To say Pungo Lake is off the beaten path would be a generous understatement.

Situated in the northeastern part of North Carolina that all major roads avoid and even Google doesn’t update, any attempt to travel there brings the possibility for adventure or the potential for mishap.

“Make sure you’re gassed up (with) at least half a tank of fuel, because you’re a long ways away from gas stations,” advised Wendy Stanton, refuge manager for Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, in which Pungo Lake is situated.

Access from the south or west puts travelers on N.C. Highway 45, N.C. 99 or both, since the roads run together for a stretch. Coming from the north or east, the most direct routes involve a variety of tiny roads and then what should be a straight shot on several miles of unpaved, single-car-width peat lanes. But these often end up being closed, either to protect wildlife or to protect the roadways’ accessibility for refuge maintenance vehicles. Google Maps does not reflect these closures, and cell phone service is spotty to nonexistent on the refuge.

When they’re open, in ideal conditions, “driving on them is basically driving on a dry crust of peat,” Stanton said. But traffic breaks down the peat’s structural integrity, as does rainfall, turning the roadways into “mucky slurry” that is unsafe for motorists.

“Last winter, we had to close all our refuge roads because they were in such bad shape,” she said.

Peat is a very fine, organic soil formed from fallen leaves and branches that remain on the ground in an anaerobic (without oxygen) environment, she explained. “When it’s dry, it’s almost the same consistency as corn starch.”

Scientists think the refuge landscape, pockmarked by lakes now, was once contiguous peatlands that wildfires burned down in places, forming lakes as rainfall accumulated there, Stanton said.

“We think Pungo Lake was formed by a groundfire …When those peat soils ignite, they can just burn and smolder for a long period of time.”

Nearby, Phelps Lake, as well as New Lake and Lake Mattamuskeet, each are thought to have formed in that same way. Those lakes, and Pungo Lake, too, are all on North Carolina’s large Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula.

Pungo Lake is a “blackwater lake” with very little to no sunlight penetration, due to the “tannins from the peat and the vegetation, and particulates from the peat soil,” Stanton said. That means there is no submerged aquatic vegetation growing in it, and the lake — with holes up to 6 feet deep in places — looks deeper everywhere than it is, she explained. Swimming, boating and fishing on the lake are always prohibited because “the focus of Pungo Lake is inviolate sanctuary” for wildlife.

The nearly 2,800-square-acre lake is the centerpiece of the refuge’s 12,000-acre Pungo Unit, which was first established as a national wildlife refuge in the 1960s. The rest of the land that now constitutes Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge was added in the 1990s; so currently, the refuge spans over 100,000 acres in Washington, Hyde and Tyrrell counties, according to the refuge website.

A refuge map shows its piecemeal sections spread over the large geographical area.

The refuge’s easternmost swath is by the western bank of the Alligator River, while small areas just south of Columbia include the refuge office. The Pungo Unit is almost the westernmost reach; just one small section of refuge lies even further to the west.

Southeast of Pungo Lake, a larger body of water mostly included in the refuge, New Lake, has been so named since at least 1998, when Stanton began working for the refuge as a biologist. It’s still mislabeled as Alligator Lake on Google Maps.

The refuge owns about 85%, or 4,500 acres, of that roughly 4,900-acre-lake, she said, with the remainder privately owned.

North of Pungo Lake, the refuge includes about 4 miles of shoreline around Lake Phelps’ perimeter, so refuge staff works closely on projects with Pettigrew State Park, which includes Lake Phelps, Stanton said.

While all three lakes are rainwater lakes, their waters are each strikingly different colors because of the soil types beneath them. Lake Phelps appears clear to blue-hued, Pungo Lake is blackwater and New Lake appears brown due to its mixture of peat and mineral soils, she said.

Even not being the farthermost reaches of the refuge, traveling just from the refuge office to the Pungo Unit takes 50 minutes, Stanton said. The only facilities on the refuge, apart from the volunteer-staffed visitor center, are two porta-potties. She encourages visitors to bring water and to be mindful of the weather.

Most of the year, Pungo Lake and the surrounding refuge are quiet, almost seeming otherworldly. No rush of passing traffic or other human-related noises exists to overrun the occasional birds’ calls or the steady thrum of insects.

Early one July morning, the contents of three overturned trash cans were spread across both lanes of Shore Drive, which is included in the refuge and runs just south of Lake Phelps. There had been no overnight storm or significant wind. Turning onto Allen Road, which leads to Pungo Lake (about 6 miles to the south), a plausible explanation appears: A big black bear lumbers off the peat roadway into the bushes.

The Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula has the largest recorded black bears and the highest black bear population densities in the world, according to the nonprofit North Carolina Wildlife Federation.

Many people visit the refuge specifically to see black bears, according to Stanton.

Plymouth, the most populated town on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula and about half an hour’s drive northwest of the Pungo Unit, hosts an annual black bear festival in June to celebrate its famous residents.

A 2003 black bear population estimate based on collected hair samples found 3.5 black bears per square mile, meaning between 300 and 400 bears lived on the refuge, Stanton said.

The bears of Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge were found to have the highest genetic diversity in their population out of three regional refuges, meaning “that population is more adaptable to change,” she said. The next-highest genetic diversity was found at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, located to the northeast, also on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, and which is connected to Pocosin Lakes by a “wildlife corridor.”

The lowest genetic diversity was found in the black bear population of the Great Dismal Swamp Natural Wildlife Refuge in Virginia, which “makes sense because of all the development going on around it,” she said.

Two decades later, a new black bear population study is in the works for northeastern North Carolina. “Genetic technology has expanded in the last 20 years,” Stanton said. “I’m excited to see that study.”

Other year-round refuge residents are also numerous, including whitetail deer, beavers, muskrats, nutria, otters, marsh birds, wood ducks, hawks, owls, bobcats, foxes, red wolves, turtles, frogs, toads, salamanders, snakes, alligators and more.

“I consider it ‘the Yellowstone of the East,’ too, with the diversity of species,” Stanton said of the refuge, borrowing phrasing from one of her friends.

The only sound first thing on a July morning is the aggressive bumping of huge horseflies into the parked car’s windshield. The roadway is closed immediately ahead. A beaver scuttles across the road into a ditch, quickly disappearing from sight.

About a quarter-mile west of the chained-off Allen Road, turning from Shore Drive onto F2 Road, a longer stretch is drivable before a metal gate comes into view, closed and locked, with posted signs announcing the road’s closure to vehicles. Turning around reveals curious wild turkeys, one creeping out first to check the surroundings and apparently giving its nod of approval to another, who then ventures out. The turkeys run down the road together.

Rabbits and quail are well-camouflaged among refuge flora, which includes wildflowers, grasses and ferns. Honeysuckle and wild grapevines dangle from trees and bushes overhead. A combination of high humidity and the smoke from Canadian wildfires obscures everything more than a short distance away in haze.

Each year from about November through January, the refuge gets naturally louder as more than 100,000 migrating swans, geese, ducks and other birds convene annually to rest and recharge before continuing south. For over 20 migratory species — including ducks, tundra swans and snow geese — the refuge is more than a stopover: It’s their winter retreat, according to the refuge website.

With “very minimal human disturbance” and proximity to fresh water and waterfowl impoundments — designed to grow native plants for the birds’ consumption — Pungo Lake provides an ideal sanctuary for migratory waterfowl, Stanton said. In the winter, “amazing flyouts” take place around sunrise when the birds leave to go forage, and then again at sunset as they return to the lake at night.

Over 30,000 people annually visit Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, which is about a 5,000-person annual increase since before the COVID-19 pandemic.

But Stanton maintains even the 30,000 reflects “a real underestimate.” She said there is sometimes bumper-to-bumper traffic in the winter when people flock to see the waterfowl, which settle on all area lakes.

Landowners’ objectives before the refuge was established were different, Stanton noted.

While nearby areas boast rich soil and productive farmland, peat is a “nutrient and mineral poor soil” that people unsuccessfully tried to farm in the past, she said. Much of northeastern North Carolina’s pocosin land — “pocosin” is a Native American word for “swamp on a hill” — was ditched and drained, with numerous canals dug by hand by enslaved people, such as those around Lake Phelps and Lake Mattamuskeet.

Stanton thinks the area near Pungo Lake was ditched and drained with “old, heavy equipment” more recently, closer to the 1960s, to access a valuable commodity — white cedar wood. For a time, she said the land was also mined for the alternative fuel source, ethanol.

“Now we recognize the value of healthy pocosin land,” Stanton said. Pocosin is also called “Southeast shrub bog” and provides “tremendous carbon storage…(and) excellent wildlife habitat.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages the refuge with main goals of providing quality wildlife habitat, reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire and preserving the “tremendous water quality benefit,” she said.

Wet peat ensures a higher water quality for the surrounding area as it reduces both catastrophic fire and flood risks, she explained. Over the years as the refuge has received funding, it has installed water control infrastructure designed to rewet the peat.

“We have now restored over 37,000 acres of pocosin habitat,” she noted, and the goal is to add more water control infrastructure to keep water in the peat in an additional 7,000 to 8,000 acres.

This is one of the largest hydrology restoration projects in the country, according to www.fws.gov.

“Just over the years as we received funding, we piecemealed that infrastructure in to start rewetting the peat,” she said.

The refuge drafted a water management plan, which it put out for public review in 2020, and Stanton said that plan is still being finalized.

