Other than Christmas, the event I look forward to the most each year is the Georgia Botanical Society’s Wildflower Pilgrimage. The three-day gathering of nature lovers takes place each spring in a different part of the state and offers several field trips to surrounding natural areas, many of which are off the beaten path.
This year's pilgrimage, held last weekend, was based in Carrollton in west Georgia. As usual, it provided a chance to visit areas that are seldom, if ever, visited by the public because of their remoteness, private ownership or strict protection.
A morning field trip that I opted for, for instance, was to a remote, seldom-visited area near the boundary of Sweetwater Creek State Park in Douglas County. We followed park ranger Don Scarbrough to the edge of a large pond, where we came upon a breathtaking view of a great blue heron rookery -- some 50 nests, made of sticks, scattered among several tall sycamore trees.
Some of the nests already had chicks, whose heads we could see. We watched quietly and unobtrusively as the adults tended the nests, perched statuesque on high branches or glided about in graceful flight.
For an afternoon trip, several of us went to a heavily wooded 300-acre farm on Tally Mountain in Haralson County owned by artist Charles Thompson. Our leader, Tom Patrick, a botanist with the Department of Natural Resources, billed it as an “exploratory trip” because we were not sure what we would find. One nice find was a small stand of rare mountain longleaf pine.
A pleasant surprise was a spectacular American beech tree. One of us got out a tape measure and wrapped it around the big trunk -- 64.5 inches around. The tree stood amidst a lush growth of blooming mayapples, whose blossoms almost always are white. But we found several pink ones -- the first time I had ever seen such color in mayapples. We speculated something in the soil caused the flowers to turn a beautiful pink.
On a daylong field trip, we followed naturalist Malcolm Hodges to the Camp Meeting Rock Preserve in Heard County. Owned and managed by the Nature Conservancy of Georgia, it is a 110-acre granite rock outcrop, one of the largest in the Southeast. In short, it was one of the most beautiful spots I have seen in Georgia. With its spring flowers -- some rare and endangered -- blooming in and around rain-filled pools in the rock, the preserve looked like a giant, landscaped Japanese garden, an awe-inspiring sight.
In the sky: The moon will be in its last quarter on Sunday -- rising about midnight and setting around midday, said David Dundee, an astronomer with the Tellus Science Museum. After being out of sight for several weeks, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter reappear low in the east just before dawn. Venus rises out of the east about three hours before sunrise. Saturn rises out of the east at dark and is visible throughout the night. Though its peak has passed, the Lyrid meteor shower is still visible this weekend. Look to the northeast from about 2 a.m. until dawn.
