This Month's Story

Suddenly the two birds launched themselves at one another and slammed together about four or five feet in the air. For a moment they hung in the air amid a wild flurry of hard flapping wings. Then they fell back into the water still lashing out and sending great splashes of water flying about them …

This morning as I entered the dining room, I caught a glimpse through the glass door of a heron flying low over the beach shallows of a low tide.

I stopped and took a quick second look.

It was the bird’s flight posture that had attracted my attention. Its neck, rather than curved back in the usual sort of relaxed “s” pattern that characterizes a heron’s flight, was stretched in a rigid line straight forward, as if pointing to some objective.

I knew what was about to take place and not wanting to waste a moment, quickly grabbed a pair of binoculars and, calling to Stella, ran out on the porch.

Once outside, I saw the bird land on a large mud flat just a little west of the house. About fifty feet from where he landed, another heron was nonchalantly walking about near the edge of the same flat, examining the shallow waters lapping at its feet.

Upon landing, the first heron began to walk stiffly about, its wing expanded into a sort of akimbo spread, its head and long bill pointed to the sky. The second bird stopped its phony pose of indifference and also started to do a similar walk, puffing out its wings and sticking skyward its own dagger-like bill.

In moments, the two birds had formed a duet, strutting slowly, apart yet together, in a stylized dance.

These two birds were Great Blue Herons, big birds of some four feet in height with large wings. They are impressive birds to see.

Normally, one sees them as solitary introverts perched as statues on piers along the beach, looking as Stella once described them as “lonely old men in oversized raincoats.” In late October, this changes and each male stakes out an approximately 300 yard length of the beach to defend as its own.

Now, two of these solitary birds had started their seasonal territorial defense and what was pleasurable for us was that the invisible line separating these particular birds’ territories was just a hundred yards to the west of the front of our house.

I know from years past that the birds would keep up this defense for several weeks. During that time, it would go on nonstop and if I went out on the porch tonight, I would probably hear their harsh croak of frank, frank, frank, added to the sky-turned bill and stiff, strutting steps I was witnessing now. I guess in the dark, they need to add audio to their threat display to make sure the other bird knew they still there and meant business.

Stella joined me on the porch and we sat together and watched the slow, stylized dance of these two herons.

We love all the birds that live with us along the water’s edge. We love the beauty of flight of the brown pelicans as well as the splashing fiesta of their fishing. We love the gregarious arguments of seagulls and their pristine look whether in flight or afoot. We love the social grace of the terns as they fly in impossibly tight clouds low over the water.

While we love all of these and many others, we have always had a soft spot in our hearts for blue herons, the gruff no nonsense loners whose nature was epitomized by the two slow steppers on the low tide mud flats in front of us on this day.

What we were seeing would go on for days and even weeks, but this was the first territorial display of the season and we relaxed to patiently watch and enjoy this first of the year display.

On this occasion, the two herons didn’t fight. In fact, while blue herons are deadly serious about these encounters, they seldom physically go beyond the threat display Stella and I were watching.

However, when they do, it can be rather vicious. Once, several years ago, when we saw two herons do their dance, it became obvious that the pair that were unusually close to one another. Stella decided to take a close up photo of the encounter and went down to the water’s edge.

She moved quietly, slowly edging toward them till she was less than twenty feet away.

As she moved, her nearness gave a scale to how big these birds can be. These two were big birds. She is 5’ 8” and the two birds with their heads back and bills pointed to the sky presented silhouettes only several inches shorter than she was.

Suddenly the two birds launched themselves at one another and slammed together about four or five feet in the air. For a moment they hung in the air amid a wild flurry of hard flapping wings. Then they fell back into the water still lashing out and sending great splashes of water flying about them, wetting Stella who was hastily stumbling back trying to get away.

Then it was over almost as quickly as it had started. One of the birds flew a short distance off and standing thus apart, the two resumed their threats, but this time from a farther distance.

At night, on another occasion, we heard the harsh croaking screams of two birds engaged in front of the house and hurried went outside to see what was taking place. We used a pair of 10x50’s, excellent night binoculars, to watch them. That night the two went as fiercely at one another as the two that had splashed Stella. The fight that night lasted slightly longer, with much screaming before breaking off.

We were amazed to see the losing bird fly a mere ten feet directly over us, it’s large gray wings flapping audible, its Frank, Frank filling the night sky before disappearing in the trees to the rear of the house.

But today it appeared that we would only see the two do their stylized dance. As we watched Stella pointed out other presences on the sand near the stutters. Silhouetted, just beyond the two herons were a long line of terns that had arranged themselves parallel to the water on the same sandbar of the large birds.

The line included two different types of terns, one type almost double the size of the second. While they were together in a long line, they kept separate groupings, the larger birds formed almost all of the group on the left and then with an abrupt down step, the smaller terns group formed on the right.

These terns were seasonal visitors to our beach and would probably be gone in a week or two. Meanwhile they stood there in their segregated grouping, ignoring the threat display of the two large herons sharing the bar scant yards away. When the herons dance brought them close to the terns, there was a slight shift, almost a ripple of their alignment. Nothing else.

In fact none of the other birds in the general area seemed to really care about the feuding strutters. It was as if they did not exist. I saw two gulls flying directly over the bar, quarreled loudly with one another, acting as if the herons below them were mere wooden pilings in the sand.

Further off a Reddish Egret was dancing in the shallows between the tidal sand bars, trying to scare up a little breakfast from the bottom with its erratic dance. It also ignored the herons.

Around the heron’s feet, the incoming tide sent wavelets up over the bar. Backlit by the morning light, it seemed as if these waves were actually small darkish creatures hurrying over the bar and slipping below the water surface on the other side. In a few seconds more wavelets came and crossed the bar in as equally a scurrying fashion. These and the other wavelets formed a phantom parade, one dark wavelet creature following another on and on, endlessly.

As with the terns, the sea gulls and the egret, these dark mummers seemed to also ignore the pacing birds.

* * *

There are all sorts of analogies to our own human existence that one can take from all this. To the Herons, nothing else existed but their fanatical defense of their territories, whereas to the rest of both the biological and physical world there were other matters that were more important.

In our lives we, like these two herons, have on occasion these excruciating encounters. Encounters that at the time they occur are all embracing, that seem to wrap us and our surroundings into a closed continuum. At these times we feel as if we are some beings in a Roman coliseum in which thousands of eyes watch our experience, that that experience is so intense that all existence must know it is happening. And afterward walking down the street, we find a world in which people are walking and talking, in which a dog barks at nothing and that the sun is only slightly further along in the sky then it was before.

We find to our amazement that like the terns, the sea gulls, the egret and the incoming tide, the world seems to have other more important things to do.