This Exeter Life: Da Bird! Da Bird!

I saw six -- SIX! -- Blue Herons in the Exeter River the other morning! Wow it was exciting. I wish you’d been there to see it.

I’m not sure when it started, this intense interest (or rather child-like obsession) with the prehistoric looking birds who frequent our lovely river, but I've grown quite attached.

Whether I’m on foot, on a bike, or in a car, I start craning my neck looking for the Blue Herons as soon as the water comes into view. My heart skips a beat when I see one perched on a rock in the river at low tide, and I feel a sense of…what is it? Loneliness? Abandonment? Worry? When I fail to spot one. I commute to Concord a few times a week and the highlight of my trip (admittedly, there isn’t much competition) is when one of my Blue Herons flies slowly over 101 in Epping. Where is he going, I wonder? Is the fishing, the view, the water better in Newmarket or somewhere else upriver?

Somewhere along the way, I started referring to them as “my Blue Herons” anytime they come up in conversation, which is more often than you might think.

Exeter has an industrial past. For more than two centuries, the alleyway that today runs behind the real action on Water Street was a bustling working waterfront. From the colonial period through the mid 1800’s, Exeter mills produced lumber, paper, grain, bricks, and cotton sheeting among other things.

Remarkably, our now shallow tidal river that is home to the Blue Herons was once the site of shipyards that built schooners. At the turn of the 19th century, a wood and coal business existed along what is now Swasey Parkway and old photographs depict a river bank stacked high with lumber.

With the business of commerce predictably came pollution. What has become a sort of natural track for the runners and walkers among us is really a run off retention pond left over from when the mill was an active industrial site. Friends of mine who grew up in Exeter in the 1960’s talk about the river as a dumping ground. They say at low tide, you’d see tires and old furniture on the mud flats. For much of the town's existence, the river wasn’t a pleasure destination for humans or a habitat for wildlife. It was power for factories and a transportation system for our products. 

All of this is not lost on me when I run along the water’s edge towards the historic skyline of downtown Exeter and a large graceful Blue Heron sweeps past me having caught its fill of fish at the mouth of the Exeter River.

For a town with such a long industrial history to have saved a river from its polluted past and then turned it into the main attraction for people and wildlife alike is remarkable and should be celebrated. Our river is now a home not a highway. And my Blue Herons and I would like to keep it that way.