~ by Sumalee ~
“The early bird gets the worm” truly exemplifies an early birding foray we undertook recently to William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge outside Corvallis, OR. It appears that rather than sleep in on our days off from 12.5 hour shifts, we have a tendency to wake even earlier and depart in hopes of catching a good sighting. So it was at 5:00 am did we haul ourselves out of bed and hit the road, although we had warbler visions dancing in our heads at the time.
Never did we anticipate that we would spend nearly an hour with an American Bittern. This is the species that when perceived at all, is “seldom seen” (Audubon), “heard more often than seen,” “secretive,” and “stealthy” (Cornell Lab of Ornithology). Indeed, our initial encounter with a Bittern was aural: we thought we heard water drops plunking dully into shallow water but then realized that we were hearing the distinctive, delightful baritone plunk-plunk of a Bittern. A couple years ago, we complained to a wildlife biologist that we could never track down a Bittern despite its cameo presence on several wildlife refuge placards. He ominously stated that the species had been “extirpated” from Oregon due to the decline of nesting habitat. S. looked up the term “extirpate” of which meaning she had a vague notion but dreaded full accurate disclosure. Unfortunately, the OED has it as “rooted out, destroyed utterly, rendered extinct.” Hence were we quasi-placated when on one hike, we accidentally flushed out a Bittern and finally gained our first spotting, if viewing the rear end of a bird flying directly away, far far away, from the madding crowds, counts.
As V. says, luck has a lot to do with bird spottings. We’ve been just as early birds as we were on this occasion and not met success. But this time, just as we were crossing a bridge not far from the refuge entry, V. decided she wanted to get a landscape shot to take advantage of the morning light glistening through the mists rising from the ground. So I double-backed about a quarter mile. The road straddles a culvert that feeds marshes on either side and gave good prospect to the sadly diminished summer marshes. We spotted several juvenile pied-billed grebes, a female wood duck frenetically crossing to and fro the narrow waterway in search of grub, and several fuzzy-headed juvenile coots.
Then, just as V. was setting up to take her landscape shot, she descried an American Bittern hunting frogs and tadpoles at the edge of the water. Although the Bittern was the spitting image of every photograph we’ve ever seen, since it was so rare and unexpected, we needed quite a bit of reciprocal confirmation before we accepted that yep, that’s a Bittern and she’s keeping our company.
For a good part of an hour, we watched the Bittern fishing for frogs by spearing the water from time to time. She was a talented hunter, frequently capturing her fleshy prey, legs dangling before disappearing entirely into her stretchy gullet.
We knew Bitterns stood still, or rather, motionless, compared to their heron kin, but only video proved how still—the video appears to be a photograph until some subtle movement in the water proves that this is recorded motion. When moving through the mud, her long, long greenish-yellow vinyl legs gracefully raise and extend from the toe through the ankle with unhurried poise. From time to time, she would sashay, so to speak, her neck, so that the pinstripes along the length appear to be reeds bending in the wind in perfect camouflage of the habitat flora.
From time to time, two juvenile Virginia Rail would scurry through the Bittern's breakfast area, jabbing the mud for their own grub. The Bittern seemed not to mind these flurried disruptions to its quiet stalking; however, when a helicopter passed overhead and also when some American Coot crossed into her corner too closely, the Bittern assumed her signature pose, stretching her neck into an elegant sheaf of reeds. After our hour with her, we decided to move on and resume our search for the black-throated grey warbler. Today would not be the occasion to spot it, as fate would have it. But as with the Bittern, we trust that sooner or later, our bird will reveal itself in due time.
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