Small Miracles: The Wonder of Birds' Nests Impatient for winter
to be over, we had put on our boots to go seeking signs of
spring but had instead found a sign of the previous summer. We
must have walked past this thicket a score of times last summer
without ever noticing birds around it, but here is a bird’s nest
among the branches, at eye level, in plain sight now that winter
has stripped away the last of the leaves. “My favorite palette
is the color of winter decay,” says photographic artist Sharon
Beals. It’s 7 a.m. in San Francisco, but she is already on her
way out the door to work on her project for the day. Much of her
professional photography takes her outside, “wandering a river
for hours, looking at bugs, muck, and minnows,” as she says, or
photographing native plants or their pollinators. Today, though,
she will spend up to 11 hours in a museum, examining birds’
nests and photographing many of them. The results will add to
her growing collection of nest portraits—extraordinarily
detailed images tha