A hundred birds in front of me

Part 5 in a series covering my project of birding every county in Georgia

Hooded warbler, Unicoi State Park, White County, Georgia

MY FRIEND DAMON preached at church this morning. He took Matthew’s account of the feeding of the 5,000 as his text (14.13-21). Much to his credit, Damon does not try to be original or clever. He just steps through the text verse by verse, sharing his knowledge of scripture and tradition and history along with his own story as an addict and inmate and human being recovering from the slings and arrows of this world.

Verse 13 begins: “When Jesus heard this, he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself.” Now this of course begs for some backstory, and when we look at the preceding verses we find that John the Baptist had just been killed by Herod Antipas. Damon then referenced some commentaries that try to explain why John’s death would make Jesus withdraw. One scholar posits that he withdrew because he was afraid he’d be targeted and killed next. But Damon said no. “Jesus wanted to be alone because John was his relative and dearest friend and his heart was hurt and grieving,” he told us. “He needed to be alone.” When death shows up everyone feels it, and Jesus is no exception.

Neither am I. When Dad died I could not bear the friendliness of the faculty lunch table so I spent the academic year coming home and eating lunch by myself while watching the birds in the back yard. In response to losing Mom and the house I am working on this 159-county birding project in almost complete solitude. Over and over I find myself walking quiet trails and empty fields and when I get home I sit and draw and write in my journal. I need solitude and silence like I need water.

Yesterday I drove up to White County in the Blue Ridge, the highest and most mountainous part of the state. I parked at the dam at Unicoi State Park and was met by a cloud of barn swallows, which always remind me of Dad. They swooped and twisted their way above and below the bridge, above and below the dam, impossibly graceful and quick.

When I visit the north Georgia mountains I visit my past. I was seven when Dad married Mom and from then until I went to graduate school the family spent two weeks every summer on Lake Burton, one county up in Rabun, and as often as possible after that until Dad died. It is the place my parents loved best, the place they knew peace, the place we spread their ashes.

I hiked around the lake in search of warblers. Now this was not Rabun County and this was not Lake Burton but when a breeze passed over the lake it carried the rich mineral scent of its tea-colored water down the trail and up my nose and into that part of my brain that so uncannily connects scent with memory and I was at once caught up in reverie of those summers at Burton, for the scent was the scent of Burton. Whatever regional things living and dead that mingle and stew to make Burton smell like that also mingle and stew to make this lake smell like that, and the sudden flood of memories took my breath from me.

I was still reeling when, a few minutes later, I found a black-throated green warbler.

Later in the day I walked the Clarkesville Greenway, a short loop trail in Habersham County. The heat had really risen. The place was empty and the birds had settled down for the afternoon. There was nothing doing. Determined to make a go of it—would I ever again be in Habersham County with time to kill?—I made my way in the stillness, noting a few jays and cardinals, always with the cardinals. The far end of the loop runs along the Soque River, but for most of that distance a high wall of trees and scrub runs between the trail and the river, blocking a view of the water. But I found, next to a bench, a nearly invisible grown-over trail through the tangle, and after several minutes of cursing and backstepping and getting cut by thorns I found myself standing halfway down the steep bank, surrounded by blackberry and privet, looking down at the Soque.

It was narrow, with steep muddy banks and slow-moving opaque brown water. The dense scrub to my left and right created a kind of window through which I could see only a few feet of the river’s course. The disappointment of this discovery did not last, however, because when I looked up my eyes beheld a weedy field stretched out beyond the far bank, densly populated by indigo buntings and field sparrows and common yellowthroats and American goldfinches. They flitted in and out of sight, singing from the scrub and tall grasses. I even heard the raspy cluck of a green heron nearby. I was thoroughly surprised by this sudden overflow of bird life. I had passed a large patch of similar habitat just 100 yards behind me, but had been met there by total bird silence.

After a minute I realized there was something alive at eye level just a few feet to my right. A not-small creature was executing minute movements six feet away from me on the other side of a tangle of blackberry and honeysuckle. I could discern a dark humped shape but nothing more. I raised my binoculars and pulled the focus toward me as far as it would go; blackberry leaves blurred as the face of an adult black vulture came cleanly into view. She was perched on a dead branch, eating a dead thing held beneath her left foot. She occasionally looked up and when she did I could see her brown iris and black pupil and the creases of her orbital ring, the circle of flesh immediately surrounding the eye of all birds. Why she had not flown when I came crashing and cursing down the bank I do not know.

After watching her for a few minutes I took stock of the situation. She seemed lost in her work. And here I was, birding, with a hundred birds in front of me. So I stood there in that lonely place, calves sweaty and bleeding, surveying the festival across the river, noting numbers and sexes of birds, listening for new ones, and doing my best, but ultimately failing, to ignore the beautiful dark creature shining beside me.