But I'm not bittern

Bitterns are one of those elusive marsh birds that you rarely see unless they are flying and the American Bittern is no exception. There is a large (and accessible) marsh at Point Pelee in which bitterns nest and can occasionally be seen. But far more fun than watching them is listening to them.

The American bittern is one of the birds out there with hundreds of common names: stake driver, belcher squelcher, thunder pumper. In the evenings, if you are lucky, you can hear the bitterns calling to one another, or more precisely, booming. There really are no words to describe the sound of an American bittern – you’ll just have to hear it for yourself. Listen. Unfortunately, the recording doesn’t do justice to the volume. The booming of the bitterns can carry for miles over a nice open swamp.

I remember the first time I ever heard bitterns booming. It was the summer after grade 12 and my parents and I had gone to the annual Canadian Nature Federation (now Nature Canada) meeting in Sackville, New Brunswick. Before coming home, we spent a couple days on Prince Edward Island. One evening, after having viewed the wind farms at the north-western tip of the island, we stopped for dinner at a quaintly rustic (read: tourist trap) restaurant in a small Acadian village beside an extensive marshland. Over the course of dinner it sounded like the kitchen hands were going out to use an old fashioned hand pump to get their water. I never would have guessed that the sound I was listening to was made by a bird.

And now, with marshes being drained and purple loosestrife invading more, the large marshes which are needed to support bitterns are becoming harder to find. It also doesn’t help that most of a bittern’s food is frogs which themselves are becoming harder to find. The net result of course is that in the last four decades, the population of American bittern has dropped by 59%.