by Marcus Wohlsen

Laid up this winter with a badly twisted ankle (that’ll teach me to go jogging), what’s an armchair hiker to do but dream about the spring? We have it easy here in the Blue Ridge. While friends up north continue to shiver in record low temps, we start to see redbud and dogwood blossoms appear. Flame azalea flashes in pink and gold from the mountain tops before oak and hickory and maple and beech hide it away under thick carpets of green.

But what I’m really looking forward to this spring is the return of the birds. Up in Maine at Thanksgiving, walking out along the coast on a pitch-black night, I heard the ghostly, wrenching cry of a screech owl come ripping through the trees. Back home at 6000 feet, the crunch of snow under my feet beat time against a chickadee’s CHICK-A-dee-dee-dee-dee as a low howling wind rippled through the gap. Other than that, the woods have held little but silence for me during these cold months.

So as spring begins to seep up from the earth this month, and if my gimpy ankle cooperates, I’ll head down to the South Carolina Low Country to catch the vanguard of the spring migration.

In his indispensable Seasonal Guide to the Natural Year, naturalist John Rucker details the return of shorebirds to the Santee National Wildlife Refuge. At the end of March, black-bellied plovers, red knots, black-necked stilts, willets, and yellowlegs take up residence on these coastal mudflats to feast on crustaceans and mollusks. But the marquee bird here is the wood stork, a tall, lordly bird with a body of purest downy white and a featherless wrinkled head only a mother stork could love. On the Dingle Pond Unit, a short trail threads the wetlands and offers a close-up view of one of America’s most imperiled animals.

As spring heads north, the birds follow. In the mountains, neotropical migrants begin to filter into the Appalachians by early April, filling high-elevation forest along the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Appalachian Trail with the buzzing and whirring of their clipped, noisy songs.

One of the best places to see warblers and other harbingers of spring in western North Carolina is Stecoah Gap near Robbinsville. As rich in birds and wildflowers as any place in the Blue Ridge, Stecoah lies on the AT about halfway between Wayah Bald and the southern end of the Smokies. When spring arrives, the dense forest canopy glitters with avian color. Black-and-white, black-throated green, black-throated blue, blackburnian, cerulean, and golden-winged warblers nest alongside blue-headed, yellow-throated, and red-eyed vireos, scarlet tanagers, indigo buntings, and American goldfinches.

For the best chance at seeing the most birds, I’ll head up the AT to Cheoah Bald. I haven’t been there yet, but I hear that the grassy meadow at the top, with its big views of the Nantahala Gorge to the south, rivals Max Patch. It’s a steep hike-more than 1800 feet over six miles-but to see the most elegant birds in the mountains, you have to go where they live. Just before the summit, the AT intersects the Bartram Trail. Bartram paid more attention to plants and flowers, but you can be sure that he’d have trained his meticulous gaze to the trees if only he’d had better binoculars.

Join the expert guides at Birdventures for a guided bird walk at Stecoah Gap on April 26 (www.birdventures.com).