THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 7, 1996 TAG: 9607040320
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Coastal Journal
SOURCE: Mary Reid Barrow
LENGTH: 86 lines
The family life of a pair of yellow-crowned night herons and their youngsters is playing out on a pine tree branch in Kings Forest.
Brenda Leary and her family have been watching the slow-motion saga since early spring, when the heron pair first began to build a nest in a tree in the Leary's front yard. Now the birds have four youngsters, almost too big for the nest, who spend a lot of time standing quietly and motionlessly out on their home branch.
Leary remembers the day the birds built their big stick nest. She watched them gather nesting materials by grabbing dead branches off the trees. She also saw them hold the sticks in their bills and hammer them onto a living branch, breaking the stick down to their size specifications.
Leary also recalls when the eggs hatched. Pieces of shell dropped to the street.
``They were thick and blue and bigger than a jumbo size egg,'' she said.
The bluish-gray herons have a distinctive black and white face, but their yellow crowns aren't always visible. In breeding season, plumes trail off their heads.
They are exotic and stately birds that stand very still or move slowly and regally unless food is in the picture. Then the birds move almost too fast to see, grabbing a fiddler crab or other crustacean meal with their beaks.
The youngsters out on Leary's branch are mottled gray-brown and white with none of their adult coloration yet. Although a little awkwardly shaped, they were maintaining the same stately, quiet stance of adult herons - that is, until a parent arrived back at the nest, with food no less.
I watched as one of the parent birds flew in from a creek off the Lynnhaven River just across the street from Leary. Silently and gracefully, it landed near where the branch met the tree and walked in slow steps out to the nest.
When the youngsters realized that mama (or papa) was back, they became babies again. The little birds hopped back into the nest, arranging themselves in a circle, crouching with their rumps facing outward around the nest and their heads down toward the center.
The parent was still majestic even as she gave what appeared to be a little burp and lowered her head slowly down into the middle of the nest. As herons do, she was reguritating a meal for her youngsters. She did this once more, as the babies peeped like tiny birds. Then she lifted from the nest in her quiet, majestic way, off to search for another meal for her hungry, growing babes.
Although herons tend to nest in colonies, another single pair of yellow-crowned night herons are nesting across from Heddie and Quentin Kaylor's home in Point O Woods. The birds started building their big, stick nest only recently, late in the season compared to the Leary's nest. Heddie Kaylor was particularly fascinated with the pair's courtship motions.
``They would bob up and down and back and forth and rub their necks together,'' she said. ``It was beautiful. They are very close to each other. They really seem loving.''
Now the female is sitting on the nest and the male comes in to feed her a couple of times a day, she said, and then flies in to stay at night.
If you are interested in seeing a live yellow-crowned night heron, visit the new aviary at the Virginia Marine Science Museum. A bird that was injured and cared for by a wildlife rehabilitator, but which is unable to return to the wild, has just been released into the big outdoor bird exhibit.
Later this summer, another of the beautiful herons also will find a home in the aviary. It's a local bird that Museum Director Mac Rawls found injured near his home.
Rawls captured the bird and it turned out one of its wings had been shattered by a bullet. The heron is recovering at the museum now, but its injury was so severe that it cannot be released into the wild either.
You might want to take your binoculars when you visit the aviary, because herons are shy birds and they like to stay in the marsh grass where they feel concealed. With binoculars, you'll be able to observe the beautiful markings up close.
P.S. HISTORIC UPPER WOLFSNARE, 2040 Potters Road, will be open for public tours from noon to 4 p.m. on Wednesdays through August. Owned by the Princess Anne County-Virginia Beach Historical Society, Upper Wolfsnare was built in the mid-1700s by Thomas Walke, a prominent resident of old Princess Anne County. Admission is $2 for adults and $1 for children, 6 to 12. MEMO: What unusual nature have you seen this week? And what do you know
about Tidewater traditions and lore? Call me on INFOLINE, 640-5555.
Enter category 2290. Or, send a computer message to my Internet address:
mbarrow(AT)infi.net. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by MARY REID BARROW
A pair of yellow-crowned night herons are now raising four youngters
in a nest in a pine tree in Brenda Leary's front yard in Kings
Forest. The bluish-gray herons have a distinctive black and white
face, but their yellow crowns aren't always visible. by CNB