Walking the property at Wild Woods Retreat & Farm this week turned up two nests, and neither one is something we built or planned for. Both are just part of what thirty acres of woods, walipini, and pasture produces on its own.

The first is a bird's nest, empty by the time we found it. What's stranger than the nest itself is where we tend to find these things: at knee height inside the walipini, at eye level right along the Lane, our quarter-mile path from the entrance. Those seem like bad hiding spots to us, low, exposed, right where people walk. But birds have been building nests a lot longer than we've been watching them do it, and whatever logic they're using, it's worked well enough to keep doing. Some seasons we get lucky and catch one with eggs still in it, or hatchlings not yet ready to leave.

The second nest is impossible to miss once you spot it: a paper wasp nest roughly the size of a basketball, built about 25 feet up in a tree between Otter Beach and the barn. We don't mow the ground underneath it, on purpose, so we're not stirring up the wasps working above. Paper wasp colonies don't survive the winter the way honeybee colonies do, so our hope is that once it goes dormant and empties out, the nest itself will eventually fall, intact enough to keep. If it does, it'll be one of the stranger, more beautiful things this property has handed us.

Neither nest was posed or placed for a photo. They're just what's out there if you slow down enough to look up, or down, on a walk around the farm.

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