Photo Credit : Great Blue Heron, John James udubon
I have no idea how long the bird stood there in preternatural stillness before I finally saw it. A great blue heron is more gray than blue, and I might have taken this one for a split-rail fence post—the cedar kind that goes gray in the weather—if I weren’t looking out a window at my backyard, where no such post exists.
The bird stood in plain sight, really, on empty lawn some 10 yards from the shore of our small pond. But this was late October, and all the world was gray: the bare-boned oaks and maples, the tumbledown stone walls, the fallen leaves, the leaden water of the pond.
The heron stood like a sentinel, as if there just to guard a pond that still stirred, barely, with frog and hornpout. I stared a few moments, waiting for something to happen, the bird inert as a palace guard. I turned away. I looked again a few minutes later to find the heron gone.
It came back the next day—possibly a different bird, but more likely the same, since these herons are territorial about where they feed. This time I caught it in motion, its pipestem legs lifting those spidery feet in a mincing, high-stepping walk across the grass. With a shake of its tail feathers, it strutted haughtily, like a runway model, up the narrow, shrub-bordered peninsula that pokes like a ramp into the center of our pond.
There, it mounted the crest and tiptoed down the far side of the granite boulder that caps the peninsula. From my window I could see only the top half of the heron, its head and javelin bill turned to the east in profile. Then it squared to the pond and lowered its head, probably down to within striking distance of the water. I could see only its back and shoulders, which would have passed for a bump in the rock had I arrived just then.
This time I was determined not to turn away; I would bear witness to the whole narrative of this event, whatever it might be. Meanwhile this hunched, headless version of the bird assumed the same sort of stillness that had eventually bored me the day before. Game on.
“Wherever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song and dance,” wrote Annie Dillard. My own sort of stillness was far removed from that whirlwind—a twitchy, impatient sort, not quite worthy of the name, shot through with glances at my watch and dips into email.
People who keep ornamental fish in their ponds are advised to throw in a length of pipe to rest on the bottom as shelter from herons. These ugly hornpout were on their own, and I wondered what a hornpout thinks about as it eyes the spangled ceiling of its world, if it can really discern and recognize the shape or movement of a heron on that unimaginable other side.
The bird seemed to think so, it took such care to conceal its shape, to throttle its movement. I wondered what a heron thinks about in its stillness, marveled at how individuals of some species of heron—green, night, perhaps great blue—learn to drop insects, feathers, or stolen bits of bread on the surface to attract fish.
After 22 minutes the bird raised its head, turned, descended from the boulder, and strolled back down the peninsula. I couldn’t say if anything had happened, if it had eaten or not.
On the lawn the heron tipped forward, extending its wings, and lifted weightlessly into the air, into the whirlwind, its legs trailing behind, a dancer at one with the dance.
