A mere 1 egg ten outcomes within a grownup heron. Just a bit more than 25 percent of fledglings survive their first year. Successful foraging requires training. At a trial-and-error world, how frequently does an inexperienced bird get another chance? Luckily, almost 75 percent of yearlings will survive to maturity.
My last story was rather tongue-in-cheek. For all the crazy-looking immature birds I watched, I never truly felt that some of them were ugly maybe funny looking (gotta have a sense of humor!), but definitely not awful. Walking through and observing anhingas perched in trees drying their wings; red-winged blackbirds calling to each other and defining their lands; wood storks feeding their never-silent youthful; and alligators sliding quietly through the water is really all amazing to me. It's a never-ending fascination for me to see these animals go about their daily lives.
For instance, with several different people, I watched an excellent blue heron eat a snake by a flow. Great blue herons were constructed for hunting in the water. Their long legs let them wade into deeper water than short-legged birds, and they have particular vertebrae in their neck which make that characteristic S-curve and permits them to snap their neck into deep water and catch their prey.
The large blue bird stood patiently in the water's edge waiting for something to come by. After staring in disbelief for a few minutes at the snake dangling down, my first idea was, how do a bird with a long beak and no arms or arms (and certainly no opposable thumbs) swallow this snake whose length has been half of the height of the bird? It turns out there's a procedure.
First, the heron simply stood quietly while the snake twisted, coiling and uncoiling itself, attempting to eliminate. If you are familiar with The Borg in Star Trek--The Next Generation, resistance was futile. Still pinned in the heron's beak, the snake began to tire after a while. The heron just lets the snake hang and occasionally wiggled its mind, perhaps to determine if the snake was dead yet, or perhaps to accelerate the procedure.
Once the snake stopped moving the real work started. The heron slowly has the snake head-first. In the beginning, it looked like it had been experimenting to see whether the snake could
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return. Halfway through either the snake began moving, or the bird could not swallow it. The snake came back up, still entire and gripped solidly in the heron's beak. Then the process began.
After the first couple of "gulps" that the heron managed to get down it quickly --down to half, then only a little bit of the tail sticking out of the heron's mouth. The one thing left to inform that the heron had only consumed a meal was that the bulge in its neck because the snake made its way down the bird's throat.