Correction

So yesterday I talked with a woman who lives in a house overlooking the ravine where the heron nesting takes place. She has lived there for five years and said that when she first arrived there were "a few" heron nests and that the herons had been adding to the rookery at the rate of about two nests a year, until this year, when she estimates the rookery size increased by about a third, with lots of new nest construction.

One conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the logging of the area somehow made the location more desirable. Or...some other rookery may have been lost, or...or...

Less raucous activity now, generally one bird is established at each nest, which I take to mean that egg-laying has commenced.