Structure Lakes is just not a well-kept park. The primary boardwalk is buckled up like a youngsters’ curler coaster after a 2021 storm with total sections of railing sitting uselessly within the shallow marsh. Graffiti covers practically each signal within the park, and there’s a lot trash that almost all of it has been gathered into an artwork set up known as The Doll’s Head Path with creepy displays like “The Linda Blair Witch Challenge.”

However in the event you can tune out the noise of vehicles and practice and planes, nature is alive right here. This morning alone, I noticed a trio of river otters swimming a dozen toes away, and a big white-tailed deer sure throughout my path. There have been yellow-bellied sliders sunning on logs and dragonflies with incredible names—blue dasher, Japanese pondhawk, whitetail skimmer, inexperienced dancer—darting across the lakes’ edges. There have been not-quite ripe muscadines and the final of the summer time’s wild blackberries. And much and plenty of birds.

River otter, stunned to see me

I watched a little bit blue heron, younger sufficient to nonetheless have its white feathers, catch and eat a frog, and an indigo bunting with a grasshopper in its beak. A fledgling white-eyed vireo cried for its dad and mom to come back again and feed it, and a yellow-billed cuckoo known as repeatedly within the distance. There have been giant birds—an osprey, a belted kingfisher, a pileated woodpecker, an excellent egret, two yellow-crowned evening herons and three red-shouldered hawks. And tiny birds—tons of blue-gray gnatcatchers flitting concerning the leaves of timber and a ruby-throated hummingbird glistening like gold because it zipped among the many flowers. And I noticed two birds this morning that I’ve by no means seen wherever else in Atlanta: a pair of cattle egrets and an anhinga—additionally known as a snakebird for the way in which it appears with its physique beneath water and its lengthy, skinny neck uncovered. The cattle egrets represented species #180 in my ATL Birds mission (atl_birds on Instagram and BirdsAtl on Twitter).

Juvenile Little Blue Heron with a frog

Cattle Egret, removed from house

I’m a local Atlantan, however I didn’t learn about Structure Lakes till two years in the past. I’ve been making up for misplaced time, taking lengthy walks on the weekends or quick walks earlier than work and watching the surroundings and flying fauna change with the seasons, whether or not its migrating warblers within the spring and fall, bizarre geese within the winter or awkward younger fledglings in the summertime. And there are all the time surprises, just like the American White Pelican that took up residence for a few week final October. Or the juvenile White Ibis that confirmed up the 12 months earlier than. The again boardwalk separates two of the three lakes on the property and has turn out to be my favourite spot within the metropolis. It’s there that I’ve seen otters looking within the shallows and a wide range of wading birds that I might anticipated to see down in Florida, not in my metropolis.

The view from the again boardwalk all year long

American White Pelican, the second largest chicken in North America

DeKalb County purchased the outdated deserted brickyard alongside the South River in Southeast Atlanta in 2003 and transformed it right into a 200-acre park. The lakes themselves have been shaped from brick excavation pits after the South River Brick Firm was based in 1892 to compete with the convict-labor practices of firms like Chattahoochee Brick that have been utilizing the still-active “besides as a punishment for crime” loophole within the thirteenth Modification—mainly arresting Black folks for crimes as innocent as “vagrancy” and exploiting them as free labor. South River solely employed free males.

A dashing blue dasher

The park sits alongside a big swatch of undeveloped land—simply throughout Moreland Avenue is Atlanta’s latest metropolis park, Lake Charlotte Nature Protect, a 216-acre oak-hickory forest with some 60,000 timber. Each parks are a part of the Soapstone Ridge, the place Native Individuals within the Late Archaic Interval dug out the dear metamorphic rock to be used in cooking, artwork and commerce. Simply to the north is the Outdated Atlanta Jail Farm alongside Entrenchment Creek, the positioning of a proposed police academy coaching facility. And all of that sits in what may at some point be the three,500-acre South River Forest conservation space, an concept the Nature Conservancy calls “one of the vital formidable ideas for greenspace growth in Atlanta.”

For now, Structure Lakes Park merely presents my favourite escape from the town.