The Fool Multitude

This bird's nest, covered in snow, sits right at eye-level along the Heritage Trail.  What kind of bird aims so low in life?  Why would any avian creature--capable of flight--choose to make its home within such easy reach of humankind?  It must be a martlet...except that they only exist in medieval heraldry.  Walking past this nest made me think of a line that I haven't recalled in a decade and a half from The Merchant of Venice:

"What many men desire?"  That 'many' may be meant

By the fool multitude, that choose by show,

Not learning more than the fond eye doth teach;

Which pries not to the interior, but, like the martlet,

Builds in the weather on the outward wall,

Even in the force and road of casualty.

I will not choose "what many men desire,"

Because I will not jump with common spirits

And rank me with the barbarous multitude.

~William Shakespeare

That's one of the reasons I go hiking; it helps me to reclaim parts of myself that I would otherwise forget, like the fact that I was once a literary snob who sneered at "jumping with common spirits."