Fall within her reach, and she will snatch you.
Whether you’re a wood nymph fluttering at her feet, a bobwhite whistling outside her window, a tea olive tree dousing you with perfume or a visitor to her sprawling plantation, Betty Komarek will seize you. And with you, the moment.
Then she’ll let it go. Because there’s always something new for her penetrating blue eyes, her failing ears, the hands that constantly reach about her as if she were groping her way through the world.
“Oh, it’s so wonderful to be 81 years old!” the sprightly botanist exclaims. “I can say, `I don’t know.’ I don’t know anything about that tree. I don’t know about you. I don’t know what that butterfly’s going to do. I do not know! And,” Komarek adds with satisfaction, “nobody else does, either!”
This lifelong learner, who marvels over dogwood blossoms as if she hadn’t watched them bloom every spring for the last eight decades, is also a dedicated teacher. Although her professional resume is short – she taught botany at Florida State College for Women, now Florida State University, for a year in the 1930s – her true career has spanned most of her life.
The 565-acre south Georgia plantation Komarek and her husband, biologist Ed Komarek, bought in 1938 has served as an open-air classroom to a constant stream of farmers, scientists and Girl Scout troops.
And thanks to the Komareks’ foresight, it will remain a classroom in perpetuity. In 1985, the couple formed a non-profit organization that will preserve their beloved plantation, Birdsong, forever.
Today, Birdsong is a sanctuary for 500 members and thousands of non-members who visit a year. The organization offers a variety of educational seminars that teach about everything from stars to butterflies to the nesting habits of bluebirds.
“A lot of people give a lot of themselves to Birdsong, in large part because of Betty,” says Kathleen Brady, Birdsong executive director. “She is just devoted to making sure there is a place where people can come and learn things firsthand.”
Like the increasing number of Americans who are preserving their property through conservation easements and gifts to local land trusts or national preservation agencies, the Komareks wanted to use their land to teach about nature.
Birdsong visitors are encouraged to stroll along the miles of trails the property offers. Watchful ones will find beavers tending to their dams, great blue herons courting in the tree tops and alligators lurking in the swamp.
And don’t forget to keep your ears open too. A screened-in porch perched right on the swamp’s edge offers Birdsong visitors the perfect place to eavesdrop on the animal kingdom. Kicking back in a plastic recliner at this “Listening Place,” you can hear pileated woodpeckers bang out rapid-fire rhythms, southern bullfrogs grunt like pigs and so many mysterious caws, screeches, moans and whistles that you’re sure you’ve been beamed back to the Mesozoic Era.
But Birdsong’s main attraction is its bird window. Conceived by Komarek in 1958, the floor-to-ceiling window spans the length of her living room and looks out over a landscaped paradise for birds. Inside, visitors perch on the edge of their seats to watch a colorful parade of birds feast on the suet, sunflowers and cornmeal Komarek has set out for them.
“Some people never looked at a bird before,” Komarek says incredulously. “Birds weren’t important to them.”
But anyone who visits her bird window becomes an instant fanatic. Komarek helps novice and expert birdwatchers alike tell males from females and immatures from matures, all the while weaving in stories about their hunting and mating habits.
“My firm belief is you don’t teach anything until you teach a love for it,” Komarek says.
“You learn a lot about human nature watching the birds,” Komarek preaches to her students. “It didn’t all start with us.”
Komarek draws a sudden breath when a visitor tells her she heard a bobwhite at the window.
“Was he whistling, the bobwhite?” Komarek asks. “Oh, that’s the first whistling of bobwhite! That whistling bobwhite means it’s a lone quail looking for a mate! I thought they were starting to break up and come in twos! They were coming in bunches before, but now they’re coming in twos.”
When suddenly the birds beyond the window freeze like a picture, Komarek knows there must be a sharp-shinned hawk circling overhead.
What’s a sharp-shinned hawk?
Funny you should ask. She just happens to have one in her freezer, Komarek says, dispatching a Birdsong volunteer to retrieve it.
In fact, she has dozens of frozen-stiff birds in the icebox so that the curious can get an up-close look. Although today’s volunteer can barely bring herself to look at the bright, feathered bodies Komarek keeps arranged in plastic cutlery trays, Komarek caresses the tattered creatures as a girl would a doll’s tresses.
Komarek is not put off by death and speaks often of it, death in general, as well as the particular death that awaits her one day. She jokes that she will throw herself to the hungry gators patrolling her swamp when her time comes.
“If you look out there, you can’t say it’s peaceful,” says Komarek, gesturing vaguely toward to the longleaf pines. “It’s not peaceful. Everything is contending. Like Darwin said: survival of the fittest. We don’t want everybody to survive. We only want the fittest to survive. Really.”
