Walking the Sweetwater White Trail

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of visiting Sweetwater Creek S.P. Pleasure, partly, because it's the closest state park to my home. I am famously 5-10 minutes late to other birding sites. Here, I was actually early.

My other observation is that when a birdwalk is run by a park ranger rather than an audubon volunteer, the park ranger waits for stragglers :-) Volunteers who are birding on their time leave right at the top of the hour, on the button, no exceptions. The park ranger is AT work already!

Now, before the birding, an aside about the Visitor Center at the park. As a state conservation park, the visitor's center was designed and built green. It was finished in 2006, classified as a LEED Platinum building. We got a tour of the rooftop garden. Just as the building was finished, they lost funding, so the proposed landscaping was left incomplete. This prompted the rangers to opt for native Georgia plants rather than invasive non-natives. They are also harvesting the seeds from locations from throughout the park system. So, they are slowly removing any non-native invasive plantings already there and replacing with Georgia native plantings.

There's another notable difference between ranger-led hikes and audubon hikes. The ranger know his park. He likes his park. His house is in the park. He wants you to see lots of his park. That means you're going on a hike, which includes watching birds. Whereas the audubon folks can spend twenty minutes in the parking lot, the ranger was having none of that.

So what did I learn this trip? I learned that I've learned. When it came to binocular skills, I was near the top of the pack. When it came to spotting birds, I was right in the center. When it came to identification, I was also right in the center. I learned the names of birders I'd seen on other hikes, and discovered that many of them were more amateur than I thought. I learned that I should have bought a Sibley book ages ago.

The other thing I learned from the park ranger. As I said, he knew his park, so as we birded, he pointed out areas where they had spent considerable time and energy eradicating those non-native plant species. For half the walk, I wondered why he was so proud of that. The native species taking over weren't more attractive, in my estimation, and some were downright scraggly. But at one point, he elaborated on how the native plants actually improved the landscape for birds. For example, while dense grass like you see on green lawns might look great, it doesn't give birds many places to hide while feeding. By contrast, the scrubby native grasses provided perfect places for them to dive down and pop back up, watching for predators and feeding in turn.

"The birds are coming back here," he said. "When you walk through here enough, you can actually tell where the native plants have taken over by the number of birds you see and hear. They actually differentiate between habitats that exist just a hundred yards apart."

What goes for birds also goes for butterflies. They are introducing butterfly counts at this park. And the numbers are slowly increasing.

It was like a light went off in my head. No longer was this native plant species thing a nice, slightly greenie thing to do, just as a bragging point. I'm sorry to all the people who already knew, but I did not. I did not know the native plants were healing the habitat.

Now I do. Thanks to a quiet park ranger.

--Laura