The wave of green serves as a dinner bell for migratory songbirds who are pouring in from Central and South America each night, eager to dig into all the delicious fruit and insects now on offer. One of the earliest arrivals is the Louisiana waterthrush, a secretive, tail-bobbing denizen of creeks and streams, most easily identified by its clear whistling songs. Next up are yellow-throated warblers, striking black, white, and gold birds that set up shop in the tops of tall pines and wetland trees. Their lofty foraging habits make their distinctive field marks difficult to see from the ground, and they sing a song that is not so different from the Louisiana waterthrush, so be sure to brush up on the differences. When you hear their songs, note that you only have a week or two left to plant cool-season plants in your garden, such as potatoes, collards, spinach, and turnips.
These migrants are followed closely by northern parulas and blue-gray gnatcatchers, buzzy little birds that pack a dizzying amount of energy for their size. By the time these two arrive, you should have your tissues and allergy medication on hand, because oak and pine pollen really kick off around this time.
Many more species are starting to trickle in, including common yellowthroats, vireos, and black-throated green warblers. In a few weeks, songbird migration will be in full swing, so have your binoculars at the ready! If you have one, prepare your spotting scope as well, because shorebird migration is about to take off, bringing in spotted sandpipers, solitary sandpipers, American golden plovers, yellowlegs, dowitchers, and more as they make for the mudflats of northern Canada.
The clouds of blackbirds have dispersed for the season and have been replaced by massive flocks of American goldfinches, the males of which have already donned their brilliant yellow breeding plumage. When you see these birds in unusually large numbers, you should be getting ready to plant your tomatoes! They’re a real cacophony picking through mowed fields and treetops for seeds and buds, very difficult to miss, but they aren’t as noisy as their predecessors, who have become impossibly more vocal at this time of year. The biggest racket of the lot is the male red-winged blackbird, who flares his fiery shoulder pads as he stakes his claim to his reedy kingdom with a nostalgic, fluid song. When he sings in concert with the clicking and buzzing of purple martins and barn swallows, and the maiden flights of dragonflies, you’ll know that it’s time to dust off your fishing pole and tackle box.
Other resident songsters that have recently started up include the eastern bluebird, song sparrow, field sparrow, eastern meadowlark, eastern phoebe, brown thrasher, and of course, the northern mockingbird. Even ruby-crowned kinglets and yellow-rumped warblers have begun to sing in earnest, practicing their performance for their arrival on their breeding grounds far to the north. They’ll begin to ship out over the next several weeks, following the waves of ducks, gulls, and sparrows that have already started their journeys. We’ll certainly miss them, but they’ll be back before we know it. In the meantime, we can look forward to the many colorful, feathered musicians that spring and summer have in store.
How many businesses have a plan for the next 50 years?
The sophisticated search engine I turned to offered a quick answer: Sorry, no relevant information was found in our search.
The murky research I could find suggests that only 12% of business survive longer than a quarter century, and half of businesses close within 5 years. It’s no wonder that few bother to plan 50 years ahead.
But the ForestGEO research model the Paint Rock Forest Research Center was founded on assumes a 50-year program. The first forest dynamics plot, developed by our founding partner Stephen Hubbell in Barro Colorado, Panama, is now in its 52nd year, and it’s still shedding new light on the future of life.
We’re now entering the ninth year of financed operations (our planning began years before). To the amazement of many, we’re
likely to stride into our second decade of operations. But none of what we’re building here will fulfill our promise and our promises unless we’re still shedding light on the world in the year 2075.
That’s why we enlisted the help of the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Lyndhurst Foundation to bring in the top planners in North America. We reviewed many outstanding proposals, but one stood out.
