Still there.
2nd November 2008, SundayThe Green Heron is still at West Hythe. I don’t normally go to look at rare birds, but we were “going that way anyway” and so we “found ourselves” last week, leaning on the canal-side railings in the bright October sunshine.
It was so easy to see, so close, so indifferent to the rank of bird-watchers whose shadows raked the rosy raft of Water Fern: hunched, attentive, yellow eye swivelling, the fore-edge of its shadow a sumptuous imperial purple across the Azolla.
From time to time, it would suddenly take flight, too close to track easily, on leaden blue wings, and land on the sluice right beneath birders, but in the shadow and the wrong side of a metal grille. Or it would clamber through the waterside vegetation, grasping greeny-yellow stems with greeny-yellow legs, splayed out as gawky as an Audubon painting.
It would close up, egg-shaped, then stretch down, rust and verdigris, towards invisible prey and after periods of watchful inaction snatch a Rudd too fast to follow except in retrospect.
Each new turn was applauded by a clattering of camera shutters, while from the rough slope, up beyond the golden trees, came the lonely howling and whooping of apes, somewhere beside the landslipped instalments of Roman fort, somewhere behind the pack of African Hunting dogs tussling over a crimson lump of carcass.
