On lost causes and nemesis birds

Part 6 in a series covering my project of birding every county in Georgia

Shortleaf pines, A.H. Stephens State Park, Taliaferro County, Georgia. It was so very hot that day.

I SPEND THE SABBATH at yet another government entity named for a Confederate big shot. A. H. Stephens State Park lies along the northern limits of Crawfordsville in the heart of the state’s least populous county. Between 1861 and 1865 Alexander Hamilton Stephens, a Crawfordsville native, served as the vice president of the Confederate States of America under Jefferson Davis, who he did not like, then as governor of Georgia in 1882-1883.

A few weeks before the first shots of the Civil War were fired, Stephens delivered his so-called Cornerstone Speech to a packed Savannah theater. In this speech he openly attacked the Declaration of Independence and its foundational idea that all men are created equal:

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

He used scripture to justify his position, covering himself with the old Curse of Ham fig leaf and including this forced reference to Psalm 118.22:

This stone [the superiority of the “white race”] which was “rejected by the first builders” [Founding Fathers]—“is become the chief of the corner”—the real corner-stone of our new edifice.

Stephens delivered his speech in March 1861. And there, out in the warming light of August 2023, stands the tragic sign: A. H. Stephens State Park. I drive past it and then past Stephens’ restored home. On the front lawn a tall white statue of the man shines with belligerance in the morning sun. I stop at the gatehouse for a map and enter the park, wondering at the hold the Lost Cause has maintained on so many of my fellow southerners.

I park and step out of the car into a vast and palpable silence. The plaintive weep of an eastern wood pewee sounds from deep in the trees to the west.

It is church hour in Georgia. I think of my small community gathering at that moment on the ground floor of a church in Decatur. Andrea is preaching today and I am missing it; I feel bad. Cecil, eighty years old, is reading the announcements. After Andrea finishes her sermon and offers communion, Cecil will walk slowly to the lectern, shuffle his papers, look up, and begin as he always does: “Boy have I got some news for you.” Jonathan will lead the group of doctors, recovering addicts, ex-convicts, teachers, children, nurses, gay couples, straight couples, wanderers, political operatives, grocery store clerks, CDC employess, retirees, and general misfits as they join hands and sing the morning’s last song.

But I am here, alone in Taliaferro County, in search of a reset. I spent the previous day in rural Alabama at the funeral of a dear friend, a friend of my childhood and my first college roommate. He was an only child who died suddenly last week and is survived by two elderly parents.

During visitation my friend’s mother bent low over his open casket and talked to him for five full minutes, touching his face and saying what holy words I do not know, while his father stood by in silence. Chris and I went different directions after that first semester of college. He became what he always was: a good old Alabama boy, the real deal. I joined the funeral procession in my Corolla, surrounded by trucks with Trump stickers and confederate flag plates. Sweat ran down my back as a military detail played Taps, folded the burial flag, and presented it to the new widow, seated with her children in the shade of the tent. Prayers were offered to a God of strength and compassion and we left before the coffin was lowered.

I make for the woods. An equestrian trail opens before me, wide, stamped with hoofprints and interspersed with muddy bogs. The map shows this trail running along a lake, but I discover that in actuality it does no such thing. I can see the lake to the south, shining dimly beyond the trees and brush, teasing me, but no paths open toward it. After a half mile the trail turns north and I say goodbye to the prospect of herons and kingfishers. I am dismayed; the forest is empty of birds; I turn around. 

Ten minutes later, at a bend in the trail in a low sun-dappled place, I see movement in a young maple. No sound, just a quick small shift of light and leaf. I pull up my binoculars, find the bird, and gasp. I cannot believe what I see. 

I do not presume to understand religion. I cannot grasp the cosmic significance of even my own modest religious community, gathered on this very Sabbath, seeking again to orient itself properly to the secret of the world. I cannot account for humanity’s murderous knack for hatred, for making enemies of brothers and sisters, for making war, and for glorifying it all. And I can only sit in silence as a mother weeps over the coffin of her only child. If I ever believed that I could understand such things by going to college, or to seminary, or by teaching, or by preaching, or, God help me, by thinking, then I am as vain a fool as ever took up space and breathed air. Such knowledge is too high for me.

But when I lift my binoculars to the bird in the young maple I know this: I am looking at a Kentucky warbler. I know this instantly and completely, even though until that moment I had never in my life seen a single living bird of that species. In fact, for about three years up to that moment, the Kentucky warbler had been my nemesis bird.

A nemesis bird is a thing in birding. Your nemesis bird is usually not rare, but uncommon, the kind of bird you should see a few times a year. You look up this creature on eBird and it shows up on lots of local lists. All your bird friends have seen this bird. They tell you where you can go to see it. Go to Lyon Farm, they say, walk along the creek west of the farmhouse. So you go to Lyon Farm and you walk along the creek west of the farmhouse once, twice, five times; you do not see this bird. Nor do you hear it, even though everyone insists, with perfectly straight faces, that it is quite vocal. You have never, in six solid years of birding, found this bird. You begin to suspect a conspiracy: somewhere, someone is laughing. Finally, in order to keep yourself sane, you give up. You forget about it.

Except you don’t, because one day you visit a lonely place in a lonely county and walk through a late summer wood bereft of birds, and then you come across a bird, just one bird, and you pull up your binoculars and there it is, your nemesis, and you nearly pass out.

The intellectual pleasure of seeing a bird you have only ever seen in books, and of identifying it immediately and without ambiguity, comes directly from the hand of God. This is difficult to explain and quite personal. As meager as it seems, such knowledge—that is a Kentucky warbler—serves for me as fixed point in a world of tumult and chance, a small but unequivocal gift in a world of loss, a pearl of great price. It carries a strange existential significance, suggesting that the world might make sense after all, and giving me a jolt of happiness wholly out of proportion to the physical event itself. 

The warbler flies away, low into the brush opposite the trail, and is gone. I hang around for fifteen minutes more, hoping to see the bird again, but the woods stand as silent and empty as before. I am buoyant. The Kentucky warbler has completed my day and possibly my week. I shoulder my camera, turn my back on that sun-dappled place, and follow the trail back into the wounded inscrutable world.