The Creek- Still Frozen

 Youngest daughter and I visited the rookery today.

We had some errands to run and decided to take the scenic route home, snapping a few pictures on the way.

We have a small river or creek (pronounced crick in these parts- and no, I don’t know why) and a large Blue Heron colony, or rookery, just down the road. We like to visit the rookery before the trees leaf out.

 The nests are just awesome!

Blue Heron Nests

They are huge, 3 to 4′ across, and way up in the taller 70′ trees along the creek and river banks.

Watching those big lumbering birds fly into the trees and hit those nests with any sort of accuracy is amazing. If you’ve ever watched them fly, you’d swear they’d been drinking. Their movements are jerky and ‘spazzy’ as the youngest says. She’s right, they are spazzy.

Althought there was too much snow to get close, days like today are perfect to view the nests. Instead of hiking through drifts, we sat in the car on the road about 1/2  mile from the trees. We’re lazy that way, but you can still see how impressive the nests are-even at a distance.

Great Blue Heron Nests

The herons group a whole bunch of their nests together, too- being colony nesters. You can see five or six (maybe seven?) nests in this one tree.

Once the trees have leafed out, these big nests are virtually invisible…then all you can see are ginormous blue-gray spazzy birds plowing straight into them.  Even after all these years I still wait to hear the crash of a great Blue Heron, but it never comes.

Herons really know how to stick their landings!

Fog Hides the World

Things are quiet here this morning.

I woke to a sky that was grey, but slightly tinged with pink and realized that the sun was coming up.

It was just hiding behind a thick blanket of fog. It looks like the rest of the world has disappeared.

As the fog starts to lift you can see the bed of sage out in the medicinal herb garden.

How can you can tell it’s sage? It’s almost green!

Bed of Sage in the Herb Garden

The fog rolls back a bit more. It always makes everything look so peaceful.

View From The Herb Garden Gate

Just so you don’t think everything here is grey…

Splash of Color in the Garden

These are crab apples. I occasionally make crab apple jelly, but I always leave plenty on the trees for the wild birds to eat. Over the winter the birds will pick them off one by one, although this morning there is not a bird in sight…besides the chicken crew.

Peace to you, enjoying the quiet here~

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OK, no herbs or gardening stuff for you today, because everything in the herb garden is still frozen, and I haven’t gotten into the greenhouse yet. Sheer laziness on my part…

So- instead I have a video for you!

As I was driving my Herb-Child # 4 into town yesterday, we spotted a pair of Bald Eagles. This may come as no surprise to many of you that live in Bald Eagle country, but it really floored us!

Now, normally we see scads of Red Tail Hawks, Kestrels, Owls, and other birds, but these two were simply phenomenal!

We’ve seen Eagles once or twice fishing at the lake about 7 miles from here, but these two were just hanging out in the cornfields, and lounging in the wind breaks.

Sorry the quality is poor-

I caught them with my little Flip camera and was driving the backroads simultaneously. I know, don’t say it.  It was worth driving into a ditch or bean field in order to get this film!

I don’t know if it’s any better in fullscreen-but you can try and see if there is any improvement.

Wow!