Keep out of the Korn

Moore County

(#8/100 North Carolina highpoints)

It was this kind of a day in Moore County:

Gated communities can commandeer entire lakes with no public access. The guard helpfully recommended we try birding at a reservoir down the road…30 minutes down the road.

Oh well, birds are all over the place, after all. But first let’s get our highpoint.

And lest we get any ideas about actually standing on the highpoint, we find this:

Highpoint done, there’s time for some dedicated birding. First we stopped in Aberdeen at a lovely public lake with a trail and this charming covered pedestrian bridge.

The birding was fine, although the neighbors have questionable taste in yard art.

But by far, the premiere birding site for Moore County is Weymouth Woods–Sandhills Nature Preserve near Southern Pines. We’ve been several times, and we were happy to hike the woods there before heading home.

Weymouth Woods is home to an endangered species, the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker. We were thrilled to find several, initially locating them by their distinctive squirt-squirt call.

Red-cockaded Woodpeckers are habitat specialists of long-leaf pines with little understory, which is why their numbers are struggling.