Great Blue Heron

A great blue heron fishing in Tanyard Creek, the stream that runs through my neighborhood park.  A bird one more expects to see along the Georgia coast, in a setting that looks like the North Georgia Mountains.  Surprising slice of nature ITP (Inside The Perimeter).

I've learned that I need to break up my day when I work at home.  With no other influences to pace me, I tend to work for something like 10 to 12 hours straight, interrupted only by the occasional call of nature and less frequently to eat, until I suddenly find myself almost hypoglycemic and mentally exhausted.  It doesn't help when I'm working, as I was today, on spreadsheets and calculations - I can get so caught up in the left side of my brain that I almost lose right-brain communication skills entirely.

My remedy for this is to set my alarm for 12:00 noon, and go for a noon-time walk along the trail through Tanyard Creek Park regardless of the weather or the other chores at hand.  The hills between my house and the park gets the heart pumping the blood a little, and the random encounters with neighbors, dog-walkers, and nature are the perfect cure for my work-at-home syndrome.  And today, I was particularly rewarded by the sight of the large heron foraging for its meal.  I caught a couple of pictures with my phone, and the bird inspired the following haiku:

Great blue heron bird
Waiting for a Tanyard fish -
The shadows grow long.

I'm not really sure what to make of the presence of a Great Blue in Tanyard Creek.  The creek is heavily contaminated, the victim of numerous and frequent sewage overflows, and there are warning signs posted in the park against having any contact with the water.  So is the heron now doomed to disease and other chronic symptoms for simply having waded into the stream, or is it a sign that conditions are improving?  Was the bird attracted to the water simply because that little chute looked like a place fish might be found, or did it know or somehow sense that there actually was something there to eat?  Nature typically does not like to waste effort of unrewarded tasks, but frankly I'd be more than a little surprised to see the big bird  pull a fish out of the creek.

Our neighborhood has a little Riverkeeper grant to pay for analysis of samples of the creek water.  The EPA standard for E.coli is 200 MPN (most probable number) per 100 ml of water.  The past few E. coli tests from Tanyard Creek yielded 2,020 MPN (March 1), 1,165 MPN (Feb. 16), 50 MPN (Jan 26), 540 MPN (Jan 19), and a whopping 12,980 MPN back on January 12.  Not exactly conducive to a breeding population of fish.

Regardless though, it's nice to see a little reminder that nature still persists, despite man's best effort to destroy it.  I hope the heron stays healthy.