The Mystery Tree and Other Questions

This morning has been beautiful! I have spent the past hour watching the morning begin with first the goose honking and honking and honking about 6:00 am and waking me. I opened the blind beside my pillow and looked out to near darkness over the Pond. Why so early honking??? I've done my meditation and reading and prepared a mug of green tea and am back at the window. Now he's at it again. Alone. He just spent some time over on the peninsula in the bushes - Could it be the mother is on her nest there? If I'm not remembering wrong, I saw our first goslings(geese or ducks or both?) swimming on the pond last year about this time. Then the Great Blue Heron showed up where he usually does - at the far end of the dam - and began his trek in the shallow water at the edge going from east to northwest away from the dam along the edge. He moved very slowly most of the time stepping carefully as if trying to not disturb the fish and creep up on them unnoticed. Occasionally he shot his beak down into the water but didn't seem to come up with anything. I could see fish jumping about 20 feet in front of him. Could he see them too? Or does he operate on smell? Sometimes he stopped for a long time, then resumed his trek. When he reached the little inlet off to the northwest, he suddenly took off flying about 30 feet across the inlet to the edge - where Walker and Jack got stuck in the pedal boat last summer - and began his careful journey again but with more times darting his beak into the water and twice I saw him gulp! Then, shortly he resumed his trek back in the opposite direction away from the peninsula retracing his steps. Now I've lost him. And the goose has disappeared. Shadows stretch across the labyrinth but soon will disappear back into the woods. Two of the weeping willows have leaves but one does not. The little cedar over there is still standing guard. There is another tree near it I don't remember seeing before!!! How can it be that such avoids our observance for so long! It must be 6 to 8 feet tall! I can't tell what kind it is - that will be my first excursion this morning - to befriend the tree! I'm shocked that she has been standing there in full view so long without my seeing. What else am I not seeing? How can I be so BLIND! What trivia is(are?) blinding me to the REAL? Why do I refer to the tree as "she" and to the heron and goose as "he"?