In 1958, the famous American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Carolyn Kaiser wrote a poem for the Great Blue Heron.

If you don't mind, I would like to read part of it before we begin.

As I wandered on the beach, I saw the heron standing, sunk in the tattered wings he wore as a hunchback's coat. Shadow without a shadow,

hung on invisible wires from the top of a canvas day. What scissors cut him out? Superimposed on a

poster of summer by the strand of a long-decade resort, poised in the dusty light some fifteen summers ago, I wondered.

An empty child. Heron. Whose ghost are you?

I think this poem captures the eerie feeling of all I get when I lay eyes on the magnificent

animal that is the great blue heron.

I used to have the privilege of seeing one every morning as I went running by the water,

a soft blue-gray bird, colored in such a way that he would fade into the mist, if not for his piercing

yellow eyes, his long orange blade of a beak, and the black stripe adorning his head like a crown.

Standing in the same shallows as always, neck coiled like a spring, he would at once look at me

and into the water. In the dark dawn light, over four feet tall and as skinny as the reeds he

stood amongst, he looked more like an

instrument than an animal, a scythe, a spear. But while the reeds blew in the morning breeze,

he stood stock-still. His stillness betrayed his life, and in this way he was different

from the other animals I saw on my runs,

who were instead revealed by their movement. He was haunting, both in his beauty and his reliable

reappearances. I would feel a shiver slide down my spine as he stared at me, as if I were being

observed by a spirit, a ghost. As the 50th anniversary of this poem

approaches, I am comforted by the knowledge that this feeling is timeless. He was waiting alone,

in ambush, scanning the water, waiting for the perfect moment to strike and take life.

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