Of Herons

A heron is a bird made for rain. I say this as a metaphor, but then I think of the one I saw today, on a pier of the oldest bridge on the Ravensbourne, between Deptford and Greenwich. Dark was coming in and although there was nothing falling from the sky the air was full of water.

The bridge’s feet, built in the early nineteenth century, extend into the bleak current of this rare above-ground survivor among London’s rivers. The heron was a bundle of clenched grey, its long yellow bill inimical to the gleaming development that disfigures the mouth of what’s known at this point as Deptford Creek.

Its scruffiness seemed far more in tune with the decayed industrial buildings - now largely occupied by arts organisations – further up the Ravensbourne, inheritors of the “presumably” unromantic mills recorded here in the Domesday Book.

Unlike the wren or robin, the heron is not a very mythological bird. The opening of Paul Farley’s poem "The Heron" (google it) conveys much of the feeling of bloody-mindedness that seems to hang about it. Even the most ardent of anthropomorphisers would be hard pressed to imagine a heron smiling.

The heron that occurs in Britain, which here is called the grey, has a broad distribution, also inhabiting Europe, Asia and Africa. Its main diet is fish, grabbed from close to the surface by that long bill. But it also eats other small creatures. I once saw one stride through winter grass on Christchurch Meadows in Oxford, and seize and swallow what looked like a field vole.

Its speed and the muscularity of its neck were unnerving. After the frenzied squeaking stopped the heron moved on, more slowly, standing out against the frosty view. They can often be seen in fields far from water, usually motionless, like ragged sentries at absent gates.

Aloneness seems to accompany them. Even though the RSPB lists them as among the commonest large birds in Britain, they don’t spend much time together. Only in raising young in large heronries do they gather.

I can imagine a dull sky fragmented by slow wide wings, the bizarre looking chicks staring up at their parents from disordered, towering nests. The idea recalls the scene in Conan Doyle’s The Lost World when the explorers come upon the pterosaur colony.

No doubt I exaggerate. The most herons I’ve seen in a single day is nine – about one for every mile of the walk along the Thames from Oxford to Abingdon. It was a chilly day, inevitably (I’m sure I’ve seen a heron in blazing sunshine, but I just can’t recall it), and the wind sent ripples skating over the surface. Each heron was focused deep into the water, and unless it flew off on seeing us (though we were on the far side of the river), was unmoving. There were none of those startling instants when the neck uncoils, the water leaps up and suddenly the beak’s retreating with a fish still flapping against the implacable chitin. It was a strange day of watching the watchers.

It’s hard to say that I actually “like” herons. They don’t have a good cultural profile. The Farley poem is a good expression of the effect they have on the mood of texts. In Alice Oswald’s Dart the heron makes a gruesome appearance:

“I knew a heron once, when it got up
its wings were the width of the river,
I saw it eat an eel alive
and the eel the eel chewed its way back inside out
through the heron’s stomach”

In my grandma’s kitchen I remember a poster showing a heron swallowing a frog. The frog’s arms reached down from the beak and were trying to throttle the bird. The legend: “Never give up”. In the TV adaption of The Gruffalo, a heron’s beak and legs are the only parts of it seen as it devours a glum-looking fish. The only positive portrayal of a heron I can think of is Whistler in the Animals of Farthing Wood sequence by Colin Dann. I can’t remember if I was a wildlife nerd before I read those books, or if they helped make me one.

I may not like them, but I know they are fascinating. My earliest memory of anything to do with herons is of a painted iron frame in the shape of one that stood over the pond in the centre of my infants’ school. It had a grim eye, and when I understood that it was there to drive away other herons – because they don’t like to be near each other – and so stop them eating the “fat goldfish”, they seemed weird and mysterious, as if you might keep dragons off in the same way.

In those days small children were not encouraged to spend time near ponds or “nature” while at school. At least, I wasn’t. In the three years I was at that school I never once went out into the middle courtyard. No doubt there were doors (for the gardeners). But all I remember is glass, some indeterminate green, and the model heron. I have clear memories of staring at it. An artificial bird may be the root of my fascination.

There’s also that slight tightening of the throat as one flies over, huge in a sky of jackdaws and blackbirds, its neck recoiled onto its body, the beat of its wings that odd fraction slower than my heartbeat. In the pub garden beside Folly Bridge in Oxford, sometimes one stands on the bridge piers, like the one I saw on the Ravensbourne – but late at night, so the yellow lights of human occupation distort the colour of its feathers. Beside it, geese and ducks drift past, comic in their surrender to the current. Or I might lean over the bridge’s parapet and see one with its air of endless waiting, seeing out a hailstorm.

“Like” is a cheapened word in this context. “Like” many of the sturdiest adaptors to humanity’s impact on the world, herons live close to city centres, but do not partake directly of them. A muntjac deer on Abingdon Road, a robin in the “garden” of the Turf Tavern, keeps its animality. I can’t look into its eye and see a friend. More so with herons. Unlike that of other animals the idea of the heron cannot easily be domesticated. Let’s say a deer is cute, a robin is a symbol of a cultural identity. The heron is – a monster? a pattern of endurance? Or just a bird, whose relations with the world are not accessible, definable, certainly not comfortable.

If I were a pagan, believing in local, tutelary gods, the heron would take a difficult place in my pantheon. Its will is capricious; it will not easily be placated; its judgement of when to strike is precise and unfathomable to the watcher on the other bank.

The longest I’ve watched a single heron was in central Oxford. West of the colleges, the canal moves towards its last few metres between Hythe Bridge Street and Park End Street (it stops altogether just behind the castle). It was a cold day, grey of course, with rain doing that hesitant spitting that sets off speculation about just how bad the weather’s going to get.

Here the canal towpath has been made a gentle walkway on one side, with benches and unsteep steps up to the road. On the other side willows let long extremities into the water, and the bank is built up high – green “weeds” in summer, in winter soggy earth.

This earth met the stone of the canal’s embankment just where the heron stood. By its feathers it was young, about to enter its first winter. It still had a juvenile ruff of colour. It did not like the cold, because it was very hunched, and sometimes shifted a long leg’s pace or two when the wind picked up. Those watching eyes still kept on the water, but there was little to see. Just starting out, it had found a spot as poor as it was uncontested. We watched it, then moved on. There’d been no strike.