The refuge’s visitor center, the Walter B. Jones Sr. Center for the Sounds, is located at 205 South Ludington Drive in Columbia. Free, public programs take place there regularly, as well as at the Red Wolf Center, located a mile south of Columbia on N.C. Highway 94.

For more information about either the visitor center or the red wolf programs, call 252-796-3004 or visit the refuge website at www.fws.gov/refuge/pocosin-lakes. For updates on road closures, call 252-796-3004, extension 225.

NAGS HEAD — Officials last week celebrated the newly renovated visitor center at Jockey’s Ridge State Park, marking the completion of a $2 million project that ran about a year behind schedule.

State officials from Raleigh, as well as local government representatives, park staff and members of the nonprofit Friends of Jockey’s Ridge, which supports the park, were on hand May 25 for the ribbon-cutting ceremony on the visitor center’s back deck.

It was an unusually cool and blustery day for late May, courtesy of a coastal low swirling in the Atlantic Ocean. The weather underscored the importance of the project. Several who spoke told the crowd of more than 90 that the expanded and upgraded visitor center provides an educational atmosphere in which visitors can also briefly escape the Outer Banks’ sometimes harsh elements.

The 426-acre state park, situated on a thin strip of sand between the ocean and the Roanoke Sound, contains the tallest living sand dune system on the East Coast.

“This is already such an iconic park,” said D. Reid Wilson, secretary of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. “People, if you mention Jockey’s Ridge, go, ‘Oh yeah, I love it.’ Everybody has stories about this amazing place.”

Wilson continued, “But now the visitor experience will be even better. People will be able to come in here, get out of the sun a little bit, get out of the wind, and learn a lot more than they could before in just a beautiful, beautiful facility. So, congratulations to all who made that happen.”

The $2,048,463 project began in June 2021, with an expected completion date of April 2022. The work, which included renovating the building’s lobby, exhibit hall and meeting room, as well as installing electric vehicle chargers in the parking area, was just finished in April this year.

Park Superintendent Joy Greenwood said the delay was partly because of having to wait on federal flood maps to be approved and because of materials supply chain issues.

Jockey’s Ridge State Park boasts the second state park visitor center to be built in North Carolina, but the structure had not been updated in any major way since its completion in 1998, she said.

Officials said the renovation improved the flow of foot traffic throughout the visitor center and added 1,000 square feet of space. “The lobby is twice as big as it was originally,” Greenwood said, describing how cramped people had been in both the lobby and in the exhibit hall before.

The exhibit hall “has totally been gutted and redone,” she added. The educational exhibits hadn’t been upgraded since around 2002.

“There was an exhibit on hurricanes, and the last one on the list was in 2001,” she said. “The exhibits were so old and people had touched them so much that the writing had worn off.”

The meeting room similarly underwent a conversion into a more open, better lit, “usable space,” she said. Before, it was an infrequently used dark room with a heavy, wooden door.

Connect NC bond funding, which state voters approved in 2016, paid for most of the project, with supplemental funding from the state Parks and Recreation Trust Fund.

“Every park has a new facility or a new land acquisition that was started in 2016 with the Connect NC bond,” Brian Strong, interim director of the North Carolina Division of Parks and Recreation, said during the ceremony.

Jockey’s Ridge was the most-visited state park in 2021, with 1.8 million visitors, and it consistently ranks as one of the most-visited North Carolina parks.

“We get well over a million people here every year, and I’m excited that these new facilities will really help to enhance those visits, (and) help people to understand how important this natural resource is,” Strong said.

Strong thanked the Friends of Jockey’s Ridge “for all of the hard work you guys have done; you have put in some amazing hours.” He also thanked members for their advocacy on behalf of the park, both within the community and to elected officials.

The nonprofit was founded in 1990, explained Mike O’Brien, Friends of Jockey’s Ridge board chair, during his remarks. “Our mission is tosupport, enhance and promote Jockey’s Ridge as a significant geological feature on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.”

Led by Executive Director Robin Hallac, the Friends of Jockey’s Ridge acquired a tourism grant for a utility terrain vehicle, or UTV, for the park, which has provided 125 dune rides to 341 individuals so far for this year, O’Brien said.

The nonprofit’s work today continues efforts that began with the Junior Friends of Jockey’s Ridge: “The first budget was a brochure written by children for children,” O’Brien said, noting that their second project was creating “Tracks in the Sand,” a trail to the sound that still exists. “Then they built the boardwalk, which we still have today.”

George Barnes, the first superintendent for Jockey’s Ridge State Park, is a longtime Friends board member who said he helped shape the organization. In his 32 years as superintendent, “I saw a lot of things that we needed to do and we couldn’t get money for it, like that boardwalk out there,” Barnes said at the reception following the ribbon cutting.

The Junior Friends of Jockey’s Ridge and the newly formed adult Friends contingent, along with two area contractors who donated their time, built the 340-foot boardwalk with lumber donated from lumber companies, Barnes recalled. Even some visitors who were passing by and asking what was happening ended up lending a hand and helping build part of it.

Everyone’s efforts about 30 years ago resulted in a more accessible way for more people to enjoy the park to this day — “and it didn’t cost the state one dime.”

Barnes was enthusiastic about the renovation and said he thought children would be, too.

“We used to have like a little magnifying glass (through which) you could look at a grain of sand and see it. They’ve got this thing now where you can look at it and blow it up on that big screen,” he said, gesturing toward a microscope focused on grains of sand by a projection screen in the community room.

“Kids see that kind of stuff and think, ‘That’s what we’re here for,’” he continued. “Let them learn about what it is here, and why it’s here, and why it stays and why it moves away. It’s a living sand dune.”

Tim Rayworth, an interpretive designer for North Carolina State Parks, chatted with guests in the community room during the reception. He and other staff began work on the new exhibits over four years ago.

“We started by working with the staff and talking about what important stories were here, and then distilling that down into a few big ideas,” Rayworth said.

Those “big ideas” included the park’s three habitats: the dunes, the maritime forest and the estuary, “because that’s often overlooked.”

The new educational exhibits “spilled into the lobby” as the park’s origin story of concerned residents banding together, raising money and lobbying the state became a feature in the lobby.

“We’ve got some parks that have really interesting stories,” he opined. “This is among one of the more interesting ones. It was really a grassroots thing … the community rose to bring it together.”

The first state park, Mount Mitchell, was created in 1915. “There’s really nobody around anymore” who could share firsthand accounts of that or of other early state parks.

But crafting the exhibit about the efforts that led to the 1975 establishment of Jockey’s Ridge State Park underscored a difference.

“Here, it’s not history,” Rayworth said. “It’s living memory for a lot of people.”

For Ann-Cabell Baum, whose mother Carolista Baum famously initiated actions to preserve the dunes, it’s an indelible part of her childhood.

During her remarks at the ceremony, Ann-Cabell Baum recalled playing on the sand dunes every day during the summer with her two younger siblings. “One afternoon, we were coming back across and there was a bulldozer. And then guess what? We ran home and told our mom.” She’d promptly marched over to confront the driver, who stopped.

“I would have stopped too,” Baum quipped. “If you knew my mom, you would have done what she said. And later that evening, she went back and took the distributor cap off so they could not complete the work.”

Baum thanked everyone “for the hard work that’s gone into this gorgeous building.” She also shared a reminder: “We have an incredible legacy with this natural resource behind us, and … it’s our responsibility every day to make sure that it is here for generations to come.”

Just last fall, Baum followed in her mother’s footsteps and spearheaded efforts to that effect when a section of the park was threatened with potential development. Plans surfaced of a private, for-profit museum that was proposed to be built on park land with a free 99-year lease. Baum crafted a petition, collected more than 2,500 signatures and, along with the Friends, shared concerns with state and local officials. State officials in late October decided to decline to lease the land.

In an interview during the reception, Wilson appeared to give a nod to those events.

“It’s just a really special place, and when you consider how hard the Friends of Jockey’s Ridge works to support this park, you realize how invested the community is in its success,” he said. “These are tenacious people.”

For her part, also at the reception, Baum said that members of the Friends “are awesome. They really dug in, and when they needed to be there, they were there and made things happen. And reminded everybody why we all love this place.”

She added, “It’s my favorite place on Earth.”

WANCHESE—Location.

That was a driving force behind the establishment of the Coastal Studies Institute, or CSI, a decade ago as a research partnership between five public North Carolina universities. Being on the Outer Banks provides direct access to the nation’s second-largest estuary, the Albemarle-Pamlico, as well as to a unique part of the Atlantic Ocean.

And CSI’s location continues to make it valuable in the eyes of those involved today, from the executive director to professors and researchers to undergraduate students.

“CSI is a place-based steward of the best available data and science,” Executive Director Dr. Reide Corbett told Coastal Review in an email. Such place-based facilities “transform the lives of students of all ages” and allow collaboration with the local community “to integrate science into decision-making.”

To celebrate 10 years on the Outer Banks, CSI held a free open house Saturday on its campus in Wanchese. The public was invited to tour the building, participate in a variety of hands-on learning experiences and talk to professors, researchers and students from East Carolina University, Elizabeth City State University and the College of The Albemarle.

Various organizations in the Coastal Environmental Educators Network also had informational and activity booths on-site for the 2023 Earth Fair OBX that took place in conjunction with the open house.

The parking lot was full by midday and groups of people meandered through and around the LEED Gold-certified building. LEED is a green building rating system.

