Herons and Egrets of the Willamette

Three of them share the same water here, and most people only ever notice one. The great blue heron is unmissable — four feet of gray patience standing in the shallows, Portland’s official city bird since 1986. The great white egret is the bright one, the shape that stops traffic on the Sellwood Bridge. And the green heron is the one almost nobody sees at all, because he is the size of a crow and spends his life folded into a lump at the water’s edge.

They are all in the same family, all built around the same idea — stand still, wait, strike — and all of them are doing something more interesting than standing there looking elegant. Here they are.

🪶 There’s a quiz at the end — ten questions on what’s below. Jump to the quiz →

The Great Blue Heron

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Start with the thing everybody gets wrong about him. He stands about four feet tall with a wingspan near six, so people assume he is heavy. He weighs about five pounds — less than a house cat, less than a gallon of milk. Nearly all of that apparent size is feathers, air and hollow bone. It is why he can stand on a branch too thin to hold a squirrel, and why he lifts off with two unhurried beats and no visible effort.

He has been Portland’s city bird since 1986, and he takes the job seriously. There is a rookery at Oaks Bottom, and the birds from it work the entire river through town — the industrial reach, the park shallows, the flooded ditch behind the grocery store. For an animal that looks like it belongs in a nature documentary, he is a committed urbanite.

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Spend a moment on that eye, because it does something ours cannot. A heron’s eyes sit on the sides of the head, which gives a wide view of the world and almost no depth perception — useless for judging the exact distance to a fish. So the bird rotates its eyes forward and downward, swinging them into a narrow band of binocular overlap that looks straight along the bill. Two eyes on one target, distance solved, and only then is the neck released.

There is a second problem to solve before the strike lands. Light bends when it crosses from air into water, so a fish is never quite where it appears to be. A bird that aimed at what it saw would miss every time. Herons correct for the refraction and strike where the fish actually is — a physics problem I had to look up, solved daily by a bird with a brain the size of a walnut.

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Everyone files herons under “water bird,” and then one turns up eighty feet in the air. They roost in trees at night and they nest in colonies at the very top of them — sometimes a hundred bulky stick nests in a single grove. In late winter the bare cottonwoods at Oaks Bottom fill up with them, and the noise is something between a rusty gate and a pterodactyl.

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They will work any water that holds food, right down to a creek you could step across. And the diet is far broader than “fish.” Great blue herons take frogs, crayfish, snakes, large insects and a genuinely surprising quantity of rodents — voles and gophers, hunted in dry grass with no water in sight. If you ever see a heron standing motionless in the middle of a field, it is not lost. It is hunting mice.

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He is not contemplating anything. A bird can preen nearly its whole body with its bill, but not its own head and neck — the one place the bill cannot reach. So the grooming tool went on the foot: a heron’s middle toe carries a pectinate claw, an actual comb with fine teeth along one edge, used to work through the head feathers and clear out parasites, dust and fish slime. He is combing his hair, on one leg, in a tree, in the wind.

He also carries his own dry shampoo. Herons grow patches of powder down — special feathers that crumble into a fine dust, which the bird works through its plumage to lift the slime and oil that come with eating fish for a living.

How a Heron Flies

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This is the single most useful thing to know about them. Herons and egrets fly with the neck folded back into an S. Cranes, storks and geese fly with it stretched straight out ahead. One glance at the silhouette settles the identification, at any distance, in any light.

The reason is weight and balance. That head and long dagger of a bill are heavy, and carried out front they would put the center of gravity well ahead of the wings. Folding the neck brings the mass back over the wing roots; the trailing legs balance what remains behind. He looks unhurried — barely two wingbeats a second — and is moving at twenty to thirty miles an hour.

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Flying that close to the surface is not showing off, it is economy. A wing passing near the ground or the water gets a real aerodynamic bonus — the air beneath it cannot spill away as freely, so drag falls and lift comes cheaper. Pilots call it ground effect. Pelicans, herons and skimmers all use it, coasting inches above the surface for long stretches on almost nothing.

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And then, between wingbeats, this: the entire bird folded into a single tapered shape. Body as fuselage, legs retracted, neck and bill out front as the nose section. Nothing protruding, nothing fluttering, drag down to almost nothing. I labeled a version of this frame like an aircraft blueprint on my Nature Is Funny page as a joke, and then realized every label was accurate.

Worth remembering how often that arrangement has beaten ours. When Japanese engineers needed to stop a bullet train from booming out of tunnels, they solved it by reshaping the nose after the beak of a fish-hunting bird.

