Every year they ask what I want for my birthday. It's July, always the same request, because summer is when the pond is at her best — the focal point of our lives and our home. We don't have a backyard. We have a cement pond on a patio, and everything else arranges itself around her.
Every year I ask for bullfrog tadpoles. And every year they're harder to find. When my kids were children, they caught them themselves — waded in, cupped their hands, brought me the future chorus. Now they have their own lives, their own children, and the time to find and catch a tadpole is a luxury for them.
This year my son Griffin called a Chinese grocery store. He asked, in English, if they had bullfrogs for sale. They spoke Mandarin, didn't understand him, and hung up. He called back. They hung up again. He tried a third time, same result.
Finally he asked ChatGPT to help. What it gave him back wasn't Mandarin — it was the instruction “say in Mandarin: do you have any bullfrogs for sale.” We both burst out laughing. Then his dog lost its footing and fell in the pond. He called the store again and held his phone up to mine so it could speak the instructions instead of the actual words — still not an answer. So he asked ChatGPT to actually teach him the words this time, not translate for him, but teach him — and he called back one more time and said it himself.
They had bullfrogs.
I love how determined he was. How resourceful. Somewhere in a birthday request I've made every year for over a decade, my son ended up learning four words of Mandarin because he wanted this particular quiet nugget of wildlife to keep existing in our lives.
Four bullfrogs came home. Two nights later, a yellow-crowned night heron came to see about them.
The minute I saw him, I was torn. I wanted to protect these frogs — not only for what they give back to the small ecosystem of our patio, but for everything they hold: twenty-two of them in 2009, my children young enough to still be catching tadpoles, one who lived to be nine inches long and outlasted everything else that year, silence during Covid, and now, this — three hung-up phone calls and a few words of borrowed Mandarin, so that I could have this chorus for my 69th birthday.
And I love herons too. For years I shooed themselves off the pond without a second thought. Then one year — 2023, I think — the creatures of the cool dark night started coming at midday, in the worst of the heat, standing in the water, gular fluttering, that fast open-mouthed panting birds do when they're desperate to cool down. From then on I tried to give them space in the heat of the day. But that day, I didn't.
So the poem that follows isn't really about the heron. It's about me, standing in my own garden, torn between two things I love, and having to admit that “protecting” one of them meant treating the other as a threat.
I wrote it in his voice because he needs to be heard. All summer I've been writing in the voice of the beings I love — the frog, the passion vine, the dragonfly, the prairie, and now the heron. It's how I advocate. It's how I try to spur collective action: not by telling you what I think a heron deserves, but by letting him tell you himself.
