It’s impossible, when considering the great blue heron, to begin with anything but size. It’s right there in the name: This is a big bird. Four feet tall, with a six-foot wingspan, the heron is long-legged and long-necked and long-billed. Those legs take it wading into the water, where it stands, for what can seem like forever, in stunning stillness, neck curved into an S. It waits, and waits. It tilts its head, ever so slightly, to adjust for glare against the water’s surface. But then: A fish or frog or (sorry) lost duckling appears. And that neck, as if spring-loaded, snaps into action, propelling that dagger of a bill toward the poor prey, which the heron spears (or plucks, as with tongs) and swallows whole.

Everyone’s got to make a living. And herons make pretty good ones in wetland areas across North America, including along the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. But Portland has claimed them as extra special since 1986, when then-Mayor Bud Clark declared them the city’s official bird. The suggestion came from Mike Houck, then working as an urban naturalist for what was then known as Portland Audubon (and today as the Bird Alliance of Oregon). “There was an effort afoot to move Marine Drive,” Houck says, to reroute the road through a golf course—and right through a heron nesting site. Houck had recently read that Hinckley, Ohio, had adopted the turkey vulture as its city bird. “I was thinking, how the hell could you relocate a road through the city bird’s colony?”  

So after a presentation to a room of wildlife managers, during which Clark kept talking about herons, Houck grabbed the mayor by the arm and made his pitch. “Whoop whoop!” answered Clark, and a few weeks later it was so. A fledgling brewery called BridgePort released a beer in tribute. Houck reached out to William Stafford, and in 1987 Oregon’s then–poet laureate penned “Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron.” Says Houck, “I tear up every time I read it.” The next year, the city created its first wildlife refuge at Oaks Bottom, and a few years after that Houck got an artist named Mark Bennett (not to be confused with artist Mike Bennett) to paint a 70-foot-tall heron on the refuge-facing wall of Wilhelm’s Portland Mausoleum. It would be joined, decades later, by a bevy of other wetland birds. 

Marine Drive stayed put, and so did the colony, high in the canopy of the cottonwoods north of the seventh hole on the Greenback course at what’s been known since 1988 as Heron Lakes. Those nests are just for the springtime breeding season. By the time the chicks hatch, the leafed-out trees make it difficult for observers to see much. Your best bet for peeping wee ones is to the south, where West Linn’s Maddax Woods Park looks out to a rookery on Goat Island, a little lump in a bend of the Willamette. You’ll be near enough to hear the chicks’ cacophonous chatter.

The rest of the year, herons are usually solitary, staking out for themselves in places where water meets land. And with, as Stafford wrote, “heads in the light / feet that go down in the mud where the truth is.”