The route Chris typically takes to get to his office from our apartment building takes him through a little park and across a small bridge over the Ammer River. Both the bridge, and the Ammer itself in that particular spot, are rather small and not at all like the Neckarbrücke (bridge) over the Neckar River, which is my typical “postcard shot” location in Tübingen. The Ammer River is actually a tributary of the Neckar; it’s narrow with fast-moving water that (almost!) qualifies in my mind as rapids, but it’s not really that fast or deep. There are no buildings next to the river in the park, just some trees and plants, although the park is bordered on one side near the bridge by a street with several shops and university buildings.

However, crucially, that spot along the Ammer in the park has something we’ve seen nowhere else in Tübingen:  a heron.  There is a heron that can regularly be spotted  before 9am on Monday, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and sometimes on Thursdays. Normally it’s not there on a Friday, for whatever reason.

So, on a Wednesday a couple of weeks ago, we were surprised when we walked by and the heron wasn’t standing in the Ammer.  We joked it had gotten the day off, or was running late to “work”, etc.  However, about 10 minutes later, as I was headed back home and passing by the bridge again, I happened to look up and over beyond the edge of the park, to a building across that street that runs along side the park.  There, up on top of a building across the way, was a bird standing motionless. At first I even thought that it was just a statue put there to scare off birds from landing there – you see a lot of those kinds of statues on the roofs of buildings here.

But then the “statue” moved, and I realized it was our heron friend, high up on a roof instead of cooling his heels in the river. He wanted a roof with a view, rather than a river with rapids, for his morning place to perch? We’ll never know.

Of course, we’ll also probably never know for sure that it’s always the same heron that we see in the mornings. And since the photos I’ve included (below) of the heron were taken with my little point-and-shoot camera, which has limited zoom capabilities, I’m not sure you can tell if it’s the same bird or not when you compare the images – they were taken on two different mornings, weeks apart.

Anyway, while the Neckar River may have a lock on the “postcard shot” here in Tübingen, I thought I’d point out that the Ammer  — and the buildings nearby 😉 — can also serve up some interesting photo possibilities on occasion.