The 50th anniversary of the great Point Roberts heronry

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Great Point Roberts Heronry, which was the largest colony of pacific great blue herons in the Pacific Northwest. Located south of McKenzie Way, between Winston Drive and Delano Way, our local heronry housed up to five hundred nests, about double the size of the next-largest heronries in the region, and 15 times the size of an average heronry.

This heronry has been documented on bluffs in Tsawwassen as early as 1900, but human activity has caused the herons to keep moving their nests around the Point Roberts peninsula. Hundreds of nests were destroyed in Tsawwassen in the 1950s when the alder, fir, spruce, cottonwood and maple trees they favor were logged for development.

After 100 nests were lost in 1960, the heronry split between English Bluff and the bluff above Maple Beach in Point Roberts. The Maple Beach heronry was destroyed in 1970, and the herons moved to the McKenzie Way site in 1971. It was well-established by 1973 when 30 nests were counted, and by 1977 it had grown to over 200 nests. The loud cacophony of the crying chicks and squawking pterodactyl-like adult herons were a part of Point Roberts for the next three decades, peaking in 1992 when an incredible 500 nests were counted.

With eight percent of all the Pacific great blue herons between Olympia and Alaska (and 20 percent of the entire subspecies in all of Canada), the heronry held over 400 active nests every year throughout the 1990s. After forming in 1987, the Point Roberts Heron Preservation Committee helped to map and tag nest trees, and some of the heronry site was purchased for conservation in the years leading up to the adjacent golf course’s opening in 2000.

In 2003, the heronry began to decline, this time due to increasing predation by herons’ enemy number one: bald eagles, whose numbers were rapidly growing on the Point. In one week in June 2004, all of the herons moved to the Tsawwassen bluff (where the Highway 17 causeway meets the shore on Tsawwassen First Nations land), leaving the last 163 active nests and even chicks behind. Despite the herons having moved their nests over the border, they are still a continuous presence and enduring symbol of Point Roberts to this very day.