Bird's Nest
Escalante Grand Staircase National Monument, Utah

When one considers the forces shaping slot canyons, the torrent of brown water that rages between narrow rock walls during a rain storm, sweeping boulders, logs and anything that stands before it, then the tiny nest in this image, with its precious cargo of two white eggs seems doubly miraculous. In such an environment life is precious.  It has earned the right to exist through millennia of adaptation, pure stubbornness and tenacity.  We look at the birds nest in this photograph and we automatically connect with the fragile unborn life within, waiting to hatch, to fledge and grow, in the brief window of time before the clouds move in and the weather turns once more.