I stood for about half an hour observing a great blue heron in the swamp down the road. Strangely, it was a mottled, beige color that blended in with the surrounding muddy water. Its head was also all the same color, its spring markings faded. There wasn’t a hint of its blue or blue-gray coloring as it stood, as still and columnar as the tree stumps around it. And where were the long, elegant, ribbon-like feathers over its head? The chest feathers were fluffy like the nearby cattails going to seed.
After watching a heron during the day, the author was visited by an evening ray of sunlight on her wall that looked like a heron. (Courtesy photo)
The heron had settled in on this spot. Its graceful, stalking walk had led it here to the edge of the swamp, where it was standing poised to strike when the time came. The bird was the picture of focused attention and muscular readiness, its posture exquisitely expressive of its intention. My muscles imagined the tension that the bird must maintain in order to stalk its prey, the way a dancer or an athlete must find the perfect balance between power and grace. I became aware of the discipline required to patiently observe, but the longer I stood observing this 4-foot-tall bird, the less strange it was to me.
Before you could see it coming, a frog was pinned between the long mandibles of its pointed bill, the frog’s arms and legs frantically struggling for release. The heron did let up its pressure for a second but only to toss and reposition the frog for an even better grasp. After a couple of violent shakes and several gulps, the frog disappeared. When the heron stretched upward to better accomplish the swallowing of the frog, I expected to see a lump remain in its long thin neck. But the neck returned to its usual curved shape after a few more stretches and sips of water.
When I continued my walk along the edge of the swamp, the heron crouched, slowly spread its huge wings, and achieved liftoff with a few flaps, flying low over the water, at last revealing its slate-blue feathers. A few more flaps and the great bird was already a third of the way across the swamp; a few more and the bird was a moving speck until it landed, out of sight.
I didn’t ask for anything from nature that day, but maybe because the heron got my undivided attention for 30 minutes in the morning, I received a shadow of a heron-shaped sunspot on my bedroom wall as the sun set in the evening.
A heron hunts in the Delaney Wildlife Management Area.(Photo by Thomas Kilian)
Margaret Kusner is a retired middle school art teacher, a lifelong artist, and a walker who considers herself to be a part of nature.
