I’ve covered and written about herons nesting on the Mississippi River in the Minneapolis and realized that there’s not a centralized area giving a history about the rookery currently visible off of islands at Marshall Terrace Park. This is a round up of all the blog posts I’ve done about the birds.

The North Minneapolis Heron Rookery used to be further up river visible off of an island from North Mississippi Regional Park. I blogged and took photos of it in April of 2011 and it was covered by Minnesota Public Radio not long after that. The rookery was incredibly active with a guess of 150 nests at the end of April.

Then on May 22, 2011 a tornado ripped through North Minneapolis and went right through the rookery destroying every nest.

I was able to get in to the park in my capacity as a park ranger to assess the devastation. We managed to rally the National Park Service, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, and women with experience handling cranes and herons to get to the island and see if we could find any survivors. We found very few, most of the young went into the river and most of the adults flew away when the tornado hit. The birds we could get went to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Minnesota. All the adults we captured had compound fractures and were euthanized. Remarkably, the few young we found survived and were released later that summer.

The neighborhood was devastated already by the damage from the tornado, but also grieving the loss of their avian neighbors. Since the rookery was destroyed towards the end of May and it takes about 90 days for a freshly laid heron egg to become a free flying adult, the thought was that the adults would fly off and spend the summer without raising any more young. However, the birds immediately moved to two islands less than two miles down river to just off of Marshall Terrace Park. The park service went out to inspect the rookery and found it incredibly active…in spite of people who foolishly tried to camp on the island. I can’t imagine their tent or clothes smelled great after getting covered in fishy smelling poop…and herons vomit as a defense strategy.

One the one year anniversary of the tornado, Minnesota Public Radio came out with us to see the rookery and did a great story on it. Over the years, I have lead tours out to the rookery via canoe or the PaddleShare kayaks. And eventually, I started a Welcome Back the Herons program while I worked at the park and is a still a huge event today that happens at the end of March.

The rookery has changed over the years. Not only does the rookery now host great blue herons, but also double-crested cormorants and great egrets. There are a lot of things wrong in the world, but I think it says a lot about North Minneapolis that these big birds choose to call it the best place to raise their chicks.