At 5:20 a.m. on a Monday morning, I sat in my car in a large, empty parking lot surrounded by pitch-black darkness and wondered if I was crazy. Should I walk alone down the forested trail beside the Chattahoochee River, as planned? No other vehicles or people were in sight.
The mid-May sunrise was still well over an hour away. A reflection of the waning crescent moon created a moonglade on the river’s surface. In the far distance, I could see an orange streak: the headlights of cars and trucks speeding across a highway bridge over the river.
Overcoming my trepidation, I locked my car, turned on a small flashlight, and proceeded down the public walking trail in the darkness. The sound of thundering traffic on a nearby interstate highway retreated. But for the slap of river water against rocks and a few singing tree frogs, chirping crickets, and buzzing insects, the path into the Cochran Shoals unit of the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area was quiet. The morning air was still. It was simultaneously spooky and calming.
Feathered orchestra
From deep in the forest, I heard a barred owl with its distinctive hooting call, memorably described as “Who cooks for you?” Turning onto a smaller trail through wetlands, I paused on a boardwalk, listening to the deep, “jug-o-rum” calls of a bullfrog, and admired the silhouettes of trees against the dawning sky.
Suddenly, a Northern Cardinal in a bush near me pierced the early morning with one of its sixteen different calls. It was 6:08 a.m., half an hour before the official sunrise. The dawn chorus had begun! Slowly, and then more swiftly, the twitterings, tweetings, and chirps of wild birds joined together in song to herald the first light. Hope and promise for a new day.
My Merlin app – a mobile application developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology – lit up with names to match the mostly male birdsong. Wood thrush, vireo, warbler, scarlet tanager, eastern bluebird, indigo bunting, Carolina wren, hawk, swallow, woodpecker, yellowthroat, eastern kingbird, goldfinch, heron, and more. Thirty-two distinct bird voices in all.
Researchers believe that the dawn chorus, which peaks in May, is primarily about courting female birds, defending territory, and communicating food locations. This theory holds that only the strongest, best-fed males will produce the loudest songs, attracting females and deterring rival males.
I much prefer to believe, as Terry Tempest Williams writes in “When Women Were Birds,” that wild birds sing at dawn to heal the world through joy. To remind us of the wonder of life and that the world is meant to be celebrated.
Land conserved for all
America’s public lands, like the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, are places where we can experience the dawn chorus in protected forests and along rivers that belong to all of us: our natural heritage. Set aside for public use and enjoyment over the past 150 years, these federal, state, and local lands offer natural history lessons, natural beauty, and stories about our shared past. They safeguard the wondrous variety of species that live on our planet.
Alarmingly, our cherished public lands in the United States are under siege by the Trump administration. Over the past year, actions have been taken that will harm the places that inspire us, enrich our well-being, provide exceptional recreation opportunities, serve as havens for wildlife, and sustain local economies. Trump’s federal agencies are exploiting the public trust and selling our natural heritage to the highest bidder. The list of outrages is staggering and ongoing.
Visit Alaska now, before it is ravaged by mining companies, loggers, and climate change. Ditto the Boundary Waters wilderness and its lakes, where Trump’s people have opened the door for sulfide-ore copper mining in its watershed. Think heavy metals and sulfuric acid draining into pristine waterways. In time for Mother’s Day this year, officials repealed the “public lands rule,” eliminating the (overwhelmingly popular) requirement that conservation be considered alongside mining, drilling, timber, and grazing across 245 million acres of public lands.
Despite strong opposition to these attacks on the lands that belong to all of us, we are losing our country–one national park, forest, river, wildlife species, desert, mountain range, and cultural site at a time.
Hero for Atlanta and the world
Like many Atlantans and millions of people around the world, I’ve been thinking and reading about Ted Turner since he died on May 6. In fact, I can’t stop. Ted was our city’s bigger-than-life hero: an authentic, fun, complex, steadfast believer in saving all life on this fragile planet. With his outsized vision for the world, Ted could see the dangerous trajectory of our overexploitation of nature – what it would do to all species on Earth, including humans.
“Save Everything” was not just the bumper sticker on Ted’s small electric car; it was what he tried to do as he conserved millions of acres of land and invested in habitat protection and restoration for rare and endangered species. Public lands are important for environmental protection, but so is private land. Ted revived entire ecosystems. His conservation successes helped the recovery of grizzly bears and wolves, prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets, birds, sea turtles, native trout, large mammals, plants, and the American bison.
Ted approached life with a relentless belief that even the most impossible goals were achievable, be they global communication, peacemaking, or the protection of all life on Earth. His greatest legacy may be this fearless conviction that dreams can be realized, if we “work like hell,” and don’t let setbacks stop our forward movement. I can’t imagine a more important time in our country’s history than now to embrace his philosophy.
