HERON NEAR-OOPS!

Most of the time the numerous great blue herons, which daily frequent the shallows of pool edges and riffles near the cottage, are highly intolerant of company. Just open the door leading to the side deck and they'll be flapping off in alarm, squawking in disgust with every wingbeat. 

Making a good photo is pretty much a matter of luck and quick shooting.

But every once in a while a bird will surprise you. Yesterday evening, midways between twilight and full dark, as the sky dimmed and a few stars began winking on through the skim of clouds, the heron above came winging up from downstream. The big bird landed on the edge of the pool directly across from where I stood—smack in the open, as hulking and highly visible as a bear in church, my canine sidekick Moon-the-Dog alongside, who, being mostly white, glowed like a neon phantom in the dusk. After eyeing me warily for several minutes, the heron waded carefully out to the middle of the riffle to a favorite fishing-platform rock. 

I made a few cautious photos. Sometimes, as if responding to the sound of the shutter, the heron would pause and spend a few moments speculatively rechecking us out. Still, while it was certainly aware of our presence, it didn't seem particularly anxious.

What was causing the heron problems was the slippery stone. We haven't had much rain this spring to keep things scoured clean. The river is low and the riffle's rocks are slick, making footing precarious and problematic for all us fishermen, feathered or not. More than once the big bird's foot slipped on the slimy stone, causing it to flap desperately in order to regain balance and not wash over into the four-foot depths directly downstream. That's what's happening in the image above.

After making a few additional shots, I decided to remove Moon and myself from the scene as possible distractions, in case we were more contributory than I thought. I know if I'm destined to take a pratfall, I'd rather do it without an audience, let alone what amounts to riverside paparazzi.     

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FADING TO BLACK

It begins with a final wash of gold high in the top of the tallest sycamore. As if the changing leaves had been varnished with bright, warm light. All the surrounding trees are dark, lost in the shadows of twilight. Only this old monarch, it's west-facing crown higher than those of its brethren, witnesses the day's final moments.

In the riffle and the pool above, other trees paint the water with their reflected hues. A fish stirs, takes something off the surface; quickly another feeds. This edge of darkness is the magic hour for the angler, the bewitching moment when the elemental veil seems to rend and water and sky becomes one, with you in the middle. Anything can happen. Your next cast might be that one you've dreamed about…but whether it yields a fish or mermaid, who can truly say?

The riffle begins to darken as the river cloaks itself in shadows. Objects such as stones and logs and clumps of leaves lose their details, turning into shapes—silhouettes of their former selves now surrounded by a flow of quicksilver blue.

And then even that is gone—and the only remaining evidence of the day upon the stream is a single scattering of sparkles on the pool below. A handful of magenta embers, vestiges of the sun's ebbing flame which have somehow found their way through the trees covering the far bank.

You stand quietly and watch this corridor woods as the light winks between the trunks—the sun falling, falling, pulled over the horizon until it becomes merely a glow that quickly fades to black.

Then you glance back and up, wondering if the top of the tall sycamore still has the lost day in view—but now you see only a shadow, a towering dark ghost…for all is nothing without the light.

TWILIGHT GIFT

"…a sort of reflection-of-a-reflection shot."

When twilight comes and light begins to fade, the world along the riverbank seems to pause and grows still, almost silent, as if holding its breath in anticipation. A brief interlude not unlike that experienced in a theater after the orchestra has finished tuning, the house lights have been dimmed, and you sit in the great dark room amid the muted shifting and stirring of the surrounding audience…waiting for the curtain to be raised.

For me, this is a magical period, a time when it no longer seems prudent to believe only in those things which can be quantified and explained. Textbooks and peer-reviewed papers can never deal adequately with twilight.

At twilight, land and water and sky are charged with ancient mystery. Reality shifts. Secrets lurk in the darkening shadows. Things best accommodated by old knowledge—tales told round a fire by gray-bearded elders, stories passed via careful whispers in pine-fragrant glens.

Anything is possible…

A few nights ago I was sitting on the bench overlooking the river. The sunset had not been spectacular, merely a dwindling of the light in the west. Moments earlier, I had managed a photo of the vanquished sun’s final orange gleam as the fiery light bounced off the high crown of a big, white-barked sycamore upstream to be mirrored in the pool below. A sort of reflection-of-a-reflection shot.

Now the sky was the color of old pewter, barely distinguishable above the island’s treeline. The swallows were long gone and the earliest-feeding bats were already fluttering about. That’s when twilight favored me with a rare gift and I saw the nighthawks.

Migrating nighthawks are one of the quintessential last-of-summer sights in Ohio as they head for winter quarters in South America. Over-flights of birds typically begin passing through anywhere from the last week in August to the first few days of September. Late afternoon and twilight is their preferred travel time—or at least the time I generally spot them sailing along overhead.

The flight I observed the other evening was by far the largest I’ve ever witnessed. First there was a single nighthawk…then two. Then a handful, perhaps a dozen scattered loosely, then five or six, ten, four, a single…fifteen! Group after group they came, an unhurried, steady progression that might have revealed two or three dozen birds total at any one time.

A hundred nighthawks crossed overhead. Then two hundred. And still the birds kept appearing from the northwest, heading southeast. Twos, threes, a half-dozen. I was now straining to see them in the gathering darkness, missing many, losing track of others before I could make out their count.

How many were there? I honestly don’t know—but certainly several hundred. A thousand or more was equally possible.

Unlike a traveling skein of geese, the nighthawks were totally silent. And yet, long after it became too dark to see anything, I believe those migrating nighthawks were still passing above me—I seemed to feel their moving presence up there in the ebony sky.

Wishful thinking? Fantasy? Perhaps.

Or just maybe time spent savoring September’s twilight had reawakened some atavistic sense. All I know is that after a while I felt—no, I knew—the sky was empty…that my once-in-a-lifetime flight of nighthawks had gone.