“I’m not a tree hugger or a tree hugger’s son, but I’ll hug trees ’til the tree hugger comes.”

That’s the ditty that was running through my head late last night. It’s actually a variation on a tongue twister I learned as a college student several decades ago. Only then it was all about “fig pluckers.” Go ahead. Try saying it aloud with fig pluckers in the proper places. Once you do, you’ll understand why I didn’t write it out in this blog. By the way, it’s something I have always been able to say perfectly. Good luck.

But back to tree hugging. At one of my very first Oregon book signings, back in the mid-eighties, a young man came striding up to me and demanded, “How many trees had to die for you to publish that book?” It turns out, not many. My original paperback books sold for $2.65 back then. They were printed in tiny fonts on pages of brittle newsprint. And the print runs of those first books were tiny as well. In other words, if I had told the man “one,” I probably wouldn’t have been far from wrong.

That doesn’t mean I don’t love trees. When Bill and I were selling the first house we owned together in South Bellevue, I went to war with the real estate agent who insisted that a weeping cedar that was planted too close to the house had to go. We took a vote. It came out three to one, and I lost. The tree went.

So where is all this going? It turns out that tree hugging aside, this blog is all about nature. And birds. And fish. And the fish are losing.

Three years ago we redid our backyard. We replaced a go-cart track and an astro-turf putting green with a garden and two ponds. (By the way, did you know that in the summer, if you step on astro-turf in your bare feet that it’s hotter than blue blazes? When it comes to bare feet, nature is better! Maybe I’m a grass hugger at heart.)

Back to the fish pond. Once it was installed, filled, and the waterfalls were running, we went straight to our local PetsMart and bought several hundred goldfish–the 11 cent kind. Tiny. We put them in the ponds. It turns out not all gold fish are gold. Some are black and orange, some are orange and white, some are all orange, some are a mottled kind of gray and orange, and some are plain white. The two-toned orange and white ones in particular have beautifully transparent tail fins. For the next several months we fed them. One of that number, a ringer, grew like crazy. He was a mottled gray and orange, but he turned out to be four times larger than any of the others. He tended to hang out by himself in the bottom of the pond. He was the only fish who had a name. We called him “The Big Guy.”

After months of feeding them, winter came and the fish went dormant. We stopped feeding them. That’s what you’re supposed to do, even though it feels mean at the time. And in the spring, when the water warmed up there they were again. That happened three winters in a row. This spring when we came home from Arizona, I practically danced a jig when I saw The Big Guy again.

Last week, there were noticeably fewer fish in the front pond. We told ourselves that the water was too cold. We told ourselves they were hiding. But then, yesterday we found out what’s really going on when a huge heron came gliding in over the yard, dove into the pond, and settled in for breakfast.

Bye-bye to The Big Guy and everybody else.

And this morning, what should I see on the front page of the Seattle Times? A color photo of a heron, flying over Lake Washington. I have no doubt, he’s our heron, and his 80 inch wingspan was being fueled by OUR poor little fish. I’m a little cranky about that. I can’t help it.

Somehow I don’t have the heart to go back to PetsMart. I don’t want to drag home bags of pretty little goldfish to serve them up as some big bird’s breakfast.

It’s not that I don’t like birds. In fact I have two bronze owls and a ceramic eagle and two large ceramic roosters in my home right this minute and a tin rooster and hen out on the patio. I also have a whole flock of chickens, including a six foot tall wooden rooster, on the patio in Tucson. My collection of bird statues doesn’t include any herons, and I don’t think I’ll be getting one any time soon.

I know that in real life herons are protected creatures. I won’t be doing anything about our neighborhood freeloader other than sitting outside on the patio as much as possible to keep watch over the few skittish goldfish that remain. If the heron shows back up, you can bet I’ll be running down the stairs, waving and yelling like crazy, and telling that bird in no uncertain terms, “Get out of here. Those are MY fish!”

All of this goes to say that what I said to begin with is correct. I’m not a tree hugger or a tree hugger’s son but maybe I’m a fish hugger at heart.

P.S. Adjust that rooster count – Bill got me a Mother’s Day present!