We interrupt this hiatus to offer the following sunrise and subsequent morning.  Read on.

The Front Yard

There was something special about this morning on Skinny Island.  The sunrise was spectacular, but was more participant than cause, a piece of the mosaic of clouds, wind, humidity, temperature, and light that overwhelmed the senses.  And behind it all, the engine of hurricane season, that for these few months, produces an almost ineffable rearrangement of these common elements.  There is a system trying to develop down in the Caribbean, scudding clouds and tropical air filtering in, the winds bearing a slightly different scent, the light somehow sharper.  It feels different.  It felt like the Keys this morning.  We love hurricane season.  It’s the best weather of the year.  It is why we stay.

Stalking Egret

A lengthy bike ride on the cruiser offered even more.  Two new turtle nests, another false crawl, this egret stalking prey in the tidal pools.  And further south, an osprey hunting the surf line.  I watched as he zeroed in on something from forty feet up.  They are so fascinating to watch.  He held a wide-winged position, virtually still, then folded in the wings and dove with incredible speed to a spot only a few feet from shore, his talons extending at the last second before contact with the water, followed by an almost instantaneous lift-off.  A miss.  They always then shudder the wings to shake off the water.  He did a wide arc over the beach and one of the condos, then flew back out over the water, higher this time, maybe eighty feet, tracking, watching. Slowing flapping the wings to hold position, then stillness again, then the collapsing, heart-rush dive and splash, and this time success.  He rose with a twelve-inch mullet in his sure grasp, shuddered, then executed a wide turn out over the water and headed west, back to the nest, presumably in the spoil islands of the Tomoka Basin, the mullet a brilliant silver in the low-angled light.  I thought of James Dickey’s poem, “The Heaven of Animals,”

And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey
May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy,
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward

And this night heron, patient and watchful in the soft sand of the dune line.   Six feet from a large crab hole he waited, tensed and focused.  The crab emerged, (knowing this as his life, his reward,) a hefty four-inch specimen.  The heron struck.  And it is a curious thing.  I’ve never seen one take the crab on the first strike.  They must wound or stun the crab, for though they don’t hold and consume on the first strike, neither does the crab make it back to the hole.  There is a kind of macabre dance that follows: the heron pecking, holding, dropping, repeating; the crab moving, but essentially resigned, it appears; the heron ultimately grasping the crab in some acceptable fashion in its beak to begin the lengthy process of turning and manipulating the crab to be swallowed whole.  Fresh crab breakfast, indeed.  Okay, back to summer hiatus, with breaks as warranted.