Thu, Mar 10 2016 - Birdwatching Walk at Briarlake Forest with the Audubon Society (View Original Event Details) Trip Leader(s): Charlie Cottingham Participants: Charlie Cottingham, Jim B, lraymer

We had a wonderful time birding with our AtlantaAudubon.com friends this morning on the first-ever official Audubon field trip at this beautiful new wooded park in NE Atlanta.  The Society's friendly volunteer guides, Ralph and Stan, did a bangup job heading up the 2-1/2 hour event and about 15 birdwatching aficionados of all experience levels participated.  By observing with our binoculars and carefully listening we were able to jointly identify about 20 different species including red-bellied & downy woodpeckers, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, brown-headed & white-throated nuthatches, cardinals, blue jays, warblers, towhees and several types of sparrows.
Along the trail we enjoyed hanging out beside a "portable herd" of about 2 dozen sheep in a solar-powered electric fence enclosure.  Our "Friends of Briarlake Park" volunteer group is renting them to eat invasive non-native vegetation. Since they'd finished devouring almost every live invasive in this original enclosure two nice young "Bo Peeps," Lowi and Chloe, were erecting a nearby second enclosure to move them into this afternoon.
After the other birders had left I was glad to donate an extra couple of hours as an "anti-invasives specialist," using my own clippers and saw to cut and remove a few hundred pounds of overgrown privet, ivy and "ugly-agnus" (thorny elaeagnus). - submitted by Charlie, Thu PM