Heron poetry book takes flight — all proceeds to FMR

A new poetry anthology honors one of the river's most iconic birds and benefits FMR. 

"Broad Wings, Long Legs: A Rookery of Heron Poems" features more than 50 Minnesota poets, including state poet laureate Gwen Westerman and renowned local poets like Robert Bly, Deborah Keenan and Chelsea B. DesAutels.

All proceeds from the sales will be donated to Friends of the Mississippi River so we can continue to protect and restore habitat for the beloved great blue heron and its cousins.

How the book came to be

Editor James Silas Rogers has loved herons since he was a kid growing up near a wetland in Inver Grove Heights: "I used to sit in the backyard with my binoculars. The evening sky was punctuated with great blues, egrets and black-capped night herons passing overhead, as regular as a conveyor belt. There's something strangely calming about the sight of a heron overhead, rowing the air."

During the pandemic, he remembered poet Denise Levertov had once remarked that "every poet of the Pacific Northwest has to write a heron poem now and then."

He wondered if the same thing was true of Minnesotan poets. Rogers began to ask around and eventually uncovered more than enough poems to fill a whole book. "It kept me occupied during the isolation of COVID," Rogers said. 

The anthology he curated includes 57 poems by contemporary Minnesota poets about herons, egrets and other birds of the same family. North Star Press opted to publish the collection, which came out earlier this year. Rogers hoped the proceeds from the anthology could go to an organization actively working to protect and restore heron habitat in Minnesota, and the contributors agreed. We're grateful they chose Friends of the Mississippi River as the recipient of the book's profits.

Rogers knew of FMR through benefit concerts hosted by long-time FMR members Dan Gjelten and Lisa Burke. He also contributed to Write to the River — a community writing project at FMR that resulted in 17 editions of river poems and stories over four years. 

The heron anthology features other friends of the river, including Write to the River contributors Laura Hansen and Suzanne Swanson. I contributed a poem about a heron I spotted in the tidelands of the Salish Sea. Gwen Westerman, current poet laureate of Minnesota, has graced FMR's events with her poems, including De Wakpa Taŋka Odowaŋ / Song for the Mississippi River and Breathe Deep and Sing. In this anthology, you'll find her poem Migration Path.

How FMR is restoring the Mississippi River flyway

If you look closely at FMR's primary logo, you'll see a river formed from two hands on one side of our name and two great blue herons amidst a marsh on the other.

We're obviously big fans of the bird. (I've even got a tattoo of one.) If you spend enough time by the river in the warmer months, you'll likely see one, still and then striking at water's edge or winging overhead, long legs trailing behind like a kite tail. 

On the river north of downtown Minneapolis in the spring, dozens of nesting herons perch in the trees on islands north of the Lowry Avenue Bridge near Marshall Terrace Park. Our friends at the National Park Service welcome these herons back every year with a celebration each March.

The Twin Cities is also home to one of Minnesota's largest heron and egret rookeries, with over 1,600 nesting pairs of herons at Pig's Eye Island Heron Rookery Scientific and Natural Area, south of downtown St. Paul. This area — where great blue heron, great egret, black-crowned night heron, double-crested cormorants and yellow-crowned night heron all nest — closes to the public during nesting season to keep the birds safe. 

Industrial lots, roads, train tracks and even an old dump lie within a stone's throw of these sites. And yet the herons still come. So do tens of millions of other birds as they travel to or through the Twin Cities on the Mississippi River flyway, one of the continent's most vital migration routes. 

FMR and our members, advocates and volunteers protect and restore hundreds of acres on that Twin Cities flyway. Quality, connected habitat along our urban river is crucial for all kinds of wildlife.

Our Land Conservation program aims to create that habitat, as well as improve water quality and benefit our communities. Conservation Director Alex Roth explained how this holistic work supports herons:

"We work to support all kinds of wildlife by starting from the ground up. When we restore diverse plant communities, that provides food and resources for more insects. More insects mean we'll see more fish, birds and mammals that depend on those insects. Our riverside habitat restoration project on the south branch of the Vermillion River is a good example — the greater abundance and diversity of insects we've found there feeds young-of-year and smaller fish species that, in turn, feed herons. 

"Second, the floodplain forests where herons nest face real threats — ash trees are dying due to emerald ash borer and cottonwoods aren't regenerating as well because of managed water levels and extended drought and flood seasons. We're planting climate-adapted tree species so that Minnesota's floodplain forests can continue to be home to nesting birds and other wildlife far into the future."

Lifting us into another world

Restoring the river feels like an act of reciprocity for the gift we receive from herons — the chance to witness their wildness and share the riverbanks with them. We're grateful for the way this collection of poems both honors herons and benefits them.

Editor Rogers shares his hope for the book in his introduction: "Herons provide an image that shimmers with meaning, or invites the writer and the reader to share in the making of meaning. They are, as Jim Moore notes, 'Creatures who, when stirred, open their wings / without a sound and lift themselves into another world.' I hope the work here will in some way also lift us into another world."