I always find my solace and peace outdoors. Recently, I was in Louisiana to attend a funeral. It was an emotionally trying time. I awakened at 6 a.m. There were no more details to attend to - nothing left to do but wait for the 2 p.m. services. I tried to go back to sleep, but I was awake.

I grabbed my binoculars and headed out. I had no place in mind. I was in Bastrop, La., in Morehouse Parish in the northeast corner of the state. Bastrop is only seven miles from Mer Rouge, where I grew up. I had even attended Bastrop High School for one year.

Some of the landmarks were easily recognized, Bayou Bartholomew and Bussey Brake Reservoir looked much the same as they did so many years ago. I thought I would go into the Georgia-Pacific Wildlife Management Area, but try as I might, I could not remember how to get there.

Then I came upon a sign for Chemin-A-Haute State Park. I decided to go in and take a look around. I pulled off the entrance road at a wooded area. It was a young and brushy stand of mixed hardwood and pine. I hadn’t even closed the car door, when I heard an old friend. A hooded warbler was in the dense underbrush, singing.

As I was trying to determine if there was a path I could take to perhaps get a glimpse of this secretive choruser, I saw a flash of yellow to my left. It was a Kentucky warbler, another early successional species.

As I got good looks at the Kentucky, the woods and roadside began to ring with birdsong. I could hear the rolling “witchity-witchity-witchity” of a common yellowthroat. An adamant indigo bunting was calling from the power line along the roadside. Towhees and robins and song sparrows had all joined in.

I heard a buzzy trill that caught my attention. Worm-eating, I thought. But wait, I was in Louisiana, not Western North Carolina. I listened more intently to see if maybe it was some jazzed up pine warbler.

To clarify things, a pine warbler sang its ringing trill while the worm-eating warbler buzzed away. I checked a range map when I got back in my car and it showed north Louisiana to be the southern most edge of the worm-eating’s nesting range.

I drove into the park. Great-crested flycatchers called out from the tops of the large oaks that surrounded the open areas. Bluebirds were present in the open spaces and I could hear another flycatcher, the eastern wood pewee, calling from deeper in the woods. Red-bellied woodpeckers were also present in the large oaks. It was a pretty birdy spot.

I thought I remembered a lake at the park. I asked one of the park staff and he directed me to it. In the south, standing water and cypress trees equal prothonatary warblers.

I found the lake. There was a parking area and a path that followed the shoreline. From the parking area, I watched a pair of downy woodpeckers playing tag. I stepped onto the wooded trail and immediately heard the loud “kawop” of a yellow-billed cuckoo. It shook memories loose.

As a kid I spent what seems like endless lifetimes in a shack on a small lake surrounded by woods. In the summer the woods rang with the different songs of the cuckoo. Besides the sharp call described above, cuckoos have a longer song that starts out rapid and then slows; “ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-kop-kop-kop.” They also have a softer almost cooing note.

Their propensity to sing when the summer skies would darken preceding a thunder storm led to the moniker I knew these birds by as a youngster - rain crow. This slender, handsome neotropical migrant is suffering significant decline.

Where I stopped to admire the rain crow, I heard the song of a summer tanager. I found the singer. A really exotic looking first spring male. First spring, summers don’t acquire the all red plumage with the first molt. They wind up with a patchwork coat of many colors. This one was rosy pink around the head with a yellow-orangish breast and olive green back.

I continued down the trail. I stopped to watch a trio of tiny blue gray gnatcatchers creating a ruckus along the lake’s edge. There I heard the clear “sweeet-sweeet-sweet” song of the prothonatary.

The warbler was just a few yards farther down the trail. When I got to the prothonatary, I couldn’t see him. The song was coming from a cypress a few feet out in the lake. I pished and a lemon yellow glow sailed from the cypress into a small oak just above my head. This bird does glow - a rich lemondrop yellow accentuated by large black eyes and a black bill.

It was 8 a.m., time to go back to my room and prepare to meet friends and family who were arriving for the funeral. It had been an exceptionally cool morning for late May in Louisiana. There was a breeze and the sky was clear except for the occasional large white puff of a cloud.

I left the green woods of the lake with a much lighter spirit. I didn’t know any more. There were no revelations. Just the cool green of the woods and birds busy doing the things birds, intuitively, must do.
And somewhere in that spot that knows no place or time there was peace. At the graveside, the breeze was still cool. It would turn the leaves of the oaks and I would hear the prothonatary and glimpse the tanager. The inexplicable web is all consuming. We are as much a part of it in death as we are in life.

 

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