Today's high was 51 degrees - quite a change from last week. Right now it is sort of misting, but has sprinkled or rained off and on all day. This is similar to last Fall. I have been expecting us to receive about the same amount of precipitation this year and have been disappointed that it didn't come in the Spring or Summer. Now that I think about it, there was very little rain during those times last year. Our Fall and Winter were the wet seasons and probably will be again.
My sister has been sleeping on her couch during the day and can watch the North berm of the pond through a glass door. She said that the Bittern marches around the pond a lot between bouts of fishing. It also walks into the dense area of reeds through a rounded opening it seems to have created. I had never noticed it before but it's obviously a tunnel to something. She has also watched it carry fish from the ring to the bank. One of the fish that it caught today is huge but was just dropped on the bank and left. Maybe it wasn't hungry, or the fish was too large to swallow, or maybe it doesn't swallow live fish, but I wonder if it could be fishing for practice, or even pleasure? Hard to tell why it does what it does, and published descriptions are just that. It is at least engaged in out of the ordinary behavior. This bird is a wader, build to hunt along a gently sloping shoreline, but it has become adept at fishing where there is no shoreline by standing on a feeding ring (2" polypipe connected in a circle that is 4' in diameter) that floats in the middle of the deepest part of the pond.