The Herons Were Annoyed

I didn’t have my good camera, so you’ll have to believe that those dark balls up in the tree are heron’s nests, not mistletoe.

I went on a little adventure yesterday. Paddled upstream 4.64 miles in 3 hours. The current wasn’t bad in spots, but there’s a long stretch that seems unnaturally straight. It’s shallow and fast. Had to wade and drag the boat along behind. The whole business was much harder than I had anticipated (probably because I’m not very good at anticipating), but it was a wonderful experience.

The herons were not impressed.

I had paddled the kayak over to the bank to rest a moment, and two huge herons were suddenly upon me. They swooped and yelled, startling me. I hadn’t realized I was invading their nursery. When I paddled back from the bank, they retreated to their nests, watchful and irritable.

A little while later, having navigated maybe a dozen fallen trees (red-eared-slider conventions) and several areas where the limestone has eroded deeply in a long, sinuous channel, but where it is a wide, shallow shelf toward each bank, I came upon a place where erosion from a hilly area in the forest has created two little islands. As I passed the first, a raccoon (or beaver, I never really saw it) launched himself at my boat in fight-or-flight terror.

Of course, I screamed like a blonde in a slasher film.

And then I laughed and laughed and had to stop at the next little island to have lunch.

But it struck me that no matter how many plants and animals I had seen and recognized, there were countless others that had escaped my attention altogether. And I wonder about that.

Humans think we see a lot. We’re quite keen on how awesome we are. But we’re so rarely aware of what we don’t perceive. I hadn’t seen the herons, the raccoon or beaver, or several of the turtles who loudly protested my intrusion on their home. How many lives escaped the approach of my little kayak and never made a sound?

And what could I have learned from them if we could have made friends?