Birds, Pond

Big feet of heron walk into pond

The camera overlooking the wildlife pond has been doing a great job in adding a new perspective to gardenwatching. I love it. Image captures have been varied from birds and hedgehogs drinking, cats trying to catch the resident frogs to blackbirds eating the tadpoles and taking away nesting material from the edges. A huge variety of birds were been seen bathing during the dry spell when the image above was taken on May 30th.

Rolling back to the month before, the pond looked quite different. Yes, and as the title above suggests we had a completely different bird visitor to the wildlife pond and this one just walked in. On April 28th at 06:28 to be exact. Often before breakfast I’ll take a brief look to see if anything interesting has been recorded overnight but I nearly fell of my chair when two large feet walked into view. A heron was walking around my pond.

My heart was in my mouth fearing for my liner as well as the resident frogs and newts. I’ll not say what happens, I’ll let you see for yourself in the video below. I should add that the whole visit lasted 10 minutes which I reduced to 2:30 with the bits cut out being when the heron stood statue still. This is shown by fading transitions. It stood so so still, that was the unnerving bit.

I bet your heart was in your mouth there too. What an experience this was to watch and I’m delighted to be able to share it. To be honest, it’s one of so many over my gardenwatching years. Seeing waxwings finally feed from apples I put out for them is another. Seeing them so close was just brilliant.

What is also brilliant, is that I have finally been through all my bird photos to locate and select images to represent all bird species that have been seen in/from the garden since I began this blog. It is something I have wanted to do for years but was daunted by the challenge of this task. As all bloggers will know, photos don’t always get stored where they should, as you just want to get on and use them for a blog post.

Now a garden record of all visiting birds can be found on one of the menu pages above my blog banner – THE BIRDS. It’s great for me to look back on and I hope others will find it interesting too, especially visitors from outside the UK. Images of the birds can be viewed through two slideshows. The first being the main cast and the other the extras. As always there is some chat too.

What surprise sightings have you had in your garden? Are there any standout ones like this heron? I should add that it hasn’t been spotted since. I guess as I’ve no fish in my pond it went fishing elsewhere. I’d also guess our resident frogs and newts were very grateful for dense plantings of water forget me not to hide in. I certainly won’t forget me not this garden visitor.

This post was published by Shirley for shirls gardenwatch in July 2020.

2 thoughts on “Big feet of heron walk into pond

  1. We once had a heron near our fish pond which was a bit of a shock. Luckily the fish survived. I was on guard until Martyn could go for some netting in case it came back. Our rarest birds have been siskins, a female blackcap and a redpoll. We also once had a sparrow hawk just outside our window staring back in at us. I’d love to see waxwings.

  2. Hi again Sue, gosh I can imagine you standing guard for your fis, I would be the same. I’m guessing the netting worked and the heron didn’t return. Ah that’s interesting to hear that siskins are rare with you as they can have spells of being regulars here. The blackcap is more on the rare side though. It more passes through en route to Germany I was told in an email many years ago. Gosh again re a sparrowhawk staring through b your window! Scary that. I’ve had a juvenile blackbird do that but much more exciting than that last weekend, a red squirrel do this twice. I do hope you get to see waxwings, they are such a breath of fresh air. It’s hard to stop watching them to take photos.

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