Mike in the Wild

What does my humble blog have to do with Africa's big five?  It'll be a while before you read about rhinos, elephants, lions, leopards or cape buffaloes in my posts.  After all, I'm still mostly writing about Arizona wildlife and local natural history.  But the term big five came to me as an apt description when I noticed I was seeing the same five heron species every time I explored the Phoenix area waterways. Herons are in the ardeidae family, and live along freshwater shores.  In Phoenix, their habitats are mostly near our parks' man-made lakes, so it's easy to find all five species at the same time you're admiring the ironic abundance of water in our arid landscape.  Some members of the large family are called egrets while others are bitterns. The five I consistently notice when hiking, running or just plain birding near some local lakes are the great blue heron, great egret, black-crowned night heron, snowy egret and green heron, listed in order of size...