Herons + Friends With Totipalmate Feet

Recovered words from my Wild Beat blog (2013)

It begins with a twig in the bill and the throaty croak of the swamp. They’re creatures of the marshes, the Great Blues, now on ascent to a season in the trees where nests incubate eggs, and where clumsy young legs will soon dawdle on branches until they get their wings.

They call this place the satellite colony, since the rest of the rookery is tucked in a ravine so lush it oozes dew and steam. This row of trees sprouts at the end of the ravine, high above a park and pathway that hosts a lot more humans than herons.

Double-crested Cormorants now also roost over the path after fishing the spillway all afternoon.

A Bald Eagle does a spin over the exposed trees, looking for prey before the resident crows escort her away.

The fresh construction of an Osprey platform to the west awaits the return of the couple who might choose, instead, to rebuild on the railroad bridge where they’ve nested for the past many years.

On a sunny evening, I walk the cement path below the trees, now painted with cormorant guano and fallen feathers. I stop by the nests just long enough to check on the new heron couples, and take a few shots of heron eyes reflecting the magic-hour. Walkers who know, hug the security rail farthest from the guano trail as they pass under 30 or more roosting cormorants.

A guy from Arizona asks me where the nearest pay phone is so he can call Billy, a guy on a bike he just met at a bar.

Ten minutes later, another guy — who almost fits the description of Billy, with a beat-up bike and the worn serape — marvels at the “web-footed birds perched in the tree” — the cormorants. He says to me, “I can’t believe they can hang on with webbed feet, can you?” I mention the toes and the webbing that make up the totipalmate foot, and he says, “wow, cool, totipalmate. Right on.”

I think about that moment after, how webbing between toes forged a connection between me and a guy possibly named Billy. I think about the survival humor we share as visitors, dodging guano that drops like cake batter. I think about the little bit of anatomy that separates a heron’s foot from from a cormorant’s from a human’s, and how tiny that separation really is.

I see the guy with the serape, possibly named Billy, several times over the next few weeks. I never ask his name. That doesn’t seem to be our relationship.When he sees me, he just says, “totipalmate” and smiles.

Video from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology — a heron’s-eye-view from the nesting branches.

Rookery update: The nesting is in progress right now, with the sleek silhouettes of herons visible through branches and buds — buds that will soon shield the nests with greenery, making the rookery almost invisible except to those passersby who know.

The Osprey platform I wrote about still waits for the pair to return after last year’s successful nesting season, their first in the new digs. Two of our six neighborhood Ospreys are back. I’ve been looking for them everyday and saw the first female arrive a few days ago. Yesterday, I spotted the male in the nest — the two Ospreys huddled together in a rain storm, on their command post over Puget Sound and the busy Port of Seattle.

The Bald Eagles are also back nesting in our neighborhood, doing regular flybys and catching thermals above our apartment balcony. And, it’s almost time for the Caspian Terns to crash the party — a story that will be my next post.