I’m a dues-paying, card-carrying member of the Atlanta Audubon Society, but to this point my participation in society activities has been limited to drinking a lot of wine and dropping a little cash at the annual fundraiser, a banquet-slash-silent auction. No longer. When the recent issue of the newsletter announced the upcoming Christmas Bird Count, I immediately emailed Bob Zaremba, the coordinator of the event, and signed on.

The count would take place at several locations around the city, Bob told me, but he personally would be leading a group around Kennesaw Mountain National Park beginning at 9:30 Sunday morning, December 20. Nine-thirty sounded like an hour I could do, and the location was one I was familiar with, so there I was, along with some half-dozen other counters, in the parking lot of said facility at the appointed hour. I introduced myself to Bob, then quickly headed back to the car to swap out my golf hat for the stocking cap I had prudently brought along. It was cold, but promised to warm up when the sun broke through a low, wet layer of cloud.

Bob was wearing a regular hat. But, then, maybe his day had already warmed up. He had been at it since five, tromping through the park’s marshlands in pursuit of more elusive species like woodcocks and Virginia rails. The rest of us, as the count proceeded and the sun quit trying, just kept getting colder.

It turns out that a bird count consists of walking—slowly, of course—standing, and looking, none of which are great at stirring gelatinous blood. And when hands do nothing but hold binoculars, gloves merely lock in the cold. Emily, a local wildlife biologist, started with a hooded jacket, then pulled a stocking cap down over the hood, and soon sprang into a set of lively jumping-jacks. I watched with envy as the joggers leapt happily down the mountain, their hot breath fogging the freezing air.

Oh, birds. We saw some. Of note, for me, were the yellow-rumped warblers and golden-crowned kinglets, exceedingly rare visitors in my own little woodland, and there’s never anything wrong with the sight of a beautiful Eastern bluebird—all the more so a day like this. Nature writer Charles Seabrook, covering the event in his weekly “Wild Georgia” column, got the final tally from Bob: 86 species (with all teams reporting) and some 10,000 individual birds.

So let’s call it a success. And when the next Independence Day Bird Count rolls around, I’m in.

Wild turkeys have enjoyed a unique distribution cycle. Spanish explorers found these big, flavorful birds in the Americas and hauled them back to Spain, whence they spread across Europe. In sixteenth-century England, they were highly enough regarded to be served as a table delicacy to Henry VIII. A century later, the prudent Pilgrims brought them along to the New World, only to find the woods of New England resounding with the gobblers’ call. (It was while making its way across Europe, by the way, that the bird received its common English name, probably through the erroneous assumption that it had come from Turkey.)

It’s well known that Benjamin Franklin believed the useful, attractive, and thoroughly indigenous wild turkey would have made a more appropriate national emblem than the bald eagle. In his day they were plentiful enough to be sold in the marketplace for a penny a pound. But the axes and blunderbusses of the settlers told a predictable tale. Franklin died in 1790; surely he would have been saddened to learn that the bird was gone from New England a half-century later.

Those same causes—overhunting and habitat loss—continued to decimate wild turkey populations in other areas of the country as well, and by the middle of the twentieth century the situation reached its nadir. Here in Georgia, the turkey population was down to just a few thousand birds in the whole state, and reliable estimates put the total number of wild turkeys nationwide at a mere 130,000. In the 1970s, though, captive breeding and relocation programs began to reverse the decline, and by 1980 the count, nationally, was back up to 1.8 million.

Moving to the woods 15 years ago, we numbered ourselves among the beneficiaries of the turkey’s resurgence. Before we got dogs, the handsome birds helped themselves to the grass seed as soon as I could scatter it, and, a.d., they still scratched in the woods, roosted in the trees, and called to one another down by the creek on warming spring nights.

But latter-day pilgrims are arriving in droves, it seems, and our little northeast corner of Paulding County has been transformed into a patchwork of subdivisions. My journal confirms that we haven’t seen a gobbler on the property in more than two years.

For that I’m sorry. Otherwise, on this Thanksgiving Day, 2009, I will count my many blessings. Peace . . .

I was reading the paper in the little light-filled den on the southeast corner of our house the other morning when I heard the telltale “whump” of bird hitting glass. I got up to assess the damage and was relieved to see neither chickadee nor titmouse lying lifeless on the floor of the deck. But as I turned away, a flutter of motion caught my eye. Under a little plant stand out at the edge of the deck I saw the small bird flapping a helpless wing. I went out and gently picked it up, easing the other wing out from between two deck planks. Once settled in my palm, though, the little bird just rolled over onto its side, breathing, but, I figured, probably not for long.

