One fairly reliable criterion is the length from the tip of the bill (culmen) to the bit of bare skin before feathers emerge on the forehead. It is difficult for even seasoned GBH watchers to determine sex. Male great blue herons are described as bigger than females but that comparison doesn’t work well when viewing a solitary individual. The adult plumage of males and females is indistinguishable. Neck vertebrae of the GBH noticeable in the reflection. After all, RBG is used routinely for the great Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginzburg. Here I will use GBH as a useful abbreviation. In the language of her ancestors, the Potawatomi, “You hear a blue jay with a different verb than you hear an airplane,” she writes. In searching for a pronoun other than “it” for a nonhuman living being, she learned of the Potawatomi word “Aakibmaadiziiwin” for “a being of the earth,” perhaps too long for everyday use. Animacy is defined as “ a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is” . Kimmerer objects to the use of “it” to refer to any sentient life form, noting that “it” is best reserved for manmade objects like a chair or a table. I have been puzzling about how to refer to him or her without using “it” having recently listened to moss ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer discuss animacy, on Krista Tippett’s program On Being. I decided to dedicate my walks to the great blue heron, a daily fieldwork, rain or shine, a time to meditate on the habits of a nonhuman fellow creature–a pandemic practice in schooling myself in the ways of another life form. They appear permanently immovable but can break repose lightning fast to seize prey. They combine ganglyness and grace, the Abraham Lincoln of birds. ![]() Like many, I have always been attracted to great blue herons-their statuesque silhouettes, the intense stare of their yellow-rimmed eyes, the elegant plumes, and the lengthy stillness of their poses, which implies a fixity of purpose-an assumption that is not far wrong. ![]() A favorite perch of “my” GBH at the Stewart Park “lagoon.”Īnother regular is a great blue heron (sex unknown). ![]() Only a handful of regulars are there so early-one or two walkers and runners, a tennis player with a bandana who plays by himself and pulls ball after ball out of his skimpy shorts pockets like a magician, a cluster of kayakers at the boathouse, and a few people who just sit in their cars and observe Cayuga Lake, which is 38 miles long, disappear into the north. I go in the early morning after picking up a decaf with a splash of milk. Stewart Park in Ithaca, NY, has become my stomping ground during the pandemic. My first view of the great blue heron I have observed at Stewart Park, Ithaca, NY.
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