There are lots of lessons to be learned while observing the stillness of a heron

My seat was a ruin with the sense of a window, but nothing of the frame, just the shaping of a few stones that would have edged it. The flat stone where I sat was the windowsill. What’s left of the floor space was mostly nettles.

I had grown comfortable there just a few paces above the high tide line and still enough for the heron not to notice me.

It had landed out of my sight but then walked into view beyond the broken end of the wall, a stilted way of walking by which the progress of the top half of the bird seemed quite unrelated to the possibilities of its legs.

The lie of the land obscured much of its legs, revealed only the slouch of its back, the poised neck, that yellow bayonet of a beak. The small headland between us dwindled to shingle so that the heron revealed more and more leg by degrees as it jerked shorewards. There were long pauses between strides.

No sooner was the whole bird visible than it lifted off, drifted forward a few airborne yards. (Why? Why not just keep walking?) It froze as it landed into a tall and skinny parody of the walking-croucher of moments before.

If you did not know the flexibility of herons, you might think this was a different bird, a different creature even, for in that new tall and head-on pose it had become a scarecrow with its hands and arms behind its back.

Then it simply stood. In perhaps half an hour it did not move, though the sea wind stirred its feathery coat tails.

I had begun to scribble-sketch the changing walking postures, but the last one had been the scarecrow one, so that now the pen in my hand had not moved for half an hour either.

Instead, I became aware of my own stillness. I know the nature of it well enough. It is the guise in which a nature writer must work in order to work well. Stillness in nature’s company is the primary tool of the nature writer’s trade. It opens the mind and once the mind is open the writer sees a path and writes it down. Or at least that’s how it works with me.

Nature inhabits such stillnesses and moves easily through them.

An eagle crossing this shore now and looking down would take in the unremarkable presence of the heron and my silent shape in the roofless window and draw no correlation between the two. How I would love to borrow a moment of such a flight to see how the spun thread of stillness between the heron and my watching self might be revealed.

But no eagle crossed and even as I let the fantasy go, the heron moved.

It moved because in its long stillness the tide had retreated a few yards and taken the sea’s edge away from its feet and the tide’s retreat had also removed the heron’s imperfectly cut reflection which I had admired and tried to draw.

It was as if the heron had awoken from a vertical doze. It stirred into flight, a dozen yards slung beneath the high arc of huge grey wings held stiffly.

I don’t pretend to understand the principle of science at work here: A large and skinny bird jumps into the air where it lands on its wings and the very fact that these are lifted high and spread – not flapped, not once – facilitated a glide of a dozen yards at almost zero feet.

The heron stood at the redefined water’s edge, but now it was hunched, crouched, neckless, no longer an indifferent spectator

but an aware hunter, packed with patient tension. But after 30 minutes more, the tide had rolled on and the bird had not moved. Then it straightened, looking like itself again, dressed in its long robes of grey patience.

The heron wore the patience of the ruins, for it had moved in and tenanted the lost habitat of man. It is my species, not the heron’s, which was left in ruins here, so I reached for the heron, borrowed from its patience, meshing my heron stillness with the old stones where I sat.

It seemed to me that slowly my own stillness grew easier and deeper and I began to see with heron eyes.

Something changed then. A change of awareness, borrowed from the heron. Perhaps I had simply sensed the heron stiffen and perhaps all I had borrowed was its sensitivity to the tideline.

Suddenly I sensed that it was about to fly again. Almost at once it did, another dozen yards to the shallows and I smiled an inward smile.

It was good to be so attuned to nature, however briefly, good because it is so rare, and what it reveals is beyond price. I was going to be there in that lost habitat of man for some time.

After 30 minutes, the tide had rolled on and the bird had not moved

BIRD OF PEACE: Watching a heron’s total stillness by the waterline provided Jim with insights into his own craft as a nature writer.