It was sunny this morning, as forecast, but it was also windy and cold when I set out at 7 o’clock, about 25 degrees (minus 4 degrees C), according to the thermometer in my car. Most of the birds at Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge seemed to have decided to sleep late, but eventually I started to see some of them, including this Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) that was wading out into the shallow waters of a low tide.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
great photo
I love watching them when they move do slowly that you barely see it.
They are definitely stealthy. I have seen them stay motionless for an extended period and then all of the sudden they thrust their heads violently into the water and pull out a fish.
what a way to get breakfast.
It always amazes me to see Great Blue Herons in such cold weather! They look so ‘out of place’, though we also used to see them in upstate NY before we moved to Florida.
Here is Northern Virginia, the Great Blue Herons stay with us all winter, unlike the Green Herons and Great Egrets that migrate south. It has to be tough for the Great Blue Herons when it gets cold enough for ice to form, but somehow they manage.
Great GBH! If you’d love to be brightened-up with gorgeous Aussie dragonflies – take a peek at my twitter a/c – I’ve just RTed some magnificent dragons 🙂
I checked out the dragonflies and they are amazing. I can’t wait for ours to appear. Thanks for alerting me, Liz. I still haven’t really figured out what to do with Twitter and am at about the same place with Instagram. However, I do have accounts on both now, which is a start. 🙂
You were my 80th twitter follower, thank you! I joined in May 2019 to keep up on a local issue and stayed on. I keep in touch with some fellow WP bloggers, do some tweeting and RTing, and as on WP learn all sorts of things I wouldn’t otherwise. I’m still pretty random re content so please bear with me as I’m still figuring out why I’m there (that’s why I’ve not yet updated my bio) but I do enjoy twitter more and more.
Beautiful capture of the Blue on blue water.
My all time favorite bird!