Breeding Colors

I had never seen a tricolored heron in full breeding plumage at this close range before this morning. The crest was up - those pale gold-and-rust filaments raised into a corona around the head, the blue-gray of the body feathers shot through with iridescence that shifted as the bird moved. It was landing on a branch over a still Lowcountry pond, wings half-open, the whole bird in a state of maximum display. I held still and kept shooting. In years of photographing birds in the Lowcountry, I had not seen anything quite like this.

Tricolored herons in breeding condition are among the most visually extravagant birds in the Lowcountry - the combination of blue-gray body, reddish-brown and white neck, white belly, and that extraordinary crest places them in a category of visual complexity that most birds don't approach. This particular bird, at this particular moment, in the dappled light of a spring morning over a lily-padded pond, was as fully itself as anything I had ever photographed.

Breeding Colors is the most colorful and dramatic image in the Lowcountry bird series - a portrait of a species at the height of its annual transformation. The detail in those crest feathers, the sheen of the blue plumage, the red eye: all of it holds at scale on metal in a way that makes the bird fully present in the room rather than reduced to decoration. It is a piece for anyone who has ever stopped at the edge of a marsh and wondered what else was in there, just out of easy sight.