Category: nests

Last week a fellow birder showed me photos that he had taken of green heron chicks in a nest. He told me where the nest was, roughly, but I wasn’t able to find it that day. This morning, a fellow dog walker who knows I take bird pictures flagged me down to tell me she had seen the nest, too, and explained the location a little more clearly. But once I got to the spot, all I could find was a paper wasps’ nest, busy with traffic. (Another kind of wasp, Eastern cicada killers, were out in a field in large numbers, busy not with a nest but with one another; maybe they were mating?) At last I did see a green heron, preening herself, in a tree between the path where I was standing and the water’s edge. “What a beautiful dog,” a man in a cap said, of Toby, who was waiting patiently, looped to a fence post, and after petting Toby, he joined me in trying to photograph the heron. After he left, a few bird photographers with professional tripods and lenses walked by. I asked one if he knew where the nest was; he admitted that there was one, but would only say that it was “around here,” and then added that the heron had flown away, in a tone that sounded meant to be discouraging. I kept looking. Finally another dog walker saw me peering into the trees, asked if I was looking for the heron’s nest, and pointed it out to me—a darkened smudge fairly high up.