This morning I took my dog, Molly, for a walk in the woods. Walk isn't the right word, exactly; meander is more like it. She stops every few feet to bury her Labrador retriever nose in piles of leaves, in clumps of grass, in loose bark at the base of a tree. She revels in all the scents: ground squirrel, raccoon, deer, coyote, dead turtle, warm soil . . . so we take our time.
When Molly's face is pointed down--the downward dog--mine usually points up as I scan the treetops, looking for birds. This is a good time of year to spot them, since the trees aren't yet fully leafed out.
Along the trail where it dips a bit, near the spot where my once-upon-a-time six-year-old son hit some rocks with his bike and took a nasty spill, there stand a couple of dead trees. Cottonwoods, maybe? The bark of both has weathered away, and the crown of one of the trees snapped off a few years ago, leaving what I imagine is a hollow space up there, open to the sky.
Today when I looked up at that tree--about 25 feet up--a bird was hunkered down in the hollow, eyeing me (or the dog) and preening in the sunlight. I couldn't see enough of the bird to identify it. So I hurried Molly home and went back to the woods alone, with binoculars.
By the time I got back to the trail, the bird was standing up. Black head, long black neck, brownish-gray body, white cheek patches--no doubt about it, this was a Canada goose. And it wasn't such a surprise to see the goose in the woods, since a small river and large pond are close by. But at the top of a dead tree? And the goose appeared to be standing atop a cushion of . . . down?
Yep, the Canada goose had made its nest in the hollow at the top of the tree trunk. As I scrambled up the side of a ravine to view this scene from another angle, even without binoculars I could see two yellow goslings peering out from underneath their parent. Most likely there were more.
Years ago, a wood duck nested in an oak tree in my back yard. One Saturday morning I spotted the duck flying from tree to tree before she entered a hole in one of the trees, high above the ground. It wasn't long before tiny ducklings started to appear one by one, at the hole, and one by one they dropped like stones to the ground, assembled in a line behind their mother, and waddled away in the direction of the aforementioned pond and woods.
But I've never heard of a Canada goose nesting in a tree. From what I know, they usually nest on the ground, somewhere close to the water. So now I wonder: How will those goslings get down from up there? Does their nest site mean certain doom when they try to leave the nest?
I hope not. Molly and I will amble down that trail often this spring, trying to see how things develop. But I've walked in the woods enough to know that happy endings, as defined from my own point of view, are not always a sure bet there.