And what a pretty thing. No, this wasn’t a chickadee or a titmouse, or a nuthatch or a winter-faded goldfinch—the familiar birds whose gray-black plumage matches the fading year. Here was a bird with a bright yellow, black-streaked breast and a cheery little yellow rump-spot as well. As I freely confess in The Armchair Birder (see “Confusing Fall Warblers”), I’m no warbler expert—largely because they never visit me here in my little piece of woodland. But here came one of the prettiest—a magnolia, if my reading of Peterson is correct—only to crash and break itself on my all-glass deck door.

I turned it right-side-up in my palm, and it seemed to perch there steadily enough, clearly on its feet rather than crumpled on its underside, eyes open, breath still regular. I held it like that for a couple of minutes, then, with other things to tend to, I eased it down onto the deck rail, where it continued to perch. When I checked five minutes later, it was still there. After another five minutes it was gone.

I know there’s every probability that it didn’t make it, that it toppled off the rail and onto the ground underneath the nandina. But we’ve all seen instances of birds being stunned by flying into windows, then recovering after a few minutes and flying away none the worse for the mishap.

So I’m hoping. I’m not checking.

Have you read Providence of a Sparrow: Lessons from a Life Gone to the Birds by Chris Chester? It’s a great book: beautifully written, moving, insightful, funny, and full of wonderful information about birds in general and house sparrows in particular. That’s because the book chronicles the author’s eight-year cohabitation with, at first, one house sparrow (which he rescued as a tiny hatchling) and, eventually, several additional house sparrows, along with a handful of zebra finches and a couple of parakeets. I should emphasize that none of these birds lived in a cage. Chris and his wife Rebecca never saw it coming, but the entire upstairs of their house evolved into an aviary.

So, anyway, I’m reading along, thoroughly enjoying myself, when I suddenly come upon this sentence about Chester’s purchase of his first zebra finches: “Many pet store finches are products of a level of inbreeding that makes our southern states look incest-free.”

Excuse me? Here’s a guy who grew up in Pennsylvania, spent his adult life in Oregon, and, I’m guessing, never set foot as far south as Virginia. But, OK, I read on and get over it. Then I get to this passage, again about sex & finches, and the commotion they make while mating: “If that popular metaphor for the interconnectedness of things known as ‘the butterfly effect’ is correct in pointing out that a butterfly flapping its wings in China affects weather distantly elsewhere, our finches are probably responsible for meteorological upheavals in any number of places. Monsoons in India, twisters in Arkansas wiping out trailer parks.”

Listen. I’m not sensitive. I just want to help. Chester clearly doesn’t realize he’s offending a sizable percentage of the U.S. population. He needs a gentle reprimand. So I Google the guy to see if I can come up with an e-mail address or website, some way to get in touch. Well, what I find out is that Chris Chester is dead. Died in 2007 of an undiagnosed cancer—a cancer that may have been undiagnosed because he was too depressed to seek medical treatment. (A fine account of Chester’s life and death can be found on-line; it appeared in the Oregonian, May 5, 2007, by Inara Verzemnieks and Douglas Perry.)

So let’s forget the reprimand. Instead, here’s another sentence from the book, about the ants that have infested the house: “Now and then I’d see a pair of them in the kitchen moving at a brisk pace as though late for a meeting where they were expected to speak.” Actually, that sentence, with its combination of close observation and great wit, is pretty darn typical of what—despite my own thin skin—I’m happy to admit is an utterly wonderful book.

Providence of a Sparrow. Spread the word.

Maybe it wasn’t the first bird song imitation contest ever, anywhere. Maybe it was just the first bird song imitation contest ever to take place at a literary festival. In any case, it was huge. It was, in daughter Ruthie’s vernacular, “epic.”

The room was packed. (Really. More than 100 people, which surprised the heckadoodle out of me.) I warmed the crowd up for the main event by reading the piece from The Armchair Birder on the wood thrush, whose ethereal song is probably the prettiest in North America. Then I took my seat next to the other judges, brother Richard and his son Lawson, giving the event another claim on history: a panel of judges all of whom were named Yow. We asked for a show of hands from people who intended to participate. I was concerned. What if there were 50? How would we get through the thing. Well, six people raised their hands. Perfect! That was exactly the number of prizes I had brought along.

For his imitation of a pterodactyl, Scott took the sixth-place prize: a pack of four little yellow replacement “stamens” to go in his hummingbird feeder. (It actually sounded like a pretty good imitation, but since nobody has ever heard a pterodactyl, we had to dock him a few points.) Bob White (he swore that was his name) won the coveted deck of “owl” playing cards for his imitation of—guess what?—a bob white. A couple of exotic women took home mini-sized hummer feeders (the woman at the Bird Watcher Supply Store guaranteed that the birds love them) for a couple of exotic imitations: a hadada ibis and an Indian quail.

