Longlegs the Heron

We’ve been reading and enjoying Thornton Burgess’s Longlegs the Heron. A friend loaned us a copy of this difficult-to-find book after reading this post, and as food for our ongoing heron interest it has been timely and fun.

This book has a feel slightly different than other Burgess Bedtime Books I’ve read — more purposefully educational about the habits of Great Blue Herons. We learn a lot about Longlegs’ fishing practices and his striking patience. We learn that he eats field mice as well as fish and frogs. And we learn a lot about his competitors for the fish — Rattle the Kingfisher (who I’ve not met before in the pages of Burgess books), Billy Mink, and Plunger the Osprey, to name a few.

As in Lightfoot the Deer, the predatory habits of humans are front and center, and contrasted to those of the “little people of the Green Meadows and the Green Forest,” who are not careless but skilled and who never take more than they need. In this book, it takes the moral courage of Peter Rabbit (who plays a heroic role twice in the story) and Sammy Jay, as well as the intervention of Farmer Brown’s Boy, to save a young heron caught in a trap that someone has set for mink and then forgotten about. Longlegs has a couple of speeches about the unjust hunting habits of humans as well.

I remember this theme making a strong impression on me when I read Lightfoot the Deer as a child, and I think my daughters come away with a sense of what it means to be a good steward of nature — and the cost of being a poor one. In any case, they loved Longlegs and were there at my side like glue, pleading for extra chapters, at every reading session.