From this place forward

Part 1 in a series covering my project of birding every county in Georgia

Tavia’s Trail, Moody Forest Wildlife Management Area, Appling County, Georgia

FROM THIS PLACE forward, everything is new. I will not look back except to laugh and remember and express thanks for those who have carried me to this place along the trail. I will not turn around in nostalgia or in a desire to escape the path ahead, even though I will surely get lost and injured and days will come when I will want nothing more than to go home again. But my home has been emptied and sold, it has gone down the river, and I cannot go back.

My life, like anyone’s I suppose, has come in chapters, and those chapters have comprised books, and those books have made a story. We are all stories.

Today I find myself between books. The old one has closed and a new one waits. This trail, Tavia’s Trail, lies between them: a remote place where my self-consciousness evaporates, a silence in which I can hear things. I am exhilarated. I walk along its soft sand, left behind by an ocean that receded some seventy million years ago, and I stop. I hear something. Above the clamor of towhees I hear a voice that begins with a wheeze and ends with a trill. Like the trill of a towhee but steadier, more deliberate. It is, to my ear, a new voice.

Notice the habitat. Its open pines and complete lack of understory make it unusual. There is no heavy brush, no thickets, no saplings, just tall pines and wiregrass and young saw palmetto and short scattered weeds. This is by design. This land was burned a few years ago; you can still see the carbon low on the pines. Some time from now it will be burned again. The pines will survive and the wiregrass will not. But it will return, for its roots will remain, and the cycle will start again.

This burning benefits wildlife. For hundreds of thousands of years this habitat was common in the land temporarily called Georgia, when wildfires burned without human interference, before the state was logged from the mountains to the sea. Across these millenia birds like the Bachman’s sparrow and the red-cockaded woodpecker, specialists who cannot survive outside this particular habitat, found plenty of places to rest their heads and raise their families. But no longer. The loss of habitat has translated directly into loss of birds and today both species are in peril. So we, wiser now than in days past, burn their homes that they may live.

I stand in place and stare out across the wiregrass, empty my mind and look for movement. I find my bird, my lifer Bachman’s sparrow, singing atop a blackened pine stump fifty yards distant. I record him on eBird, my first and, it turns out, only lifer on my three-day trip to South Georgia.

I came down here to bird a small set of rural counties, neither in the mountains nor on the sea, well off the interstates, counties with no notable cities and nothing in particular that we might desire to visit them. These days, even more than usual, I am drawn to such places. Lonely, forgotten landscapes offer me respite, they resonate with and nurture the interior silence I try so hard to maintain as I live out my days in the city. Such places give me permission to feel what I have always felt most deeply and for as long as I can remember: an enduring, unfathomable sadness.

This blog is an attempt to gather my thoughts as I work through vast personal changes at the threshold of my later years. In response to these changes I will be birding each of Georgia’s 159 counties, and my progress will be charted here. I expect this project to cover several years because I have a family and a job and a full life in Atlanta. Themes of grief, place, religious struggle, natural history, and wonder will emerge in the days ahead, all in the context of my mission to know my home state and its fabulous birds more intimately than ever.

You are invited to check in every once and again. I hope you will.