A family viewed local shipwreck video footage through 3D glasses in the scientific diving lab room. Groups of attendees perused rooms full of the latest research on marsh cores and sediments, Gulf Stream ecology, renewable ocean energy and more. Attendees also had the chance to see drones, autonomous vehicles, a wave energy converter, CSI’s research boat and other science technology firsthand.

Dr. Jim Morley, an assistant professor in ECU’s biology department, welcomed members of the public into the Fisheries Ecology Lab he oversees on CSI’s third floor. He had a computer screen set up to display the view through a microscope of tiny crabs and transparent shore shrimp swimming in a water sample.

Morley said he’s been stationed here for almost 3½ years. “The best part? Definitely the location,” he stated. “Just being close to the places where you’re conducting field research is very handy.”

The Albemarle-Pamlico estuary, located directly behind CSI, is one of the country’s most important estuaries “in terms of fish productivity,” Morley said.

The six people he oversees in the lab are interested in how marine ecosystems change over time.

“We’re doing research on climate change impacts and other forms of human interference with habitats,” he said. They’re also currently studying a shrimp parasite. And they’ll start a project this summer on invasive species of catfish to see “what their predatory impact is on the native species.”

Next to him, Lela Schlenker, a postdoctoral ECU student, invited people to catch and hold shore shrimp swimming with small fish and crabs in tanks on a lab counter.

“I’m a fisheries biologist, and this project is a broad fisheries assessment,” Schlenker said of a nearby set of charts displaying her research. “We’re basically trying to understand the state of fisheries and ecosystem in North Carolina.”

Verena Wang, another ECU postdoctoral scholar, invited people to hold an otolith. Otoliths are ear bones unique to fish, which help them both hear and orient themselves as they swim, she explained.

Juvenile fish develop daily otolith rings, while older fish have yearly rings, like a tree. Scientists can tell how old a fish was and what species it was just by studying its otolith, since each species’ otolith has a unique shape and size, Wang explained.

In a second-floor classroom, undergraduate ECU students asked attendees if they wanted to look through microscopes at various forms of plankton. Laminated sets of photographs of plankton and their corresponding names were next to each telescope.

Julia Callender, a junior ECU biology major and coastal studies minor, helped a child get situated at a microscope. Callender is studying in the semester-long program ECU offers at CSI, which she said is “like a study abroad program, but it’s local.”

The undergraduate housing in Manteo costs the same as a semester in a campus dormitory, but doesn’t include the meal plan, she said.

Prior to coming to CSI, “I didn’t think I was interested in working with the public,” Callender said, but she found she has enjoyed working with the K-12 science outreach program. She has also enjoyed the hands-on learning — even learning how to tie boat knots — and the small undergraduate class sizes, generally between four to 10 students, which “are beneficial” for developing relationships with professors. She plans to host an outreach table when she returns to Greenville to recruit more students to the program: “Why wouldn’t you want to come here?”

Outside on the dock by CSI, Andrew McMains, an ECU doctoral biology student, manned the Adaptive Resolution Imaging Sonar, or ARIS, which provides a way to count fish. A screen was set up so if a fish swam by, people could see it in real time. ARIS sends out sound, and fish bodies reflect it back, so it can still effectively be used when waters are not clear, he explained.

Starting this fall, he and his colleagues plan to study fish movement through Oregon Inlet. McMains said questions they hope to answer include whether predatory species or prey leave the sounds for the ocean first, and what exactly prompts fish to leave and to return — is it temperature or wind or multiple days at the same temperature?

Meanwhile, Patterson “Trip” Taylor, a research assistant at CSI for almost 10 years, stood on the deck of the Miss Caroline, which was docked nearby in the canal.

“This is our research vessel,” Taylor said, gesturing around the 42-foot Duffy & Duffy boat. “The majority of boats with the same instrumentation are significantly larger.” But its compact size helps when navigating the shallow waters of the local sounds, he noted.

Instruments onboard measure water temperature, salinity and speed, and special cameras can map up to 600 meters below the boat. From the salinity and other characteristics, he said he can map the “boundaries” of waters, determining where Chesapeake Bay outflow, Gulf Stream and other distinct water bodies are in the ocean.

Hanging off the back of the boat in the air for people to see was a “rosette with gray canisters,” through which water can freely flow until researchers decide to close the tops. After taking water samples at specific depths, they bring the filled canisters back to CSI, “so chemists and biologists can do their own research,” Taylor said.

The Outer Banks is situated at the confluence of the Mid-Atlantic Bight and the South Atlantic Bight, in an area that is also heavily influenced by wind and by the Gulf Stream.

“It’s an extremely dynamic environment out here, which is why it’s interesting for oceanography,” Taylor said.

CSI is a multi-institutional research partnership between ECU, Elizabeth City State, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University and University of North Carolina Wilmington.

ECU took administrative lead over CSI in 2015, establishing the Outer Banks Campus, according to Corbett. That led to the development of a new college called Integrated Coastal Programs at ECU in 2018, as well as the new Department of Coastal Studies and the redesign of a doctoral program. Prior to 2015, CSI reported directly to the University of North Carolina Systems Office, he said.

CSI has grown from three to 10 full-time faculty since its establishment and currently has more than 50 undergraduate students spending at least a full semester on campus, Corbett said in an email. Faculty have backgrounds in fields of study that include anthropology, remote sensing, human geography, coastal engineering, physical oceanography, fisheries, hydrology and marine geochemistry — bringing together “an interdisciplinary team unlike any other marine center.”

“This breadth of experience allows CSI to focus on the cutting edge of coastal science, providing solutions to coastal communities through cutting edge research and engagement,” Corbett said.

“We are proud of our ability to expand the amount of long-term ocean observations, including waves and currents, off our coast from Ocracoke to the Virginia line,” Corbett said. “We maintain this suite of instrumentation off our coast to better understand the energy resource, address questions related to the complex physical and biochemical interactions in our coastal waters, and provide the data publicly as an important scientific and public resource.”

CSI scientists have also been working with Dare County, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service collecting long-term data “that has been instrumental in creating a monitoring program to assess possible biological impacts along the beach following a (beach) nourishment project.”

Over its first decade, CSI’s external grant revenue has multiplied by more than tenfold, to $4 million currently, “with research being conducted in our backyard and around the globe,” Corbett said.

He pointed to North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program as “an important part of our strategic growth.” The leadership team has expanded its partnerships with the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, and CSI hosted the DOE Waves to Water prize program in conjunction with Jennette’s Pier in April 2022, where four devices competed for $1 million in total prize awards to use wave energy to convert ocean water into drinking water.

Also in 2022, Corbett said the DOE awarded ECU/CSI and three partner institutions competitive grants to create the Atlantic Marine Energy Center,or AMEC, a new national center “to address the ongoing needs for research, development and testing” of wave, tidal and ocean current energy. The University of New Hampshire is the lead organization for AMEC, which is the fourth national renewable energy center.

The U.S. is “certainly about a decade behind Europe” and is “playing catch-up” in harnessing offshore wind and other forms of renewable energy, like waves and currents, he said in a phone call. Only in the last several years has development really been pushed, such as by DOE putting significant resources toward driving innovation in that area.

CSI also works with the DOE Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Program, which annually encourages remote and island communities in the Southeast to apply. The town of Nags Head and Ocracoke Island applied and were competitively selected for the program in 2021, according to the DOE website.

CSI is working with both local governments to help them include renewables in their future energy portfolios, such as by potentially electrifying some Ocracoke ferries, Corbett said.

Outside of that, scientists also collaborate locally to address challenges or specific project concerns. They have provided data for the town of Nags Head’s estuarine shoreline management plan, and students are currently working with the town to evaluate shallow groundwater changes.

“We have worked with Nags Head on helping the community understand the science behind sea level change and possible implications of future rise,” Corbett noted. “We are here to serve our community to the best of our ability.” 

As scientists, they recognize they don’t have all the answers, but “we are constantly searching, studying and looking for solutions,” he added.

CSI also plays a part in instructing the next generation of scientists. K-12 programs in ocean energy, marine biology and more are available both at CSI and off campus at schools. CSI educators collaborate with local teachers with Dare County Schools, but also serve groups across the state and in Virginia, according to Corbett. He expects CSI to serve 2,000 students on campus and another 2,000 off campus by the end of the year.

Additionally, CSI offers 10 summer day camps. All camp slots sold out within two days of opening registration this year, Corbett said. In the past, CSI offered as many as 17 summer camps, but scaled back because of staffing and the need to “create a balance” between the camps and ongoing research.

Echoing the top concern of many Outer Banks employers, Corbett acknowledged: “The biggest challenge for our growth is housing.” While actively trying to address that, he said he expects it to “continue to limit growth of our programming and capacity.”

He explained, “When you really want to drive research, build on research, a lot of that is done with your grad students, Ph.D. students (and) post-docs.”

But several graduate students have chosen to return to ECU’s main campus in Greenville “due to a lack of housing” on the Outer Banks. The campus set up a weekly shuttle to bring students to CSI, “but that doesn’t provide the contact time or research experience often needed for their research,” Corbett said. Whereas three to four years ago, CSI had about six full-time doctoral and graduate students living and working on the Outer Banks, it currently only has two.

While CSI leases dormitory-style housing in Manteo that works well for undergraduates, the higher-level students and technical staff “typically need something more than dorm-type housing,” Corbett said.

