I saw a dead heron lying on the side of the road today. In all my driving, injured bird recovery and work in wildlife rehabilitation I have never before encountered a dead one. When I was little I would speculate where herons would go to die. An odd wondering, but it just seemed like this magical looking regal bird would have some sort of dignity for death. That it would fly off somewhere lay it's long neck down and sleep in its beautiful dreams. I would ponder finding such a place and walking among the bones and feathers of this noble race. So I stopped the car of course, I mostly always do if it feels right and is safe, just to be sure the bird is dead and not suffering.

The funny thing is that yesterday, I was moping around my studio and looking at old books I own. I found myself discovering the pictures within them again and looking at the careful technique given the bird paintings. I paid particular attention to the heron page, enjoying the obvious delight and mastery that the artist had for them. So I got out my gouache and began a painting of a heron.

As I approached the heron I looked up into the gray sky and saw the shape of another heron flying off. It was so odd that for a moment it almost looked as if it were a ghost of the heron's spirit heading out to the sky. Or more romantically, a lost mate unable to leave the body of it's partner until my presence flushed it away. Yet herons do not really tend to hang out together. I have only seen them near each other at the nest itself. Generally they hunt alone and it is not even near breeding season and most of the herons have left the north by now. It was so strange I can still see the image of the bird flying away in my mind's eye, but was it real?

So I felt a kind of reverence as I bent to look at the bird. I examined the way its beak pointed out one way from the face and then flattened into its sharpened spear tip. I looked at the wings, which folded so neatly in, that the coverlet feathers were the only ones exposed with all of the primaries disappearing beneath them. They were a perfect design, long and rather narrow. The wings did not have the compact power to them as a raptor's wings do. They were attenuated and lean almost delicate. The legs were like rods with giant spoking toes. This bird was so perfectly beautiful and heartbreakingly destroyed.

Perhaps that gray ghost shadow was my heron's spirit flying away. I cannot trust my senses, my logic to really seeing it. He is traveling to that secret place that herons go to when they die. A special place I will someday find on a granite island somewhere, where the river flows blue green . For now they keep that secret and send out a throaty cry for the one who will never lay among them.