By Sally Sears
If the great blue heron knew we were watching, he didn’t show it.
His fiery yellow eyes glared into the cold water of the pond in Rock Creek beside the old granite quarry.
Legs like stilts upheld his football sized body, blue like the water.
A few feet upstream, a sudden curve of a slick black comma told us an otter was noiselessly working the same pond.
Susan Berthelot took a knee, her long camera lens at a perfect horizontal. She caught the instant the heron’s neck uncurled. The beak came up empty.
One leg bent backwards, moving the heron inches upstream. Another strike. Nothing.
A minute passed. The otter dove under. Eric Bowles’ view finder did not move from his eye.
A third lunge of that impossibly long beak. Success. A silver fish, maybe four inches long, wiggled in the heron’s bill. It kept moving as it slid down the throat.
Life and death for breakfast.
We turned to each other wide eyed. The hunt wowed the nine quiet birdwatchers on that cold Sunday when Georgia Audubon searched the public parks in Morningside for the Christmas Bird Count.
Breakfast is life or death for many birds. Finding enough to eat is constant. Georgia Audubon Conservation director Adam Betuel reminds me birds cannot store much fat because they have to be light enough to fly. Sothey eat all the time.
Life or death for the fish, too. It grew from minnow to meal in the healthier habitat of the South Fork of Peachtree Creek, joining a growing number of living things calling the urban watershed home. This critical flyway along Peachtree Creek’s tributaries is important enough the US Fish and Wildlife Service named it one of only 17 Urban Wildlife Refuges in the nation.
The heron and the otter were still fishing as we moved away to count other birds.
By noon we'd seen 46 different species of birds in about 2 miles of creek flowing through Herbert Taylor Park, Zonolite Park and Morningside Nature Preserve.
When we finally put our cameras down leader Eric Bowles reached deep into his I-Bird digital records to compare our totals to prior years.
It revealed the best kind of reward.
Every year in Zonolite alone we've seen more species.
24 in 2018. 28 the next year. 29 in 2020 and then this year, a new record.
31 different kinds of birds.
This steady growth in species is a payoff for the work of restoring native plants to the creek banks. Birds and humans are finding these parks a good place to be as a new year begins.
That cold Sunday was two days before Georgia's runoff election. In the urgent days that followed, it was easy to forget the victory in nature.
The goals of this trail and creek restoration stretch well into the future. Still, the rewards are all around us, waiting for us to pay attention. One bird at a time.
