KEEPING WATCH, SQUINTING DOWNRIVER

Saturday, December 15, 2007: Tomorrow night the temp’s supposed to drop to 28F, but last night it was 65F at 9:00 p.m. Outside, no “Lucy,” but her diamonds popped, one by one, out of the darkening sky while frogs serenaded a new sliver of moon. 13 December 2007—eleven years since I dragged my raggedy trailer here in 1996. I’ve never kept watch on the deck without being rewarded and as I watched dark come on last night, waiting for my treat, a bird or an alligator, I knew something would show up. Finally, I spotted a white comma standing half a mile away in the Suwannee’s black waters. The white curve told me I was watching a heron of some kind, I just didn’t know which one.

It grew darker and I nearly gave up and came in. I was squinting downriver, hoping he’d feel my eyes on him and actually move when, just as the leaves on the water oak curled into crystals, while the furred ribbon of a squirrel rattled down the big cypress, as I was determinedly ignoring sounds of breakage in the foliage across the river in order not to take my eyes from my find, he lifted off and flew straight upriver, yellow feet dangling 20’ higher than the deck. I don’t think he even knew I was there.

That bird made my day. I’d been feeling ornery after a long conversation with a woman about her husband’s death, the ups and downs of their marriage, and how she, like everyone else our age, is inundated with Medicare paperwork. Thank god for the bird.

His yellow feet tell me this was Snowy Egret, Egretta thula* which, according to my bird book “during courtship sports long, lacy plumes on his back, chest, and crown.” I have seen such plumes once, but on another heron, the night crowned black heron Aunt Nadine fed bits of “weenie” at her back door when I visited Nokomis last May.

Nadine, too, lived alone, but vibrantly, and she’d still be there at age 94, dreaming up recipes and snipping pieces of hot dogs for her heron, but on October 1 she left us. My daddy’s baby sister and I learned late in life that we shared a love of the natural world and for the last few years I slipped colored leaves and dried wildflowers into the notes I wrote her. When I walked, I wasn’t walking just for my health; I was on the lookout for what I could send.

Outside today we have more squirrels, I swear, than moss, but momentarily they have allowed a cardinal to come to the feeder. Whoa! Two birds with black and white stripes on their chests. Got to get the binoculars and go.

89F at 5:00 p.m., 14 December 2007, on the deck: fish plop, dogs bark, images of white clouds and blue sky appear on the black surface of this slow river. I am looking for Snowy Egret. Fortified by the last of the Kashi cookies and a cup of milk, I have gathered laundry from the clothesline and taken up my post here, where the sky makes quick changes: the moon, a slightly fatter sliver than it was last night with a white whiff of cloud drifting over its curve and, to the west, blends of peach and gold. To the east, upriver, the water is glass. The dogs stop, a fuss comes from nearby squirrels.

This time I have the binoculars and zoom in. I’ve seen a smaller squirrel, but it was a flying squirrel; these two are the first babies I’ve ever spotted, furry ribbons whipping along tree limbs that hang over the water. Gold glints beneath them. Now I see three—three tiny heads—crammed into a hole in the hollow tree. Orange sherbet in a blue sky, white wisps gone, another volley from the dogs. Three pops from a faraway shotgun, then echoes. I count ten pops in all. The sherbet is now tangerine. I don’t see my white comma on legs.

The sky turns gray, the moon egg yellow, and I am reminded of Thomas Hardy’s “tangled bine-stems [that] scored the sky.” This Suwannee sky is a lattice of leafless limbs that speaks of winter. I slap a mosquito off my knee, think of the coming cold. Black lines of limbs and vines, carved on a sky of pearl. Friend owl offers one “whoo.”

Dark, and an old vehicle slugs past, or is that a plane? From the opposite bank—Suwannee River Water Management Property—I hear somebody in an off-road vehicle, somebody with a loud mouth, a teenage male, most probably, or several teenage males. It’s Friday night. They move on, away from me. Night insects start up. No Showy Egret. “And heron, as resounds the trodden shore,/Shoots upward, darting his long neck before.” (William Wordsworth, from “An Evening Walk,” 1787, 8, & 9)

*The snowy egret breeds on the Atlantic, Pacific , and Gulf Coasts and is found in some inland areas. On the west coast, it winters from California south to South America and on the east coast from Virginia south to the West Indies. (http://www.nhptv.org/natw@works/) (http://www.assateague.com/sn-egret.html)