This is my 12th year living a block from the heronry in Stanley Park. Each year cycle is a profound joy and awe for me. I love the hunched adults showing up on the apartment buildings in the neighbourhood, I love the gorgeous bare trees silhouetted against the sky and spotted with the stick sculptures in the winter, the springtime return to the nests, the rebuilding with fresh sticks, the dating and mating, the fish smells, the sea blue shells dropped to the ground, the feathers, the white painterly guano on the ground, the flying adults with their tinted ballet feet, the soul-lifting yap yap yap of the chicks, the eagles at dusk awaiting opportunity causing the adults to scream like (I imagine) dinosaurs, the crows, squirrels, raccoons, the fish meals dropped from the nest strewn on the ground, the fighting siblings too big for the nests, and the poignant birth-life-death cycle as I come across dead teenage herons on the grass, in bushes. Every year, I draw herons (they show up in my work – A LOT) and I always pause and honour the little dead ones. Leave a little flower on them, leaving it up to nature to move through the carcasses. This year I have come across a few under the trees already, and this one under a bush along the road was the one I chose to sketch this year. What a privilege to be able to study all the beautiful details while holding the heartbreaking little one in my heart.

“For these dead birds sigh a prayer.” – Shakespeare

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