Vomit

Yesterday I was headed down Rogers when I encountered Evergreen professor and local resident Joe Tougas. I told him about the web site; he said he used to hike in the vicinity years ago, and there were no herons nesting there. He also said that he'd heard that heron young will regurgitate on you if you disturb them when you're standing under the nest. I looked on the web for confirmation on this and came up empty-handed but encountered this from the web site of Maryland's Department of Natural Resources:

"Even within a family noted for adaptability, the great blue is remarkable. Consider its diet for example. Bird books generally list what a species eats - but with great blues it might be easier to list what they won't eat. Though they feed heavily on fish and crustaceans, when the need arises the great blue shows formidable skills as an upland - and even urban - hunter; and the size of its prey, usually swallowed whole, would impress anything short of an anaconda.

So it is that hungry great blues have been observed conking on the head and swallowing sora rails and adult muskrats around Chesapeake Bay; also stalking and eating gophers on public soccer fields near San Francisco Bay. A great blue was photographed on a parking lot in New York City, a large, limp Norway rat seized in its bill. And then there was the heron on Smith Island, a crabbing community in the middle of Chesapeake Bay, that made it through a winter freeze by dueling successfully with a mother cat for members of her late-season litter."