Great Blue Heron Rookery along Rte 2 (New England Fall)

 
Nestled right in the middle of the hustle and bustle of modern life, along side rte 2 in Acton Ma., you see the most marvelous display of wildlife — thriving in spite of it all — and this blog story is about the "Great Blue Heron Rookery", along rte 2, in particular during the New England Fall season.
I first penned this article as "Bald Eagle nests" but my good friend Austin informed me that the birds are Blue Herons and that such a nesting community is called a "Rookery". Eloquently explained in Kristen's YouTube documentary... I finally understand why there are consistently a bunch of these nests, visible from this well-traveled highway in Acton, just before you get to rte 495 going West. I've long marvelled at the dozen or so of these nests, seen from the rte 2 vantage, and have taken a few photos of them over the years. My goal from the beginning has been to get All Four Seasons shots and to publish them ensemble. You might consider this my first public step towards following thru with that.

In the early days of November 2007 I stopped off to take some pictures of these nests, primarily because it was the height of the New England Fall. And this time I took a walk out onto the point that juts out into the wetlands so that I could get some pictures — some panoramas, in fact — of the nests, primarily in their vacant state as Winter approaches. [added later: The other 4-season perspectives or this Rookery include “Winter”, “Spring”, and Summer (TBS).]

To see a Flash presentation of these panoramas visit my Flickr collection, select about the 10^th thumbnail in the collection, and then just watch the slide show from there. Failing that, just click here and Next / Prev your way thru, in the more traditional manner. You will notice that the panoramas are presented in pairs: first you see the 'raw' panorama, made from about a dozen or so snapshots, in which you can see the contribution of each picture by noticing the "rounded" edges which are a result of the stretch and projections made by Autostitch. For each one, the panorama right after that will be the same picture, only cropped so that it looks like a single snapshot.