HERONS

This morning I saw two herons circling over the now perpetually dry stream that flows not far from my house and that I am next to for a couple of kilometers along the road that leads me to work. One was gray, the other white. They flew about twenty meters from me, close to each other and far from this world now arid even in winter. Elegant, silent, fascinating and majestic in their slowness they moved in what was their element, the air, caressing it with their wings and twirling on it.

The great egret often practices fratricide while the parents stand by and do not intervene. A young can be pierced by its beaked brother, pecked and then thrown out of the nest. In the great blue heron, on the other hand, fratricide is rare. Scholars agree that the cause is related to the amount of food that the parents bring to the nest. In fact the parents of the white herons bring small boluses of fish sufficient to feed one young at a time; therefore a very aggressive little one can therefore monopolize all the food that the parent brings to the nest. Considering the amount of nourishment brought by the parents, a puppy gets more by aggressively getting rid of the siblings than by not sharing it. In the blue heron, on the other hand, the parents tend to arrive at the nest protecting whole fish a quantity of food far much greater than that which a single baby can consume on its own.