Great Blue Heron | How I Lost Dinner in Gulf Shores

November 15, 2016 • Leave a Comment

This afternoon I made a trip to Gulf Shores for some wildlife photos. I stopped by one of my favorite locations for birds and saw a great blue heron fishing a shoreline. Not much else was going on so I decided to stick around the area. I got a few shots of the bird and then walked around and got some photographs of sanderling and a hawk as well.

I returned back to the heron and noticed it had its mouth full with a fish. As I got closer I saw it had caught a sheepshead. Sheepshead have a very spiny dorsal fin so this was going to be quite a show seeing how the heron could manage to swallow the fish down its gullet.

The great blue heron would toss the fish in the air trying to get it head first. If the heron could get the fish head first it might be able to swallow it. The fish put a fight and wiggled the whole time. The heron tried to put the fish in the water but that didn't help either. Ultimately the fish proved to be too difficult to eat and it swam away. All the heron could do was watch it get away.