This Sunday I made a morning drive through Portland to a park in Hillsboro, there to meet my son Charles and my grandson, who is also my namesake. The plan was to dine on breakfast burritos and then enjoy a catch.
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| Amberglen Park, Hillsboro, Oregon |
Amberglen Park is about a half mile south of Cornell Road in an area that forty years ago was agricultural. The scene is currently anything but bucolic. On one side of the park there is a collection of buildings supporting white collar industry amid wandering roads with a bit of natural vegetation left between the large offices. On the other side there are residence hotels and fancy condominiums. The park itself is 14 acres of manicured lawn supporting a bit of modern statuary, a few fountains and a small wandering bit of running natural water. Along this minuscule waterway there are a few willows and some cattails.
After we gorged ourselves on the comida Mexicana, we decided to take a stroll through the park before plunging into our baseball activities. There was a small bridge over the stream, with rocks sporting a dozen resting ducks with even more dabbling in the slow moving water. We walked along for a while and then doubled back. As we approached the little bridge, my son asked me to "look at the bird." I had heard redwing blackbirds in the rushes, so that is what I expected. However, what Charles had found was an extremely small heron.
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| The Least Bittern fishing from a clump of fallen reeds. |
The small heron was keeping quite still, peering into the water. Bigger than a robin but smaller than a flicker, he was not especially disturbed by our early morning presence, even though we were only thirty feet away. Ever so slowly he walked down a fallen bunch of rushes, stopping at the end near the exposed roots. He waited there for several minutes, mostly peering into the water, but at one point taking a futile snap at a low flying dragonfly. Finally as we watched, his head darted into the water and he subsequently swallowed what I assume was a tiny fish.
Initially I had declared this to be a bittern, but as I thought about it, I could not get over how small this heron was. He stood so still that Charles was able to get a picture with his Nimbus 2000 cell phone. The picture isn't terrible, but the bird was so small that by the time we got done trying to enlarge it, the photo was inadequate for identification.
As it turns out, thee is only one truly small heron that fits the bill and that is the Least Bittern. The venerable Roger Tory Peterson in A Field Guide to Western Birds, 1969 Says that the Least Bittern is jsut larger than a meadowlark.the American Bittern and the Black Crowned Night Heron (with which we are very familiar due its presence on rocky Hawaiian beaches) are slightly larger than a Red-tailed Hawk. This leaves the Green Heron, Certainly seen more commonly, it is still much larger than the Least Bittern. Both the least bittern and the green heron in their youth sport streaked necks. However, the streaking on the green heron juvenile is a rich chestnut. The streaking on our bird was a dusty brown.
Having talked myself into a bird for the Oregon list, I can report the the game of catch went wonderfully: three generations of Hills tossing the pill on a cool, clear summer morning. Mother Nature took one encore around 9:30, sending a pigeonhawk swooping back and forth across Amberglen Park. The dark falcon with her long tail and pointed wings looked like a giant swallow.
Birding back in the lower 48 is a delight. Keeps your eyes open and heaven only knows what you might see.
jeff
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