The Confluence Trail in Winter

By Dorothy Sussman

For most of my life, I have lived near water.  Growing up, it was the Hudson River in Northern New York, but for nearly five decades, I’ve lived not far from the South Fork of Peachtree Creek.  For many of those years, though, I hardly knew it existed. When I did notice it, I did so from a state highway bridge because the Creek was nearly impossible to access.

I remember my amazement when I first walked on the Confluence Trail as it broadened to a meadow near the point where the South and the North Forks joined. So this was the Creek! Who knew? We worked with a Boy Scout troop to whack and pull up choking invasives. Another time, people joined to plant chestnuts and another to pick up trash in a swale and another to mow the trail or help with native tree plantings.  Hard, gratifying work and lots of it. 

Today, I walk the trail with relative ease. I get on at Armand Park in my neighborhood and fairly soon reach a rain garden right on the trail.  It’s a glorious and thoughtfully constructed assembly of honey-colored boulders and native plants that slows storm-water runoff coming from a nearby culvert, preventing erosion and pollution of the creek. Right now, the plants are dormant (they need a rest, too), and the boulders even more prominent. Together, they hold the soil as if to say, “We’re staying put.”

Farther on, dun-colored river oats hug the banks as I walk through a cathedral of trees. Here the trail offers a fuller view of the creek itself as it meanders along before approaching the I-85 overpass. A snapping turtle suns itself on a log that juts into the water. Birds keep watch from water oaks and pines. Ahead, native trees and plants, such as yellowwood and sumac, installed a few years ago with the help of Trees Atlanta volunteers, dot the landscape. When they leaf out in spring, these natives and many others will help mute nearby highway traffic. 

And then, across the meadow, rises the magnificent 175-foot-long Confluence Bridge that now spans the junction of the North and South Forks. It glows copper in the sun, beckoning people like you and me to pause for a bird’s eye-view of the creek and then to walk the trail. When it opens, the bridge will also sport a ramp replete with viewing platforms, that we can take to enter the Confluence Trail going south or to head north and connect to other parts of the trail system. I can’t wait!

During this pandemic year, the Confluence Trail has been a gift to many people, offering us a way to be in the natural world—in all seasons. I hope you will make time in your lives to walk the trail whenever you can and take in its rugged yet fragile beauty. You might even decide you’d like to get involved in protecting the creek and its trails, and that would be all right with me.  Perfect, in fact.

Life & Death for Breakfast

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.

Floating Through Morningside

By Sally Sears

With a whoosh, our inflatable kayak filled with air as we launched our adventure on the South Fork of Peachtree Creek. My friend Amy Cromwell and I had mapped out our plan to float the creek from Emory to Morningside’s Zonolite Park, and a brilliant Saturday morning was the perfect time for our trip.

We slid down a steep bank at Clifton Road, noting the din of traffic on the corridor overhead and dropped the kayak into the creek. Wading into the water, we covered the first 15 feet easily, guiding the kayak as it bumped into rocks, and stumbling some in the boots of our chest-high waders. The next 100 yards were tougher. Water seeped into our leaky boots; rocks punched at the kayak, testing its hull.  Would it hold? Whose idea was this anyway?

Then, at Sage Hill one sweet pool was deep enough for us to float a few yards. Delicious! Too soon I felt the rocks through the bottom of the kayak as it flexed, so I  got out to walk. The water level was higher at the South Fork’s junction with Peavine Creek, so we were able to float there. We passed easily under the bridge at Briarcliff Road and into Herbert Taylor Park. The sand bar ahead held company: a mom and two children startled as we floated past. Our boots were heavy with water, our arms scratched from overhanging branches we’d tangled with earlier. Still, Amy and I felt pretty righteous.

At the next turn, a blue heron stared us into silence. The creek was quiet; dogwoods lifted their first red leaves skyward, and the sun caught on mica flakes, sparkling them to life. Past the bridge at Johnson Road and the US Geological Survey monitoring station, the creek spread out and grew shallow again.

Walking, I discovered that the sandy banks weren’t as firm as they were upstream. They sucked at my boots.

We neared Zonolite Park, where the bank sloped enough to take out the kayak easily, but the last 100 yards held the biggest challenge. The three-foot-wide trunk of a poplar spanned the creek at water level, blocking mounds of styrofoam and human-tossed junk. We tried lifting the kayak up the steep bank, but kudzu made the climb too treacherous. We considered shoving the kayak through the junk, but Amy found other logs beneath the poplar. Then, in one graceful maneuver, she scaled the trunk, cracked one of the submerged logs with her feet, and tugged the kayak through the mess to the final sand bar. Bolstered by her success, I scrambled up and over and felt my boot slip on the bark. Face first, I landed in the creek.  Total immersion! Cold, wet, and done!

Time to head back to Emory. Our three-hour float ended with a seven-minute drive to our starting point. What an adventure. We are already planning our next float.