Sixty, maybe seventy of them perched in their nests. Paired. Single. Waiting. One might leave, make a wide loop out from the nest and then back to the tree, sort of like a bomber plane circling a target. So expansive that the turning radius was liberally loose. Slow.
No, that's not right. There is nothing mechanical about them at all. Their dinosaur elbows, their mile-long necks. The fat cocoon of a body. Their needle beaks.
It was like watching something extinct among us. Something ancient and orphic. I was sure one might fly over then lean down and whisper, "Yes, it begins now." Or that one might float near the divide between the wet march and the road and toss down a picture of my great, great grandmother from Germany. Like they knew everything from all time and could sense how spindly and unsteady we are without our wings.
We read that the males go out to retrieve sticks as part of the mating ritual. Picture it. The heron loping through the sky, the stick whiskered out of its beak, rising to the branch, jutting its feet out, retracting its head, touched down. Him holding out the stick to her. A gesture. A genuflection. The bending salaam of love.
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