By Lisa Peters
Great blue herons remind me of pterosaurs. I don't know if it's those huge wings, those sharp beaks or the S-curve in their necks. They fly past, their yellow eyes alert, and it could be the middle of the Mesozoic.
 When we started visiting my parents' cabin on Lake 26 in Burnett County thirty years ago, there were no herons, at least not that anyone remembers. But it wasn't long before they established a rookery less than a half-mile away, overlooking the marshy springs that feed the lake.
My mother began urging us to check on the birds whenever we came to visit. And the ritual continues today. We wander over to the rookery in all seasons. Oddly enough, the best time to see it is in the dead of winter when the marsh is frozen and the birds are gone. We walk across the marsh for an unobstructed view, count those messy treetop nests and get a different number each time -- 75, 100, 85.
The herons return very early in the spring. While they are sitting on eggs, they're quiet. It seems like an unnatural state for them. But once the young ones hatch, the croaky music begins. It's incessant. It's the sound of summer.
 We look for their enormous three-toed footprints in the sandy lake bottom near our beach. Dinosaur tracks! we exclaim. Scientists don't need to convince me of the bird-dino link. Great blue herons seem like exhibit A.
Better than seeing their footprints is seeing them fish along the shoreline. They're far more patient than I could be. With that sharp beak for a weapon I'd be tempted to jab away indiscriminately at anything that swam by. But of course they know what they're doing and we marvel at their fishing skill each time we see it.
When the birds leave, long before the calendar summer is over, I feel a little abandoned. I always wonder: Did they leave together? One at a time? Do the young ones know where to go? Will they come back?
 The two-year effort to save the rookery property from development resulted in nine acres of woods and marsh that will be protected forever. But it also resulted in something else: a perked-up curiosity about the natural world. All of a sudden my lake neighbors wanted to know where the rookery was, how many birds there were, how long they had been there.
I doubt that very many of my neighbors see a heron and think about prehistoric creatures as I do, and I'm not even sure I'd want that. Some like to point the big birds out to their grandkids. Others get up early to see if there's a heron standing still as a statue on their dock.
I like to think that a great blue heron is like a work of art: everyone values it for a different reason. And if we're lucky, this valuable thing settles into our lives and becomes indispensable.
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