Great Blue Heron

There she was in the debris of grasses piled up on the edge of the Marsh's channel, near our house in South Carolina. Her long yellow beak pointing the way, she high-stepped toward the almost dry channel, lifting one yellowish leg after the other so as not to get entangled in the mixed up grasses. She stopped and started to preen, her beak becoming almost lost in her greenish feathers and she looked no more like the bird she was, than an undefinable work of art, and I was no longer looking at the Great Blue Heron.

Later in the evening, she was preening atop the green post on our dock, very close. Standing on one leg, beak, almost invisible again, busy inside with her feathers. I watched and watched, with binoculars. Again, standing on one leg, she lost her beak and the other leg, and again became a sculpture --still as the post she stood on.