Memorable Times

We have just said goodbye to the last of our children/grandchildren visitors for the summer. Always good to have them come, sad to have them leave, and then we lie down and take a long rest. This last visit featured accounts of all the recent animal mayhem, of course, as well as a bear sighting. While walking back from the beach, a couple of blocks from our house, they found themselves coming up the road while the local bear was going cross the road. Great excitement all round!

Mayhem continues in our life as a heron arrives at the frog pond to consume the frogs (2) and a host of goldfish. Of course, they’re always at risk; it’s like leaving chickens around for coyotes and raccoons. But you can’t very well put the goldfish from the pond in a bowl every night, the way you put chickens in their coop (or their ‘chicken vault,’ as my son refers to his daughter’s chickens’ very safe night-time abode). And even if you could or did, the herons are out looking in the daytime. In fact, the fish are probably pretty safe at night. It’s the day-flying herons that are the menace. And were not even used to thinking of herons as menaces. That is, I suppose, the trouble with romanticizing the natural world. There is a great chain of eating that we have sort of lost touch with…at least as participants. Well, not that we don’t hold our place in that great chain of eating, but we have lost touch with the fact that we’re in the chain. It’s more like, ‘well, they’re eating each other out in the fields, whereas we are going to a nice restaurant where it's called cuisine not animals.’

This past spring we watched about 5 DVD’s worth of the BBC’s Planet Earth, which had wonderful photography but the most tedious narration in the history of the movies, with its endless, ‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Look! There comes a big animal to eat this cute little baby-sized animal.’ More recently, we’ve been watching The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer, which have a different format for their mayhem. The ones we’ve seen so far have tended to focus on a world in which objects take on a life of their own, and that life is not, necessarily, one that bodes well for people. Maybe we’re just in a time when we humans feel particularly threatened. Svankmajer is one of the most famous animators in the world (though not well known in the U.S.), and his stop-motion work is absolutely amazing, though a tad on the dark side. This is not Pixar or Disney, certainly.

We watched about a half-dozen of these short pieces with the visiting 12-year-old grandson and, although he allowed as he wasn’t sure at all what they were about (I had warned him this would likely be the case), he was very taken with them. Or led us to believe he was. Who knows with twelve-year-olds? But perhaps this is the role of the grandparent: to astonish, or at least to be memorable or to cause memorable things to happen. (Also to serve a lot of cuisine.)

When he’s forty, he can look back on the visit to the grandparents during which he watched weird Czech animated films and heard about herons eating the frogs and goldfish and saw a bear, right in front of him. You do what you can…

Great Bird!

Driving to the the post office and grocery store today, I saw great blue herons everywhere. They come back from somewhere else more southerly in the late winter and make steady appearances at the side of roads and highways that border big, flat, usually formerly-planted agricultural fields, but if all you’ve got is a really big vacant lot, that’s okay, too. You might think that they drop into the fields to find food...small rodents? Insects? Old seeds? Don’t know. In any case, they don’t seem to be looking for anything in the field. They stand by the fields that border roads and highways so that they can watch the cars go by. At least that is how it appears to me. Regardless of how their bodies are oriented, their heads and eyes are pointed toward the cars. Perhaps they think of cars as some kind of disabled birds, even some kind of heron, who can go fast but just can’t get up off the ground. And they are hoping that, this time, they'll get enough uplift to soar.

They are a big, beautiful bird and we are lucky to have so many of them—as well as of bald eagles—around. All spring, they’re both a continual presence. Because I mostly see the herons on the ground and the eagles in the air, they feel like a very different kind of bird to me, but they are both really big, and that’s probably their most impressive birdness.

When we moved here, Point Roberts had one of the largest heron rookeries in the Northwest. They were located in an alder grove over on the northwest side of the peninsula. Ten years or so ago, a big resort/golf company was fixing to build a high-end golf course here on the Point. Problem was, the course bordered the heron rookery and it was a somewhat protected site. Enough protection that the golf course company couldn’t just do whatever it wanted. Over a couple of years, various groups negotiated with the company to try to find a middle way. I’m sure there were plenty of people here who preferred the ‘no golf course’ route, but big money, big business, what have you, has its way. Here it was, promising to provide a bunch of short-term and maybe a half-dozen long-term jobs in Point Roberts. What government could say ‘no’ to that? We don’t have our own government here but if we did, that government might have figured out how to say no. But the county and the state were the heavy hitters here, and they produced some research to justify the building of the golf course in such a way and at such a time that the herons wouldn’t mind. At least that was the idea.

I saw the rookery once, before the golf course came in. It’s not a fenced or prohibited area or anything, but it is also not advertised because the people who think heron rookeries ought to be really protected didn’t see any value in having pedestrians tromping through on a regular basis. The herons are only there in the rookery while they’ve got eggs/chicks in the nest. It was a lovely sight. I was surprised to find that they were nesting in alder trees, which are not very long-lived trees, and rookeries, they tell me, are usually long-term homes. These trees were showing their age: lots of breakage from winter wind storms, but there were also lots of visible nests, though the herons weren’t in them at the time. They came back that spring, though, and used those nests.

And then the golf course got built according to the plan, and a year or two later, the herons failed to return to the rookery. Didn’t like golf or golfers, I guess. Nobody seems to know where they went to make new nests, or if they know, they’re not discussing it. The herons are still around, of course, eating in the marshlands, spearing fish out of the eel grass, and watching the cars next to the highway. It’s just that they don’t do their nesting in Point Roberts anymore. I miss that.