Early nesters get started on rearing their young
For most of the year, grey herons live a relatively solitary existence, lone individuals standing sentinel in the stream, stalking the mudflat pools on the low tide, or sailing silently over the house at dusk in pterodactyl-like silhouette. In spring, they assemble for the nesting season, usually returning to long-established heronries, but while they have always roosted alongside little egrets in the alder carr that borders the mill pond, the heronry here was only founded in 2014.
There are only eight nests, messy jumbles of twigs like giant witch's broom galls. Several of them are clustered in a squat, evergreen holm oak, the others in neighbouring trees. Herons are early nesters, with females usually beginning to lay in February, but the Langstone colony's 2016 season got off to a premature start. Two pairs were seen courting in mid-December and both were sitting by January.
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