GRACEFULLY BELLIGERENT
REDDISH EGRETS

I arrived at the lagoon late in the day, my feet blistered from having hiked several miles from the nearest bus stop. Light was failing as I pegged my tent next to the water's edge and I heard what sounded like two dry sticks being hit together. It was two herons doing combat about 50 meters away, shown below:

In dusk's dim light they appeared as silhouettes against the silvery water and their maneuvers were so fast and fluid that I couldn't keep track of which bird was doing what. The bill-clapping sounded serious but I'm not sure either bird ever got pecked. The way they dove and feinted, jumped and whirled about, they were like fantastical Japanese martial arts masters you see in movies sometimes on long distance Mexican buses, dancing as much as fighting, leaping impossibly high, counterattacking impossibly elegantly, but these birds were the real thing, creating some kind of perfection out there in the lagoon.

And then a certain threshold was passed and the birds lighted together at the water's edge. They seemed to pose for the picture I snapped, which you can see below:

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In that picture the vertical "sticks" behind the birds are air-absorbing pneumatophores of nearby, root- submerged Black Mangroves, Avicennia nitida. In the growing darkness I had to overexpose the picture to bring out the birds' reddish heads and neck feathers, which distinguish them from Little Blue Herons.

Reddish Egrets, Egretta rufescens, occur on the US Gulf Coast, mainly southern Florida and Texas, and extend as far south as Venezuela.