Most mornings I drive with the window down. The cool air brings the scent of the Piedmont to me. Although shrouded in machinery, it is my way of letting nature in. A window pane is not the best way to see the environment.
Working farms smell like manure and sweet feed. Rivers smell sweet and swamps like twelve-year scotch.
The exorbitant amount of rain this summer caused animals to scurry to shelter. Unfortunately, roadkill was common.
The landscape changes so often that my senses barely adjust. The hills surrounding Athens promote erosion, but further south the hills change from sharp and high to wide and long, rolling. Natural forests have mixed hardwoods and pine. Oaks and hickories dominate the canopy. Dense underbrush would make walking difficult, if I had the time to stop and ramble. Pine plantations look as unnatural as they are. Their cyclical planting pattern and periodic burning keep hardwoods from growing higher than ten feet. Underbrush is nearly eradicated, but pine-dependent add to the wildlife mix. Signs for the three artificial lakes on the Savannah Basin scatter along the route. A variety of water bodies surround me. Within those mini-ecosystems is diverse biota.
One morning I came across a pair of beaver. They were dead. A Georgia Department of Transportation worker, dressed in a yellow jumpsuit, wielding a pitch fork, struggled to remove the carcasses from the road. They were the size of pit bulls. By the time of the American Revolution beaver pelts were a commodity in Europe, which drove the species near extinction. As a beloved professor once said, “In Europe, you could be the beaver!” Perfume was made from their glands and their pelts became all types of clothing. In the 1950’s, Beaver were reintroduced to Georgia’s rivers because they completely died out in the previous century. Now their pelts lay vacant along country roads. Seeing two dead on the road is sad for many reasons. Seeing two that big is promising. They lived an awful long time without losing their pelts.
One particular day I drove through a gauntlet of baby turtles. The rain had them running for shallow water. There is a stretch somewhere between Lexington and Crawfordville, on State Road 22, that traces shallow, marshy waters where falcons hunt and turtles hide. On the former plantation lands of Alexander Stephens, I have seen alligator snapping turtles slovenly cross the road. I could see baby heads poking from shells, differentiating them from debris. Some of them were box varieties, some cooters, at least one was a snapper. I never hit a single one and personally helped a few cross the road.
Hawks often carried rodents over the hood of my car. Stunned deer gazed at my Honda. I once saw twin fawns prance behind their mother. Everyday a man walks the road and picks up garbage, because he cares. He always stops and raises a hand, either a salutation or a way to make sure I see him. Some farms have goats, some have cattle. Sheep graze hills along both.
In Athens, on the roads, I mostly see dead armadillos, nine-band variety. This ancient remnant from the Pleistocene era is the last of its family. Its closest relative is the aardvark. Hundreds die each day because they have poor eyesight. Sometimes their carcasses are scooped up and used for art projects. For all the green thumbs in the Classic City. For all the pseudo-environmentalists, Athenians protect very little. The Athens menagerie is rife with squirrels, crows, armadillos, and opossum, all scavengers. But without habit, how can wildlife thrive. The wild habitat left in Athens diminishes daily in lots sold to university-associated urban sprawl.
Habitat, though temporary, lines the asphalt trail from Athens to Augusta, sandwiched between two very different cities with similar disregard for native wildlife.
Anthony Sadler 