The Bluebird Trail: A Promise Kept

If it were a Hollywood film script, it would start with a flashback to World War II. One of the two leading characters is a Captain Dave Scott, who shot down in the China Sea who uses his 45 to shoot the sharks circling his life raft, runs out of water, keeps one last bullet for himself and is rescued on the 11th day. The other is a Navy medic stationed stateside with the Fleet Marines.

Fast forward some 45 years after they serve - Dave Scott and Chuck Owen; they meet and, like lots of friendships made here at The Landings, they become close. Their lives and interests intersect on the golf course and at church. The pilot keeps busy in retirement making bluebird houses. He goes to building sites, picks up scrap lumber and nails his handiwork to trees. He’s got maybe 10 or 15 boxes up and running when, in the early 1990s, he is stricken with cancer.

Today, alongside every golf course at The Landings Club and throughout the community on Skidaway Island there are birdhouses  – 240 of them – making the Dave Scott Bird Trail one of the longest monitored bluebird trail in the Southeastern U.S. 

Trained volunteers are responsible for tending boxes on nine holes, they track activities of the bluebirds and count bluebirds fledged during the nesting season from mid-February through August, into September at times.