"Ibis" Artwork from Urban Decay

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In full:

Silhouetted against a sky with the texture of crumbled paint flecked with rust stood the distinct shape of an ibis. Whether black-headed or glossy I could not tell against the bright early light. We were both motionless. I assume it had seen me first, and crouching knee-deep in soft muddy water, surrounded by a thin fringe of reeds, I tried to fix the scene in my memory before the inevitable burst of wingbeats destroyed the mood back to reality.

Details hold it all. A distant horizon line of dark trees on the far side of the lake's still waters is sharp with a smudge of waterside bushes and flowering reeds partially obscuring the bird. I guess it was in the process of emerging into the open when I arrived. Its subtle reflection was clear but hidden by the surface-skin of thriving life mingling with their own inverted clouds. Calls of other water birds bounced around the stillness; plaintive piping, harsh grackling and others whose description evades me.

There is so much peace to be found by wilfully entering such a scene.

Passersby, mainly on motorbikes, rattled noisily passed me, some within sneering-distance. I know they did not see the ibis, and I know the ibis felt safe in its glorious camouflage. But what did they make of me crouched by the roadside, camera in hand, intently gazing at a battered old corrugated fence that catches no eye and is so mismatched it is likely to fall any day now? Frankly, I don't care. The worlds I see are all mine.

Eventually, I withdrew. The bird had nowhere else to go and I was preventing its routine. I wish I could be more accepted but perhaps I am not quite as benign as I like to think. In the end guilt moved me and I cycled home with the colours and textures of a tranquil fence scene swilling my imagination clean of its toxic reality.

An irony struck me. As this fence created by us gains beauty by nature slowly reclaiming it through weathering we are doing something similar but opposite to the bird's real habitat. Our own destructive weathering unblessed by a beautified result.

This ibis lives low down in the second corrugated sheet from the right but it takes a blinkered eye and roaming mind to be able to see it. And it's all mine, you find your own!