What's that Noise?

Yesterday, while I was walking around at lunch in the neighborhood, I was talking on the phone with the insurance guy. It turns out he was unable to help me (a fact of which we are not surprised) and that there will be many more lunchtime phone calls to get my predicament sorted out.

I was perambulating along at a not great but not little rate when I heard a noise. It was too big to be a squawk, too loud to be a squirrel, too abrupt to be a cat (cats always seem to have to ease themselves into their vocals; everything slips and slides for them).  It decidedly was not a dog. I had never heard it before, and I had no idea. I thought it could have been a mangled crow, but it would have to be a BIG mangled crow that sounded nicer than a murder-wannabe-sized crow could make.

I looked up, as that was the direction the noise came from, and up in the tree, I saw something i had never seen before. If you look in the picture, maybe you will see it, too. (It was better in person, but alas, you all cannot be with me all the time.)

There were herons in the tree. One had its big beak open and was attacking the other one. He snapped it shut and it looked like the other one had to do some fancy neck work to avoid a serious injury. They flapped and fought their way through the tree. I wished I could hang up on the insurance guy, as this seemed much more entertaining and useful. But I was grateful that I got to see them. In the tree, they're not very graceful at all. They seem like they should be called lurchers, not herons, given what I saw. It was like they were those shooters on planet Hoth, lurching about. Not the four-legged ones, the two legged ones with shorter-range blasters, but more aim/mobility.

I was sorry they were fighting, but glad that I got to see a spectacle. They settled down and agreed to ignore each other after awhile, so peace in the neighborhood was restored, and I perambulated back to work. So, if a heron fights in a tree, and nobody was there to see it, did the heron fight still happen? I'm writing this as proof that it *did* in fact happen.