The heron, the beaver and the owl

          My friend, Nigel,  and I walked past Mackay Creek on an evening several weeks ago as we frequently do. We are happily amazed at the work that has gone into making the creek a more natural and more beautiful place than it once was. On that particular Monday we stood on the sidewalk with the busy road behind us and over on the other side, the creek which was passing beneath us. We watched a heron wading carefully through the gentle eddies of the water after prey. Every movement was patient and slow and steady. Charles Frazier in his excellent novel, “Cold Mountain” describes the heron as ‘everywhere he was seemed far from home’. So It seems, a heron in its natural habitat seems unnaturally placed, even more so in an urban environment. Yet there he stood with his streamlined beak designed perfectly for the job of catching and holding his prey, there were his spindle shanks, his twig like legs designed to create minimum disturbance in the water. So, even in the short time that we watched, he moved from slow and steady to rapid and deadly. A split second saw him fed. 

Meanwhile on the other side of the road, Nigel’s excellent eyesight spotted our friend from the previous night, the beaver. So we made our way to the other bank and stood with heronic  stillness and watched as he plashed his flat tail in the water. If ever it is possible for an animal to strut arrogantly in water, then the beaver is it. He owns this particular part of the river. It is his dam that dictates, his felled trees that block and divert, his teeth that gnaw and shape. He is the finest of rodents, the most successful of animals that gnaw.  When I was alone at home that night and reflecting on our early evening dander, I flashed back to an incident that had happened to me about a decade previously.

      It was a late winter’s evening. It was that time between day and night called in Scotland ‘the gloaming’. The light was not yet night and the day was on a dash towards darkness. I had been dropped off at Marine Drive after coaching some rugby at school. I was track-suited and had my Collingwood baseball cap on. I was tired and hungry. I was drawing opposite  Norgate Park as I walked down our street. The air was still, not a breath of wind. The trees were silhouetted eerily against the shadows of the fading light, their leafless bows witch-gnarled fingers, ominous spectres lurking with numinous intent. Suddenly my baseball cap was gone. No problem, must have caught it on a branch so I looked up. Nope, no tree nearby. Hmm, looked down at the grassy verge, not a sign. Now I was on a mission. It was nothing to do with the limited value of the hat, everything to do with the Bermuda Triangle which had taken it from the face of the Earth, some years before the end of its natural life. Now I was  on my hands and knees, now desperately combing hopelessly through  the short grass beside the sidewalk  So focused was I that I failed to notice the guy walking down the street until he was almost upon me. He paused unsure what to do. I was embarrassed. “Honestly I am not drunk or crazy, I’ve lost my hat”. Words spilled from me, an elided rapid fire justification. I stood up sheepishly. At that moment there was a flash of white from the trees on the other side of the road and a flopping sound as something landed on the  tarmac in the car park. It was my hat. I dashed over and picked it up and returned to the other side of the street where the guy was now chuckling and shaking his head. The owl which had chosen this tasty morsel had suddenly realized his folly and rejected it in disgust.

“Now I have something to tell the wife,” was his farewell to me as he laughed his merry way down the street to pick up his car.

So perfect were the adaptations of that beautiful nocturne that I heard nothing, saw nothing and felt nothing. I now know what ‘one fell swoop’ means. Had that hat been Davidson’s pet hamster rummaging through the mop of hair that so clearly represents Davidsons disheveled existence then “Hammy” would have been so very alive one moment and  so very dead the next.

Admittedly this owl incident happened a long time before our world became upturned in the upheaval of a pandemic. But it could so easily have happened in our current crisis.  The point is that humankind has become so involved in the Covid !9 threat that even when it is not up front and personal there is never a day goes by wherein we do not think of it in some shape or form. It may be at the back of our minds but it does so easily encroach its way to the front. But for the beaver, the heron and the owl that live in our urban environment, there is no pandemic. Their crises are the ones they face every day, the continual search for food. Our troubles hold no interest for them, their lives are proceeding as normal.

I am pretty happy to be a human being but, in our time of trouble, I do cast an envious glance at our local wildlife and wish that I was one of them with their simple problems and simple answers. But, then Dear Reader,  I turn away to who I am, to where I live, to my family and friends, to the food I can put in my belly and the many pleasures of life which are still available to me here in North Vancouver. The envy passes  in the lightning flash of a heron’s spear and the speedy dispatch of an owl’s swoop.