at the Riverwalk Parkway in Riverside, CA on 1-26-2023 at 3:11PM

Someone told me she had been to the Riverwalk this morning, but the Great Blue Heron that had been hanging around wasn't there. She was told it moved to one of the ponds on the grounds of La Sierra University 1 mile north. There were ducks, coots and cormorants. I had been intending to go anyway to test my new Sony RX10iv bridge camera, so off I went. I got lots of pictures of the ducks, coots and cormorants in the main pond with the observation platform. I didn't see any birds using the passage under the bridge to the pond to the north, so I was going to leave when I decided to check out that pond north of the bridge anyway. Saw a few coots and turned to leave, but as I walked east to cross over to my car I saw movement on a bed of dead dried reeds near the bridge on the east side. I took a closer look and there was an immature heron sitting on the reeds, head and neck retracted, like either just waking up or getting ready for a nap in the afternoon sun. I took a bunch of shots of the heron. With the lens zoomed to 600 mm to get the feather details, I could only get about 1/3 of the bird in the frame when it stuck its head up to full height and looked around. So because I was hand holding, I did 4 shots of the bird from feet up to head, planning on trying panorama merging software to see if I could get the whole bird into one image.
Here are the results. First is the OOC image and then one with post-processing. It was merged in Light Room Classic, edited in Photo Shop then back to LrC for color temp adjustments. Considering that the RX10iv has a 1" sensor, the details are very good.

RX10iv, @ 600 mm, 1/2000 @ f/4.0, ISO-320
hand held, autofocus center point on the bird.