1. We’d been away from the coast the whole month of August, too long gone. Now I stand in Indian Pass, re-introducing myself to her tides, her temperature and the wild birds. Small waves wrap around my shins. Their warmth will fuel September hurricanes. Still, I am grateful.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, you birds, little snowy egret, sanderling, Sandwich tern. Thank you, all beings. Thank you South, West, North, East. You sun, now tipping the horizon. You half moon, fading. Light wind, fleecy clouds, I am grateful. Align me, always, with your purposes.
I turn back to the high dune where I write but am stopped by a rush of enormous wings. The resident great blue heron has arrowed from the Halsell’s pine, croaking if not a greeting then a shout, the beginning of a small communication.
I can’t fly, but he can. He has noted me and my full body prayer, and circles me, powder-blue wings wide and overhead. A simple “roh, roh,” a croak, and then he lands on the sand at the edge of the Pass. I exclaim. I bow. We greet one another in the context of morning and edge and sky. I cannot make this happen. I cannot will the bird to come, but I can be present and wildly grateful if he does.
2. The heron knows me. What do I know of heron?
For more than twenty years, I have observed this particular bird, and in season, his mate. I know his preferred perches, have watched him tend his feathers and fall asleep. I have seen him catch and swallow needlefish, catfish, bluefish, mullet. And most thrilling of all, I have learned how he dances with his mate to maintain their marriage. If I hold perfectly still, the pair allows me to watch the renewal of their vows. But I must not move, not even lift my binoculars from my chest, once the ritual begins. That much respect is required.
Every year the herons grow lacy breeding plumes, like purple prayer shawls, to signal their readiness to breed. Side by side, synchronous and in ceremony, they step to the water, and as they process, they arch their ornamental wings, trailing the very tips into the water. They stand knee-deep, their bills pointing to the sky. Then turn as one and stride back up the beach. Again, they pivot, and suddenly, the dance is done. The cords that ritually bound them relax. Both herons stare across the water, orienting to the island where they have built a nest in a tall pine. Or maybe, like me, to the flare of the sun.
But all of this? Me, observing. As if these encounters of the lives of birds were only a performance and I am the audience. I want something closer, I want to know how I might serve their lives. Not simply watch.
Sometimes bird visitations are like passing a friend on a crowded street. There is only time to nod, maybe one or the other of you is distracted or must hurry home to the children. But you take the time to acknowledge them, smile, and it’s understood what is in your heart.
“Janet? Janet Isleib? I can’t believe it’s you!”
The man standing at the top of the driveway on Goffle Hill Road looks at me as if he is trying to turn me into my mother. But he has lived in this simple white house since my parents sold it to him in 1956. If I were indeed my mother, Janet, I would be more than 100 years old and I am just 49. I am not my mother, who is dead.
My father, my sister and I walk uphill to greet the man. He invites us in to take a look, “For old times’ sake,” he says. The house is smaller than I remembered. Painted white as my father remembered. I was brought home from the hospital after my birth and lived inside its walls in Glen Rock, New Jersey for the first years of my life. with my parents and my sister, Roberta.
“We bought this house in 1951 for only $8600,” my father said. “I had such a great time here with you two girls. Every day I would take off my commuting clothes and start working. We’d paint, put in new steps, shovel coal for the furnace.”
We cleared up the matter of my mother and myself with the current owner of the house, but still he looked at me side-eyed, thinking surely I must be her.
What I want to say is that I see the same look in the eyes of a particular great blue heron when I have been gone from Indian Pass too long. The words are in bird language, specifically the language of a great blue heron, a several-syllabled “yawp.” But I understand exactly the question.
“Sue. Is it really you? Where have you been for so long? “
We can only be fully human and part of the web of life when we are in conversation with the natural world, not just observing but engaged. Haven’t there been times you believed a bird, say a swallow-tailed kite, has come to you? When you knew it wasn’t just a marvelous event, but that something was said to you, or asked? If we don’t know how to change our minds in this way, we can begin by knowing it matters that we try.
4. On the night of the fourth day of a raft trip through the upper reaches of the Colorado River, a great blue heron – the only kind of bird I had seen at regular intervals on our downstream journey–landed on the chest of a river guide named Katie.
On this passage, there were six boats: one dory, one large paddle raft, and four smaller rubber rafts, each captained by a guide. We, the clients, slept on the ground under the sky, or inside a tent, as we chose, but the guides remained all night long on their boats, which they secured with heavy anchoring lines to the trunks of tamarisk trees, or sturdy logs, always supplementing with giant stakes they’d hammer into the sand. The boats, nearly touching, would rock the guides as they slept.
On the night I speak of, the woman Katie dozed on her back on one of the smaller rafts. She awoke to the six-pound weight of a heron landed square in the center of her sternum. Disoriented and startled, she cried out and jumped from the bedroll on the padded bench where she lay. As far as I know, a great blue heron would have no reason or desire to imprint her long dinosaurian toes onto the chest of a slumbering human being.
What would it feel like to have a large heron land on your sleeping body? What might it mean? Katie couldn’t say.
