Blog post 5 -- Season Cycle

When I set out for the pond this week, I passed a stream of people on the sidewalk with dark black crosses on their foreheads, reminding me that it was Ash Wednesday. I don’t have a relationship with the church on my block, outside of complaining every few months about the parents who idle their giant SUVs for 30 minutes every day when they pick up their children from school. Sometimes I feel guilty for not instilling the Catholic traditions I grew up with in my children. But we talk a lot about generosity, forgiveness and acceptance. And, inevitably, we question whether or not this church encourages its parishioners to be stewards for the earth.

The warm weather, bright sunshine and ash crosses made me think about rebirth. We’re moving out of winter. Bits of green are shooting up from the sleeping earth. Because it was such a nice day, there were more people at the pond than I’d seen before. Several were there alone, sitting on benches, watching and listening. In Gretel Eherlich’s “The Solitude of Open Spaces,” she writes about the healing property of space, that it “has a spiritual equivalent and can heal what is divided and burdensome in us.” Here in the city, we see fewer open spaces, but we see variety. Most of us can find a niche, or as a friend once said of city life: everyone can find his or her stream. It’s comforting to see these two forms of spirituality on the same day, in the same neighborhood: the Christians celebrating the start of a season and the pond visitors, finding solace in the quiet and the open space.

Leaf mosaic in the ice

At the eastern end of the pond several people gathered, pointing and looking through camera lenses at the tree on the island. I slowly made my way over, studying the tall grass for movement. Still nothing. By the time I reached the bird watchers, only two remained. I could see many more birds in the tree. Like the ones I saw last week, their feathers blended into the varying shades of brown in the tree. I could tell they were large, even though they were folded into balls. There were at least six. One of the birds stood watch as the others slept. It was black and gray and white. A women with a camera said it as a black-crowned night heron, and she speculated the others were young night herons.

How many birds are the trees?

I went home and consulted Google, which turned up a news segment from last summer about black-crowned night herons setting up a rookery south of the pond. The babies were brown with the same wing pattern as the ones I saw last week. From two men identified as “avid bird watcher” by the network news, I learned the herons lived in a marsh on the city’s South Side, but white egrets and blue marsh herons, bigger birds dubbed “bullies” by the anchor, moved into their space. So the herons relocated, “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps to the high-rent district,” said the anchor. Avid bird watcher agreed: “Even Donald Trump couldn’t afford a down payment on this strip of real estate.” (This I doubt.) I also learned from the bird watchers that the night herons have a 44-inch wingspan and stand 25 inches tall. I love that there are people in the city who devote their time to identifying birds and know which are local and which are visitors. A city might not offer a lot of open space, but it can accommodate many different people.

News video about the herons