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AMY SMITH LINTON

Great Blue Herons

4/2/2019

4 Comments

 
So, okay, maybe the big raptors like Bald Eagles and Snowy Owls are more impressive, and coming eyeball-to-eyeball with a Sandhill Crane is even more alarming, but Great Blue Herons are darned impressive birds. 
Great Blue Heron
Game camera photo
Great Blue Heron
Game camera appears to be slipping.
In my Shell Island Shuttle days, when we'd rescue birds  –– mostly untangling them from fishing line, but sometimes popping them into a pet carrier and ferrying them over to the local rescue outfit –– the Great Blues were among the most challenging to help.  

They are fierce, even as they are fragile. Those long legs ––!  They aim those impressively big beaks RIGHT for your eye, and they have quite a reach.  

They do not give up after they've been caught.

Magnificent, cranky creatures.
Great Blue Heron
In a book whose heavy style I enjoyed a lot –– though, sadly, after my godfather Dan complained about the many factual errors he'd found, and I did my research, I too, became less enchanted by the novel –– here's a lovely passage including a blue heron: 
​
In his mind, Inman likened the swirling paths of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the random ways thing fall against each other. It was simple enough to tell fortunes if a man dedicated himself to the idea that the future will inevitably be worse than the past and that time is a path leading nowhere but a place of deep and persistent threat. The way Inman saw it, if a thing like Fredericksburg was to be used as a marker of current position, then many years hence, at the rate we’re going, we’ll be eating one another raw.
            And, too, Inman guessed Swimmer’s spells were right in saying a man’s spirit could be torn apart and cease and yet his body keep on living. They could take death blows independently. He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been about burned out of him but he was yet walking. Feeling empty, however, as the core of big black-gum tree. Feeling strange as well, for his recent experience had led him to fear that the mere existence of the Henry repeating rifle or the éprouvette mortar made all talk of spirit immediately antique. His spirit, he feared, had been blasted away so that he had become lonesome and estranged from all around him as a sad old heron standing pointless watch in the mudflats of a pond lacking frogs. It seemed a poor swap to find that that the only way to keep from fearing death was to act numb and set apart as if dead already, with nothing much left of yourself but a hut of bones.


Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, 1997. Page 16.

Picture

PS: I actually prefer Cold Mountain the movie. Exception proves the rule.

​
4 Comments
Incredible range.
4/4/2019 08:53:37 am

About Christmas day many years ago Florida boy was riding a bicycle from Cherry Point into Birch Bay, Wa. and was stopped dead in my tracks by a Great Blue standing in the snow and straw. Hadn't seen a soul for an hour. I said out loud, 'What the heck are you doing here?' GBHeron then asked me the same thing.

Reply
Amy
4/4/2019 10:01:19 pm

Whoa, freaky spirit-animal moment!

Reply
'shrooms
4/5/2019 10:29:29 am

Given the warmer 25 years since, their incredible range north must be even more surprising.

Reply
Lois
5/21/2019 09:18:29 pm

I loved that book!
And the film, too, but the book!
(Jude Law in a crisp white shirt!)

Reply



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