Home is Where the Water Is: Carving the Great Blue Heron & Osprey
[Re-upload from our old website March 2, 2026]
There are certain birds that feel less like wildlife and more like old friends. For me, the Great Blue Heron and the Osprey have always carried that quiet, steady presence. I first fell in love with them in the tidal marshes of my hometown of Charleston, SC where the light turns everything silver and the wetlands breathe in and out with the tide. A heron standing motionless at the edge of a creek, or an osprey circling high above before folding into a perfect dive, felt like part of the rhythm of home.
When I visit my parents in Florida, the setting shifts from salt marsh to freshwater lake, but the magic is the same. The herons there stalk the shoreline at dawn, their reflections doubling their height in the still water, while ospreys claim the tops of cypress trees and dock posts like vigilant guardians. Instead of tides, there’s the hush of early morning mist and the ripple of fish just beneath the surface. Watching an osprey hover, then execute a clean, decisive plunge, or a heron step with delicate grace through the shallows, feels just as wild and reverent.. proof that you don’t need an ocean for awe, just water and wings.
Carving and printing them felt like a way to honor that long thread of connection. Translating the heron’s elegant, deliberate posture into line and shape, and capturing the osprey’s fierce, aerodynamic focus, required me to slow down and study them more closely than ever. Every cut in the block became an act of observation: feather texture, hooked beak, the lift of a wing mid-beat. It’s always humbling to try to distill such wild perfection into ink and onto paper.
What makes me happiest, though, is seeing them here in Tennessee too. Different wetlands, different light, but the same unmistakable silhouettes. It feels like the landscape is gently reminding me that home can stretch and expand. No matter the state line, when a great blue heron rises from the shallows or an osprey cries out overhead, I feel that familiar spark of recognition and gratitude that these birds continue to follow me, and that I get to follow them back with my carving tools in hand.