I’d long stalked the work of one of America’s most outstanding large landscape design and planning firms, Andropogon Associates. Andropogon’s designs in the longleaf pines of south Mississippi – oh, some 50 years ago – shaped my life choices. Andropogon has had projects ranging from the new Coast Guard Headquarters to a 6,800-acre ranch in Texas to a Living Village integrated with Yale Divinity School. They’ve repeatedly won the top national awards for landscape planning and design. Don’t just believe me, see here: Andropogon.com
Andropogon’s first contribution to Paint Rock was a big one: Theypartnered with the Mississippi-based Duvall Decker, an architectural firm known for straying into ground-breaking planning and community work that goes far beyond designing buildings and landscapes. See Duvalldecker.com.
Two of the nation’s most prestigious and adventuresome planning and design firms get led deep into the foundations of Paint Rock.
We were blown away by their proposal and their attention. We were humbled when, a few weeks after hiring both firms, Duvall Decker received the American Institute of Architect’s national architectural firm of the year award. They could have been celebrating with big wigs in New York City. Instead, Roy Decker, Anne Marie Duvall Decker and Daniel Barker were plowing through the resources of Paint Rock Valley with the Andropogon team, led by Andropogon principals Jose Alminana and Jason Curtis.
Roy and Anne Marie are already chewing on our operational structure, hoping to make it more fit for the many changes we’ll see over the new few decades. They’ll all be looking at our resources – our buildings, our forests, our caves, our streams, our many partners – to make sure we’re working with them wisely and effectively. They’ll be helping the research center find ways to protect and improve the communities and living resources of the entire 450,000-acre Paint Rock ecosystem, decades by days.
You’ll hear more from them. The fact that firms with this kind of international recognition would take on a project here should tell you something about the uniqueness and importance of Paint Rock Valley. And their unwavering focus on our work at the research center gives us new confidence that what we’re developing here has the power to shape the way we live 50 years from now.
Jason Curtis and Jose Alimanana of Andropogon Associates. Andropogon, you should know, is the traditional scientific name for the native grasses we southerners are most likely to recognize as “broomsedge” or “broomsage,” depending on who your grandaddy was. Broomsedge is the great healer of Southern landscapes, patiently repairing over and over the damage we’ve done.Roy Decker and Jason CurtisLeft to right, Daniel Barker, Jason Curtis, Finch, Will McGarity, Jose Alminana and Roy Decker. Will, a Birmingham-based architect who’s a member of our board, has been instrumental in bringing this group together.
They’re always here, but invisible until now, when the trees are bare, stripped of green by the first hard cold, in the closing dark of December.
Hollies and I go back. They show up again and again, at surprising times, in surprising ways. That may be inevitable in a place so rich with native hollies. Alabama can claim 11 widely recognized species, plus two or three more that probably deserve a good name.
The American holly (Ilex opaca) stands tallest among the evergreens, and there are mysterious, shadowy groves of it scattered around Paint Rock Valley. We should ponder them together.
But many of Alabama’s hollies lose their leaves in fall just as the oaks and elms and ash and hickories do. Up here, that includes the long-stalked holly (I. longipes), the possumhaws (the I. decidua group) and the round-leafed Cumberland holly (let’s just call it I. ambigua until something better comes along.)
This summer and fall, I drove in near panic along the Paint Rock River, cursing the railroad, the highway, the herbicides, the mowers for the disappearance of a magnificent line of possumhaw hollies I’d seen there last winter. I was worried in July, but I knew by October the berries would already be turning red. Having an eye for hollies, I surely should have seen them off the highway. Not a glimmer of red in that dull green, even into November.
Until a hard frost shook the mountains. The oranges and yellows of the maples were shattered at their peak. The trees trying to hold on too long to summer shed leaves bruised purple and black. Bare sticks clattered in the harsh winds.
And there they were unleafed, wreathed in red berries, the hollies, radiant one after the other, enough to make even a few irritable commuters turn their heads.
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Photography by Sakora Smeby
It was hard to see while we were in the thick of it this year, but there was a lot going on at the research center, on The Nature Conservancy’s Sharp Bingham Preserve, and on our other research lands in Paint Rock. Now, while the research center house is quiet, I’m slowly adding it all up.
We finished the first census of the largest forest dynamics plot in North America, nearly 90,000 stems identified, tagged, measured, mapped over 150 acres — a jaw dropping effort involving some 75 researchers and students over 6 years.
