A beautiful day, spring-like in October, and the waters are high in the salt marsh. A rare super-high tide, a moon tide, floods the marsh grass. This water comes from the sea; we've had no rain to speak of.
Birds are
chirping, the trees and the thickets ringing with calls I haven't heard for
months. Not just crows or jays. Sparrows, chickadees, swifts, phoebes.
A scurry at
the top of the path alerts me to a small animal presence. I've been hearing a
lot of squirrels this time of year when they're in food collection over-drive.
But this sudden retreat has a different rhythm. I pause, look into the
shrubbery, the thicket off the path. The leaves in the low brush have fallen
and the skeleton of the underbrush reveals a hidden presence: curve of back,
piece of legs, ears laid back. Rabbit. He thinks I can't see him. I snap a
photo; he still doesn't move.
I leave the
main path for the narrow passage through the marsh grasses. To focus my
binoculars I scan a distant tree line. No movement. With glassed down I stand
still and survey the grasses. I am about to start walking when a shape just
inches above the thick elder brush lining the path, a liminal zone between
higher ground and marsh grass, separates in
my vision from the top branches of the elder. Slender, thin as the top handle of
an old-fashioned cane, it can only be the blade-sharp head of a heron. It
doesn't move, or react, even when I look directly at it. I step one way or
another to try for an angle for a clear shot. It takes me a while to realize
that he's standing in water, one of the many pools that form in the low-land marsh
when the water level is unusually high. He doesn't move because he's not afraid
I'll get any closer. He knows I won't go splashing into this water.
The high
water makes my usual path impenetrable, as I discover when I round the first bend,
unless I want to soak my feet. I know where the holes in my sneakers are.
So I slip
up the bank to the higher ground overlooking the marsh. Under trees, I have no
uninterrupted sight line here. But I move along to the curve in the marsh's
expanse and find a path through the underground that will take me down to my usual
route. Peering between branches where trees are thin I see a great white egret,
perched in a welcoming pool of the flooded marsh. Then, using the glasses, I
scan horizontally to one side and find another egret. I backtrack, find another
path to follow down. From there I can see the marsh and notice yet another
couple of white egrets closer to the shore, four altogether. Unruffled by my appearance, they don't fly away on
seeing me.
I snap
photos of these birds, many of them. One egret stretched tall or horizontally extended, its rapier beak poised above the water. Two together; the other pair; three
together. But I'm looking into the sun. So eventually I backtrack. 'It's all
right guys', I call out, 'I'm walking backwards, not towards you. Go about your
business.' Their business is standing still; then leaning forward and
stretching out those brontosaurus necks in the predatory inspection of the
possibilities of the moment until the entire body becomes a horizontal plane. The
bird doesn't strike dramatically, so I can't tell if it finds something or not.
Back on the
hilltop I walk further along, roughly parallel to the path below, then find
another cut downward... and drop myself on the other side of my targets, now
"ahead" rather than "behind" the egrets. One flies past just
as I am on the way down, having decided on his own to move his fishing hole. With
the sun behind me now, I try to get closer to the poised egrets to take photos.
They tolerate this for a while and then one, then another launches into a
flight across a flat wide sector of the marsh to far side, where I usually see
them. I snap photos while they're in flight.
Having
decided I've bothered them enough, I move along on my usual path -- who else
knows what will pop up next?; though nothing big does -- but my way is flooded almost
at once. This time I go back up and stay. I have to take the high ground to complete my loop walk through the marsh.
It's a
beautiful day. Cool, as predicted in the a.m., but by mid afternoon up to
seventy, much warmer than I expected. And the marsh is alive, totally alive
with bird calls. Is it the water, the sun, the everything?
It's as if
we've been favored with another little spring. When I work myself around to get
a good angle on the pools of shining water in the marsh, a familiar voice I
haven't heard in eons rings out from hiding: mockingbird.
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