In the future, CSI plans to continue to grow its capacity to harness the many forms of renewable energy available off the coast, including using the Gulf Stream as a source of energy, he said.

CSI staff members look forward to the Pioneer Array being stationed off the Outer Banks coast in 2024 and learning how that ocean observation system “can be integrated into our current research,” he said.

The Pioneer Array just finished a seven-year stint of continuous data-gathering off the Massachusetts coast.

CSI also plans to continue to study coastal change in order to supply solutions to coastal communities’ challenges.

“CSI is truly blossoming as a marine center,” Corbett said, noting the importance of its many local partnerships. “We want to work across these partners to create a more resilient coastal community.”

For more information, the public can attend CSI’s free, monthly “Science on the Sound” events, visit the campus or visit www.coastalstudiesinstitute.org.

Sorting out recycling can be a tricky process.

Currently, recycling professionals say the commodity markets — where recyclables are sold — are stable, so everything that can be recycled is achieving that goal.

But on the Outer Banks, the past several years have been tumultuous for recycling.

Officials and residents in Southern Shores, Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, Nags Head and Manteo learned in early 2020 that recyclables leaving Dare County through Bay Disposal & Recycling were actually being burned at a waste-to-energy plant, Wheelabrator, in Portsmouth, Virginia. They faced a dilemma: Should they continue recycling?

Nags Head opted to switch in March 2021 to the recycling provider with which Duck had contracted since 2005, Tidewater Fibre Corp., also known as TFC Recycling.

The Nags Head Board of Commissioners when it met March 1 approved TFC’s 73-cent rate increase. Homeowners contract directly with TFC and now pay $10.33 per month.

The town pays $5 per month per household of TFC’s total $15.33 fee “to encourage recycling,” according to Nags Head Public Information Officer Roberta Thuman. The number of subscribers increased over the first year and is now steadily around 900.

Manteo, meanwhile, chose to end its townwide curbside recycling program in January 2021, according to Emmett Moore, district manager for Bay Disposal. He noted that individual residents can still contract directly with the company for recycling services, as some Kitty Hawk residents do, absent a townwide curbside recycling program.

Kill Devil Hills continues its residential recycling franchise agreement with Bay Disposal, a contract in place since 2008. Residents who opt into the program pay $13.20 per cart per month, according to Public Services Director Steve Albright. Subscribers have increased from 950 to about 1,060 over the past several years.

Southern Shores also continues to contract with Bay Disposal for curbside recycling, but residents don’t pay out of pocket for the service, instead it is included in their taxes. “This is a service that our property owners expect,” Town Manager Cliff Ogburn said in an email.

Duck has a similar program, but with TFC.

“No separate fee is collected for recycling services as it is included in property taxes,” Public Information and Events Director Kay Nickens said in an email, explaining that TFC provides each home in Duck with a recycling container.

A LOOK BACK: COVID-19 and the Waste Stream, a special reporting series

Formerly known as Outer Banks Hauling, Bay Disposal operated its own material recovery facility — sorting, baling and marketing the various recyclables it collected — until fall 2018.

Commodity markets took a dive and left the company, which was acquired by Waste Connections in early 2018 but still operates under the same name, scrambling and asking for a rate increase.

“Recycling commodity values have dropped to a point where we have been forced to close our recycling processing facility and deliver the material to a third-party vendor at a rate of $75.00 per ton (transportation and processing),” Moore wrote in his Nov. 30, 2018, letter to town officials in Kill Devil Hills.

While the vendor wasn’t named, records show that Bay Disposal was taking materials to TFC. But by early 2020, all recyclables Bay Disposal collected were going to Wheelabrator.

A Jan. 16, 2020, letter from Joshua Smaltz, then-Outer Banks site manager for Bay Disposal, advised Kill Devil Hills officials that the company had the capability to take materials to TFC instead of Wheelabrator, if the board so chose, but the cost would “nearly double.”

Bay Disposal was still taking all materials to Wheelabrator as of April 21, 2020, according to a follow-up letter from Smaltz.

In March 2022, Albright questioned where recycling was going, and a new site manager, Pamela Stine, said most of it was being recycled at RDS, a facility in Portsmouth, Virginia.

“As we continue to educate the community and our customers on proper recycling, we continue to be able to increase the amount of clean recycle we take to RDS,” Stine wrote in an email dated March 8, 2022.

Stine wrote that of the recycling collected in February 2022, 70% was “clean enough” to go to RDS, with the remaining 30% of “contaminated recycling” going to Wheelabrator.

Bay Disposal had yet another Outer Banks site manager by mid-2022, who currently holds that title.

Jeremy Savage told Coastal Review that he’d relocated to the area seven months ago.

“Ever since I’ve been down here, the market’s been good. We’ve been taking 99% of our stuff to RDS,” he said.

“If RDS closes on us for a couple days, we kind of just hold onto our recyclables (until they reopen, and then) we bring it up to them,” Savage said. The facility has a large loading area, and if it becomes full of material to the point that equipment can’t maneuver, the area must be cleared out before they accept more material, he explained.

Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk each operate a drop-off recycle center, where residents without curbside service can take and sort their own recycling. Nags Head has two unattended drop-off recycling locations. Dare County Public Works operates a recycle center in Manteo and keeps mobile bins in Wanchese, Stumpy Point, Rodanthe and Buxton, which can be used by both county residents and visitors.

Bay Disposal hauls items such as cans, plastics and paper from the Manteo facility, where all county recycling is brought.

But the county also accepts used tires, which go to a facility in Cameron to be converted into a soft surface material for playgrounds and football fields, used vehicle motor oil, which it sells to Noble Oil. It sends scrap metal and appliances like lawnmowers and refrigerators to Dare Area Recycling Technologies, or DART, in Wanchese, said David Overton, sanitation and recycle supervisor for the county.

Dare County sells its cardboard directly from that facility to a buyer in Suffolk, Virginia.

Glass from all over Dare County — 36 to 42 tons annually from restaurants, businesses, mobile bins and individuals — comes to the Manteo facility, where a glass crusher has been used for more than 25 years, according to Overton.

There are two bays below the machine for the two products the machine churns out, landscaping pebbles and sand. Both are made available free to residents, who must visit the facility to pick it up. Calling ahead to confirm availability is encouraged. Overton said people often use the glass pebbles for landscaping, for jewelry and for art.

But on March 7, all the pebbles were gone, as one Roanoke Island man was filling his truck bed with sand to use as fill on his driveway.

“If recycling doesn’t take place, at some point, we’re going to run out of places to put our trash,” Overton said. “That’s why it’s necessary to recycle. If you dig a hole and you keep putting dirt in it, after a while it’s going to fill up. It’s kind of simple.”

The recycling leaving Dare County through either Bay Disposal or TFC ultimately ends up at a facility owned by members of the same family.

Michael Benedetto owns TFC Recycling in Chesapeake, Virginia. His brother, Joe Benedetto III, owns RDS.

Joe Benedetto III’s biographical information on the RDS website says he is “a third-generation member of the recycling and solid waste industry and has worked in and around recycling facilities his entire life.”

Their family has been in the business since the 1800s, according to Kathy Russell, a community and outreach education staff member at TFC. She confirmed they are brothers.

TFC is celebrating 50 years in business and has well-established relationships with recycling markets, Russell said; while “RDS is not nearly as old.”

At TFC, everything but fibers (meaning paper) is recycled in markets in the U.S. “There are just not enough paper mills in the U.S.,” Russell said. But being close to ocean ports, TFC can easily ship its paper recycling internationally to countries including India, Indonesia and Mexico.

She encourages people to only recycle clean paper and empty bottles and cans. Recyclables are only truly recyclable if there is a market for them. In a perfect world, manufactures would only use packaging materials for which there is a market, she stated.

But as it is, people should never put items such as plastic wrap and plastic bags in recycling bins. Those can cause machines to jam. Only special programs — such as those some grocery stores operate — accept plastic bags.

For his part, the most frequent nonrecyclable items Savage regularly sees are lithium batteries and pizza boxes.

Any paper or cardboard with food residue is trash, he noted; and people should take lithium batteries directly to landfills.

“Those cause major fires for our trucks and our loads,” he explained.

To learn exactly what is recyclable, recycling professionals encourage people to contact their town, county or recycling provider.

For more information, visit www.darenc.gov/departments/public-works/recycling; https://tfcrecycling.com; https://rds-virginia.com; or www.wasteconnections.com.

Carp removal. Sedimentation reduction. Regrowth of underwater vegetation.

Years of cooperative groundwork between individuals and agencies will soon translate into visible projects to restore Lake Mattamuskeet’s water quality.

And that, in turn, could benefit all area residents — human and wildlife.

Located on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, Lake Mattamuskeet covers about 40,000 acres and is the largest natural lake in North Carolina. County residents point to the lake as the center of Hyde County, both geographically and culturally.

Related: Inner coast: Lake Mattamuskeet draws outdoor enthusiasts

Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1934, comprises the lake and 10,000 acres of surrounding land. It’s an important overwintering site for migratory waterfowl along the Atlantic Flyway and a year-round habitat for many other species. The county is known as a hunting, fishing and bird-watching destination and for its rich farmland.

Hyde County, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission contracted with the North Carolina Coastal Federation, publisher of Coastal Review, to develop the nearly 200-page Lake Mattamuskeet Watershed Restoration Plan, which was finalized in 2018 and approved by the state in 2019.

