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.