Tuesday 15 February 2022

A large visitor

This morning we had a visit from a heron, presumably usually based on one of the ponds in and around Epsom Common.

He took up station by one of our very small ponds, probably more or less free of the sort of animal life which would interest a heron. But very quickly attracted the attention of two crows, who strutted around in a rather aggressive way, while keeping at a respectful distance. After a while they got bored and flew off.

After which the heron got bored and had a poke around behind the pond but was soon back on station by the pond.

At which point Joey, the Siamese cat from next door, thought he would stroll up the garden path towards the pond. Seconds after that, he noticed the heron and moved up to what in the US they would call DEFCON 2. At which point the heron jumped up into the air and has not been seen since.

Evidence of all this being provided above, in the form of a rare exercise of my telephone's not very powerful zoom capability.

PS 1: I wonder what DEFCON actually is just presently? My guess would be DEFCON 3.

PS 2: sometimes the allusions in older posts are quite impenetrable to me, so certainly to others. In the unlikely event of my revisiting this post in 15 years time, will I have any idea at all of why DEFCON might have been of interest?

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2007/03/queueing-up.html. Far too many mentions of herons in the blog archive to check them all, but, as luck would have, the second one was a heron in our back garden. I guess it is reasonably likely to have happened again, before today.

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