Heron Encounter

A casual lunchtime visit to the Campus Pond at the University of Massachusetts here in Amherst on Thursday, August 27, brought a sweet surprise. A family had taken up one of the stone benches at my favorite spot under a tree beside the pond. They were feeding the geese and ducks like many folks do, but one of the birds near the shore was clearly not a duck or a goose. It was a great blue heron wading just a couple yards away from them.

It seemed completely absurd that a bird I am usually lucky to spot from a football field away should be right there, like somebody’s pet, or a permanent resident of a wildlife rehab facility. No broken wings on this elegant animal, I saw it fly gracefully across the pond on a later date.

The scene this day reminded me of a story I read many years ago in Natural History magazine about herons and egrets (maybe pelicans, too) in Florida that had taken to hanging out on the docks and begging fishermen for part of their catch. The article was entitled “Brother Can You Spare a Fish?”

I had also heard a story when I first arrived here about an egret that frequents the Campus Pond and is equally habituated to humans. A young boy was tossing popcorn at the bird, which obviously ignored the overture. A professor passing by muttered arrogantly “They eat fish, not popcorn.” The next kernel the boy threw bounced off the egret’s head and into the water. A fish surfaced to investigate the morsel, at which point the egret nabbed the fish and took flight. The boy turned to the professor with a satisfying smirk on his face.

My home town of Portland, Oregon named the great blue heron the official city bird many years ago. There, it is even the emblem on an ale produced by a local microbrewery. I find it ironic that I would have to go across the entire country to get this close to one, but I’ll treasure the memory.

Bullfrogs

I haven’t been to the Campus Pond at the University of Massachusetts in many weeks now, but back on June 8 I was treated to a large, very cooperative amphibian as a photo subject during my lunch hour. The bullfrog, Rana catesbeiana, is native here, but elsewhere in North America, where it has been introduced, it might better be called the “bully” frog.

The species is named for the early English naturalist Mark Catesby who explored the southeast United States in the early 1700s, documenting his findings in words and illustrations published as Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. Just like its human namesake, the frog has had “legs” to parts of the world far removed from its native eastern U.S. haunts.

It has, in fact, been those meaty hind legs that have caused the dispersal of the bullfrog around the globe. Prized as a delicacy, frog legs are a staple appetizer on many a restaurant menu. It is far less expensive to harvest the amphibians locally than to import them, so consequently the bullfrog was introduced to various new territories including the western U.S. and British Columbia, Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico, South America, Europe, Asia, even Hawaii.

That humans prey on bullfrogs, along with herons, raccoons, snakes, and other animals, is not enough to mitigate the effects of what the bullfrogs themselves eat: which is nearly anything and everything. Where bullfrogs have been introduced, native wetland fauna can suffer dramatically.

Bullfrogs have been at the least implicated in the decline of the western pond turtle in the Pacific Northwest (they eat the hatchling turtles), the Mexican garter snake in parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico, and native frog populations in California.

Any animal smaller than the bullfrog is fair game, though, and even tarantulas are on the menu, along with various large insects, small rodents, and birds.

I have a hard time now hearing that deep bass call of “jug-o-rum” without cringing a bit. Every organism surely has its place, but when Homo sapiens extends the boundaries of place for an animal like the bullfrog, all hell can break loose in the aftermath.