EGRETS AND GRANDMOTHERS

Now that the rice fields have been planted with long even rows of the faintest wispy green brushstrokes on pale gray silk that are the rice seedlings, and the leftover blocks of unplanted rice shoots remain here and there in the fields and on their edges, the only large living things to be seen in the paddies are egrets and grandmothers.

The egrets, in their turn, with long, slow, careful steps practiced and perfected over eons, elegantly patrol the paddies filled with young rice plants (never stepping on even one tiny shoot) and continue patrolling throughout the growing season, ensuring that proper balance is maintained between the populations of little fish, frogs and insects.

The other large creatures in the paddies, the grandmothers, are out there early in the morning or late in the evening after the machines have gone, to plant by hand here and there in the difficult corners and paddy-edge curves, to use up the last of the otherwise wasted rice shoots. Then the grandmothers come throughout the growing season to pluck the weeds that always, in the history of just about everything, try to take over.

The egrets do it because it feeds them, it's a pleasure and it leads onward. The grandmothers do it for the same reasons.

Two egrets trace
the soaring calligraphy
of sunset

BIRD PARTY

Today I observed the first of the Springtime bird parties around here, when the birds really go wild. The party starts when the farmers flood and harrow their paddies, one by one down the mountainside. Today it was the paddy across the road.

Hearing all the avian commotion, I left breakfast and stepped out on the deck to behold a couple dozen hawks, wings wide, swarming the air directly over the paddy, doing their lazy lacework just above the farmer as he harrowed slowly back and forth with his small tractor. Now and then a hawk would swoop down and snatch a grub or a frog from the freshly turned mud that had lain fallow for eight months.

Over in the far trees some egrets were watching from the sidelines, waiting for the farmer to leave. Darkly prominent at the scene were a bunch of crows, who weren't dining at the moment (since they don't wade); their only interest was in harassing any hawks that weren't just sitting on the paddy banks watching with sharp beaks and talons at the ready.

When the farmer finally left, the egrets stepped in and slowly stalked the fresh buffet, selecting breakfast while the hawks kept gliding, swooping and grabbing at the sky-colored water, the crows now and then selecting a particular airborne hawk and closely following him around from above as he scanned the water, then at just the right moment swooping down and mussing up the hawk's hair.

When the hawks had had their fill and glided off into the rest of the air, the crows' fun was done so they left too, leaving the paddy mirror to the slow-motion egrets who, now having the serendipitous banquet all to themselves, took their long-legged graceful time until the entire paddy had been thoroughly enjoyed.

Tomorrow morning comes the next party, one venue lower.