MARIETTA — To his two daughters, Jim Bearden is a father, and 79-year-old retired event planner from Alabama who loves nature. But to most of the southeastern nature community, he’s known as “the Bluebird Guy.”
In 2011, while working in the community garden at Green Meadows Preserve in west Cobb, Bearden noticed bluebirds. After being allowed to put a bluebird nesting box in the garden by the county’s parks department, Bearden says he asked for forgiveness rather than permission to continue. Today the park has over 30 bluebird nesting boxes, and it has come to be known as the Bluebird Trail.
Local bluebird enthusiasts recently gathered on Marietta Square to raise a toast and funds for the Bluebird Trail, a 13-year conservation effort to repopulate bluebirds in the southeast…