The country has been in the grip of a freeze, and South Carolina has not been spared. To avoid black ice, J. Drew Lanham, a writer, poet, and wildlife biologist, has advised Isaiah Scott to arrive at Congaree National Park in the warmer afternoon to bird-watch. Lanham, a son of Edgefield, South Carolina, is meeting Scott for the first time. Scott has traveled up from Savannah to meet his mentor-from-afar; the eighteen-year-old enrolled last fall as a freshman at Cornell University, majoring in environment and sustainability and working with the Lab of Ornithology there, inspired in part by Lanham’s work. ¶ In latter years, Lanham, the author of , has turned to visual art, poetry, and creative nonfiction to express and explore the joysof nature and bird-watching and the complications of birding while Black. Scott, also a skilled artist and leader of his own bird-watching hikes, harnesses social media to tell his story. On the one side, each is a birder and nature lover; on the other, each navigates being a Black birder and Black nature lover, specifically. It is not a choice, but a tenuous balancing act. A coexistence that cannot be disentangled from the very landscape upon which they converge, the knees of Congaree’s bald cypresses recalling the rising hands of the enslaved Africans, known as Maroons, who once escaped and sought refuge here.
