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.