Synchronicity

Watching a frog's webbed feet trying to push their way out of a heron's neck.

For a while now, a memory keeps coming back to me. It’s not pretty, but I thought it was pretty interesting. It keeps coming at me differently, so I decided it must be giving me a message to write about it.

Many years ago, a friend I used to jam with introduced me to The Incredible String Band. You may not remember them, but they performed at the original Woodstock Festival on the evening of Day 2. I don’t think they appeared in the movie.

Lately, I’ve had their song White Bird in my mind. It is, of course, in the #Top 500 songs list that goes with this blog. I don’t think it is a great song, but it draws interesting melodic and work pictures in their Scottish psychedelic style.

By coincidence, one of the band members who joined when the band changed from a duo was called Mike Heron, which brings me to the memory that motivated this post.

The band is said to have influenced many artists. Robert Plant once claimed that Led Zeppelin learned their craft from The Incredible String Band. If you can stick with this song which is about 15 minutes long, you will probably hear snippets that remind you of Led Zep songs. Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney strongly endorsed them.

This brings me to the white winter of 1970. I was living and having adventures in Holland with my grandparents, uncles and aunts and loving our backyard which was about an acre of land backing onto the dunes. As you can see below, there was a pond in the backyard covered in ice.

Underneath the ice, if you dusted off the fresh snow towards the end of winter, you could see tadpoles swimming around. Here’s your ‘one new thing I learned today’:

Green frog tadpoles will typically hibernate for about a year before metamorphosing (that’s a new word for me) into frogs. That solved the mystery of how frogs arrived in our pond.

Then in spring large herons, known to us as reigers, would swoop in and eat the frogs. The first time I saw this blew me away. A big bird selected a frog, and gripped it by its beak, shaking it around, perhaps to try and kill it before dining. I guess at this time, like many of the birds in Holland, it was very hungry and couldn’t wait for the frog to die. The heron lifted its head, tossed the frog in the air and swallowed it whole. I kid you not. I watched in amazement as I saw the frog’s webbed feet pushing out from inside the bird’s neck, as the bird used its powerful neck muscles and proceeded to swallow it whole.

Sadly I wasn’t able to take a photo as my Instamatic camera was too far away, upstairs in my bedroom and I didn’t want to miss the bird as it satisfied its hunger cravings.

What I did manage to find without having to break anyone’s copyright, was a YouTube video of herons eating a variety of fish and other morsels, even larger than the frogs in our backyard. It isn’t pretty watching, but nature works like this. The food chain provides for each of us according to our needs. If you can stomach this, watch this short video. I think you might be surprised if not pleasantly entertained.

Do you see nature at work in your backyard in ways that others of us might not experience? Feel free to leave a comment and share this post.