Of a hitchhiker and hot sauce

There is so much beauty around us, it’s often easy to pass by the most remarkable things and barely realize that we have done just that.

A mullet breaching the bayou’s pane of liquid glass, splash-slapping as birds returned for the winter chatter and cheer, as the last wildflowers of early fall bear wise and silent witness, is a moving work of art that begs appreciation.

And then there are the egrets.

Stately and white like snow, they stand like sentries on the bayou banks, calculating and exact, secure in the knowledge that meals will come to them rather than the other way around. The egret is not a hunter so much as a grand recipient of opportunity.

The bird keeps a steady gaze on the shallows and when a meal appears, it snatches with one effective splash of a yellow bill. The fish, frog or other unfortunate travels within the long, graceful gullet, and the bird resumes its confident, entitled gaze.

If you know anything about egrets – and I did not until very recently, having looked up information from multiple authoritative sources – then you are privy to an understanding that each one viewed is a miracle.

It was back in Victorian times that they were sought ruthlessly for their plumes, attacked on the rookeries by men with clubs and knives who stripped them of the prize feathers and left them to die on mud, grass or rocks, carcasses left to rot as vultures picked at their parents’ flesh.

It might not have been so bad if there were controls, some sense of the moral obligation to preserve, to protect. But man being what he is, the carnage continued until some few stuck out their necks and demanded change. President Theodore Roosevelt was one. The founding members of the Audubon Society were among the others. Once the killing was halted came the undoing of damage, coaxing the species back to a point where recovery might begin.

In Louisiana, the McIlhenny family, with the creation of Bird City on Avery Island, played a big role.

There are local natural elements that have so far resisted purposeful attempts at actual eradication, and perhaps none is so pervasive here as the water hyacinth. The flowery lily-like plants live on the top of slow-moving streams, and so are pervasive on our bayous. Huge mats of interwoven plants move with the tide’s ebb and flow.

They clog propellers and marine water pumps, add difficulty to navigation and rob the bayous of oxygen. An accidental species, they were brought to New Orleans as ornamental plants around the same time of the egret holocaust. Like the nutria, they have never been conquered in these parts.

You might be wondering at this point why you are spending time reading the musings of a scribe-turned amateur naturalist, and here is the reason.

A few mornings ago I was regarding the est-bound hyacinth mats, or floton, passing by a back door. It was then that I noticed, sitting pretty on a clump the size of an eagle’s nest, a lone egret, head high, traveling where the floton might will, oblivious to surroundings, and looking in all ways regal.

I captured a moving image of this avian hitchhiker, for whom the floton was not a nuisance, but a vehicle, allowing precious energy to be spared while traveling to the next bountiful dining area.

As the egret passed on its verdant throne, no attention was paid to me. It was as if the safety of the center-floating mat provided enough protection from the likes of me to not merit a single wing-stroke.

The spectacle forced me to slow down, to regard the beauty before me, which I shared with others through the miracle of social networking, and to find out a good bit of what makes egrets special and worthy of remark.

This arrogant traveler was here for me to observe, I learned, through Herculean conservation efforts. But also, I came to know, due to a strong will to survive on the part of the individual. It appears that while in the nest, the otherwise docile egrets attempt to destroy their siblings, allowing only the fittest to be allowed continued existence. So the little traveler was a survivor in more ways than one.

Which brings us back to the initial point, which is how fortunate we are to live in a place that allows, indeed demands, such examination in order to be fully enjoyed.