My Life

On a crisp, late Fall day several years ago, my husband and I went

on our annual Thanksgiving picnic and hike.   We like to go to Torreya

State Park, which is named after a kind of tree that grows only in the area

and whose seeds millions of years ago was carried to this location by a

glacier.   First we ate, then we set off on our adventure.   After we had

gone only a short distance into the woods, Bill decided to scout ahead,

looking for the well-worn path that led to the creek.   I sit on a fallen trunk

and scanned the treetops, looking for songbirds and squirrels.   My eyes

rested high on a sprawling, fifty-foot pine tree at a fork, where an

abundance of pine needles and leaves collected.   Then it dawned on me:

those leaves were, in fact, a nest, the biggest nest I had ever seen, larger

then my living room.   First I wondered what had made the nest, then,

imagining something like a pterodactyl, I worried that it would return.  

Soon Bill came back from his scouting trip: and I pointed towards one of

the tree's highest forks, showing him the nest.   His opinion was that it

could of been built by a colony of birds, but when I returned home and

looked in my bird encyclopedia, I discovered that no colony of birds

builds a single nest.   The only North American bird that builds such a nest

is the bald eagle, and they, I read, uses the same nest for than twenty

years.   So the following April when I saw in the Tallahassee Democrat

that the Florida Panhandle accommodates thirty-two "active" bald eagle

nests, I seized the opportunity to observe our national symbol, and a once

near extinct species, in the wild.