A pageant of birds

Part 4 in a series covering my project of birding every county in Georgia

Scarlet tanager, Lullwater Preserve, Atlanta

THE BIRDS THIN OUT as I walk east, upriver along the Chattahoochee. Things started out nicely back at the trailhead: three vireo species in the first three minutes, a blue grosbeak singing in the field north of the river, two hairy woodpeckers at the oxbow. But further up the trail I come across nobody but the occasional Carolina wren or northern cardinal, the two most common and noisy birds of the Georgia piedmont. Before turning around I cover nearly a mile in total bird silence. It is a grim march. The sun blinds me. I feel like I’m hiking inside a closed oven set to bake. I walk face-first into a spider web every fifty paces. Something mean bites me on my left arm. The river moves like a mudslide. And like I said, there are no birds.

In late summer, after all the nest-building and family-making is finished and fall migration has not yet begun, many birds molt. Old feathers are lost and are replaced by new ones. Some species undergo a complete wardrobe change; these birds shift from their bright summer clothes into neutrals and earth tones appropriate for the coming winter. Others grow a fresh set of their perennial colors and still others receive the first proper plumage of their lives. In all cases, this process requires a great deal of bird energy. The juice that, during spring and high summer, went into singing and breeding and making general havoc is now channeled into the effort of making new feathers while the birds lie low, lurking, conserving energy. And if birds don’t move or make noise, you won’t see them.

These days are not good birding.

Welcome to the doldrums. It’s like a miniature winter in bird world, a blank space, a season of inactivity during which not-so-obvious but vital work is done in quiet, out-of-the-way places. 

I consider turning around. Where am I going, anyway? What birds am I hoping for? Also I have a lunch date in Newnan. I have a schedule to keep. Best to stop sweating and getting spider webs in my mouth and being eaten by insects, submit my records to eBird, check Coweta County off my list, and be done with it.

I keep going. I hike uphill and the river slides downhill. I begin to think about the river. It starts in the far northeastern corner of the state as a fast-falling stream, its perfectly transparent water tumbling over shaded moss-covered rocks, singing its way down the southern Blue Ridge, building as it goes. Down here in Coweta, however, the Chattahoochee seems spent, exhausted by its slaking of Atlanta. Here it runs wide and heavy, slowed by the feeble grades of the southern piedmont and thickened by the state’s ancient red clay. It has been flowing down these banks for many tens of millions of years. I am nothing to it. 

After another half mile the forest opens a little. I stop and look up. No motion, no wind, not even a gray squirrel. Just tall oaks and poplars and stagnant air. A spell of dead calm. Then: a nearly imperceptible shuddering of leaves 60 feet up. It is a bird, taking a full minute or more between each short flight. I watch, head thrown back. Another, then two more, for a total of four, all moving in the same lazy way here and there high in the canopy. The trees’ full crowns make it difficult to get a clear look at any of them through binoculars.

Eventually a male scarlet tanager shows himself. A fabulous, impossibly red bird, a point of brightest crimson in a world of deep green. Now this is very exciting for me personally. I have never seen scarlet tanagers breeding so far south. After fifteen minutes more I have recorded a total of two males and one warm yellow female; I lose the fourth. Then at once I lose them all. They are gone like ghosts, none of them having made a single sound.

I turn and go back the way I came. The heat rises but now the sun is at my back; the river flows with me, downhill; the spider webs are cleared; red and yellow birds fill my head, reminding me of something I knew but had temporarily forgotten: even in the doldrums there are birds everywhere, a pageant of birds, surrounding me even as I walked, filling the trees, quietly watching me pass. They have been there all along.