North Carolina county #32 Cashiers, NC - The Village Green (sort of)
I chose an ebird hotspot in Jackson County called The Village Green, which was supposed to be in the center of Cashiers, a small town in the mountains. From reading about it online, it was supposed to have some sort of path through a park and it sounded like a nice spot. I couldn’t find many other public areas to walk. The county itself is beautiful and I’m sure someone with a little more local knowledge would be able to find many places to go birding.
Anyway, when I got to the spot listed on Google Maps, this is what I saw.
I tried using satellite view to verify but my signal was spotty and slow, and all I could tell was this was the exact spot that was marked as The Village Green. I did immediately see a Song Sparrow, and had already done about 4 hours of driving, so I figured I would get out and walk along the bushes and hope to see some birds.
As it turned out, this empty lot in the middle of the town gave me 15 species, including a life bird – Common Raven. I had been looking for one of these for a while and when I saw what looked like an immense crow soaring with a wedge-shaped tail, I knew I finally found one. When a crow came from a tree to harass it and I saw how much larger the Raven was, it cinched the identification for me.
There was also a bunch of swallows flying around, and an Osprey flew overhead at one point.
As usual, there are some more photos in the ebird checklist. When I got home, I looked again at this hotspot, and after doing further research, I think that Google Maps has the location marked incorrectly. It looks like there is a small park a little bit to the west of where I was. Oh well, at least I got my Raven.
ebird checklist