Dawn at the heronry

Text 1: The Heronry at Coldmere, by Henry Ashcombe

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

I rose at four this morning, while the house still slept, and walked down through the wet meadows to the heronry at Coldmere. The grass soaked me to the knees within a hundred yards. A thin mist lay along the river, so white and so still that the alders seemed to stand in milk.

The herons nest in a clump of old elms upon the island, and I had been told that a man who sat quietly in the reeds might watch them without disturbing their business. I sat. I was quiet. For half an hour I saw nothing whatever but the mist, and heard nothing but a moorhen complaining somewhere upstream, and I began to think myself a great fool.

Then the first bird came. It rose from the trees with a slow, laborious flapping, its long legs trailing behind it, its neck folded back upon its shoulders, and it looked for all the world like an old clergyman who has been woken too early and resents it. It cried once, a harsh, croaking call like a gate upon a rusty hinge, and from the elms a dozen voices answered it. In a moment the whole island was awake. Great grey shapes lifted and settled; nests of sticks, as untidy as bundles of firewood, swayed in the branches; the young ones, which are ugly past description, stretched up their bills and clattered for their breakfast.

I watched for an hour, until the sun had burned the mist away and my legs had quite lost their feeling. In that hour I saw one heron stand motionless in the shallows for twenty minutes together, as patient as a statue, and then strike so swiftly that I did not see the fish until it was already in his throat.

I walked home wet, stiff and hungry, and well content.

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