Grey Heron (Ardea Cinerea) coming in to land on Horsey Mere and a slightly alarmed swan. |
Looking for dinner at Nosterfield. |
Found a snack at least |
- Mostly solitary hunters, they eat mainly fish but they will eat anything from moles to baby rabbits to small waterfowl and amphibians if they get the chance.
- Ross told us the local Norfolk name for these birds is the Harnser.
- As you would expect they have quite large size statistics. A 185cm wingspan and they are 94cm long. Both male and female birds weigh on average 1.5kg!
- They are a green status bird sitting safely at 13,000 nests in the UK.
- While we're on the subject of nests I read somewhere that at about this time of year you might be surprised to see a heron in a tree because they will be building nests. A good example of this is when me and my Dad were walking in York and we saw a Heron in a huge Willow tree!
- Herons tend to mate for life and often return to the same nests year after year.
- They tend to nest in colonies or heronries, which can be noisy places.
- Herons have interesting courtship displays which may involve some flying and diving but gets more interesting on the nest when they stick out their head and neck plumes, twist and turn their heads, snap their beaks and make strange noisy calls.
- This behaviour and their skulking nature when hunting has meant they have a lot of folklore associated with them. Anglers used to think that Herons feet emitted a smell which attracted fish and so they would carry a herons foot with them.
- Kings and Queens used to like to eat them too and poaching them was a crime, in Scotland they would chop off a hand for this!
So I hope you liked the results of my research. If you want to find out some more about these birds then try these sites:
Hope you enjoyed,
Z.
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