I was driving along a pond this morning when I had the impression something was quite near beside me. I turned my head and there was a full-sized heron just taking off.
When you are so close to that bird in the midst of its takeoff, the sensation is like being near an airplane that is just getting airborne. So big, so complex, so quiet, so confident.
There is a museum in Alabama that shows a heron and a dolphin side by side. Both animals are six feet tall but the bird weighs 6 lbs. while the dolphin weighs 600 lbs. Google says that the heron usually lives about 5 years while some dolphins live 55 years.
Something that big and that impressive gets me thinking about the wildlife around us. We sometimes have deer in our yard. Around us, there have been bears but not in our neighborhood. We get all sorts of small birds and sometimes, an eagle. It is not all big animals, either. As the snow melts, impressive tunnels are revealed, made by voles. Their tunnels are deep impressions in the grass bed but are open on the top. They run around under the snow cover. The voles are quite secretive and rarely seen but their nibbles of our squash or tomatoes are easy to see and irritating.