The plan names three interconnected goals: To protect the current way of life; to actively manage the lake’s water level; and to restore the lake’s water quality and clarity.

The plan was developed with input from a stakeholder team that included area residents, local government officials, graduate students, university professors, refuge staff and the Mattamuskeet Technical Working Group, a joint effort between Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

“Everyone wants to see that lake cleaned up,” said Wendy Stanton, technical working group co-chair and acting refuge manager for Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in Columbia.

Stanton called the lake “out of balance,” explaining that everyone is “trying to restore that balance” so it can again become “a healthy aquatic ecosystem.”

After about six years of the team meeting to address the problem from various angles, “it’s encouraging that their stamina and enthusiasm for the effort is still there. That speaks volumes to the care and concern and love that everybody has for this lake,” said Erin Fleckenstein, oyster program director for the Coastal Federation. She helped coordinate the development of the watershed restoration plan.

“Most local stakeholders have very fond memories of boating, fishing and crabbing on the lake. It’s part of their history, as well as their community’s history,” she continued.

Officials involved in the restoration efforts point to the growth of submerged aquatic vegetation, also called SAV or seagrass, as both a main goal and as an indicator of success.

Monitoring by the Fish and Wildlife Service initially noted seagrass declines in the late 1980s. By 2017, no plants could be found during the refuge’s annual SAV survey.

For aquatic plant life to return, two actions are required, according to Stanton: carp removal and the reduction of sediments being put into the lake.

The restoration plan calls for the removal of 5 million pounds of invasive common carp from the lake. Each adult fish weighs 4 to 5 pounds, Stanton said. Carp are bottom feeders, and their rooting for food also results in ripping up vegetation.

Human activities also must change. Fertilizer, fossil fuels, wastewater, stormwater and pet manure can cause “nutrient pollution” — excess nitrogen and phosphorus — in nearby waters, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

These sediments reduce water clarity, blocking sunlight from reaching the bottom, and aquatic vegetation cannot grow without sunlight, officials note on the agency’s website.

The overabundance of suspended nitrogen and phosphorus solids in Lake Mattamuskeet also contributes to blooms of phytoplankton and cyanobacteria, which “outcompete SAV,” according to the Fish and Wildlife Service website.

Cyanobacteria’s adverse effects extend beyond harming plant life.

As a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “Harmful Algal Bloom Advisory” sign posted near a Lake Mattamuskeet culvert notes, “Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) can produce toxins that can cause serious illness in animals and humans.”

Lake Mattamuskeet is currently considered a phytoplankton-cyanobacteria-dominated system. Once the shift from an aquatic plant-dominated system to an algae-dominated one like this occurs, “it takes a lot of work to return the system,” said Kelly Davis, who owns land adjacent to the lake and worked as the longtime refuge biologist.

She’s implementing a water-control project on her property to change the direction of runoff from her farmland. Instead of allowing gravity to carry runoff, which invariably includes some sediment, to the lake, she’s diverting it to the woodland area of her property.

Davis acknowledged that her actions alone will not clean the lake, but putting water management on her farm is one of many positive steps that area residents are taking.

“You take little bites of a big problem,” Davis stated. “It’s exciting to be working toward improving it.”

Davis’ project was already being designed prior to the restoration plan’s development, but that plan may involve similar water-control projects on other properties.

Although not yet finalized, one involves replumbing a private landowner’s drainage to move through restored wetlands instead of discharging into coastal waters, Fleckenstein said. Smaller projects with individual landowners like these may eventually serve as models for others in the county or in the 55,000-acre watershed, she added.

Larger-scale projects are being developed simultaneously. The Coastal Federation has worked on behalf of the county to help orchestrate some engineering, surveying and permitting work on those, Fleckenstein said. Multiple grants are involved in work toward the plan goals.

Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge already has been working on better water quality control in its waterfowl impoundments, which are areas managed specifically for waterfowl, according to Stanton.

For any such effort, large-scale or small-scale, the key is to slow down the movement of water draining into the lake, so sediment has time to settle and not as much enters the lake, Davis explained.

Another necessary task is regularly clearing excess sediment from the four main canals that link the lake to the Pamlico Sound. The lake’s water level has been passively managed by the wind since the canals were built with one-way gates allowing drainage into the sound, Davis said.

As the restoration plan document states: “Rising sea levels and siltation of the main canals connecting the lake to the Pamlico Sound are thought to be contributing factors in the decline of drainage function, and those conditions are anticipated to exacerbate flooding in the future.”

And when the surrounding land floods, landowners sometimes use pumps to push the water off their properties. That accelerated velocity gives sediment less of a chance to fall out of the water before it ends up back in the lake, Davis noted.

But with the widespread support of the community, the restoration plan will disrupt that negative chain reaction.

Some changes are already underway.

Signs are going up at each of the five culverts that run beneath N.C. Highway 94 and connect the east and west sides of the lake warning of possible temporary closures for recreational fishing when carp removal efforts begin, Stanton said.

And that could be soon.

“We expect to receive that money any day now,” Stanton said on Feb. 24 of a $1 million large invasive species grant the Fish and Wildlife Service awarded the technical working group.

As soon as the money is available, the group will publicize the contract and accept bids. She estimates most carp will be removed within the next two years.

“Whoever the vendor is, they get to keep the carp,” she said. “They can dispose of them or use the various markets as they see fit.”

Carp are in demand as a food source in markets in New York and elsewhere, Stanton noted. Another option might be stocking catch-and-release fishing ponds on the western side of the state. When a prior, effective, large-scale carp removal program took place at the lake in the 1940s and 1950s, that is where most carp ended up, Stanton said.

Other steps have already been taken to address the carp problem. Barriers were installed at the tide gates in March 2021. Flat metal bars two inches apart prevent adult carp from entering the lake, while still allowing native fish species and blue crabs to pass back and forth from the sound, Stanton said.

This will also be the third year that the state Wildlife Resources Commission has stocked the lake with bluegills, a native fish species known for its voracious appetite for carp eggs and carp larvae, around the mid-May carp spawning season.

“A lot of people like fishing bluegills, too, so it not only helps us reduce the carp, but also provides recreational fishing opportunities,” Stanton noted.

For more information about the restoration projects, visit www.fws.gov/project/lake-mattamuskeet-aquatic-grass-restoration and www.nccoast.org/protect-the-coast/stormwater/lake-mattamuskeet-watershed-restoration/.

Featured Image

A rainbow appears in the spray of a breaking wave Jan. 26 off Hatteras Island, near Buxton. West winds blow the spray offshore behind the wave, and the water droplets scatter the sunlight, allowing surfers and onlookers to see the full visible spectrum of color from certain angles.

Second of two parts. Read part 1.

Reading a history book as an undergraduate student, a northeastern North Carolina woman paused, surprised — “Well, there’s my grandfather.”

Ramona Brown, now 61, was in a history class at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, working toward her degree in journalism, a field in which she’s worked for 40 years.

She was learning about the turbulent school integrations in Charlotte during the Civil Rights era.

“And that’s when I discovered this story out of Hyde County,” Brown said. “I shared it with my mom and she said, ‘Oh yeah, I was a part of that, along with your granddaddy.’”

Her grandfather, Golden Mackey, was quoted in David S. Cecelski’s 1994 book, “Along Freedom Road.” He was an alumnus of one of Hyde County’s two Black schools, both of which officials planned to permanently close in the process of integration.

Brown was 7 and 8 during the 1968-69 school year, when Black and Native American parents in Hyde County carried out one of the longest and most successful Civil Rights protests in the country, spurred by their disagreement with this school desegregation plan. They didn’t send their children to school that year, held nonviolent protests daily for months, marched on Raleigh twice and rid the county of the Ku Klux Klan with a gunfight, as Cecelski details in the book.

Seeing her grandfather’s name in print prompted Brown’s interest in genealogy and a desire to seek more information out about that time, which she remembered, but hadn’t fully understood as a child.

She recalled her grandfather hosting community meetings along with other ministers, sometimes in homes but “principally at the quote-unquote ‘Black’ churches at the time,” where they discussed strategies for approaching the school board and government officials “to integrate the schools in a way that was not racially infused.”

Her mother, Ethel Mackey Brown, served as a secretary for the meetings.

Throughout the South, whites persistently fought against school desegregation, sometimes violently. “The depth of white resistance to sending their children to historically black schools was also reflected in the flames of the dozens of these schools that were put to the torch as desegregation approached,” Cecelski wrote.

And when it happened, desegregation was a one-way street: Surviving former Black schools were almost always shuttered; Black and Native American teachers and principals were fired en masse; Black and Native American students were sent to white schools; and only white teaching styles and school cultures were preserved.

An entire generation of Black principals were “eliminated,” Cecelski wrote. And North Carolina was second only to Texas in the number of Black teachers who lost their jobs.

“By 1966 and 1967, few black communities failed to raise objections to school closings and teacher displacement,” he wrote. But while other communities in the state had protested, “one of the strongest and most successful protests, the first to draw national attention to the problem, occurred in one of the South’s most remote and least populated counties.”

Hyde County’s community of people of color didn’t want to sacrifice everything for integration. They organized and they committed fully for the long haul.

The meetings centered on “how to successfully integrate the schools so that the people of color don’t feel like they’ve lost all of their traditions and their cultures … and how Caucasians don’t feel this is a bad thing and that they’re losing as well,” Brown explained.