The great blue heron lived along that same strip of sandy edge where we had harnessed our boats. That is where she sought her fishy prey. This was her place on the planet. Perhaps the bird mistook the boat and the sleeping woman for a log jam; maybe they had created the silhouette of a familiar perch. Perhaps there was a message. If it had been me, I would afterwards consider myself branded or marked. I would know that I had been chosen by that magnificent, river-stalking bird. I would try hard to live into that privilege.
5. One chill November night, I went out on the beach at Indian Pass with a letter that had troubled me, a wand of sage and a packet of matches. I wanted to mark the ending of a friendship through ritual, under the privacy of the night sky. I was sad about the loss of my friend but couldn’t see a way to repair what had been broken between us. This was our last communication.
I excavated a small depression in the sand with my hands, lit a match to a corner of the card and dropped the flaming paper into the dark space. I sat and thought about how the loss of that relationship was like a small death, a rent in the fabric of our community. I thought about the many years we’d known one another, wanting to acknowledge the falling away with a soft heart.
When the paper had gone up in smoke and ash, I refilled the hole and patted the sand flat. The temperature had dropped and I shivered, turned towards the water and the ribbons of moonlight on its surface.
A tall figure stood in my path.
Not a person; there was no one else out on the beach so late.
Moonlight shimmered on a long daggering bill. A great blue heron, her presence letting me know that I was not alone. Was she watching? Or keeping watch? Either way, a witness.
As I rose to my feet, she turned and stepped away.
The next morning, my son David called me from his home in Los Angeles. “Asa wants to tell you his dream,” he said. My three-year-old grandson came on the line, his voice, sweet and earnest. “Grammy, I dreamed that I was with you on the beach last night and we were digging a special deep hole. And it was nighttime. But it was also scary because a tall skinny. skinny monster with wings was also there behind us.“
What is the nature of a world in which a bird accompanies human grief, and a beloved child, 1000 miles away, dreams of being in that very space and time with his grandmother?
6. Measuring the Point
Over and over, I fell into despair. The trip wire, the cause, was the number of unmanaged tourists ranging all over the protected Bird Sanctuary on the island across the Pass, perfectly within their rights under a new version of legal. Because: for no discernible reason, the agency’s middle-manager had decided to pull back the protections for those birds. His decision was deeply personal to the birds, who were shunted over and over into the air by dogs, running children and flying frisbees. I felt fear and exhaustion taking over their bodies.
My husband Jeff is a problem-solver. And he, unlike me, had cachet with the higher-ups in the agency responsible for protecting those birds.
“Let’s go over to the Point and mark each of those ’new’ posts on our GPS,” he said. “Then we will walk straight out toward the water and find the true mean high-water line. We’ll map all these points on the computer to use as evidence and take it to St. Marks to show the upper management. Our data will prove how much land they are giving away with their new delineation of the bird protection area.”
It was still hot and bright at 6 p.m. when we launched our kayaks into the Pass. Most tourists were back in their rented beach houses, shades drawn, cocktails in hand. Everyone working for the agency had departed as well. So there was no one to see us walking across the trail to the Gulf beach and then west to the edge of the Point. Only the sea oats and the lupines, in full seed, swinging lightly in the breeze.
Even this late in the day, and after all the earlier disturbances, the sandy Point was covered up in birds: hundreds of pelicans and every kind of tern and gull, and red knots. A single American oystercatcher slipped away from her nest on the sand. As my father used to sing to us, her eggs, now so unprotected, were “more precious than diamonds, more precious than gold.”
It felt wrong to duck under the ropes and into the life space of the birds. I didn’t want to cross the line that I knew was off-limits. More than ever before, I understood how we humans claim power over every other being on the planet.
I watched for the birds to alarm and rise into the air, but they didn’t. They felt our intention and let us work. They knew we were allies, and that we understood how this place is made sacred by their presence, their choice to be here, and by the way it is molded and held in the arms of the Pass and its tides. Sacred on its own, but also in the ways it has been chosen and stamped by the feet of the birds.
We made our way from waypoint to waypoint, marking with great care the space the birds needed undisturbed. (Since it is the space of the birds entirely, it of course contains not just their beautiful bodies, but their raucous cries, the nitrogenous stink of their excrement, their discarded feathers, their tracks in the sand). We picked our way carefully around sploshes of poop, which very much resembled washed- up jellyfish which dry and condense and disappear into the sand so all that remains is the memory of jellyfish and a bit of slick.
The sun lowered. The heron came flying from across the Pass. She landed with a little bounce, a slight knee-bend on the sand. So near and unafraid. So straight-necked and poised. Standing by as we worked.
Even when we eased around her to the next point we had to measure, she didn’t flinch or startle. She had come to companion our witness. We were working together on behalf of all birds.
After Jeff and I had collected our data, we pushed our kayaks into the quiet Pass waters, floating until just after sunset, the light tide knocking at our boats.
“Birds,” I prayed. “What can I do to protect you? Help me know how. ”
Quickly, laughed at myself. Hadn’t the heron already just come and with her presence, spoken?
*This essay is excerpted from If This Were a Map: Rekindling Connection with Animate Earth, by Susan Cerulean, to be published by Apalachee Press, 2026.
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