Ardea herodias

Posted 10 October 2011 by

Ardea herodias -- great blue heron, Walden Ponds, Boulder, Colorado.

7 Comments

Renee Marie Jones · 10 October 2011

Birds are sooo beautiful! Thanks for the wonderful picture!

Kevin B · 10 October 2011

Renee Marie Jones said: Birds are sooo beautiful! Thanks for the wonderful picture!
Huh! Toothless, feathered dinosaurs.

Karen S. · 10 October 2011

Huh! Toothless, feathered dinosaurs.
The phrase "feathered dinosaur" is from the department of redundancy department. But blue herons are great; there are plenty of them where I live, and our library has an intelligently designed sculpture of one.

Kevin B · 10 October 2011

Karen S. said:
Huh! Toothless, feathered dinosaurs.
The phrase "feathered dinosaur" is from the department of redundancy department. But blue herons are great; there are plenty of them where I live, and our library has an intelligently designed sculpture of one.
What is redundant about "feathered dinosaur"? Are you suggesting that all dinosaurs had feathers? That feathers arose in a common ancestor of all dinosaurs, rather than that they arose in some sub-branch of the tree of dinosaur species (that includes the birds)? Are you proposing a common ancestry for Aves and Quetzalcoatl?

Henry J · 10 October 2011

But it's still a dino soar!

Karen S. · 10 October 2011

What is redundant about “feathered dinosaur”?
I was exaggerating, of course. But lots of dinos did have feathers.

Carl Drews · 18 October 2011

That's a nice picture of a Biblical kind! (Lev 11:19 And the stork 02624, the heron 0601 after her kind 04327, and the lapwing 01744, and the bat 05847.) Thanks for posting it.

I see a number of great blue herons around Boulder; they are always graceful and beautiful.