by Margie Hanrahan
Photo Courtesy and © Copyright Richard L. Becker
http://www.songstar.org

It wasn't my first misidentification last summer. I had also taken in a young turkey, or so I thought, that summer and passed him along to Lynn, a Messinger Woods volunteer, to raise until he was old enough to go to secondary caging outside. She named him Thor. It wasn't until later, after his feathers came in, that we had to break the news that her tough tom turkey, Thor, was really a hen pheasant. I believe Thor is out there right now kicking some serious pheasant behind with such a label. For the record, chick pheasants and chick turkeys DO look very much the same. In any event, THAT was my first ID screw-up.

The second was much more stupid. I had had numerous reports about a flightless heron when I checked my messages from work that day. On the way home, I decided to check with the police department, who had also been notified, to see if they knew if another rehabilitator had made it there before me. The answer was "no". Since it was relatively close to my house, I decided to stop on the way home to save myself a trip. One of the police officers was nice enough to show me where it was last seen. He said a farmer had seen it in the fields and some kids saw it on a nearby baseball diamond.

We walked around for fifteen minutes before giving up. At this point, he could have been anywhere in the undergrowth. As we crossed back over the creek bed to get to our cars, he said, "What about down there?" For the heck of it, I walked the area again and lo and behold there he was. I had been expecting a blue heron. "Hmmm, a little green heron," I said. He was standing in the creek, of course, in about four inches of water. "Yeah, it's shallow maybe for a heron," I thought, as I looked down at my favorite pair of loafers. "Well, I'm gonna get wet." I resolved out loud. I took my net down the embankment.

The creek bed was very sandy and, as I said, shallow. However, it was also about five feet wide. I knew I couldn't jump it, so without further ado, I jumped right into the middle with a nice muddy splash and again to the other side, throwing my net over the startled heron. He almost escaped out from under it, and I was afraid to push him down too deep into the water. He started to slip out under the front edge so I put more pressure on the net and he went into the water. I was afraid he was going to drown. At the same time all of this was happening, I grabbed him behind the head with my left hand to pull his neck up until I could manage to untangle him from the net and hop him and myself quickly back to shore. I splashed mud and water all over the back of my work clothes because now I was sinking in the sand as well. The whole rescue took about 30 wet seconds. As I scrambled up the embankment, he started screaming horrendously. The sound was like something from Jurassic Park and I was positive he was related to the Pterodactyl.

He was so loud that the policeman started laughing and reported back to the desk. "Hear that? that's the sound of ONE angry heron!" While everyone else was causing a big ruckus and having a good laugh, I had been kicking off my shoes and dragging my stocking feet in the grass to get the mud off and wondering if there were leeches in that water. At one point, I tried to shut him up because I was sure he would soon be alerting all the baseball players to a nice scene. Here you have it...a crazy woman dragging her feet around in the grass, freaking out from leech paranoia, holding a rather large, loud and annoyed bird, while a police officer was apparently trying to radio in for backup or something. I went to shut his big mouth (the heron's, not the police officer's) and he made a nice lunge at my face. Luckily, I have quick reflexes and was on to that sort of trick. I grabbed him quickly by the beak. All I could think of was that Christmas movie, "You'll put your eye out, kid!"

And so began the daily trips to the bait store during my lunch hour. The first night, I bought fifty twelve-cent goldfish at a pet store. If you do the math, that works out to about $7.45 a meal. That cash would have lasted longer if I had held a match to it. I watched dollars flicker away with lightning speed. I've never seen anything eat so fast in my life.

Every day at work, I asked, "Who wants to go get bait during lunch with me?" Of course, I didn't get many takers. The novelty of getting bait wears off quickly for the non-rehabber type. I did manage to get a few people to go along for the ride when I neglected to mention the purpose of the trip and I worked diligently on some of my other co-workers to no avail. But by the end of this bird's rehab, I'm sure everyone felt the annoyance of the daily bait trips. Wing wrap off and flight therapy completed, the heron was released at Advisory board member Jim Thompson's pond. It was not until I left, that Jim did a little verification and called Mike. Mike in turn called me. "You know that heron you released at Thompson's pond?" he asked. "Oh no," I thought. I was hoping the news wasn't going to be that he was found "down" again. Mike continued, "He's NOT a HERON!  He's an American Bittern!"

"Owatadopeiam!" I thought. I had been so busy dealing with fish problems and my other charges that I never really did a thorough identification. Quite an embarrassment for a rehabber! A little after four o'clock on Friday, I was talking to my co-worker Mark--a co-worker who never actually lived through a bait shop drive, but vicariously did so through me on a daily basis. He had stopped over to my desk to say good-night. I said, "Oh, yeah, guess what? I'm an idiot! You know that heron I've been rehabbing? Well, I released him yesterday. He did fine."

But guess what? He's not even a heron, he's an AMERICAN BITTERN!"

Without batting an eye, Mark said, "WHAT?!!!!! After ALL you did for THAT bird! He SHOULDN'T be a Bittern!"

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