A heron has been standing at the west pier since Thursday morning. It is silent. It is a short distance from the water. It appears to be waiting. As of Saturday afternoon it had changed its posture twice in three days, each time by so little that the witnesses could not agree the change had happened at all. This is the whole of the news, and the pier has spent three days unable to look away from it.
The sightings, in order. Thursday morning a passing drake noticed the heron and mentioned it to the Clerk without thinking it mattered. He did not, he says, think it would still be there by lunch. It was. Thursday evening a coot saw it too, a coot this paper trusts in ordinary matters, and that second sighting was enough to make the Clerk raise the question at the close of business. Friday the heron was watched without a break, with reports logged from at least four separate parties. By Saturday it was a fixture. So was the small respectful crowd that had gathered to watch it be one, and which now arrives at dawn as if to relieve the night shift.
This correspondent has been through the visitor logs at the reed-bed office. The heron has not filed. Invitations to present its credentials have gone unanswered. The Clerk notes, with professional restraint, that a heron is not strictly required to answer and would not, in his experience, do so regardless. “One may invite a heron,” he said. “One may not expect.”
Local opinion is cautious and not especially informative. A drake passing on Friday called the heron’s bearing “thoughtful” and, pressed to say more, would not. A second drake, asked separately, called it “unusually thoughtful,” which this paper reads as an escalation of the first account, though possibly not in the direction intended. The Warden of the Sluice watched it for some minutes from a prudent distance and offered that “the heron is, at a minimum, not un-thoughtful.” We print this with his permission and without interpretation.
A cluster of goslings, questioned at length, held that the heron had not moved at all, then conceded under follow-up that they had only been watching a little while and could not speak to the gaps between honks. The eldest of the goslings added that she found the heron “not frightening, but also not not frightening.” Her mother has asked us to strike the remark. We have declined.
This has happened before, after a fashion. Older readers will recall the Matter of the Quiet Visitor of three winters past. A heron of much this temperament held the upper bend then for the better part of four days. Then, one dawn, it was simply gone. No one saw it leave, which at the time was thought the most remarkable part. The Subcommittee of the day filed no report, being unsure what a report on such a thing would say. The episode passed instead into the pond’s informal archive of events that had happened without, strictly, happening. There is a good deal in that archive. This paper is not yet prepared to say the present case will end the same way. It will allow that it might.
No protest has been lodged, the grounds for one being unclear. The Subcommittee will sit after the tides to decide whether a heron at a west pier, absent paperwork, is a matter for this gazette or merely the ordinary shape of a Saturday. Drake Halford, still contesting the census (see Wednesday’s bulletin), has asked to attach a note to the agenda. He proposes the heron be enrolled, provisionally, as one of the three persons currently occupying his place on the rolls, “until such time as the matter is otherwise resolved.” The Clerk has taken it under advisement.
So the pier waits, unusually quiet, on a bird that has explained nothing. Whether it is one heron or, as on the night of the recital, possibly another, no one can say, and the heron is not telling. The matter remains open. It is, for now, the most reliable thing about the west pier.