Brown prefers the term “people of color” because, as she learned from her grandfather, her family has not only African descent but deep Indigenous roots as well.

Golden Mackey’s children were all adults at the time, “but he was such a proponent of education, he got involved in it,” Brown said. He took part at the marches at the state legislature, but she didn’t know of any involvement in the gunfight.

Mackey was involved with the “Star of Zion Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ,” which his father had helped found. As Cecelski’s book notes, the church community was intimately involved in not only the organizing and sustaining the peaceful protests, but also in supporting the children’s education while they were out of school.

That echoed earlier school history in the county.

“Before there was public education for all children in Hyde County, there were parochial schools there,” Brown said. “This particular church — my great-grandfather Benjamin Mackey was the superintendent and founder of that school there for children of Native American descent and African descent.”

The protesters prevailed despite enormous challenges.

North Carolina’s government officials would prove to be the best in the South at subverting the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

“White politicians in North Carolina opposed school integration with the same conviction as their counterparts in other southern states, and with more acumen,” Cecelski wrote. “In the spring of 1955, the General Assembly resolved that ‘the mixing of the races in the public schools … cannot be accomplished and should not be attempted.’”

To that end, state politicians “engineered a series of legal and administrative barriers to school integration that, although very effective, did not appear openly to defy the Supreme Court.”

The Pupil Assignment Act and the Pearsall Plan were two such measures. They shielded the local education boards from potential lawsuits, allowing North Carolina to avoid school desegregation for more than a decade after Brown v. Board of Education — “longer than many school districts in the Deep South and Virginia where militant resistance to school desegregation had occurred,” Cecelski wrote.

And by fall 1967, Hyde County was an outlier in the state, with just three Black students attending classes with white students — the lowest biracial school enrollment in the state.

Not only was white resistance to integration constant, but Black students felt uncomfortable in the white schools. They missed their Black teachers and principals who had served as “their most important role models and counselors,” and they missed the high expectations and family-like school atmosphere they were used to, Cecelski wrote.

Students encountered racism from classmates, teachers and administrators, and their parents experienced harassment that included death threats and intimidating messages from the KKK, as Cecelski detailed.

After years of protests, negotiations and federal pressure, as Cecelski wrote, by the end of the 1969-70 school year, Hyde County officials agreed to keep both the Black schools, O.A. Peay and Davis, open.

That alone was a remarkable victory in the South, but there were more. Among other agreements, officials decided to keep both the Black schools’ principals; preserve the teachers’ jobs; hire a Black assistant principal at the historically white Mattamuskeet School; start an African American history class; keep former educator and principal O.A. Peay’s name on that school; and allow use of all three of those schools for the Founder’s Day and the Homecoming celebrations that had played a big role in Black school and community culture for years.

“These were, in the end, the ultimate successes of the Hyde County school boycott,” Cecelski concluded.

The North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program cast a marker in 2018 to denote the historical significance of the event. The marker was formally dedicated in May 2019, with Alice Spencer Mackey, a student during the time of the protest, in attendance, according to the Ocracoke Observer.

To read more about the marker, visit http://www.ncmarkers.com/Markers.aspx?MarkerId=B-76.

First of a two-part series on the legacy of Hyde County’s earliest people.

Traces of history reside in names.

The surname Mackey, for instance.

While linguistically Scots-Irish, in the Hyde County area, Mackey is well-documented as being associated with the Mattamuskeet Tribe, said Ramona Brown.

Her great-uncle on her mother’s side, Napoleon Mackey, is one of the Native Americans that archaeologist Patrick H. Garrow interviewed and quoted in his 1975 publication, “The Mattamuskeet Documents: A Study in Social History.” At nearly 200 pages, it is likely the most thorough study done to date on the Mattamuskeet Tribe.

Mackey lived “just past the lake itself in a little town called Fairfield,” Brown said. “I remember as a child going over there often, particularly on the holidays.”

While visiting him, she recalled her mother and grandfather telling stories about Lake Mattamuskeet. “Grandfather told us — he was born in 1904 — that that lake was actually dry land, and he said that his ancestors … actually were able to walk on that area. And over time, it became a natural lake.”

Brown, who has worked in journalism for 40 years, noted that when she researched the history of the lake, what she found backed up the oral tradition her grandfather shared. “That was interesting to me,” said Brown, who grew up in Beaufort County and now lives in Knightdale.

Lake Mattamuskeet, the state’s largest natural lake and Hyde County’s most prominent feature, bears an Algonquian name meaning “dry dust.” That seems counterintuitive until one learns that the lake wasn’t always there. Scientists theorize that a meteor strike or a fire caused the depression that then filled with rainwater.

Like many tribes in present-day eastern North Carolina, the Machapunga — also interchangeably referenced as the Mattamuskeet — spoke Algonquian before Europeans arrived.

Other Algonquian names — Roanoke, Hatteras, Croatan — remain sprinkled throughout the landscape. Algonquian-speaking tribes were the first encountered by the English who landed on their shores beginning in the 1580s; and they took the brunt of the resulting disease, war, murders over land and forced relocation.

“There was a high degree of linguistic and cultural uniformity throughout the area explored by the English at that time, although several major political divisions were present among the Indian inhabitants,” Garrow wrote.

But the most damaging interactions were not intertribal; they resulted from European intrusion.

“It is known that encroachment by white settlers on Indian lands was causing problems by 1700, and that those encroachments were largely responsible for increasing the hostility between Indians and whites,” he wrote.

The Tuscarora War, which lasted from 1711-1715, involved the Mattamuskeet, Bay River, Pamlico, Neuse, Tuscarora, Coree, Woccon and potentially other small coastal Algonquian groups against the Europeans.

“Several of the small coastal groups disappeared completely as a result of the war and the remainder were greatly reduced in population,” Garrow wrote, calling the war “a disaster” for the tribes.

Post-war, the Native inhabitants were relegated to a roughly 4-mile-square reservation by Lake Mattamuskeet. For various reasons, the tribe sold off portions of the reservation lands to whites beginning in 1731, and all of it completely by 1761.

Detailed records about the tribal members are difficult to find.

That is explained by considering who historically kept all official records.

“The Mattamuskeets and their descendants were not represented in the Hyde County Records during the period in which they owned little or nothing of value that was desirable to the whites,” Garrow stated. Tribal members never held public office and didn’t even appear on county tax lists.

Some Native Americans from Roanoke and Hatteras islands moved to the area in the mid-18th century, according to Garrow. Still, the tribe “declined in both population and cohesiveness” in the last half of the 18th century, he wrote. There was much documented intermarrying with whites and Blacks — even when it was illegal — and a trend of the tribal members’ loss of culture for many reasons that continued into the 19th century.

“The history of the Mattamuskeets and their descendants may be typical of small fragmented triracial groups in other areas of the eastern United States,” Garrow opined.

Garrow acknowledged his “debt of gratitude” to Napoleon Mackey, whom he interviewed in 1975: “His concern for and interest in the history of the Indians of Hyde County made many parts of this research more meaningful.”

Mackey named the Collins, Barber, Chance, Clayton and Bryant families as other area families also of at least partial Native American descent.

For his part, he “traces his Indian descent to his great-grandfather Benjamin Mackey, who was supposedly a ‘pure-blooded’ Indian,” Garrow wrote. “Benjamin Mackey was never apprenticed and was apparently able to go through a type of enculturation denied to many of his relatives.”

This was significant. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mackey retained a sense of Native identity and was able to pass on at least some oral traditions of the tribe.

Apprenticeship for many

The apprenticeship policy in Hyde County from 1834-1865 effectively disintegrated the nuclear family structure and the cultural heritage of much of the tribe, Garrow found.

During this time, Native American children were placed in white households from as young as infanthood — and the majority by age 9 — until they reached age 21, to be taught a specific trade. There were no requirements for them to be taught to read or write, nor to be paid. Most boys were “apprenticed” to be farmers and most girls to become seamstresses or house servants.

Hyde County’s “Apprentice Bonds” records from 1771-1849 are included in “The Mattamuskeet Documents,” and children with the surnames of Mackey, Collins and Long Tom are well represented in that list.

“That policy may have been an attempt by white planters to neutralize the free nonwhite population,” Garrow wrote. “It is probable that well over half of the children of the free persons of color became apprentices during this time.”

The widespread apprenticeship policy meant there was “little opportunity for the older generation to pass on whatever elements remained of their Indian heritage,” he explained.

Beginning with the 1804 records, Garrow found that people with known Mattamuskeet tribal surnames were referred to as “free persons of color” instead of “Indians.” That social status, shared with free Blacks, was only slightly higher than that of the enslaved; they similarly did not own land.

From 1804-1834, only orphaned Native children were apprenticed, but that “changed dramatically” in the 1830s, three decades before the Civil War. The North Carolina General Assembly had stripped “free persons of color” of most of their rights by 1835, Garrow noted.

Dr. Lason Mackey-Hines, a distant relative of Brown’s who also traces her lineage to the Mattamuskeet Tribe and also is a journalist by trade, noted the huge consequences of apprenticeship.

“If you could pass for white, or if you could pass for Black, you’re going to go with one of those because you’d want to not give up all of your freedom,” Mackey-Hines said.

The decades of the apprenticeship policy left a continuing legacy of fear around tribal members asserting their Indigenous identities.

