Last week my wife Lisa and I took our daughter Faith out to Claiborne West Park to start showing her the ins and outs of wildlife photography.

As we came around a bend on the big pond we noticed something in the water. At first glance I thought it was a great blue heron, but then it looked a bit strange.

Was it a heron decoy like the ones duck hunters use? Or was it one that somehow died stuck in the mud or something? The feathers were dull and a bit disheveled and the bird did not move when we got pretty close.

Faith snapped this photo, her first ever photo of an animal in the wild, and then we approached closer and it flew off.

On the way home I told Lisa the heron wasn’t dead. It was just a zombie heron, flying a little bit slow.

Actually upon examining the photos, it was obvious the bird was in the last stages of the molting process where the feathers are replaced. However I sort of like the zombie heron idea a little bit better.

For some reason that makes me laugh.

(To submit photos to the Critter Cam project email them to chester@kingdomzoo.com. Put “Critter Cam” in the subject line.)