my spirit bird

i have been crawling through my archive trying to put together a proposal for a STILL book. as a result i found this unpublished photo of a great blue heron. i came across this guy, trailside in winter. probably too old to fly south. he was frozen, but otherwise in tact. look at the elegant dexterity in that foot. the great blue heron is my favorite bird. they arrive very early in spring, when the lakes are still mostly frozen. then stake out their personal fishing grounds. we almost always have one who chooses our long boardwalk as his or her private fishing platform for the summer. they nest in large colonies called heronries (a more specific term than “rookery”) that are isolated from human disturbance.  i think i know where there is one near me. but i don’t tell anyone about it. only my hiking partner knows about it. every evening in summer, when our heron wraps up his day of fishing , i am awed by the tremendous volume of his wing span as he effortfully lifts himself up out of the cattails and glides over our house to go join his family, and the rest of the colony, for the evening where there is safety in numbers. magnificent.

great blue heron