The Blues are Back! The early Birds Get the Prime Sushi!
By Tom & Carol Braford
As luck would have it, our fresh launch of the Arizmendi Ecovillage and Hummingbird Micro Ecovillage has happened as well. After the Great White Egrets arrived earlier than usual this year, we expected the small blue herons, night herons and snowy egrets to follow quickly. After two and a half weeks, we started to be concerned that they might not be coming this year, so we were thrilled when they all showed up in quick succession last week.
I was out in the garden when the blues arrived. The Egrets must have seen them coming, because they flew up to meet them in a huge fly-around where they bumped each other in greeting, before a half dozen of each settled down in the dead tree for the picture I snapped above.
This is a great metaphor for how cohousing and ecovillage communities come together, as well. You have a few pioneers that show up in advance of the quickly growing community. A handful of the biggest, boldest Great White Egrets showed up really early this year, before there was even much foliage on the trees and staked out their nests on the highest branches.
I did not see them at first, but I could hear a pair of the night herons’ warning cries when I first approached the rookery on foot. They are sometimes referred to as Night Hawks because they look a lot like hawks and they sometimes dive bomb intruders to scare them away, if their eerie calls are not enough.
I once went up on top of our 3-story ecovillage building to get a better look at the egrets as they were arriving and a pair of night herons came at me like they were going to take my head off. They serve as the guardians of the rookery. I thought I saw a pair of small blues shortly after the great whites arrived, and I saw one in Forest Park, which seems to be their favorite feeding station, a week or so later, so I knew that there were at least a few of them around before the main flock arrived. I am not sure when the snowys arrived, but there seems to be a fair number of them in the mix at this point, and the rookery overall looks like it is going to be quite a bit larger than usual this year. Maybe that is because of the loss of trees in north St. Louis due to the tornado.
There is safety and power in numbers. We need Ecovillage pioneers, guardian investors and a host of cohousing settlers to show up en masse immediately! A host of predators in the form of real estate speculators looking for an easy kill and politicians and their minions eager to show conventional progress of scraped sites and status quo development before the next election are at our gate.
We need your active support and action now. The people rookery pre buildout is now open for business and prime nesting locations are available at bargain purchase prices. We have created a number of mechanisms to make sure that the early birds get all the sushi or whatever their favorite delicacy is when it comes to what optimized live-in, work-in community of practice building delicacy they prefer. So, whether it is a safe and secure nest in a supportive community you are looking for or a super fulfilling permanent family wage job leading to co-op ownership in one of our 6 breakthrough community development technology divisions that will be building out this and future state-of-the-art climate solution oriented communities of practice, remember it is the early birds that get the sushi! Please contact us at braford@sbcglobal.net or at www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com.