We boated down the beautiful Satilla River in Brantley County deep in South Georgia the other day to look for migrating Mississippi and swallow-tailed kites.
With its numerous sloughs, oxbow lakes and bottomland swamps, the Satilla provides the type of habitat preferred by the birds, which, along with hawks and eagles, are raptors.
Kites also are some of Georgia’s most gracefully flying birds. Birdwatchers travel far afield to see them. In particular, the swallow-tailed kite, with its long, forked tail, has been called a “breathtaking master of flight.”
Alas, it was a slow day for kites: We saw only three Mississippis and no swallow-tails.
Nevertheless, it was reward enough to be on the Satilla, said to be one of the South’s most scenic and natural rivers. Rising in Ben Hill County, the undammed Satilla flows 260 twisting miles across Georgia‘s flat Coastal Plain and meets the Atlantic Ocean at St. Andrews Sound.
Riding in a boat with my friends Royce and Christa Hayes, we followed our mutual friend, Gordon Rogers, in his boat.
Few people know the Satilla better than Rogers — a former Satilla riverkeeper and now the Flint riverkeeper. While we ate lunch on one of the river’s glistening, sugar-white sandbars (found at nearly every river bend), Rogers explained that the Satilla is one of Georgia’s five major blackwater streams.
Such streams are characterized by a deep, slow-moving channel through densely forested swamps and other wetlands. As the vegetation decays, tannic acids leach into the water and give it the color of strong tea. In stunning scenes, the dark water reflects a variety of trees and shrubs crowding the banks.
Rogers led us into one of the Satilla’s biologically rich oxbow lakes, Long Lake, where cypress trees more than 1,000 years old stand in the tranquil water. (Oxbows are crescent-shaped lakes formed when a bend of a river is cut off from the main channel.)
It’s uplifting, Rogers said, to know that 14.5 miles of riverbank — including Long Lake — and 4,500 acres in the Satilla basin are being protected from development through conservation easements sold by private landowners to the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service.
More information on the Satilla: http://www.satillariverkeeper.org.
IN THE SKY: The moon will be full on Tuesday night — the "Fruit Moon," as the Cherokee peoples called this month's full moon, said David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer. Mercury is low in the east just before sunrise. Venus is very low in the west just after dark and sets shortly thereafter. Mars and Jupiter are low in the east just before sunrise. Saturn is low in the southwest just after dark and sets about three hours later.
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