Destruction is, in fact, a way of life at Birdsong. Komarek and her husband were pioneers in fire ecology in the 1940s, long before forestry officials considered it acceptable. Every year, through controlled burning she sets fire to 80 percent of her property. The flames maintain the meadows as meadows by preventing pine trees from taking root and maintain the pine forests as pine forests by keeping the hardwoods in check. The fires also eliminate fuel that might otherwise accumulate to dangerous levels.
A student of Native American medicine and spirituality, Komarek perhaps sees her own death as a way of giving back to the Earth. Yet the Nebraska native will tell you, she has always given back. Giving is the only way to live.
Nestled in a rocking chair on her front porch, knees drawn to her chest, Komarek explains.
“The Indians say they’re a hollow bone to siphon it through,” she says, forming a circle with her index and finger and thumb. “Whatever you want to call it – God, the great force, the great spirit, the divine one.
“It’s a god within, and you’ve got to let it out. You’ll never be happy, no one will ever be happy, unless they have a passion and let it through. You see something, then you’re also responsible for carrying it on. That’s just happiness.”
Komarek lives alone in her Civil War-era house. Her husband, incapacitated by a stroke several years ago, was cared for in a nursing home nearby until his death last month. When Birdsong is open, Komarek puts up with a constant stream of strangers traipsing across her property and her home.
And so it should be, says Komarek, who views herself less as a property owner than a caretaker. The true owners, she says, are those who can momentarily embrace some corner of the land and in understanding it, make it theirs.
That magnolia tree over there, for example. Komarek has seen three generations of Girl Scouts clamber up its sturdy limbs.
“I just thought that when the scouts were up that tree, that tree belonged to them,” she says.
Komarek disapproves of many changes she has seen as the years have passed, and holds some harsh opinions about everything from farming to raising children. Children, she laments, can’t climb trees like they used to. Although she herself came up in tough times and taught her two children to fend for themselves, too many folks nowadays take the easy way out.
“Cows used to be happy, out on the pasture, ordering everyone around, `Do this, do that,”‘ recalls Komarek. “Now they’re bred to be docile, just to let their milk down. You used to have to earn your milk.
“You should have to earn your knowledge too. You want to know what that tree is over there? So grab a handful of its blossoms and warm them up in your fist for a spell. Then tuck them into your bosom, like Southern ladies used to do, and take a whiff. You’ll have your answer – it’s a banana bush.”
Komarek tries to chat with as many Birdsong visitors as she can, encouraging new arrivals to keep an eye out for the cedar waxwings preying on the mulberry trees, or the nesting turkeys other visitors accidently startled earlier that day.
A smiling Komarek watches a young mother head home, pulling a sleeping child in a red wagon behind her.
“How can you be thanked any more than that?” she asks. “You feel like you have meaning in life. And I’m happy.”
Komarek’s thoughts turn to her husband, in a nursing home shortly before his death: “I’m not happy for my husband, where he is. But that’s God’s -.”
Komarek’s voice trails off, and she pauses, perhaps entertaining a momentary vision of alligators.
“All of us want to go off easy,” she concludes, before intercepting the next visitor. “Hey! You hot? What’d you see?”
Ever since the Komareks moved to Birdsong, a massive pecan tree has dominated their yard, providing shade and constant entertainment. Through the years Komarek has seen raccoons cavort in it, children swing from it and wood ducks nest in hollows carved out by strikes of lightning.
Sprawling skyward, the tree attracted one too many lightning bolts. Planted in 1855, the one-time state champion pecan tree had already long outlived its life expectancy. Facing the growing likelihood the tree would crash through her roof, Komarek decided earlier this year to call in the chainsaws.
“It’s like an old friend to her,” Brady says. “She’s seen so many cycles of animals and so forth using that tree, it was a hard decision for her to make.”
Brady feared the day of the tree-cutting would be a sad one. As it turned out, it was more like a celebration. Looking and laughing like schoolgirls playing ring-around-the-rosey, Komarek and some friends joined hands to circle the tree and measure it: six arms spans, or 18 feet 7 inches.
After the saws were done, limbs lay scattered across the yard. In them Komarek saw not destruction but dozens of hand-carved bowls.
She keeps two slices of the tree on her screened-in porch, along with animal skulls, a pine-cone collection and, on this morning, a couple of caged painted lady butterflies slowly emerging from their chrysalises. When they are through, Komarek will set them free.
“Isn’t that interesting?” she asks one visitor, showing off a cross-section of the tree. “They say you can tell everything from a tree.”
Komarek follows the tree’s concentric, pear-shaped rings with her fingers and stares at it, as if looking in a mirror. This mirror, though, holds not just her reflection but the totality of all life’s countless incarnations.
“I just think of it as being Mother Earth,” she says of the pattern displayed in the wood, “being womb upon womb upon womb.”