First prize went to Chris—eight years old, ten at the most—who absolutely nailed the mourning dove. He won one of those little wooden things you twist back and forth to make bird calls. I’m pretty sure he was delighted.

Finally, the grand prize, which surprised nobody. Kristen, a 19-year-old coed from UNC-Asheville had utterly blown the room away with her imitation of a sandhill crane. I swear—if we had been outside and didn’t know better, everybody would have been craning their necks and searching the skies. Kristen won a copy of The Armchair Birder, inscribed to:

Grand Prize Winner

Bird Song Imitation Contest

Decatur Book Festival, 2009.

The whole thing was a riot, if I do say so. Thank you, Decatur.

The Armchair Birder World Tour ’09 stops this weekend (September 4 – 6) at the Decatur Book Festival in Atlanta. Free-thinking festival chief Tom Bell encouraged participants to do their own thing, so I complied. On Sunday at 2:30, at the Decatur Conference Center Stage, I will be hosting a bird song imitation contest. I see it working something like this: Contestants will announce the name of the bird they will imitate, then offer up their imitation, which will be immediately compared against a professional recording of said song. The panel of judges (consisting of my brother Richard and me) will factor in “degree of difficulty,” and, at the completion of the “song-off,” award fabulous prizes. If you’re reading this somewhere within whistling distance of Atlanta, come show your stuff.

On an entirely different note (several notes, in fact, have been left unsounded since my last post), did you realize that there’s just a whole different bunch of birds living right over yonder on the Georgia coast? (OK, you probably did.) Your Armchair Birder is mightily tempted to spend a few months watching the moon pull on the ocean while contemplating Volume Two.

These thoughts are prompted by a recent family vacation on Fripp Island, South Carolina—a bird-watching bonanza. We saw pelicans by the hundreds hunkered down early every morning on a sandbar that would be gone an hour later. We watched ospreys dive from 50 feet up and stab their talons into definitely pan-sized fish, then, shedding the heavy water, flap laboriously up and away, holding the fish always head-first into the wind. (We also saw an osprey nest full of young—full because the young were as big as the adults, but young ospreys are spoiled rotten and hate to leave home.)

We saw wood storks mucking in the muck when the waters receded from the marshlands—and occasionally saw the huge, striking birds lift off over the waving grasses. We saw snowy egrets with their “golden slippers,” and an especially proud tri-colored heron that preened in the sunlight while we gawked from maybe 25 feet away. (Algebra basically bewildered me: If you’re looking through 8 X 32 binoculars at a bird that’s 25 feet away, I can’t tell you exactly how close it seems, but it seems pretty damn close.)

We saw lots of birds, including—at the feeding station outside a nature center on neighboring Hunting Island—a female painted bunting.

It was all good. Stay tuned.

It’s raining, at last. I do believe we’ve been almost a month without what my horticulturist friend Don Hastings calls “significant rainfall.” By week’s end, though, the rain gauge should have something to report.

So now, with the leaves dripping and dry ground drinking, I’m listening for the call of the yellow-billed cuckoo–aka the “rain crow,” so named for its tendency to call out its throaty kuk-kuk-kuk-kuk-keow-keow-keowlp-keowlp when rain is in the wind.

It was a memorable day in my birding life when I first set eyes on this furtive bird, and not only because of its striking appearance: slender, elegant body; rich brown on top contrasted against the pale white underside; the long, curving, ivory-colored bill; and, most conspicuous of all, the pattern of white circles against black on the underside of its extra-long tail.

That was enough to get me started reading about this bird, and what I discovered was that everything about it is odd and wonderful. Take its nesting habits, for example. While its cousin across the Atlantic, the Old World cuckoo, is, like our cowbird, strictly a nest parasite, the yellow-bill does build its own nest. Sometimes. Then again, sometimes the female will lay her eggs in the nest of another yellow-bill. Then again, sometimes she will lay her eggs in a robin’s nest, or a thrush’s nest, or a cedar waxwing’s nest, or the nest of one of three or four other species.

Isn’t that odd? To me it’s very odd that the cowbird engages the services of foster parents to ensure the survival of the species, but at least it does so consistently. It’s way, way odder, I think, that the yellow-bill doesn’t know what it’s going to do until the time comes. Amazing, too, that if the female does decide to lay her eggs in the nest of another species, it’s usually one whose own eggs are the same blue-green color.