The Great White Egret

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This is the closest thing to a religious painting I have made with a camera, and it is the one photograph here I deliberately shot to print in monochrome. Color would add nothing — she is already white. What makes the picture is tone, and taking the color away lets the light do all the talking.

The pose is real behavior, not a lucky instant of something else. Egrets hold their wings open like this to brake on landing, to steady themselves on an awkward perch, to shade the water so they can see through the glare, and simply to dry off and warm up.

And while you are looking at those feathers: plumes like these very nearly finished the species. Great white egrets were killed in enormous numbers so their breeding plumes could decorate hats, and the outrage over it helped launch the American conservation movement. The egret has been the symbol of the National Audubon Society ever since. Every one you see today is the result of people deciding to stop.

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If you want to tell her from the smaller snowy egret, look at the ends: yellow bill, black legs and feet is a great white egret. The snowy wears the reverse — black bill, and bright yellow feet that birders call golden slippers.

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A white bird against dark water is one of the harder things to photograph well. Expose for the background and she burns out into a white cutout with no feathers in her. Expose for the bird and the whole scene turns to mud. Everything worth seeing lives in a narrow band at the top of the range — the shadow under the wing, the faint gray modeling along the neck, the individual barbs of the plumes.

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Here is the quiet secret of photographing a white bird: she is never actually white. White plumage is a blank canvas that takes the color of whatever light falls on it — gold at sunrise and sunset, faintly blue in open shade, pink for a few minutes after the sun has gone. This frame holds two light sources at once: warm sun on the bird, cool skylight on the water.

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That puffed-up shape is insulation: raising the feathers traps a thick layer of still air against the skin, exactly like a down jacket. But the real trick is in the bare black legs, which have no insulation at all and spend the day standing in freezing water. Inside them, the arteries carrying warm blood down run right alongside the veins carrying cold blood back up, and the heat crosses from one to the other before it can be lost. It is called countercurrent heat exchange, and engineers use the same layout in industrial heat exchangers. Her feet can run cold while her body stays warm.

The Green Heron — The One Nobody Sees

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Where a great blue stands four feet tall, this one is about the size of a crow. He hunts by folding himself into a hunched, apparently neckless lump at the water’s edge and waiting — and then the neck comes out, startlingly long, stored folded like a carpenter’s rule. The heavy streaking down the breast marks him as a juvenile; an adult wears a clean chestnut neck and a smooth slate-green back.

And this is the species worth knowing about, because green herons are one of the very few birds on earth documented using tools. They drop bait on the surface — an insect, a feather, a twig, a scrap of bread — then wait motionless for a curious fish to rise and investigate. Deliberate lure fishing, worked out independently of us, happening in ponds all over Portland.

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The raised crest is real communication — green herons lift those crown feathers when alarmed, excited or sizing up an intruder, usually along with a nervous flick of the tail. Flat, he looks like a small dark lump on a branch. Up, he looks twice the size and considerably less agreeable, which is the entire point.

It is also the photograph that finally justifies the name. The green is structural iridescence rather than pigment, so it only appears when the light hits at the right angle. Most people who meet one walk away describing a small dark bird. Here it is, unmistakable, right on top of his head.

And Then There Is the Feud

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Two of the best fishing birds in Portland, one stretch of shoreline, and an argument in progress. That wings-out spread is a genuine territorial display — the standard currency of a dispute over a good fishing spot. Herons and egrets settle these things with posture, because a real fight risks a broken wing and a broken wing is fatal. Almost all of it is theater, and almost all of it works.

What makes it funny is the arithmetic. The great blue heron is the larger bird by a comfortable margin — a foot taller, roughly twice the weight — and he is the one giving ground. Great white egrets are famously pushy for their size, and a determined one will routinely displace a bigger, more patient neighbor.

These two have a running history on my Nature Is Funny page, where he gets turned down, loses his log, and finally answers with a magazine cover.

Go Look

All three of these birds are on the Willamette right now, within a few miles of downtown Portland. The great blue heron will be standing somewhere obvious and pretending not to see you. The great white egret will be the brightest thing on the water. The green heron will be six feet away, folded up on a branch, entirely invisible until he moves.

Stand still for ten minutes at the edge of Oaks Bottom and you will get at least one of them. Stand still for twenty and you might see a strike — the neck unfolding faster than you can follow, the correction for the bending light already made, and a fish that never saw it coming. 🪶

Quiz: Do You Know Your Herons?

Ten questions, and every answer is somewhere above. Nobody’s grading you but the heron, and he’s pretending not to watch.