During the most busy times of life one gets the urge to slow down some and this invites the eye, but mostly the brain, to begin to observe. While slowing down in most South Louisiana’s rural areas a modest 20-minute walk might bring you to several leveed ponds as it did for me that day.
It did not take my eye long to notice the varied collection of ducks and other kinds of water fowl which attract birds of prey. What drew me to that walking route was “eagle talk,” which became real in south Louisiana in the late eighties.
An eagle had been spotted recently on my walking route. My walks to those ponds did not bring me close to the eagle hunting there for its meals, though I did sight it on several occasions.
But I was beginning to get discouraged even though I learned that an eagle’s vision is 50 times more powerful than a human’s. They see you long before you see them.
Nature has a way of presenting its surprises. On one of my eagle walks, I proceeded to jump the fence, once again, (with property owner’s permission), and followed the narrow levee to its far corner, where a beautiful cypress log presented a natural bench for me to sit and reflect.
With binoculars in hand, no eagles in sight, I closed my eyes. While closed eyes don’t allow for any vision at all, except internal, the intermittent, solid pecking close behind me promised a remarkably close apparition.
The tense and slow swivel and simultaneous slow motion turn of head allowed me to see first, its long black tail pressing down on the dead tree trunk like a separate set of feet. Then, its black wings, then the black and white stripes down the side of its face and neck and finally the red crop of hair on the top of its head.
It had to be almost two feet long. I don’t know what I feared more – that the bird would hear my brain silently, screaming the question, “What in the world is this?” Or that I would suddenly flinch, because of the painfully slow turn of my torso while I tried to hold the difficult pose to take it all in.
But then, against my will, I flinched, and instantly the apparition flew. Please notice I did not say, “away,” because in many ways that moment still lives in me, even though that moment is more than 30 years old.
Now no one of that local area could identify the apparition, and this surprised me. My inquiries caused too many shrugged shoulders and some doubted my vision, even when seeking out the opinion of some hunters of the area.
Finally, one day, on returning from yet another “eagle walk,” a painter working in the area saw me with my binoculars in hand on my return and inquired if I had seen any woodpeckers in the area. My description to him of my vision drew the exclamation, “Oh yes, that’s a Red-headed Pileated Woodpecker.”
I immediately ran to my Field Guide, looked it up, and there it was, my apparition. And it was already in a book.
You might ask, “How can I have dignified that aviary sighting with the word, “apparition?”
Well, isn’t an apparition a unusual sighting that has deep meaning? If it is life changing, would that qualify it as having “deep meaning?”
For that sight introduced me to birding, the photography of birds and as much of nature as I could find and led me to the study of photography. And all its terms, such as, ISO, shutter speed, white balance, aperture, manual, digital, raw, jpeg, dng and I assure you many more terms.
All this led me to studying how to save the photo files, how to edit them, how to catalogue them, etc., which led me to building a web site, which let me to studying (it never ends) how to update my computer and all the software on photography, which led me to sharing my experiences with others, not only through the internet, but through writing. I discovered that this external and internal process led me to look deeper in the meaning of the sights I was experiencing and to know that there is something much more meaningful than simply seeing nature, but knowing that it is was revealing something much deeper.
This led me to several monthly visits to the many NWR (National Wildlife Refuges) in Louisiana and throughout the United States, especially Texas, Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, Alabama, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Alaska, Ireland, France and Italy … so far.
Each of these experiences led me to experience as true what Father Richard Rohr (Franciscan mystic, writer and speaker) has said, “Nature is the first Bible,” which inspired me to name my website “Nature and Grace.”
An experience of nature can be a grace filled moment and thus called an apparition.
Open your eyes and see. Take the time to visit nature and watch.
Father Burns is a retired priest and an amateur photographer whose specialty is shooting wildlife and LSU football.