The day I found the rookery was warm and still, one of those late-summer afternoons when the lake west of Fort Collins looked like glass. I’d been wandering with my camera near a plant nursery south of Harmony Road, following a faint game trail through willows and cottonwoods. I expected dragonflies, maybe a single heron hunting along the shallows. What I didn’t expect was the noise — a dry, prehistoric clatter echoing through the treetops. I stopped, scanned upward, and there it was: a massive cottonwood alive with life. Roughly twenty-five stick nests crowned its highest forks. Great Blue Herons had turned this single tree into a city in the sky. We think of Great Blue Herons (Ardea herodias) as solitary — one bird standing
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 as solitary — one bird standing still and alone on a sandbar. But when it’s time to raise young, they gather. These gatherings are called rookeries, and on Colorado’s Front Range they form wherever water, fish, and old cottonwoods still exist. What I stumbled upon that day wasn’t an accident; it was the result of generations of birds returning to a site that works.){kind=link}