Shelter Cove 4/14--Tricolored Heron

I put in way too much effort for this bird. 

Sometimes, a supposedly "easy" bird just eludes you--I think of it as your life line not intersecting with its life line, except that there are so many life lines not crossing your path. It isn't like finding a rarity which is a "Dr John event"--right place, right time. Tricolored Herons are in virtually every marsh in Ocean County starting in the spring (one or two even spend a warm winter on LBI), so I usually don't have to actively go looking for them. In the past, it's played out like this: I got to Cattus Island CP, look to the left when I hit the first marsh, and boom, I have my Tricolored Heron. Then I'd email a friend in North Jersey (where they are distinctly rare), that the tricolors have returned to Cattus and go on to the next bird. 

But last week a walk around Cattus' marshes turned up no tricolors. Four miles of marsh along Great Bay Blvd on Tuesday was bereft of the species. I missed them at Spizzle at IBSP the last time I was there. Today, I checked every marsh from every angle again at Cattus, going so far as to walk through the marsh all the way to the Ocean County Parks Headquarters' Yellowbank Trail and failed to find one. What is going on here?

Finally, with time to kill before meeting Shari for an appointment, I ate a quick lunch then went over to Shelter Cove, which is about a mile from Cattus. I never bird Shelter Cove in the warmer weather because it is then that the soccer and baseball fields are actually used and the beach is full of kids and their parents. But it has a marsh. 

I tiptoed through the goose shit on the soccer field and came to an opening in the phragmites that looks out on the marsh, which is just a continuation of the same habitat at Cattus & OCPHQ. Framed by phragmites was a Little Blue Heron. A disappointment. I took a few more steps, shifted my viewpoint slightly right (geographically, not politically), and there, there, finally, was a Tricolored Heron, staring off into space, posing, as if to say, take my picture already so I can get out of here, which I did and it did.