The yellow-bill’s eating habits are also fascinating. This bird loves caterpillars, even the hairy and spiny varieties most birds shun. In fact, according to Edward Forbush, its eager ingestion of these creatures has led to the development of perhaps the bird’s most unusual ability. “When, in time,” Forbush writes, “the inside of the bird’s stomach becomes so felted with a mass of hairs and spines that it obstructs digestion, the bird can shed the entire stomach-lining, meanwhile growing a new one–a process that would be beneficial to some unfeathered bipeds could they compass it.”

The doe has apparently decided that our sorry dogs pose no threat and that my tomatoes and cucumbers make lovely hors d’oeuvres. Consequently, over the past two weeks we’ve been able to watch as her two spindle-legged fawns grow out of their spots.

On the feeder I’m seeing the young cardinals now (”looks much like the female, but with blackish bill”). They’ve learned quickly that it’s all theirs–that they can sit on that dish and eat as many sunflower seeds as they can break open.

Along the driveway, the fuchsia crowns of bull thistles are bursting open, a reminder to the goldfinches that their heedless days are done and it’s time to get down to the serious business of nest-building and child-rearing.

Yesterday in the garden, looking down between my flip-flopped feet, I saw a pair of gold-green Japanese beetles writhing in a furious and passionate embrace.

In Atlanta, those two red-tailed hawk chicks have just now fledged. And, at last, inside the house, in the downstairs study-turned-bedroom, hearing those young birds cry from the treetops like untutored angels, my father can release his spirit from its worn shackles.

Rest in peace, dear old Dad.

In Highlands, NC, a few weeks back, mid-morning, I heard a bird singing from the crown of a tree in a clearing across the road. It was a pretty song–three or four phrases, slightly varied, and repeated insistently enough for me to pick up my nocs and walk across the road to investigate.

A robin. Cheerily, cheer-up, cheer, cheerily, cheer-up. Yep. That standard rendering is close enough, once I had finally put the actual bird and its song together. I wrote in The Armchair Birder that, deep in my woods, I don’t see summer robins and so never hear them sing. I’m about to decide that that’s OK.

I’m writing this in Charlottesville, VA, where we’re attending the wedding of a friend of our daughter Ruthie. This morning a cardinal started singing at 5:00 a.m., then, perhaps realizing that it was still well before daylight and that there had been considerable human bibulosity the night before, he had the good manners to shut up. But at 5:30 (still black-dark outside our open window) the robin tuned up. If my two recent experiences are any indication, once robins start, they don’t stop.

In fact, with the robin going full-out, the cardinal apparently decided to throw decency aside and joined in, and the two birds continued their a cappella concert until the rising sun completed the job of rousing the household.

I’m kinda looking forward to getting back to my woods, where the morning songs of wrens and titmice begin early, but not criminally early.

I got a call from my step-mom the other day telling me I probably ought to grab my binoculars and come into town (”town” being the middle of residential northside Atlanta). Some kind of big bird–probably a hawk, she figured–was raising a family in the top of one of her magnolia trees.

Whoa! What a sight. Did you know that a red-tailed hawk nestling is a big ball of snow-white fluff? Actually these two young were big enough to be upright in the nest, looking quite interested in the question of when their mother would arrive with their next meal. Pure white they were, with a bit of black marking their eyes, and we could hear a clear, drawn-out, high-pitched k-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-r, an infant version of the adult hawk’s call.

It was an interesting sighting for a number of reasons–not the least of which was that it called into question most of what I had written about this bird in The Armchair Birder. In the first place, why were we seeing baby hawks in late June? Redtails–at least according to the experts I consulted–are early nesters, with eggs in the nest by March or early April at the latest.

I had also written that, while I certainly had redtails in my woods and saw them regularly cruising the treetops or circling high overhead, I was unlikely ever to find their nest. The bird is so skittish, I wrote, that “you can’t get within a hundred yards of one,” and dependable Arthur Cleveland Bent maintained that if you wanted to observe the home life of these birds, you needed a blind that offered “absolute concealment.” But here we all were–me, brother Richard, step-mom Camille–standing in her driveway with our binoculars gawking away as the mother bird flew in to the nest no more than fifty feet above our heads.

In one respect, though, I believe I was correct. I was defending the redtail against Audubon’s charge (and a popular opinion in his day) that the redtail was the notorious “chicken hawk.” Audubon believed the Louisiana Creoles of his acquaintaince had good reason to call this bird the grand mangeur des poules, given its inclination to “visit the farm-houses, to pay its regards to the poultry.”

Well, I don’t know what that mama bird was fetching home for dinner, but I know this: You’ll find tennis courts and swimming pools aplenty in Camille’s neighborhood, but you ain’t gonna find any chicken coops.