New Artwork – Ian Rogers – a Hedge of Herons

Another collective noun – today, as promised, coming back to that skipped H – a Hedge of Herons. An interesting thing about collective nouns is that there are often a bunch of different ones for the same creature. You can say “a hedge of herons”, or “a scattering of herons”, or “a siege of herons” or even “a sedge of herons”. You can also use standard collective nouns for birds like “rookery” or “flock”. The tricky part is that quite often specific collective terms apply to the creatures in a particular grouping – as in an erst of bees, which only applies to the first or prime swarm when bees leave their hive in the process of establishing a new colony. Not having been able to find much in the way of details on this one, I can only hope that I depicted a “hedge” of herons correctly. The herons I chose to draw are great blue herons, which are common across North & Central America.