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.

Your Armchair Birder is back from Asheville, North Carolina, and a book signing at Malaprops Bookstore & Café, the laid-back hangout where native Ashevillians chill with their lattes and lit. I talked about my book to a dozen or 15 enthusiasts, one of whom threw me a bit off stride by asking why I hadn’t been on the birdwalk that morning just a little way out of town on the Blue Ridge Parkway. “We saw 11 kinds of warblers,” she told me, and proceeded to start listing: Kentucky, hooded, blackburnian, yellow-throated, American redstart, black-throated blue, cerulean (yes! cerulean)–I mean, it went on and on.

I had to tell her, “Whoa, whoa. Who wants to be on a fragrant mountainside looking at 11 kinds of warblers when they can be in the line of cattle being prodded from room to room in the Biltmore House?”

But Dede and I loved Asheville–and Malaprops. May the independent bookstore not merely endure, but prevail.

Back home, the chickadees that took over the bluebird house are beginning to feed their just-hatched young, and the phoebes that have returned, once again, to the beam under the eave of the front porch must be very close to the end of incubation. (Last year–and it couldn’t have been more than a day or two before fledging–a big milksnake gobbled up the babies. This year I hope to be more vigilant, though I don’t know how.)

Then, yesterday evening, I heard the distinctive chick-burr, chick-burr, and looked just off the porch to see, on the limb of a pine tree surprisingly close to the ground, that most spectacular sign of summertime in my own lovely woods–the gorgeous scarlet tanager.

So to heck with 11 kinds of warblers.