Sometimes I think I am totally out of step with the modern world.
Was I the only one to see the ballerina of the bay, a beautiful great white egret pirouetting in the still waters of the Derwent one autumnal morning?
Out of step but in-step all the same, joining the walkers along the foreshore of Cornelian Bay. People with dogs, with prams, with bikes, with friends, or going solo.
It appeared only I paused to look at the egret’s reflected beauty, a mirror image in the cold-blue waters, a giant bird going about its business of stalking and fishing.
I often venture to the bay for coffee at the café attached to the Boathouse Restaurant after taking my daily fitness walk, and to watch birds. Although the birds tend to be run of the mill – if our avian treasures can ever be described as such – sometimes the day springs a surprise. So it was on this morning when on an outgoing tide the great white egret appeared.
To describe the egret as “great” among its similar cousins, the little, intermediate and cattle egrets also seen in Tasmania is an understatement. It stands more than one metre tall.
Out in the bay it looked massive, about a third bigger than another elegant bird of mudflat and saltmarsh, the white faced-heron. The egret appeared to have misjudged the depth of water when it landed, sinking above its knees and soon flew to shallower water closer to my viewing point at the cafe.
So close, I could even identify the fish it was catching – flathead. Between flathead, the egret also made a meal of a crab, shaking off a sprig seaweed attached to the crab’s body, and several whitebait, their sliver scales glinting in the early-morning sun.
The egret used a technique so different to that of a heron I had seen fishing a few weeks previously. It held its long neck sideways, hiding any view its prey might have of the bulk of its white body above the water’s surface.
As the tide retreated, more birds arrived. An oystercatcher first to probe the mud at the waters-edge and then a crested tern, taking a rest between fishing sorties.
The egret, though, remained the bird in the spotlight, hugging the stage. It moved gracefully, twisting and turning as if in slow motion, wrangling that impossibly long neck, one and a half times its body length, a soft breeze ruffling its downy feathers.
All the while the walkers and joggers, the cyclists, the dog-owners passed by with barely a glance at the ballerina, at times merely metres away, so close you could see the yellow of its eyes.
The serenity, the peace, disturbed momentarily when two black swans made a dramatic entrance, churning the waters with a heavy splash.
The egret upstaged. Cornelian Bay had now become Swan Lake.