Last night, my path once again led me through the floodplain. As I passed one of the bays from which you can view a peninsula from the side, I suddenly noticed the movement of a white flicker in the dense riverside vegetation. Just at the edge of my vision. There, in the undergrowth, a little egret (Egretta garzetta) was moving, foraging for food.
It was a fascinating sight. Despite all my time spent in nature and my constant attention, I had never encountered a little egret before — not here, nor anywhere else. For a few minutes, I watched as it stood on one leg and shook the other in the water, trying to stir up edible creatures.
These images may not be perfect by conventional standards. But when you happen upon one of these rare wild beings by sheer chance — not in a zoo, but at a place where such a bird is not even expected to occur — then a restless background and a few blurred branches in the foreground suddenly lose all meaning. To me, they even help preserve the moment just as it was.
Such encounters rarely happen in the center of our attention, but rather at its edges, where we are not deliberately looking, in the diffuse zones of our awareness. In this moment, peripheral vision became a gateway to something more than mere observation. Perhaps it is in the periphery that the unexpected, the unplanned, and the uncontrollable find space, waiting to be discovered.
More informations about little egrets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_egret
