The Hindsight Heron
Ardea retrospectans
Natural history
The Hindsight Heron is easily identified in the field: it is the tall grey bird walking with slow confidence into things. Its eyes, through an accident of development that the species has since made into a philosophy, face directly backward. The heron sees where it has been with extraordinary clarity — every ripple, every minnow, every mistake, rendered in perfect focus and receding.
It catches fish, when it catches them, by a technique ornithologists call retrostrike: the heron wades forward until a fish has visibly escaped behind it, studies the escape in exhaustive detail, and then strikes backward at the spot where the fish would have been had everything just observed happened slightly earlier. The method works nearly a third of the time, which the heron considers proof of its soundness, and which is, to be fair, better than some methods.
Hindsight Herons are solitary, principally because two of them walking together will collide, and each will then produce a flawless account of how the collision could have been avoided. These accounts are always correct. They have never once prevented a collision. The herons find this observation impolite.
A fable
A Hindsight Heron stood in the marsh at evening, reviewing the day, which she could see stretched out behind her in immaculate detail. “There,” she said. “At the third sandbar. That is where I should have turned east. The fish were east. It is perfectly obvious.”
A kingfisher, who had been diving all day with her eyes pointed rudely forward, perched nearby with a full stomach. “You could try looking the way you’re walking,” said the kingfisher. “I find it helps.”
“I have considered it,” said the heron. “But everything ahead of me is a blur and a guess, and everything behind me is certain. Would you really trade certainty for a guess?”
“Every morning,” said the kingfisher, and dove again, and missed, and dove again, and did not.
The heron watched the kingfisher’s misses very carefully — she could see them wonderfully well once they were over — and noted each one, and was never once in her long life surprised, and never once full.
Perfect understanding of yesterday is worth one-third of a fish.
The moral of it