HERON CHAOS

Most of the year the only heron-type bird seen in the Yucatan's interior, where no above-ground rivers or lakes occur, are Cattle Egrets, following cattle around. Lately, however, something different has been turning up at the rancho's tiny cement-lined pond, which teems with mosquito fish, tadpoles and aquatic insect larvae.

It's a Green or Green-backed Heron, in much of North America the most commonly seen summer-visiting heron in watery places. It's a handsome bird, with a rich chestnut face, neck and chest, blackish green upperparts, and yellowish to reddish-orange legs. Nearly all I ever see of the rancho's bird, however, is a silent shadow fleeing the moment I appear, almost ghostlike.

Along the Yucatan's coasts, Green-backed Herons frequent marshes, sandy banks, mangrove edges, muddy islands emerging at low tides, and such, but here in the arid interior there's almost nothing for them except these very isolated, little ponds. Something special is going on inside the head of any Green-backed Heron visiting here. What it is that causes a bird to break away from his brothers and sisters and a comfortable-feeling habitat, to wander far inland, over mile after mile of parched ranchland, burning abandoned cornfields, scrubland and patchy thornforest?

Probably it's enough to remember that in any population of higher animal always there are individuals with more or less wanderlust or curiosity than others -- individuals at the opposite ends of the bell curves of predisposition to wander. You can see why a certain added measure of wanderlust might be programmed into a certain small number of a specie's members. If a hurricane should wipe out the herons' coastal habitat, for example, it would be to the species' benefit for a few birds to know where isolated ponds in the interior might offer refugle. If a disease decimates the Green-backed Heron coastal population, it'd be good to have a few birds who miss the whole plague while hanging out in the interior.

Despite these perfectly reasonable explanations for our bird's visit, on these rare mornings when I glimpse our little pond's visiting heron, I like to think he might be here for another reason: Maybe our bird has gone astray because he's a local expression of that theoretical element of chaos without which -- the calculations of astrophysicists assure us -- the ways of the Universe simply can't be explained.

I want to believe that our unsociable shadow of a disoriented bird represents a local expression of utterly impersonal, randomly smiting, always discombobulating chaos because chaos gets things done, one way or another. And it's the only agency I can think of with a proven history of consistently screwing up such things as the fine-tuned, well-moneyed political and economic systems currently threatening Life on Earth.

Traditionally, indigenous Americans showed their respect for chaos by giving it a face in everyday life, telling stories to one another about Coyote the Trickster, or a similar joking troublemaker. The Maya around me here have their Alux, even today, making eggs roll off tables, inviting coatis into cornfields for midnight feasts, and even sometimes coming out of nowhere with murderous intentions.

My own culture is so impoverished of traditional wisdom that we have nothing like Coyote or Alux. Clumsily, here I can only invoke the concept in general -- of chaos of the wandering Green-backed Heron kind.