Editor’s Note: Tabb’s Trails is a commentary photo-essay series with coastal reporter, photographer and hiking enthusiast Kip Tabb.
Driving along N.C. 12 Saturday, Oct. 18, it becomes quickly obvious that a nor’easter recently blew across the Outer Banks.
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Traffic has stopped twice in the 4.5 miles to clear the road of sand and ocean overwash between the south end of the Basnight Bridge and the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center, where a birding trip was scheduled as part of the 2025 Wings Over Water Wildlife Festival held Oct. 14-19. The trip, along with several others on federally managed lands, were canceled or modified because of the government shutdown that began Oct. 1 and continued at the time of this publication.
North Carolina Department of Transportation crews are hard at work, rebuilding the sand dune, but the evidence of the storms that had battered coastal North Carolina cannot be missed.
Standing water from overwash still covers the road in places. Sand on the roadway forces drivers to slow down even when there is no stoplight controlling traffic. Some dunes show clear signs of the waves that ran over them, their sand a darker color and more compact that dunes to the north and south.
Yet nature will abide, and at the visitor center, the North Pond is filled with images that no camera can truly capture. A flock of 200 or 300 northern pintail 150 or 200 yards long seems to be paddling effortlessly from the south to the north.
There are songbirds in the trees and foliage, and a yellow-rumped warbler darts by, too quick for the camera to focus. It’s a bird that is almost never seen in the summer in northeastern North Carolina but it is ubiquitous in the fall and winter.
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As it turns out, it was a remarkable day on the half-mile North Pond Wildlife Trail that begins behind the visitor center, with rarely seen species making an appearance and migratory waterfowl filling the waters of the pond with color and sound.
