Every walk in the woods is an unfolding of new discoveries. It is easy in our complacency to see what we know, what we have names for. There are the glacier lilies, a shooting star, the leaves of a lupine sprouting in the spring wet ground. There are the first green bristles of the larch, the cones being plucked from the Douglas Fir by the greedy squirrels. We take comfort from seeing these things that we expect to see, feel a certain smugness and self-satisfaction in being able to identify them, maybe even say their names, narrow them to species.

But these are not the things that bring revelation. Revelation comes when you stumble across the scattered bones of a half eaten deer and see the white hairy scat of the coyote and you remember the night, just a few nights ago, when you heard the yipping which increased in tempo, when you could almost hear the keening of celebration and death in the long crescendos of the howling and you know you are standing on sacred ground where one life fed many others and was transformed.

Revelation comes when you see a track in the muddy ground that you cannot name, but you follow it anyway and find the logs where it disappears, only to search for the place where it comes out the other side, bobbing and weaving across the meadow like a drunkard. Then you find where they stop abruptly in scuffled ground near the base of a tree. And you can only guess at the end of the story. An ending that came with the beat of silent wings or a leap of faith up the tree trunk to safety.

     A long walk in the backwoods, across the stagnant water still sitting in the channel behind the fence–leftover from the spring runoff–now nothing more than a mucky breeding ground for mosquitoes.  Out to the pond which lays still and murky.  Not even a water skipper to riffle it’s surface.  Reflecting the grey cloudy sky, it looks like an empty hole in the field.  Walking across the grassy meadow above it, the sky is silent in the muggy midday heat.  No sign of the redtail hawk soaring overhead.  No sound of chickadees or meadowlarks or even the plaintive keening of the mourning doves.  The grass stands brown and brittle not even twitching in the heavy air.  Even the heron rookery is quiet, the only sign of life a beak sticking out of one deep nest, barely visible even with binoculars through the thick net of cottonwood leaves.

I head back toward the pond, my eyes searching for new blooms of wildflowers, but the only color in the grass is the noxious leafy spurge.  My mind drifts, finding nothing interesting to settle on and pretty soon my thoughts are already far away, worrying and planning.  Nothing.  There is nothing worth writing about today, no insights, no connections, no revelations.  Only my bare ankles being rubbed by the toxic leaves of the knapweed, raising tiny itchy welts.

I bend down to scratch them and then suddenly, out of the sky the bright flash of something dropping to the grass two feet from my nose.  I look up to see the low flying  W wings of an osprey circle once, then head back towards the river.  And there, in the grass is the silvery fish, an offering to the writer starved for a subject.

       Walking into the backwoods last week to check the heron’s nests, I was suddenly aware of what an intrusive force I was in the forest.  The herons have ignored me on my visits to the rookery–in spite of the thick layer of leaves that telegraphs my every footfall.  Maybe they are too busy with their courtship rituals and nest building, or too high up in the cottonwoods to be worried about me below.  I don’t know.  But last week as I neared the pond, a red tailed hawk circled over my head–again and again–clearly annoyed by my presence and staying well clear of his nest.  Then a rawkus squawking of two geese on the pond who swam away from me–craning their necks over their shoulders to scream their unrelenting annoyance.  A pair of mallard ducks fluttered out of the water and scurried behind a tangle of bushes as I came in sight.  A chipmunk scolded from  a tree and a raven joined in the cacophony.  I was clearly unwelcome here in the midst of all this spring mating and nesting.

We are usually the ones who feel intruded upon by wildlife: the racoons in the garbage, the chicken stealing weasels and coyotes, the flower nibbling deer, the tunneling ground squirrels and gophers.  Even the hole pecking flickers who make swiss cheese of the siding and interrupt our sleep with their drilling on stove pipes.

But this time I was the intrusive, unwanted wildlife disrupting the ravens, chipmunks, geese, ducks and hawks.  And it made me acutely aware of the ripples I send out into the wild world as I pass through it.  I think of these as “my backwoods.”  But they aren’t really mine at all.

      It was one of those mornings when my to-do list was weighing me down with its shoulds and have tos.  I was overwhelmed by the shear number of them, making me snuggle deeper into the covers and feign sleep.  But I could hear the clattering in the kitchen of my husband starting his day and I poked my head up to stare out the window  into the backwoods .  My planning for the day was suddenly interrupted by the pterodactyl form of a heron weaving its way through the sticky buds of the cottonwoods, then another and another until finally I had seen seven great blue herons making their way north, toward the hundred acre wood next door.

Instead of getting up and feeding the dog, emptying the dishwasher, checking my e-mail, I threw on some clothes, grabbed my camera and headed out the door in the direction the great birds flew.  I waded through the tall frosty grass to the fence where the  lace work of spider webs wove between the barbed wire.  I passed the pond where a red tail hawk circled low over the water and looking up I saw in the distance a huge stick nest in a cottonwood tree.  Climbing over the fence into the hundred acre wood I saw another nearby and then another.

Twenty one nests in all, and a flurry of activity.  Pairs of birds clustered around some of the nests, or one bird sat in the nest while another sat on the branch, standing guard.  At one point a third heron approached a nest and was driven away with a great deal of the croaking squawk that sounds so incongruent from these elegant looking birds.

This lone heron then circled over another nest and the resident male stretched its neck out in the gesture that clearly meant come no closer.

Wandering around under the nests I came across a broken shell.  The pale blue of a robin’s egg, it was the size of a large chicken egg.  I looked above and saw a nest that was clearly in the early stages.  The male heron flew in with a stick his mouth, offering it to the female who placed it carefully in the nest.  I wondered if their nest had fallen and they had had to start over, but there was no sign of scattered sticks near the broken egg.

Higher up in the same tree another couple had apparently finished the work on their own nest.

After spending several hours watching the activity in the rookery, I reluctantly returned to my own nest to get to work on those chores.

I didn’t back out to the rookery until this week and by then the activity in the rookery had quieted down considerably.  Peering into the nests though, you could just see the beaks of the brooding birds.  The eggs take 28 days to hatch.

With a clutch of 6-8 eggs, only two or three will survive.  And on the ground, near where I found the first broken shell, were two more.  Was it predation by an eagle?  A racoon?  Or had the mother heron knocked the eggs from the nest when she turned them?  Egg turning is a crucial process because the egg has to be kept evenly warm and the embryo on top, so the chick can develop fully in the shell.

The cottonwoods are beginning to leaf out now which will make viewing the nests much more difficult.  But I plan to keep track of the activity in the rookery and will be heading out for the next two and half months until the fledglings are ready to fly.  Just another thing to add to my to-do list.