Reed Bingham State Park in Georgia

Travel with Bennett-Watt and learn about Georgia's wildlife at the Reed Bingham State Park.

Reed Bingham State Park in Georgia Male: Georgia has over 77,000 acres protected in its State Park System just outside Adel, Reed Bingham State Park. Chet Powell: One of the main things this park is known for is out work with Gopher Tortoises. We probably have the largest concentrated Gopher Tortoise population of any park in Georgia. They’re called Gopher Tortoises, we’ll look at some buzzards they dig 0040 and were to the small mammals. And of course the Tortoises, this is land turtle and that’s the difference a turtle or one of the differences between turtles and Tortoises and they’re big slow real general creatures. Years ago, people ate them alive, they don’t do that so much anymore, they’re protected. This is a big female but if you don’t know you would look at the bottom parts so you have flat you see as here and a male would be really concaved within more. And then also, this part of the—that sticks out here or male sticks out a little further. And this actually—they use it as a weapon against each other when they’re fighting over a female. But I don’t know how well you can see her front legs so you have this long thick nails, that’s over a half inch long. And the teeth real flat and shovel like. The back teeth are—look like a little tiny elephant legs for pushing. And then another interesting thing about Gopher Tortoises is in that most turtles each one of this little jigsaws looking pieces as kind of scutes and if you look closely you can see little lines. You can count those rings and just kind of like counting the rings in the tree and get a pretty close idea of how old the turtle, tortoise is by counting the rings. Now, for one thing you can tell this is an older tortoise just by her size also over the years she’s in and out of the sand so much for the top of her shell just really polished and smooth. Younger tortoises, the ridges in the scutes would still be real plum and even on the top. But what’s happened over decades and decades, that’s worn down. She’s probably maybe 40 years old or something and that’s a guess. Male: Reed Bingham surrounds the 375 acres lake. There are four miles of trails in the park one of which is a boardwalk traversing along Indian River Swamp. Male: Most interesting things about the hotels is there is five different trails covering a number of different ecosystems everything from where we’re at now, a small plant and a river to an area where you feel lucky wrap in the North Georgia mountains so long way pine habitat. So it covers almost every conservable habitat that you would see in Georgia within about a 3 1/3 mile later. Male: What maybe the park’s most famous residence are not necessarily the sexiest. Male: There are three vultures’ species in North America: Turkey Vultures, Black vultures and the California condor. And so we have two out of the three here and we do have Black Vultures and Turkey Vultures that live here a year around but during the winter time, we get several thousand more that migrate here from the north to spend the winter with us. And they’ve been here as long as anybody can remember on that river and each year of course they’re more and more because the offspring return also. And from November roughly until about March, we’ll have several thousand extra vultures and we have a vulture buzzard day in February to—have it and support the way of educational programs and boat rides and things like that. And once people get here and see them especially in a concentrated numbers like we them here they really can’t get into it, get fascinated by, you get really close and sometimes when we’re going up in the boat, you get under several hundred which—then you don’t want make any fly out noises because bad things can happen from above. Male: In South Georgia, the small community of Colquitt. On first glance, it looks like many other small Georgia towns but there’s something else going on here. There are large murals scattered around the town.