“I can understand why a lot of my family members wanted to move to New York or somewhere else, because of fear and not being able to really identify who you are,” she said. “Choose your safest route; don’t talk about it anymore. You forget it, let it go; don’t bring it up. There’s tons of books about Natives who chose to go one way or another in order to survive.”

Mackey-Hines grew up in Pennsylvania and now lives in Humble (pronounced “umble”), Texas. Like Brown, she knows she has Native ancestry on both sides of her family and traces one side to the Mackeys and Barbers who lived in Hyde County. She said her grandfather’s grandfather, Benjamin Mackey, was never apprenticed.

Her grandfather, James Mackey, showed her family photos when she was young. “You’re a Mackey. Know who you are. Know you’re a very important person; you come from the eastern North Carolina area,” she recalled him saying repeatedly.

He didn’t elaborate, but through hearing him talk about the family photos, “I started to slowly pick up on some things,” Mackey-Hines noted. “I used to laugh because … it seemed all the kids were nursery rhymes. I was like, ‘Whoah, didn’t anybody have a normal name?’”

Over time, she figured out those were Indigenous names. She heard stories of tobacco farmers and gardeners; her ancestors survived off the land.

Josephine Mackey, her great-great-aunt, was a well-known midwife and healer.

“She was very keen and knew a lot about herbs; she knew how to put some together to help whatever you were going through,” Mackey-Hines said. “A lot of that was passed down. My great-grandma started doing it and talking about it.”

Despite historical oppression, fear and movement, Native heritage remains strong.

“We’re alive, we’re well, we’re here,” Mackey-Hines said. “Our stories have passed down.”

Making connections

Brown said Mackey-Hines connected with her through a genealogy website, and they met in person around 2003 on the Outer Banks.

“My great-grandfather’s mother, Clarissa Mackey, was related to Lason’s great-grandfather; they were cousins, I believe,” Brown said. And, strangely, both their great-grandfathers had the same first and last names: Benjamin Mackey.

Brown and Mackey-Hines noted the difficulties inherent in researching their family lines. They must rely on oral tradition, Census records, court records and historical records written by traveling demographers or historians.

Census enumerators working in the area — generally white males — seemed to have identified people “solely based on skin color,” Brown said. “Just like any other category of people, skin tones can range from being very, very fair to very, very dark.”

Over a span of just a few decades, she found it common that the same Native individual would be alternatingly identified as M (“mulatto”), Black and white.

“Census data is very important, but it can also be tricky as well,” Brown said. “Sometimes it leaves you with questions: What was the enumerator seeing? What did he see during that time?”

“You have to rely on oral tradition, which is very, very integral to the Native American and African American experience, to be able to know (you are Native),” Brown said. “It’s really like putting together a puzzle … weaving things together.”

She’s still trying to trace exactly where in Africa her African American ancestors were from. But research on her family’s Native heritage consistently leads to Cape Hatteras and Lake Mattamuskeet.

Her mother, Ethel Mackey Brown, had family roots going back to present-day Dare County; some of her ancestors moved to Fairfield after a series of hurricanes and storms.

“She said that our family suffered lots of struggles and discrimination throughout their lives, but they were always viewed as free people,” Brown said. “And that conversation evolved out of the discussion about slavery in America.”

Civil rights

By the 1950s, Hyde County residents were mostly impoverished and were only officially referred to as Black or white. Native American wasn’t a category on the Census at the time.

The federal government, timber corporations and agribusinesses owned almost 90% of the county, and only two North Carolina counties — both in Appalachia — had higher poverty than Hyde, according to David S. Cecelski’s 1994 book, “Along Freedom Road.”

Only about a third of white families had access to hot running water and flushing toilets, according to the 1950 U.S. Census. No Black family had those luxuries; few had electric lighting or refrigerators; and many couldn’t even afford iceboxes, Cecelski noted.

“Hyde County’s white citizens had colluded for generations to thwart black aspirations for political and economic advancement,” he wrote.

Thus, Black residents “lived in ramshackle homes crowded onto the mosquito-ridden banks of drainage canals or blackwater creeks, often exactly where their great-grandparents had once lived in slave quarters or settled in the first years after the Civil War.”

Every aspect of life in Hyde County was defined by Jim Crow laws, as it was in the rest of the South. And as with the rest of the South, school desegregation, once mandated, was put off as long as possible.

Despite this bleak background, Black and Native American residents in Hyde County would manage to be strikingly successful in their protests to preserve their school heritage and leadership in a way few other Southern communities of color were.

Not only that, but their school boycott in the late 1960s drew national attention to the significant issues with how schools were being integrated.

Brown said she prefers the term “people of color” to acknowledge her family’s Native American ancestry as well as their African American heritage.

Brown’s grandfather, Golden Mackey, and mother, Ethel Mackey Brown, were involved in those school preservation efforts.

Next in the series: A civil rights success.

This time of year, the only sounds greeting the sunrise over Lake Mattamuskeet are the soft plop of a fish landing back in the water after a jump and the rustle of wind pushing the grasses lining the shore. Just the spiders and tree silhouettes are visible at this hour of grayness.

As the sun breaks the horizon, a few hidden birds vocalize their presence. Shortly after sunrise, fishermen arrive and begin casting lines into the dark water.

Lake Mattamuskeet covers about 40,000 acres, making it North Carolina’s largest natural lake and a commanding presence in mainland Hyde County.

“It’s the second largest natural lake east of the Mississippi (River),” said Kelly Davis, who was the longtime biologist for Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge.

In the eastern U.S., excluding the Great Lakes, only Lake Okeechobee in Florida is bigger.

In the winter, the stillness disperses as the lake attracts about 240 species of raucous birds, many of which stop to rest there on their migrations. But some are also year-round residents, Davis said.

And she would know. As the refuge biologist, she managed the waterfowl impoundments around the western, southern and eastern sides of the lake.

The refuge includes the lake plus an additional 10,000 acres of surrounding land — the impoundments; a visitor center with mounted local mammals and birds, along with interactive exhibits and a gift shop; and the headquarters for the Mattamuskeet refuge, which also includes Swan Quarter and Cedar Island refuges.

The impoundments are a habitat managed specifically for wildlife, with native grasses, reeds and hedges grown for waterfowl consumption.

“You can manipulate the water levels in the impoundments, and by doing so — during the growing season particularly — you can influence the types of plants that germinate,” Davis said, adding she evaluated the impoundments and wrote an annual management plan for them.

Like any other wetlands, they try to go through natural succession and get “woody” with time, changing from just grasses to include more cattails, wax myrtles or red maples. Setting back this succession to maintain the wetlands means setting units on fire every four to eight years.

“You really want to set the table and have a smorgasbord ready for when thousands and thousands of migratory ducks, geese and swans show up ready to eat,” she said.

Birdwatchers flock there in winter, utilizing the wildlife viewing areas on Wildlife Drive, the nature trails and the two photo blinds on Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge for observation and photography.

The biggest migratory waterfowl is the tundra swan, which nests in Alaska and Canada and comes to Mattamuskeet and Pea Island refuges for the winter.

Duck species include the northern pintail, the green-winged teal, gadwall, ring-necked and wood ducks. There are both resident and migratory Canada geese, of which the latter return to nest near the Hudson Bay in Canada, Davis said. People might see snow geese from the Arctic; warblers from Central and South America; wading birds — some of which are migratory and some of which are not; and raptors.

“Our raptor population always picks up a little bit in the fall and winter,” she said, because they prey on the other birds that arrive. Raptors include the northern harrier, red-tailed hawk, bald eagle and osprey, plus several owl species.

In her work, Davis completed an annual vegetation survey for the lake, conducted aerial surveys of waterfowl in the fall and winter, did alligator surveys, banded “a lot of waterfowl” and counted shorebirds and waterbirds. Osprey production surveys consisted of climbing up into the nests and banding ospreys, she noted.

“When you work on a refuge, you do management, you do biology, you do public use, you do it all,” Davis stated. “National wildlife refuges are wonderful places to live and work. Our property adjoins Mattamuskeet refuge in a few places. The lake and refuge are great neighbors.”

Multiple theories abound as to how the expansive body of water formed, the most popular of which include a fire burning deep in the peat and a meteor strike. “We know Mother Nature created it,” Davis noted. “It’s not a human-made lake.”

Researchers from the University of North Carolina took core samples of the lake sediment not quite 20 years ago and found an ash layer in places, Davis recalled. That would suggest a fire occurred, “whether it was a peat forest or meteorite” that burned.

Mac Gibbs, the former Hyde County director with the North Carolina Cooperative Extension, said no proof of a meteorite strike had been found. His opinion? “I really think it’s from the fire that burned the peat soils down to the poor mineral soil.”

It’s not hard to imagine, as even today, the area is prone to massive fires that sometimes burn deep into the peat — organic matter within the soil. In 2008, the Evan Roads Wildfire burned more than 40,000 acres and “burned down 2 and 3 feet in the soil,” Gibbs said.

The fire theory also lines up with area Algonquian tribes’ oral tradition, which maintains a fire caused the depression that filled with rainwater, forming the lake. It was the Native Americans who named the area Mattamuskeet, meaning “dry dust.”

No rivers, springs or other waterways feed the lake, so its water did come from rain, runoff, groundwater, a receding ocean or a combination of those.

Gibbs said the lake’s average depth was historically about 4 feet, “so it’s a very shallow lake.” He estimates the current average depth around closer to 6 or 7 feet because of sea level rise and other contributing factors.

