Vol. 34 // Migrating birds can read the stars 🌟

Found in North and Central America

Hear Their Calls

The majestic Great Blue Heron can often be seen carefully stepping along riverbanks, and soaring silently over waterways. They may be the largest Heron in North America, but they only weigh five or six pounds, which helps them stealthily stalk their prey before they strike like lightning at fish under the water’s surface. They also have excellent night vision, making them 24/7 hunters of not only fish, but frogs, turtles, snakes, and more.

Males pick a nesting site often far above the ground, building a large nest with sticks, then courting females by flying in circles with their necks extended, crown feathers standing up, snapping their bills open and shut. They’re solitary animals except for when they gather in colonies to mate and incubate and raise their chicks for 60-90 days.

Fun fact: Great Blue Herons have special chest feathers that catch things like fish slime and oil that they can clean off with a brush of the claw on their middle toes.

Give a Hoot

Birding bits you should know about this week

🌟 Learn
Animals can navigate by starlight. Here’s how we know.
Don’t forget to turn your lights off at night so they can better find their way!

🐦 Look
Get bird migration forecasts at birdcast.info
Check out their live bird migration maps.

🦉 Watch
Baby owl gets spooked
Listen to it mimic a rattlesnake.

Your Shot

An amazing bird photo taken by one of our community members. Submit yours to hello@flyingcolors.co to be considered for an upcoming edition!

Toward evening

the heron lifts his long wings

leisurely and rows forward

into flight. He

has made his decision: the south

is swirling with clouds, but somewhere,

fibrous with leaves and swamplands,

is a cave he can hide in

and live.

– “A Poem for the Blue Heron” by Mary Oliver

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Flying Colors makes premium organic wild bird food, offering ethically sourced, toxin-free seeds and nuts of the highest quality to nourish wild birds of all types and inspire birders of all ages. Each specialty blend and single origin creation is rigorously sourced & researched, and every jar is produced with love & packaged by hand in small batches in New York's Hudson Valley and tested in our own backyards.