The Great Blue Herons come every year in the spring; the males start arriving a few days before the females and scout out nesting sites in the "Rookery". They are clumsy nest builders and vulnerable to predator birds less than half their size, but they persist and provide awe and giggles for lots of folks. The local paper even made a front page story out of the fact that a local hawk nested in one of the rookery trees and defended it mightily; they ran an almost cartoonish picture of the hawk with his talons wrapped around the neck of a Heron...all that was missing was the little "x"s on the Heron's eyes.
The Rookery is situated around a piece of Fountain Creek that runs parallel to I-25, on the east side of it, at the south end of town; just north of Circle Drive. Right beside the rookery is a piece of property that is owned by a sand processing plant; they store sand there. The company I worked for transported sand from the northern side of town, where development was eating into the prairie. We hauled a gozillian tons of sand into that storage. The sand storage hill that we created there was easily thirty feet above ground level and covered a couple of acres. It was a challenge to come into the storage area with enough momentum to get up the sand hill without getting stuck, then race along the top of the face of it and dump the sand (we used mostly belly-dumps for this), again without getting stuck, then roar down the other side and out of the site, all without getting stuck. We had a large front-end loader there full-time to keep the sand roads conditioned so we could at least have a shot at not getting stuck. We got stuck a lot. The loader was there to push us out, too.
One spring, about 2005 or 2006, I noticed the Herons for the first time. I am sure they had always come around each spring, but I had never noticed them. I distinctly remember the first time I became aware of them, even if I don't remember which year it was, because they have an extremely unusual flight attitude. They have a long neck and sharp extended beak. In flight they pull their neck back in an "S" shape and they trail their very long legs behind them. One swept in low as I was turning into the storage area and...did I mention these birds are HUGE ?..it startled the heck out of me. I thought it was a dragon. It looked just like one of the dragons you would see on any of a dozen dragon movies on the SciFi channel. I had no idea what it was but it took me several minutes to calm down...fortunately I had several minutes to spare, since I stopped when it startled me and with no more momentum, I wasn't going anywhere in that sand until the loader noticed me and had time to come to my rescue.
Well, when I saw the article in the paper, I learned what they were and the trouble the hawks were causing them. I am sure MamaCharlie remembers the night I came home insisting there were dragons at the sand pile (she thought it sounded more like a pterodactyl) Once we knew what they were, we felt safer visiting the sand pile after hours and even showing them to our grandchildren. We still refer to them as the Dragons of Janitell. I haven't been there in a while; I have heard that the rookery is all but gone now. Maybe that is why MC and I saw a couple of them near our house this week...could be they have traded Fountain Creek for a piece of Plane Crash Park.
They do look like dragons !
