Air Date: Week of June 26, 2009

The Snowy Egret (Photo: © Salt Marsh Diary)

Salt Marsh Diary’s Mark Seth Lender observes the brilliant white of the Snowy Egret does little to camouflage the bird, nor does it explain how the egret will survive the changing climate.

Transcript

CURWOOD: White is not a color of camouflage except in a land of snow and ice. And yet, for the Snowy Egret, a bird that flies south to escape winter, it is the only color – observes writer Mark Seth Lender.

LENDER: The Snowy Egret lands, the name and color of a substance she will never see. There on the muddy bank, still as chalk her carved and ancient figure stands stilting. Like Nike, she leaps sailing into the bright, wide-winged above the shallow water where she feeds, so white sunlight seems shadow.

What could be the purpose of such brilliance, Snow in Summer. Perhaps in some prior life this most strident, most absolute of colors kept her safe in a far and frigid land, and all these amazing feathers are only an artifact of dim ice ages past. Or in the brief season between her comings and goings this is her temporary color, as polished and transparent as paper made of rice, except there is no other phase than white when Egret flies.

There is fragility in all this. The bird, the salt marsh where she lands, even the turbulent sand. From the South the assault comes by hurricane, each season earlier and more ferocious than the last. From the North it is the melting, and where there is no flood, drought. There is no reprieve. As the brackish plain is silted out or altogether gives way, where will Snowy Egret go? How will she retreat from Winter when Winter itself is in retreat?

When the sun pounds like the hammer to the anvil all life is forged to the blow. The upper latitudes break away. The equator burns. North and north and north the southern creatures go driven there by unfamiliar weathers. Life once rare becomes common. The common vanishes. Perhaps it is not camouflage but survival of a more intense and personal kind which turns the egret white, reflecting not just light, but heat. Maybe she will be all right. What about us, I wonder.

[MUSIC: Goldfish “Snow” from Coming Home (Pale Music 2008)]

CURWOOD: Mark Seth Lender writes the syndicated column “Salt Marsh Diary.” To see some of his photographs and find out more about his writings, go to our website, loe.org.

Just ahead: Lewis and Clark through the eyes of a lost land and transformed into epic verse. Stay with us- on Living on Earth.

 

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