THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 6, 1994 TAG: 9407060348
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
In a break in a thunderstorm, photographer Motoya Nakamura snapped a picture of a strange darkish bird, looking rather disconsolate, perched on the edge of the Hague waterway near the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk's Ghent.
``What is it?'' he asked me.
It is either a big little bird, meaning a largish young one, I told him. Or it is a little big bird, an oldish, rather large but somewhat stunted-looking bird.
I telephoned bird-watcher David Hughes. If a bird ever had an identity crisis, it would go to Hughes to find what it was.
If there is one thing expert ornithologists abhor it is having birds described to them on the phone by an excited layman who doesn't know a hawk from a handsaw.
Moreover, the layman expects the expert to identify the subject immediately from an ill-trained observer who doesn't hesitate to offer sketchy, scrambled impressions.
Which, nevertheless, I did, starting with a bird everyone knows and proceeding into the unknown.
``This bird looks a little like a starling with legs about 4 inches long and a bill as long as its legs, and a neck that can stretch, like an accordion, half again the length of its body.''
``Does he have a kind of hammerhead?'' Hughes asked.
I looked closely.
``By George, it does!'' I said.
``It's probably a heron,'' Hughes said, ``either a green heron or a young heron of some other species.''
So I took him the slide. After all, that is what David Hughes and Bob Ake and all the other gifted ones are put on Earth to do - identify birds for laymen who are foundering around in a sea of ignorance.
Hughes held the slide to the light.
``Aha!'' he exclaimed, ``an immature yellow crowned night heron!''
``Hold on, David!'' I cried. ``Aren't we being a mite judgmental about this young bird, labeling it immature when, after all, we have no idea what it may have gone through, mayhap, even, an orphan of the storm?''
``It's a young bird, still fuzzy, not long out of the nest,'' he said.
It had, he noted, long legs for wading, a heavy bill for breaking open the crabs on which it feeds. It would soon become speckled.
As an adult it will be slate gray with white cheeks, a yellowing crown and plumes. You definitely know you are looking at no ordinary citizen when you see it.
It nests in tall pines. As it flies, trailing its legs like the final flourish in a signature, it utters a loud quonk like something from the era of dinosaurs, recalling to us that birds derived from snakes.
That such a bird is at ease within a five-minute drive of the business district may not be fit for a brochure to draw tourists, but it fetches me.
And for the sake of these wild ones we ought to leave niches of brush and brambles here and there even in the most manicured of human habitats. Our sense of survival is bound up with their enduring. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
MOTOYA NAKAMURA/Staff
The bird was perched on the edge of The Hague in Norfolk.
by CNB