LITTLE EGRET GLEAMING... (A beautiful bird against a beautiful sky...)

 Little Egret Gleaming…

The salt water Flashes had been abandoned, unusually.

No birds at all lurked upon the banks or the sparse

Islands, no cormorants stretched drying wings wide,

Balanced upon posts, no crowds of lapwings bickered

And even the irritable, squawking black-headed gulls were

Absent beneath a placid wintery sky of pale blue.

A skeletal bough glinted and sliced the azure sky harshly, 

 Which had become a perch for a single egret, terse,

Stark, white and hunched, its yellow feet astride

And clawing the slender wooden limb, whilst a keen eye flickered.

A breeze curled wing feathers to snuggle the bird like a shawl of fur,

As it tarried, watchful, a predator awaiting its cue…

Pete Ray

31st January 2023

Lovely view of a little egret, upon a bare tree at Upton Warren, where most surprisingly there were no other birds visible on the ‘Flashes’, an area of salt water near Droitwich.

The breeze whipped those feathers to make it seem that the bird was snuggling…