While making morning tea, I scan the sky through the kitchen window. I look at its blueness, the cloud shapes, I enjoy the light. Then I spot it. The heron’s morning route crosses my habitat. I squeak. A heron morning is a happy morning. My muesli tastes better while imagining the heron having breakfast at the zoo. Or did it head to the Landwehrkanal?
I stay home. I’ll ask it on the way back.
In the evening I hear the quaking sound. I am calling back: I had a good day, thanks, how was yours? I can still see the contours of its big wings. Though I cannot catch an answer. Maybe someone towards Rathaus Schöneberg received it. Tomorrow I’ll give it another try.
Dinner time, I say to my partner, the heron already passed. Oh, he says, lifting his eyes from the screen, adjusting them to the fading bird in the evening sky.
Sina Ribak – Co-embracing natures, 27.04.2020
INSPIRATIONS
Science journalists offer biodiversity, conservation and environmental policy stories focused on the bird world in the online magazine in German language ‘Die Flugbegleiter’, here one of their latest articles: www.riffreporter.de/flugbegleiter-koralle/vogelbeobachten-krumenacker
“A healthy landscape is best seen with the ears”, says soundscaping pioneer Bernie Krause. In the Citizen Science and Arts project “Dawn Chorus”, you can upload your local bio-acoustic recordings. They will be mapped worldwide and included in a scientific database for biodiversity research. dawn-chorus.org
An extract from Dominique Meens’ Ornithologie du promeneur – Livres I et II (1995, Éditions Allia, Paris) is now available in German language with the title Buchfink et. al. – Ornithologie des Spaziergängers, in Dritte Natur, Issue 2, February 2020: www.dritte-natur.de/magazin/details/dominique-meens-buchfink-et-al-ornithologie-des-spaziergangers-1