Nature Is a Language

A shorebird surprise at Constitution Lakes I took the dog for a long walk and left the camera behind, so of course I saw some rare birds. That was the beginning of my morning yesterday at Constitution Lakes, one of the best spots for birds in the city. The lake was unusually low, so I thought I might have a good chance of seeing one of the Wilson’s snipe that tend to hide among the reeds on the edge of the main lake this time of year.

Every October, Atlanta’s five wrens gather together. Marsh wren. One of the most common and persistent sounds of nature in Atlanta is the song of the Carolina wren. Unlike many common songbirds whose singing ends with the summer breeding season, these tiny birds never quiet down. Any time of year, you can hear their repeating melodies, chirps and scolds, impossibly loud for a creature that weighs less than an ounce. Carolina wren in the backyard.

A prairie state bird that likes to roam If you live in or around the prairie states, you’re spoiled with scissor-tailed flycatchers and probably didn’t look twice at the bird perched on your fencepost this morning. But, if you live in Atlanta, and your fellow nerdy, bird-obsessed friends text you that they saw one of the large, elegant flycatchers just a few dozen miles east of your town, you make the trek.

The History of Georgia’s Four Extinct Feathered Friends There they were, right at the entrance to Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, squawking and foraging high in the trees, where their colony has been since the 1960s when the first birds escaped from a shipment meant for the pet trade. Bright green-and-white birds that anyone might recognize, even if they never expected to see one roaming wild in New York. Parakeets.

An uncommonly beautiful common warbler. Of the roughly 35 warbler species that migrate through Atlanta each fall, Northern parulas are among the most common. In fact, there are a few spots in the city where you can even find breeding pairs in the summer months. I’ve found myself looking at mixed flocks of warblers, trying to pick out the different species, saying, “oh, that’s just a parula.” Northern parula in my backyard. But look at this bird! Just a parula?

A journey back to nature. I was walking through the Davidson-Arabia Mountain Nature Preserve, a granite outcropping surrounded by trees on the eastern edge of DeKalb County. I had just discovered a love for watching birds, and I had just discovered how many amazing parks like this there were within 20 minutes of my home. Atlanta really is the City in a Forest, a fact I had woefully ignored during my adult life here.

The best time to be outside. A willow flycatcher, part of the difficult-to-ID empidonax family. Every spring, from mid April to early May, the morning chorus changes. No longer is the air filled with just the same backyard birds singing but nearly two dozen different tiny warblers lend their voices to the choir, each a unique pattern of tweets, whistles and buzzes.

Music and birding rolled into one event? I feel seen. Bonner Black and Walker Burroughs on the Flyway Tour. Last Saturday felt like my own personal Venn diagram. Music, birds, nature. Old friends and new. Everything seemed to come together at the Atlanta stop of the Flyway Tour. Musicians Bonner Black and Walker Burroughs had spent the last half of October leading bird walks and talking about trees before performing together at nature centers from Chicago to Alabama.

Anyone can read it. Last month, my dog Cookie let me know that it was time for another adventure, and I decided to head north, up into the mountains, if only for a slight reprieve from August’s suffocating heat. We drove to Black Rock Mountain State Park in Rabun Gap to hike the Tennessee Rock Trail.

Sunday Morning at the Park. I’d been hoping for a day like this. A perfect September morning in the middle of fall migration when there’s no predicting what birds will have made a stop in our city. I drove to Murphey Candler Park, a 135-acre mixed-use space in Brookhaven. On the south side of West Nancy Creek Drive are the baseball fields where I first played T-ball in the late 1970s.