Before The Sky: Part One, The Waiting
If you slow down just enough, the world opens.
The first thing the rookery gave me was not silence.
It was sound — a wall of it. Hatchlings crying out from somewhere in the canopy, insistent and hungry and alive. I stood across the lake and listened before I ever looked up.
And then I began to search. My eyes have learned a different kind of seeing since I started coming here — not looking for the bird itself, but for what the tree does around it. The place where the pine needles stop. The line that should continue — and doesn't. An interruption in the geometry, an absence in the color and shape, and suddenly you know something is there before you can even name what it is.
I found my vantage point in winter, when the branches were still bare and the nests sat open to the sky — easy to count, easy to watch, the hatchlings small but visible in the cold clear light. Six nests that I know of. Probably more. Sometimes an adult comes flying straight out of the canopy directly toward me — not from any nest I've found — and that's how I know. Not by finding them, but by being found.
Spring has complicated things in the best way. The branches are filling now, leaves and new flowers closing around the nests like cupped hands. The hatchlings are more hidden. But they are also bigger, louder, more insistently alive. The rookery gives less away just as it has more to show.
I've learned the flight paths too. They always leave the same way and return the same way — arcing out over the water, disappearing into the tree line, coming back heavy with branches or food. There is something steadying about that predictability. The world is reliable here.
The hawks know this place too. They circle at the edges. But a great blue heron nest is never left unguarded — one parent always remains while the other hunts.
I never saw the eggs in the nest. What I found was the evidence — pale blue shells on the ground beneath the trees, discarded after the hatching, quiet and still while everything above them was not. Each nest holds two, sometimes three. I didn't know that until I saw them — the first small fuzzy heads just clearing the edge of the nest, barely visible, barely there. I had been coming for weeks. And then one morning, there they were.
That is what the waiting gives you, if you stay. Not a dramatic reveal. Just a morning that is suddenly different from the one before.
See You In The Stillness.
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