TRAIL BLAZING
● Alabama is justly proud of its bird fauna (to the point where 2023 has been declared the Year of Alabama Birding). According to the Alabama Ornithological Society’s official state list, 420 species can be found within its borders.
In order to capitalise on this diversity, and to help people appreciate it, the Alabama Tourism Department has overseen the development of a series of birding trails across the state. ‘It started in the late 1990s,’ explains Joe Watts, a past president of Alabama Audubon, who was instrumental in developing many of the trails. ‘The folks along the coast, which is renowned for great birding, decided that they wanted to find a way to increase the economic impact of having birders coming in, to get them to stay a little bit longer by making it easier for people to find good birding locations. So they built the coastal birding trail, which features 50 locations around the Alabama coast. Then the North Alabama folks said, “Hey, this is working really well for the coast. Let’s do it in North Alabama,” which is where we get a lot of sandhill cranes. And sometimes about 15 of the less than 700 total world whooping crane population spend the winter in North Alabama.’ The tourism department then decided to expand the programme to cover the whole state, which led to the creation of six more trails, including one across the Black Belt. ‘We got together small groups of people in each region to talk about which locations were good for birds and to work with the local chambers of commerce so that they understood what birding could bring to their community,’ Watts explains. ‘Then we got some local volunteers from the Birmingham Audubon Society to go out and scout the locations, which turned into about 180 locations around the state, excluding north and coastal Alabama. We hired a naturalist to go out and do write ups of what species and what kind of habitats there were at each location. It was a pretty in-depth, severalyear process of making sure that we were picking places that were good for birds, but also places that were geographically diverse.’
The resulting website is remarkably comprehensive. Each entry has maps and information on logistics, how to get to the sites, what to expect while you’re there, the best times a year to visit and of course, what birds you might see. One of the sites on the Black Belt trail is Perry Lakes Park in Perry County, home to several oxbow lakes and cypress swamps. ‘It’s a favourite place for birds of the region to go visit, but they had to shut it down because it needed some repair and maintenance. A couple of years ago, our staff helped to raise the funds needed for the restoration,’ says Duncan. The park features a newly rebuilt 30-metre-tall birding tower. ‘Birders can get up above the canopy or stay in the canopy and look for warblers and other birds.’
To learn more, visit alabamabirdingtrails.com