Alabama A&M researchers and students, who played a key role in helping our research team start the first census, finished the first re-census of the first third of the plot.
University of Alabama’s forest dynamics lab started a long-term project to reconstruct a multi-century history of the forest.
We developed an exciting partnership with Hudson Alpha Institute of Biotechnology that will expand the tree census to include the DNA of thousands of trees – a project unlike anything that’s been attempted before. We expect it to play a significant role in saving Eastern North America’s forests.
We worked with The Nature Conservancy and Paint Rock’s Carter England to help rebuild the Shortleaf Pine Initiative and sponsored the first national shortleaf pine conference in years. With National Fish and Wildlife Foundation funding, we supplied enough of our Alabama shortleaf seedlings to restore 300 acres above Little River Canyon. We helped coordinate an 80-acre prescribed burn to establish a shortleaf seed orchard at Guntersville State Park. We managed to channel $85,000 to Hudson Alpha to build the base for a study of shortleaf pine genetics range wide.
We dug out from a tornado that mangled a couple of hundred acres of forest to find ourselves in a great relationship with animal behaviorists, ornithologists and ecologists at Auburn University, trialing new techniques to determine how birds might use the naturally disturbed sites – and to alert rare species to take advantage of this new habitat.
We brought funding to researchers at University of Georgia to complete the whole genome on a tree that was believed to be extinct – until it was rediscovered on the preserve with the generous help of our expert research partners, Brian Keener and Ron Lance. (Yes, a very big deal…we should have that ready for publication soon!)
We worked with researchers to finish up a paper (and a pollinator video) on a new and very distinctive species of violet known only from Paint Rock, and continued to study a half dozen other species of trees and shrubs that will likely be acknowledged as new species.
We began work to restore canebrake and grasslands on a 1500-acre property on which we have a long-term lease.
We worked with the University of Georgia and U.S. Forest Service researchers to develop new ways of understanding the future of threatened native ants, which are critical to the reproduction of many of Paint Rock’s wildflowers.
Caves are now a major focus of research at Paint Rock. Hazel Barton at University of Alabama declared Paint Rock should be the center of cave research in North America, and it’s quickly moving in that direction. Auburn University’s Molly Simonis added her exciting new work on bats to ongoing research by Hazel and long-term projects by Matt Niemiller of University of Alabama at Huntsville.
We developed a relationship with Jacksonville State University’s Art Department that brought in artists from across the state to promote understanding of nature and science through art. It resulted in a celebrated museum show, Drawing Knowledge from Nature, and will lead to even bigger things next year.
With the help of an Appalachian Regional Commission Grant, and support from Lyndhurst Foundation, we secured a partnership with two of the nation’s top landscape and organizational planning firms to help us chart a clear plan of research, education and conservation for the next 50 years.
We created a great support staff of young researchers and veteran managers, and I’ll introduce you to them and their exceptional skills in the coming year.
It’s hard for me to believe we were managing all this (and more) in a single year. We have mixed emotions, knowing we did this at a time of great crisis, when funding for science has been slashed, and many of our federal partners are retiring and their programs eliminated. We managed to keep on with support from various state of Alabama programs and grants, from our legislative delegation, and from many private donors, including especially generous donations from the Kuehlthau Family Foundation, the Tom Sardy Foundation, the Lyndhurst Foundation, the Chouinards, the Goldenrod Fund. We couldn’t have done what we did without constant support from many faculty and students at Jacksonville State University, University of Alabama, University of West Alabama and University of Georgia.
It may continue to be a dark time for scientific study and our understanding of nature. We’re as worried as any research program would be about what happens in the next few months and years. We’re even more worried for many of our research partners, who face uncertainties and constraints greater than ours. But we are on track with our mission: to understand the future of eastern North America’s ecosystems and our place in them.
Look with us. Even in these short days, there’s still light enough to find comfort in what’s been done, and to see the hollies are still there, radiant, bearing in the barrenness, promise of the year to come.
