The Rookery

Spring isn’t spring without the wonderful nesting, bonding, and mating behaviors of the beautiful great blue herons! To me, it’s a definite sign spring is here!

Farmington Bay, Utah is surrounded by suburbia, but if you visit the Dolores Eccles Education Center (off the northeast corner of the parking lot) several tall structures tower high into the air. There are support beams criss-crossed to assist the herons in building nests for egg laying and incubation.

Watching with binoculars, a scope, or through the lens of a camera you can see sometimes up to 25 or so nesting pairs busily building nests and other such noteworthy behaviors.

The males search for next material and present sticks and large dried pieces of grass as offerings for the nest. Mating also occurs at the beginning of these activities until the female lays her clutch numbering 2-6 eggs. It usually takes about 27-29 days before hatching begins.

These funny looking chicks impatiently await parents to bring food and can be seen in an occasional scuffle and sometimes act like human siblings. The maturation time before chicks turn into fledglings and fly off on their own is relatively short-just about 3 months.

Watching all of the pairs at the rookery almost gives you a sense of a large apartment building filled with families of different ages and different make ups. Some herons work seamlessly together, some look like they argue often, and some fly into the wrong nest area and are met with great hostility!

Late February and March are the best times to few this fun spectacle of heron behaviors. Make sure you put it on the calendar and definitely make time to visit the rookery!