It felt like that first gasp of air after nearly drowning. Following weeks of sub-zero weather, deep snow, and shrieking winds, an unseasonably warm day beckoned me into my woods. There was plenty of snow still about, some of it too deep to traverse, so my way wound around the drifts, taking me down paths I rarely wander. Not only that, foraging creatures, large and small, had rearranged the landscape, and so many trees had fallen to the savage winds that the forest seemed all the more strange. But it yielded some sweet surprises.  I've collected bird's nests for years. I often find them when I wander, and sometimes people bring them to me, too. They are fascinating works of natural art, and they are magical, as well. More accurately, bird's nests are powerful symbols of the mechanics of everyday magic. Study one, sometime.
While hiking yesterday, I found a huge nest that had blown down from a tree. What an amazing creation! It's constructed of pine needles, dried grass, leaves, assorted dog hair, bits of dryer lint, carpet strings, scraps of newspaper, and feathers ~ all woven together and set with mud. It was originally molded atop a tree branch where it met the trunk, complete with a flap on top to conceal baby birds from would-be predators. Such magic! Oh, I know, most would chalk such architecture up to instinct. Blind, uninspired obedience to Nature's reproduction mandate. But I have heard them singing as they work ~ chattering back and forth as they build their nurseries for birds-to-be. 
And that's just the beginning of the magic. Patience, ingenuity, and joy all coalesce in light-as-flight bodies to conjure something out of nothing in an elegant perpetuation of life. So when I hear the yammer about "Intelligent Design," I look to my bird's nest collection, knowing that such magic is not confined to a distant and unfathomable God. In truth, it resides in the furred and the finned and the feathered. It resides in us. And it manifests in beautiful, unlikely surprises ~ like bird's nests. 
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Kitty R. Connell
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