Roadside botany full of beauty

Though summer’s start is less than a month away, I still have a lingering case of spring fever. For a cure, some fellow nature lovers and I last weekend went looking for the icons of spring —- birds and flowers.

For the flowers, instead of tramping through woods, fields and swamps —- as we usually do —- we members of the Georgia Botanical Society stuck to what we call “roadside botany.” In carpools, we drove along several Forest Service gravel roads winding through the Chattahoochee National Forest in mountainous Gilmer and Fannin counties and looked for botanical treasures along the way. When we found them, we stopped for closer looks.

Never straying more than a few feet from the roadside, we found an incredible array of wildflowers, ferns and other plants, including six species of blooming trilliums, along the way. Particularly impressive were growths of ferns, including New York, cinnamon, maidenhair, wood, lady and Christmas ferns, that we could see carpeting the forest floor along the roads. “I don’t know if I’ve seen more luxuriant growths of ferns,” said Richard Ware of Rome, with whom I was carpooling.

In fact, because of abundant rainfall this spring, the woods are the lushest and greenest I’ve seen them in years. Nearly every square centimeter of forest and roadside seems to be occupied by a green plant.

Another stunning roadside sight in the Chattahoochee forest last weekend was an amazing display of purple-flowered wild geraniums with white-flowered foam flowers blooming among them. Their blooms covered the roadside for miles on end.

Other noteworthy blooms included white-flowered Solomon’s plume, Solomon’s seal and four-leaved milkweed; and a small colony of yellow lady slippers.

Birds: For the birds, I went to one of my favorite venues, the Clyde Shepherd Nature Preserve, a five-minute drive from my home in Decatur.

We encountered only 31 species, not surprising because of a rainy, overcast morning. “Not good birding weather,” said our leader, Lisa Hurt of Atlanta Audubon.

Nevertheless, as we stood on the observation platform overlooking a beaver pond, two pairs of wood ducks swam in front of us. The multicolored male wood duck probably is North America’s most beautiful duck.

Rough-winged swallows swooped and dived over the water. “Like fighter pilots,” Hurt said. A magnificent red-shouldered hawk landed on a tall snag across from us, allowing us to admire him for several minutes. Then, from the woods came the flute-like “e-o-lay, e-o-lay” of a wood thrush, one of the world’s sweetest songsters. “Thank you for singing on such an overcast day,” Hurt said.

Finally, at the end of our walk, we spied a baby screech owl peering out from its nest in a tree hollow.

In the sky: The moon is first quarter this evening —- in the south at sunset and setting around midnight, says David Dundee, astronomer with the Tellus Northwest Georgia Science Museum. Mercury is low in the east just before sunrise. Venus, shining brightly, and Mars are low in the east just before sunrise. Jupiter rises out of the east at midnight. Saturn rises out of the east before sunset and appears close to the moon Sunday night.