Val Cunningham

Jerry Davis was driving on a service road through a large wetland when he noticed a sandhill crane turning its eggs on the nest. Sandhills share incubation duties during the day as one parent goes off to nearby fields to feed while the other tends the nest for about two hours, then they change shifts. However, it’s the female who sits on the nest all night.

Scott Thiede has been keeping an eye on the fox den in his urban neighborhood, and recently caught a parent watching over one of its six kits. The little one was gnawing on a piece of chicken, apparently tossed out by a neighbor who raises poultry. Thiede has posted a fun video plus stills showing the progress of the fox family on his Facebook page.

Stately great blue herons are some of the earliest birds to migrate back from their winter homes – in my area, they reliably return around St. Patrick’s Day, often encountering waterways still covered by ice. They quickly get to work building or adding to nests alongside other herons in a collection of nests and birds, called a rookery.

Bill Manuell went out to check his maple traps and spotted a bobcat crouched below a tree at the edge of the woods on his property, apparently on the hunt. But then he looked up and saw another bobcat perched in the tree.

Dick Dennie’s trail camera snapped two foxes “meeting in a wintery woods,” as he wrote, echoing the famous Robert Frost poem.