I spent the winter indoors, worrying about the wrong things. The herons, apparently, had no such trouble.
I walked the canal path near my flat this morning for the first time in what I am slightly embarrassed to admit has been several weeks, and found two grey herons already stationed at their usual post along the reeds, entirely unbothered by my absence, entirely unbothered, in fact, by anything at all, which is roughly the specific quality about herons I find myself returning to admire every single year without ever fully articulating why until a morning exactly like this one forces the thought properly into words.
It has been a genuinely difficult winter for reasons that had very little to do with the natural world and rather a great deal to do with the ordinary human business of work, deadlines, and a specific stretch of low mood I am not going to pretend I fully understand the source of even now, several weeks clear of the worst of it. What I do know, walking this same path again after too long away, is that the natural world simply continued, entirely without requiring my attendance, which is either a genuinely comforting thought or a mildly humbling one, depending on the exact morning you catch me on.
The reeds along this stretch of canal have grown back considerably thicker than I remember from last spring, a genuinely welcome sign given how aggressively the local water authority cut them back two summers ago in the name of flow management, a decision I wrote about at some length here at the time, with, I will admit, rather more frustration than the situation strictly required. The reeds, it turns out, did not need my frustration to recover. They simply recovered, on their own schedule, indifferent to my opinion about the timeline.
I mention Hackney Marshes-adjacent wetland coverage occasionally in these entries specifically because British wetland restoration efforts have, over the years, given me a genuinely useful comparative frame for thinking about our own waterways here on the continent, and a recent piece I read on urban river rewilding projects across several UK cities offered exactly the kind of specific, grounded detail I have found myself craving lately, amid a broader environmental discourse that too often stays comfortably abstract rather than getting properly into the granular, unglamorous work of what actual restoration requires on the ground.
The larger of the two herons caught something small in the shallows while I stood watching, a genuinely swift, economical movement that I have watched perhaps a hundred times over the years and still find myself unable to properly follow with my eyes in real time, the strike simply happening faster than my attention can track it. I have given up trying to actually see the moment of capture clearly. I have started, instead, simply trusting that it happened, the way you trust a great many things in the natural world you were never quite fast enough, or patient enough, or present enough, to witness directly.
That feels, on reflection, like a reasonably useful thought to carry back indoors with me today, back to the desk and the deadlines and whatever specific difficulty the rest of this particular week has planned. The herons did not wait for me to feel ready to notice them again. They were simply there, doing exactly what herons do, on exactly the schedule herons keep, entirely independent of my own considerably messier one. I intend to try, this week, to borrow a little more of that indifference myself, however unrealistic that ambition probably is by Wednesday.
A neighbour who walks this same stretch most mornings, someone I have exchanged nods with for years without ever quite graduating to proper conversation, stopped today specifically to ask whether I had noticed the herons had returned, which struck me as a small, genuinely lovely coincidence given what I had just been standing there thinking. We ended up talking for a good twenty minutes, considerably longer than either of us seemed to expect, about nothing much beyond herons and reeds and the general relief of watching a familiar landscape resume its familiar rhythms after a genuinely difficult stretch of weather earlier in the year.
She mentioned, almost as an aside, that she had been going through her own difficult winter as well, in ways she did not elaborate on and I did not press for, and there was something quietly comforting in standing together, two people who had each separately struggled through the same cold months, both independently finding our way back to the same patch of canal on the same morning, drawn there by the same two indifferent, entirely unbothered birds. I do not know if we will speak again beyond the usual nod. I hope we do. There are worse ways to begin a friendship than two strangers separately needing the same herons to remind them the world keeps turning regardless of how difficult any single winter felt while living through it.
Walking home afterward, I found myself thinking about how rarely this kind of small, unplanned exchange happens anymore, two neighbours who have shared a nodding acquaintance for years finally crossing over into an actual conversation, entirely because a pair of herons happened to return on the specific morning both of us happened to need reminding that they would. I do not think that is a coincidence worth overanalysing particularly deeply. I think it is simply what the natural world quietly offers anyone willing to actually stop and pay attention to it, a small, steady point of contact that occasionally, without any particular effort on our part, connects us to each other as well as to the birds themselves.
More from this author at Öko Angebot, prat.uk.