Thursday August 25, 2025 Bill Finch will be delivering a talk at 4:00 and the Exhibit opens from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. We would love to see you!
Universities being hard to navigate and find parking, maps are below.
Bill’s talk is at 4:00 in in the auditorium at Merrill Hall
The exhibit opens at 5:00 at Hammond Hall.
Artists include Allison McElroy from Jacksonville State and Doug Baulos from Birmingham and UAB.
Jamey Grimes, professor of sculpture from the University of Alabama
Celeste Amparo Pfau from Birmingham.
Doug Clark photography professor from Jacksonville State and Bryce Lafferty Head of the Art Department at Jacksonville State that has organized this art exhibit.
John and Kendra Abbott from the University of Alabama. John is the Curator of Musems for U of A, also an Entomologist. Kendra is the Blount Scholar and works on science and communication. They are both world renowned photographers and have Bugshot photography workshop in various parts of the world.
Leah Hamel, a conceptual artist and her husband Andrew Tynes, a muralist from Birmingham
Elaine Booth – Huntsville, Morgan Worsham – Jacksonville State and co-ordinator for the exhibit.
Patrice Anderson and Mary Dunn from Jacksonville State professors of Graphic Design
Shay Herring Clanton, raised in Huntsville, lives in Virginia and retired art professor from Mary Baldwin. She and her siblings put a conservation easement on their family land on Sharp Mountain, just on the other side of the Sharp Bingham Preserve.
Yes, a tornado slammed into a beautiful, rare and unusually rich Research Center forest on The Nature Conservancy’s Sharp Bingham Preserve May 20th.
F2 ,says weather service, about 185 miles per hour at peak.
We’re safe, the buildings are safe, most of our forest dynamics plot (though not all) escaped. But a swath of forest – 200 or so acres of rich, mature, high canopy trees which had shaded the forest floor for centuries – is now an ugly, broken, sun-burned tangle of trunks.
The amount of damage is, in a word, awesome. We can’t even find the main road in places. Trunks piled on trunks have cut us off from much of our research work, our new species, our caves, our rare plants. We still can’t tell you what came through and what didn’t.
The tornado seemed as surprised to find itself in the midst of Paint Rock’s deep ravines as we were to see it there. After wiping out houses in the flat valleys near Huntsville, it twisted and turned over the steep mountains without doing much damage, then plopped down in the deep, narrow sinks between two ridges. It tried to find its way along our primary road, then started climbing out, zig-zagging across the mountain in a way that did maximal damage to the forest and our access.
And the forest, the forest will never be the same in our lifetimes or our children’s. That’s exactly why we are here.
We don’t waste disasters. They can be opportunities, if we can put the right funds and researchers together. Tornadoes and big wind events are a fact of life here in Alabama, and they have clearly played a significant role in shaping our forests. It’s rare for researchers to have the chance to study the impacts of severe wind damage in a diverse and mature temperate forest. Those studies could produce reams of information on how species like oaks, ash, elms, hickories and shortleaf pine recover and naturally reproduce. It could tell us a lot about how these messy natural gaps have supported rare birds, insects, plants, mammals for millions of years.
Going to take a while to cut through it all. Repair to the road system necessary for our research is going to be expensive—even after cleaning the trees out of the road, we’ve got to repair massive holes where collapsing root wads took the road with them. We need help paying for the clean up.
But more importantly, let’s work together to find a way to get researchers back in this forest so we can monitor its recovery from day one.
You can contribute to our Tornado Recovery and Discovery Fundhere. These funds will be used not only for repair, but also for bringing in researchers who can help us turn this tornado into one of the rarest research opportunities in North American forests. We estimate it will cost about $125,000 to do both.
Watch for more information and videos on one of the most breathtaking natural events at Sharp Bingham Preserve in our lifetimes.
March 2025 The Nature Conservancy Magazine published an article about the Future Forest, the work of the Paint Rock Forest Research Center is a large feature of this article. You can read it here.
