`A Cow Out of Order'

Almost every evening for the last month or so, a pair of tall gray birds has perched in the branches of the post oak growing in front of our house. Out of ignorance and convenience I took to calling them “herons” without putting a finer point on it. Because they roost 40 feet off the ground and the foliage is dense, they’re difficult to describe in detail – pale gray feathers, stick-like legs. Their anatomy is attenuated, like a Giacometti sculpture. A neighbor last weekend identified the birds as yellow-crowned night herons (Nyctanassa violacea), and also solved a secondary mystery: Night herons are the source of the unholy sound that has woken us several times in recent weeks -- the blat of an ill-played tenor saxophone, louder and more hysterical-sounding than a Canada goose. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes the night heron’s call as “a loud, harsh squawk.” Thoreau captured a similar avian raucousness in his journal entry for Aug. 30, 1858:

“As I am now returning over Lily Bay, I hear behind me a singular loud stertorous [Oxford English Dictionary: “Characterized by, of the nature of, stertor or snoring.”] sound which I thought might have been made by a cow out of order, twice sounded. Looking round, I saw a blue heron flying low, about forty rods distant, and have no doubt the sound was made by him.”

I associate herons with bodies of water, and had never seen them perch so high in a tree. A ditch – ambitiously called a “bayou” in Houston – flows two blocks south of our street and parallel to it. In it we’ve seen fish, frogs, snakes and snapping turtles, so it may serve as the herons’ buffet. I wonder: Do herons typically return to the same roost night after night? Do they customarily travel in pairs? Are they monogamous and mated for life as Canada geese are purported to be?

In the Spring 2000 issue of The Southern Review, Robert Adamson, an Australian poet about whom I know little, published “The Night Heron”:

“Midnight, my mind’s full of ink tonight,
I’m drawing up some endings to make
a few last marks. Life’s complete.
You’re just a part of the mix,
a pain cocktail, dash of white spirit,
some pulvules of dextropropoxyphene
swallowed with black-label
apple juice, as I cut and paste my past.

“Life is sweet. Out there the night,
the stars in Technicolor, a half-moon –
two half-moons, the black branches
of a mangrove tree. Jasmine’s
heavy in the hot air. I feel all right
even here suspended in a humid room
with another summer to get through.
I write down words; they all seem fake,

“so I crack them open. A night
writing letters to the future and the past,
if you could look into the present
you might see this pudgy figure at the desk
throwing back double shots of gin,
fumbling for cigarettes and a light,
writing the words `political’ in a black,
thin calligraphy. Wearing a pair of digital

“blinkers set on zero. Outside the night
heron swings in from the heavens,
and cuts through the aluminum light.
See its cream under-wings, gray breast,
the gray overcoat, watch it hit the pocket
of hot air, listen as it wheels on silence,
glides into the black calm above the swamp
and lands collecting in the creek.”

Given its nocturnal habits and scarifying call, the night heron, I suppose, makes a fitting muse for a self-destructive writer chasing painkillers with gin. I note also that Frank A. Lowe in 1954 published The Heron, part of The New Naturalist Library put out by Collins of London. In an appendix, Lowe lists folk-names for herons he collected around England. Here’s the tally, a form of folk poetry, from Lancashire:

“Jemmy Lang-legs; Jammy Lang-neck; John Crane; Frank; Johnny Gant; Jammy.”

And here are the names from Stirlingshire:

“Frank; Craigie Heron; Craiget Heron; (according to Swainson [Charles Swainson, author of “Provincial Names and Folk Lore of British Birds,” 1885] craig-throat and these names are of anatomical derivation. There is a Gael word craig meaning a rock and the name might well be derived from the bird’s habit of perching on rocks).”

Craig, to my ears, sounds a lot like crag, substantiating the rock etymology. See the sixth section of Geoffrey Hill’s “The Pentacost Castle,” from his 1978 collection Tenebrae:

“Slowly my heron flies
pierced by the blade
mounting in slow pain
strikes the air with its cries

“goes seeking the high rocks
where no man can climb
where the wild balsam stirs
by the little stream

“the rocks the high rocks
are brimming with flowers
there love grows and there love
rests and is saved”