There’s a rookery just across the street from my house, tucked into a stand of cypress and cedar, and for three years now I’ve been quietly showing up with my camera to watch the wood storks come and go.
I’ve watched them arrive each spring, build their messy stick nests, lay eggs, raise impossibly fluffy gray chicks, teach those chicks how to stretch and flap and balance on branches that look way too thin to hold them. I’ve watched them fledge, leave the nest, and — every single year — come back. Same trees. Same drama. Same noisy, prehistoric-looking, oddly graceful birds.
And then, every once in a while, they hand you a frame like this one.
If you look closely, one of these big siblings has its beak clamped firmly around the other’s bill — the universal big-sibling gesture for please, for the love of everything, be quiet. The third is hunched in the middle, completely over it. The adult in the corner is pretending not to be related to any of them.
I laughed out loud when I saw it on the back of the camera. Three years of patience, and the storks finally let me in on the family group chat.
If you’ve never sat with a rookery before, I can’t recommend it enough. They’re loud. They’re smelly. They’re absolutely worth it.
— Photographed across the street from home, Florida gulf coast.
✦ caught the salt air?