A black-crowned night-heron catches a bullfrog tadpole, its last meal for the night, a meal caught in the wan light that brightens the world before sunrise.
The bird flies to a tree limb stout enough to be a tree trunk. The limb arches over a shallow river flowing with effort across silty flats and around mounded cobble.
On that limb the night-heron thrashes the tadpole into submission then quickly swallows it. After wiping its beak on the limb, the night-heron half flies and half hops to a higher branch jutting from the great limb.
Comfortable and secure in the shade cast by a leafy dome of boughs, the night-heron closes its eyes and drifts into a casual day-long sleep.
On the far side of the great willow, a thatch of fur grizzled from each hair being half black and half white clings to a drooping branchlet. It is a hoary bat; and like the night-heron, it has roosted for a day of rest before spending another night hunting on the wing.
A house wren, having discovered the snoozing bat, flits about as it assesses this stranger in what the little bird considers its tree. Chatting partly to itself and partly to the world at large, the wren considers scolding the bat but then ultimately decides to ignore it.
By midmorning the warmth of daytime has awakened a green cicada that begins to drone loudly enough to be heard a half mile on a calm day. It is a male advertising itself to females.
But an American kestrel hears it and swoops in to pluck it from the branchlet. Seeing the kestrel at the last moment, the cicada drops from the branchlet and takes flight on its cellophane wings. Though it can outmaneuver the kestrel, it cannot escape the Mississippi kite that snatches it in mid air.
All this activity, day and night, centers around a willow that grows on a riverbank. Twin trunks bend away from each other so that half the tree grows over the water and half the tree grows over land.
Compared to the likes of redwoods and sequoias and eucalypts, it is a smallish tree; but in the context of the lifescape where it grows and in the landscape where that lifescape occurs, the willow is massive.
Not all the world's 450 willow species attain such a powerful physique. Most are wispy shrubs; a few barely grow above ground level.
Of the just under three dozen Colorado willows, moose and elk eat the twigs; a tiny midge eats the bud of some species; and white-tailed ptarmigans eat the buds of others.
But none has touched this one big tree.
A species of southwestern Asia, its ancestors were brought here by people. They prospered, and this tree prospers still. Its own life has become integrated into the breath and the pulse of the floodplain.
For much of the local wildlife, it has become the Willow Motel.
Kevin J. Cook is a freelance writer and naturalist based in Loveland. His Wildlife Window column appears in the Reporter-Herald every Thursday.