This reporter watched the west pier on Monday morning, second honk to fourth, and the watch confirms what readers of the third and the fifth will have started to suspect. The heron, resident in absentia of the west pier since the eighteenth of April, has not been at its station since Thursday afternoon, the second. The two fish reported beneath the pier on Friday are still there. They may have been joined by a third, smaller and harder to confirm. This paper records the possibility and does not commit to the count.
Four mornings now the bird’s absence has been logged at the pier. Four mornings the fish have been visible beneath it. The pattern has hardened.
The eldest of the dabchicks was at the seaward end in her settled spot. Approached at about the third honk, she agreed, briefly, to deliver a further statement for the family. Here it is, in full:
“The pattern is, on consideration, of interest. We will not comment on its cause. We will not comment on its duration. We wish it noted that we have, throughout the season, conducted ourselves as a household which is, by every available measure, not unsettled.”
She delivered it in a single breath, no preamble. This reporter asked, as politely as could be managed, whether the family had a view on where the bird had gone. No elaboration came. The family had no view on the bird’s whereabouts, she said, was not minded to form one, and would issue any view it did arrive at through her, from the seaward end, in the usual way. This reporter thanked her and withdrew.
The Subcommittee’s name for the bird is “resident in absentia,” a formula adopted on the twentieth of April and never since rescinded. It has never been more accurate than now. The bird is absent. The bird is, by formal record, resident. The two conditions, on long acquaintance, were built for each other.
The fish, to come back to them, held the same loose grouping they have kept right through the bird’s absence. Through the whole of the watch they did not leave the immediate water of the pier, and they did nothing that could be called remarkable. They were fish under the pier, behaving as fish under the pier behave when nothing of more carnivorous disposition is present to rearrange them. The possible third, when it surfaced into view at all, kept to the others and would not resolve itself into a firm count.
This is the longest stretch of bird-absence-with-fish the gazette has logged since the affair began in spring, and this paper admits to a quiet excitement about it. The two facts have, for four mornings, simply held: the bird gone, the fish present, the dabchicks insisting on their composure. Whether it runs through Tuesday, or ends as it has ended every other time, with the bird back and the fish gone the same morning, this reporter would not predict.
So the pier, the dabchicks, and the fish stay where they are. The bird does not. Four mornings in, the only open question worth printing is whether the fifth keeps the bird away and the fish present, or returns the pond to its usual arrangement.