Dragons at our bird tables

Ifrightened a heron today. It flapped up from the shallows then folded its neck into an S and flew away from me and the dog. And as it rowed the air with slow, majestic pulses of its wings, I thought of Game of Thrones. The craze for Game of Thrones swept through the Western world like conkers through a primary school. It’s now subsided, as crazes do, but for a while you couldn’t go to a bar without hearing tell of Winterfell or poor John Snow. (Though for me John Snow will always be the English fast bowler who was also a poet. He was a very good fast bowler.)

I saw enough of Game of Thrones to know that a) I’d never understand the plot; b) I didn’t need to understand the plot; c) the point was the sex and violence; d) the point of the sex and violence was power; and e) there was a dragon. And it was the dragon that the heron brought to mind.

The dragon was regularly ridden into battle by a young woman with black eyebrows and white hair. How she stayed aboard without benefit of a saddle I can’t tell you, any more than I can tell you where she got her wig, but all that is by the by.

The dragon had a small head, a long neck, a long tail and a meaty body. In other words it was the Loch Ness monster with wings. Now, the Loch Ness monster lives in Loch Ness for a reason, which is that if it were to haul itself on to land it would struggle to support its own body weight.

The notion of such a beast flying is, to say the least, far-fetched. But that too is by the by, for there is something about a dragon, as there is about a Loch Ness monster, that tickles our amygdala.

Fifty years ago I watched a documentary in black and white. Its presenter was David Attenborough and its subject was komodo dragons. Overnight he made these reptiles stars. But had he called them monitor lizards I doubt that I’d have watched.

Every culture has dragon myths. Unexplored lands on ancient maps were marked with the legend ‘‘Here be Dragons’’. Some dragons flew, some crawled, some slithered, but all were reptilian. Their skin was scaly and their blood as cold as interstellar space.

Dragon bones were potent juju. There are still some on display at Wawel Cathedral in Poland, bones belonging to a dragon that terrorised the city till slain by Skuba the Cobbler (and there’s a name for a band). But in sober fact these bones are the fossilised remnants of a plesiosaur, an aquatic dinosaur, a Loch Ness monster.

For dinosaurs were the archetypal dragons, and like most boys I went though a craze for them. I thrilled to their brutishness and their size, their teeth as long as my forearm, their brains the size of a nut.

It was as if they touched some buried nerve, some almost memory, some stain in the mind. I imagined them walking the earth. What I didn’t realise is that they do.

Strip a heron to its bones and you’ve got a T Rex. It has the same three forward-pointing toes and one backward-pointing one, the same scaly legs, the same bipedal stance. The forelimbs have stretched and the body has shrunk, but there’s the same long neck and tiny head.

Dinosaurs weren’t wiped out. They’ve just shed scales for feathers and warmed up their blood like ours. Every bird table in the land is Jurassic Park. We feed our bread to dragons.