a balm to see them enjoying some breeding success at my happy place. More green herons in a subsequent post!

I always enjoy stalking deer from the water, and today was Bucks in Velvet day. Everybody got a free bobblehead buck in velvet.



They are curious about a person in a small silent watercraft, but they aren't alarmed, and we spend a great deal of time just looking at each other.



For someone who's going to get so bold and raunchy when the rut comes around in about two months, it amuses me to see him acting like a shy first-grader with his tender just-forking antlers.



We play hide-and-seek, me paddling hard a few times, then drifting silently closer; he playing fan dancer in the trunks and leaves.

If canoeing North Bend with me sounds like something you'd like to do, there are still some spaces left in the Bird Watcher's Digest Reader Rendezvous coming up August 22-24, 2014.

Check it out here: Birding Valhalla With Julie Zickefoose

How Do You Spell "Shitepoke?"

This is all you usually see of a shitepoke. They're shy.

My father had stories he’d tell, time and time again, and one of them was from his one-room schoolhouse when he was a farm boy in Iowa. The teacher asked the kids to make a list of all the birds they knew, and they were busy scratching away with their pencils when one boy raised his hand and asked, “Ma’am, how do you spell “shitepoke?”

Dad would always laugh, sometimes with a little snort, when he hit the punchline on that story. And I would laugh too, but I never quite got what was so funny about the story. I thought it was quaint that a child would ask the teacher to spell a colloquial name of a bird—“shitepoke” is an old country name for a heron. Kind of a funny name. I wondered about it then, and I've been wondering about it until just today.

I spent the day in my little canoe, drifting along on Seneca Lake and Wolf Run, messing about with herons. I got close to two green herons and three great blues, banging away with my 300 mm. lens, trying to get a decent photograph. The herons were less than thrilled with my attentions. One of my sharper photos was this one.

A dark but otherwise o.k. portrait of a green heron, only slightly compromised by the giant dollop of fish emulsion exiting its cloaca.

I looked at that photo, thinking at first the white thing was a branch, and when I realized what I’d photographed, I burst out laughing. And, perhaps the recipient of a cosmic tap on the shoulder by my Dear Old Dad, I started to think about the name, “shitepoke.” Now, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the derivation of “shite.” It’s a polite way to pronounce it, to make the i long, but it’s still feces. And poke? What IS a shitepoke? And suddenly, like a bolt, it hit me that  "poke" is an archaic word for a sack or a bag. Pig in a poke. So “shitepoke” means “sh-tsack.” Aggggh!

Anyone who’s ever flushed a heron and watched it fly away, a streamer of white trailing out behind it, knows what a descriptive name that is. "Chalkline" is another colloquial name for a heron. Shitepoke. I….love….it.

I sat alone in my canoe in the quiet little cove, laughing until I made the boat rock, laughing until the ripples spread out around me, and I felt my daddy right there, laughing with me. I’ve been trying for most of my 50 years to figure out what was so funny about that story. DOD, I finally got it.