Birding the Old Forest State Natural Area

   For breakfast, my wife ate a homemade Apple Turnover. The pieces of apple had been diced small so that the apple would bake correctly and be soft, but not mushy, the way Berry likes it. Robert had his usual bowl of fruit. This was a Saturday. We decided to go birding. Robert suggested Overton Park in midtown Memphis. This is a large urban park with a nine hole golf course, an Art College and a municipal Zoo. Part of the park is a beautiful deciduous forest, deep and heavily clogged with underbrush. We pulled the bird-mobile to the curb near the golf course and parked the car. It was only then that we noticed that the name of the forested part of the park had been changed. It is now called "The Old Forest State Natural Area".

   In the park, we started birding by walking on a paved road. Berry spotted the first bird we saw to the right of the road in the branches of a tree. Robert used his binoculars to identify it as the Yellow Rumped Warbler (Setophaga Coronata). He saw a brownish gray warbler scrambling from limb to limb. What made the identifiction was a bright yellow spot on the rump of the bird. We also saw this little fellow in Mexico when we birded the Yucatan Penincula in October of 2006.

   We turned away from the paved road and started walking carefully along the side of the fairway of the fourth hole. There were Indigo Buntings (Passerina Cyanea) and Northern Cardinals (Cardinalis Cardinalis) playing on the green of hole number four. The Cardinals say "purdy, purdy, purdy..." The Indigo Buntings have a very distinct, liquid whistle. We stood still and watched them putt. When it was time to play through, Robert spotted a small flycatcher, perched on a bare limb on a sapling. He had just found a Least Flycatcher (Empidonax Minimus). This handsome flycatcher was our bird of the day.

   We walked through the woods to the green on hole number two. We saw a lot of other birds during this short birding trip, and lots of dogs. It is primarily a city park, so the dogs were all on leash. It started to rain. To avoid the sprinkles, we walked to the car. It stopped sprinkling just as it had started. We gave up and drove to a restaurant and ate lunch.

Robert and Berry

Photos courtesy of rfowler, allaboutbirds, dpancamo