A Bucket List Sight

Note: The last couple of posts were pre-written and scheduled to post while I was in the hospital having my surgery. This is the last of them. I am home now and recovering. Daily posting should resume tomorrow or the next day depending on how I am feeling. And I can't wait to go see Abby again! 

For several years I have seen this tall tree in the woods off the road that I travel to get to the barn. I've wondered what those objects could be that are in its branches.

It's about a quarter mile off the road, and so this close up from my cell phone is blurry, but you can still see something odd about the tree.

Earlier this spring, and knowing that we love birds, Tim invited Craig and me to come walk through the woods behind his home to see a Great Blue Heron rookery that was located in the trees. I put two and two together and realized that that rookery is what I had been seeing from the road.

What an opportunity! Great Blue Herons are my favorite bird, and I knew that they nested in colonies, but I had no idea that there was a colony so close to my home. Craig and I jumped at the chance and met Tim and Loni for a hike back through the woods.

 Craig, Tim, and Loni.

 It was quite a journey through the woods and then alongside a creek. The ground was very uneven, but the rough hike was worth the sight of those birds. It turned out that there was more than one tree in the rookery. This was the first tree that we encountered. I count four or five nests in it.

The main tree is the one I had been watching from the road. If you look closely, you can see some adults perched next to their nests. We could occasionally see chicks poking their heads up out of the nests, especially when an adult arrived with food.

 The adults were constantly flying in with food and then leaving to go get more. A constant chatter from the birds could be heard the entire time we observed them.

 Loni and me.

Tim at the far end of the meadow looking at the last tree with nests. All in all, I counted four trees with 30 plus nests scattered throughout them. My guess is that there are more; we just could not see them all from our vantage point.

I will remember that day for the rest of my life.