A Great Blue Heron Photo Fest

A Stately Heron

Portrait

7:53

8:30

It's another gray morning, a bit of color above the horizon.  The lake is open, a few mounds of snow on the shoreline.  I have been up since 6:30, to a warm, 44º morning.  When I walked outside, the sounds of a woodpecker overpowered the sounds of both mallards and loons.  A couple of rafts of ducks are frolicking in front of our house, looking for food or a mate.  And I just saw there is a Winter Weather Advisory for tonight, with a wintry mix, mostly icy roads, perhaps power outages because of downed tree limbs.  Ah, April!

Hooded Mergansers Napping

Yesterday turned out to be a pleasant day, overcast in the morning but clearing up in the afternoon, the temperatures getting into the low 70's around 4:00.  I took another day off from yoga, enjoying the leisure of a morning where I don't have to be on my way to Eight Limbs by 9:00.  I was surprised by the warmth of the morning when I walked outside, like Thursday.  I knew we had to go shopping either on Friday or Saturday, so I decided to get it over with and go Friday when Wegman's would not be as crowded.  Evie put together a list while I showered and got dressed.  I left around 11:00, stopped for coffee and then did a quick run through Wegmans, as the list was not too long.

Lake's Finally Open

I was home by 12:30, ready for lunch.  Evie was out in the yard, doing some cleanup and talking with Pat, our neighbor, up for a few days.  So I had to make my own lunch, a pickle and goose liver sandwich with the last of the lentil soup from Thursday night's dinner.  I was at a loss as to what to watch, so I started Banshee but I think I watched the third season, so I switched to a series called Brotherhood, set in Baltimore, which pits two brothers against each other.  I am not sure I will stick with it either.

Early afternoon, we both took it easy, watching the pundits excitement over the latest factoid concerning Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen.  Little did they know that a missile attack was coming in the evening, pushing the Cohen story to the sidelines.

Among The Reeds

Around 4:00, the lake was too inviting to ignore, so I put on my life jacket, jumped in my kayak or rather gingerly stepped into it, and paddled down to Sandy Bottom and back.  I brought my camera, not expecting to see much waterfowl.  To my surprise, as I kayaked to the reeds, I scared off a blue heron to my dismay.  So I paddled on, then came back to the same area and there he stood, along the shoreline, so I was able to get a number of photographs of his stately pose.

Perched

Finally, he flew up into a tree, so I was able to photograph him up there.  I was excited, the first blue heron of Spring.  As I paddled home, I noticed a couple of mallards, sitting on a snow bank along the edge of the lake, and was able to get a shot of them before they flew away.  What a great paddle, my first extended paddle of April

Mallards In The Snow

We celebrated the heron photos with a glass of wine and some cheese and crackers, as Evie went through them, picking out the best ones and cropping and enhancing them for this morning's blog.  We had no worry about dinner because the previous night's pastitsio was warming up in the oven.  Nothing like leftovers for an easy dinner.  We watched a couple of Colbert's, then The Americans, just as Evie's phone pinged with the news that we had just attacked Syria.  Scary, especially since Trump is now the 'great decider.'  We listened to Mattis explain the reasoning behind the attack before going up to bed, uneasy as to the unintended consequences of this military action.

I am ending with a quotation from SUNDIAL OF THE SEASONS which seems apropos for these troubling times. It was penned by Hal Borland on April 13, 1954, during the McCarthy Hearings.

"We've had a long Winter, and not only in terms of weather.  Humankind has achieved a kind of mass cabin fever.  Life has been a serious matter, so serious that we got to forgetting that man can make a very funny fool of himself being serious.  And taking other foolish men seriously.  It has become a political crime, somehow, to laugh at some of the performers.  Maybe we can now get outdoors and begin to smile and chuckle and laugh discreetly.  At the animals first, and the birds, but eventually at men.  And eventually, we may recover our perspective, if enough of us begin to laugh at those who have so long insisted on being taken seriously with their absurd performances.  It's time we opened a lot of windows.  It's time we laughed again, in delight as well as relief.  It's time to be rid of a few inhibitions and a lot of suspicions.  It's time for Spring."

*Winters rigors and March mud often make early Spring a time of human cantankerousness and absurdity.  Usually, we can laugh off such antics, but the performance of the United States Senate's Subcommittee On Internal Security in the Spring of 1954, when this entry was written, made laughter unfashionable if not actually criminal.  This editorial provoked several letters suggesting that the author was unpatriotic, perhaps even subversive."