Much of the lake’s base is organic, although some parts are sandy and some parts are clay. “The northwest side of the lake has sections that have very peaty bottoms,” Davis said.

Sandy soils in places suggest the area was at one time a beach. Geologists maintain that about 75,000 years ago, “that’s where the sea level was,” Gibbs said of the lake area. The ocean began receding and did so until about 14,000 years ago, at which time it reversed course and started rising.

“Fourteen thousand years ago, the sea level was about 200 feet below where it is today,” he said.

Rivers provided drainage from the mountains and Piedmont area, depositing rich topsoil in the area around the lake, which functioned as a delta “just like the Mississippi Delta,” Gibbs described.

“We’ve got some of the richest farmland in the United States, we can grow crops that rival the Midwest,” he said.

For that reason, developers tried to drain and sell land throughout northeastern North Carolina, from the Great Dismal Swamp to Lake Phelps and Lake Mattamuskeet. “It’s been a history of the whole area,” Gibbs said, noting that enslaved people were forced to dig the canals to drain the land.

Developers later succeeded in fully draining the lake several times in the early 1900s and tried to sell it off as farmland — a plan that never came to fruition. “I think mosquitoes had as much to do with it as anything” Gibbs opined. “It was a disappointment at that point in time; it just didn’t work.”

According to a 2016 Our State article by Bryan Mims, the cost of keeping water out of the lake via miles of canals and the three-story pumping station was also prohibitive.

The pumping station was built in 1915 as the world’s largest.

The U.S. government acquired the lake, dedicating it as a wildlife refuge in 1934, and the pumping station was converted to a hunting lodge until 1974. The former pumping station has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980 and is now state property.

“Hunting is a big part of Hyde County’s economy,” Davis said, noting that duck hunting and bear hunting are popular, and most hunters pay to hunt on private property.

The refuge runs a small waterfowl hunt near its headquarters, managed on an automated lottery system people can enter for a two-day hunt in December or January, Davis said. The hunt takes place on a 4-mile strip of shoreline that has 16 hunt blinds, including one Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant hunt blind. Hunting is prohibited in the refuge outside of the specified time frame for those lottery winners.

Bank fishing and crabbing are permitted year-round from N.C. 94 and in a few other places on the refuge, while most other fishing is limited from March to October.

Eugene Grays was bank fishing soon after sunrise on a late-September day. He placed one small, round, silvery menhaden fish onto his hook from a bucket of the live bait fish that he’d caught earlier. A rockfish had just broken his line by swimming under the culvert below N.C. 94, which runs north to south across the lake.

“He was a whopper,” Grays lamented the loss of the rockfish. He and his older brother Theotis Grays caught white perch and crabs another day and were currently fishing for white perch and rockfish.

The brothers grew up in Fairfield, the town directly north of the lake. Their father taught them to catch, clean and cook fish, and Eugene Grays recalled coming to the lake as young boys and taking home for lunch whatever they had caught.

He currently lives in Maryland, having moved there to work for the government, but he’s now retired and visits home as often as possible.

“I come home to go fishing,” he said. “There’s nothing like home fishing.”

Many others are similarly drawn to the lake to fish and catch the renowned, massive lake crabs.

“Out-of-towners come all the time,” he said, listing Elizabeth City, Wilson and Raleigh as some of the places from which people come. “They eat everything they catch.”

ELIZABETH CITY— LeVern Davis Parker’s family has deep roots in the boatbuilding history of Dare County. 

The Manteo native recently released a book, “Our Family, Its History Their Boats: Six Generations of Boat Builders in Dare County,” from which she shared highlights during a presentation Oct. 5 at Museum of the Albemarle, part of the museum’s monthly “History for Lunch” series. Copies of the book are for sale in the museum gift shop.

Parker is a descendant of George Washington Creef Sr., who developed the shad boat that was adopted in 1987 as the state boat of North Carolina. Creef Sr. was born in East Lake and moved to Manteo around the time of the Civil War. He worked for the U.S. Navy, hauling coal. 

“He crafted a boat that could maneuver shallow sound waters of Roanoke Island called a shad boat,” Parker said.

White cedar, a lightweight, native wood with a natural ability to resist rot, was used for the shad boats, which were powered by three sails. Fishermen used the boats to retrieve fish from pound nets in shallow waters and unpredictable wind shifts, according to the state Department of Cultural Resources.

“Two men were needed to operate this new design of boat. One to steer and one to shift the ballast, which often weighed 50 pounds or more,” Parker said. “They were workboats, and over the years had gone through many changes.”

Parker’s grandfather, George Washington Creef Jr., learned the boatbuilding trade from his father. One boat he built named the Hattie Creef steadily “plied the waters of northeastern North Carolina” for 70 years, Parker noted. 

“The book refers to both the boat and my great-aunt Hattie as Renaissance women,” she said. “They were able to change and reawaken with the times.”

The boat Hattie Creef evolved from being powered by sails to a gas engine to a diesel engine over the years and was used as a fishing boat, sailboat, oyster boat and recreational boat. 

But its lasting claim to fame was making a trip from Elizabeth City to Kitty Hawk, taking “two young brothers and their crates” containing airplane parts. Orville and Wilbur Wright would, from there, launch aviation history.

Creef Boatworks was an extensive operation in Manteo and included Creef and Creef Railways, which Creef Jr., and his brother Benjamin Howard Creef jointly owned and operated, Parker said.

Her father, Vernon Davis, and her uncle Ralph “Buddy” Davis continued the family tradition of boatbuilding but took a different tack. 

“They weren’t really interested in the utilitarian boats of the Creefs,” Parker said. They were instead “interested in developing boats for speed.”

In the 1930s, her uncle was called “the Speed King,” she said. Later, around the turn of the century, her father was called “the ‘Master of Going Faster’ – something he was pretty proud of in his late 80s.”

They’d started building racing boats as boys and in their late teens and early 20s “raced all over North Carolina” in boats with names such as Miss Ford, Miss Chevrolet and Dodger, Parker said. They built boats in the garage, backyard and barn and worked in their family’s store, which they viewed “as a way to get spending money for their first love: Boats.”

The brothers built many Class E runabouts, which were popular on the East Coast from the 1930s to the 1960s, and later in Louisiana and southern Florida, Parker said. The boats they built were for “the weekend racer” who would return to his job on Monday. 

Boat racing stopped in the country from 1939 until 1945 because of World War II, but the brothers would later build some of the most successful race boats in their era.

“I knew growing up they had built race boats, but really until I started researching, I wasn’t aware how important those boats were on racing circuits in the 1950s and ’60s,” Parker said. “I was amazed at the number of local, national and international championships they held. Neither would boast about it — that just wasn’t their demeanor.”

During Parker’s talk about about her family’s connection to boatbuilding, she encouraged the audience to return Monday to view a new exhibit, “Rock of the Eye: Boatbuilding Traditions Around the Albemarle,” which traces the region’s extensive maritime heritage from the Indigenous canoes dating back to as early as 500 B.C. to modern boatbuilding techniques.

“Rock of the eye” means building by tradition and building right, according to Don Pendergraft, director of regional museums. 

The term comes from the “Hoi Toider” brogue of Ocracoke and Engelhard, and described how area boatbuilders historically used their eye and lining a finger up with their eye to perfectly make a symmetrical boat. “It has to be symmetrical to float,” he said.

“In the exhibit, you will see techniques that would have been very familiar to my father, my uncle, my grandfather and my great-grandfather,” she told the crowd.

Parker also encouraged attendees to visit Manteo, where they can see two restored shad boats built by her family members.

After her presentation, Parker signed copies of her book at the museum gift shop.

Julie Pipkin said she attended the talk because her two sons are Creefs and distantly related to Parker. 

“They love the water (and) love boats,” the Elizabeth City resident said. “I enjoyed the history and want to share it with my sons.”

Beverley and Michael Egolf recently relocated to Elizabeth City from New Jersey and said they found the presentation informative. Michael Egolf, a new Museum of the Albemarle volunteer, had worked as a diver for 10 years at New Jersey Maritime Museum. 

“We’ve always been interested in boats,” Beverley Egolf said, adding that Parker “really knows her stuff.”

A dragonfly zipped over the water.

“Who knows why we love dragonflies?” queried Sarah Burgart, the National Park Service lead interpretation ranger for Hatteras Island.

For a moment, one could only hear the wind and the quiet dip of kayak paddles in Pamlico Sound, a large body of brackish water that separates the barrier islands of Hatteras and Ocracoke from their respective counties’ mainland portions of Dare and Hyde, just to the west.

“I don’t know; why?” responded Tara Augustin, as she paddled a double kayak with her 7-year-old son, Nicholas.

“Because they eat mosquitoes,” Burgart said.

“I didn’t know that,” Tara’s husband and Nicholas’ father, Randy Augustin, admitted Monday after the tour, the first in the Cape Hatteras National Seashore’s new “Kayak with a Ranger” program.

Education and sustainable enjoyment of the area are goals of the program, which is scheduled for 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. every Monday and Friday through Labor Day in Salvo.

The Augustins, vacationing from Maryland, participated in the first program offering Monday. The couple said they appreciated being guided by those with knowledge of the area and nature.

“We like to kayak,” Tara Augustin said. “We like to learn about the area. It’s better than us going around by ourselves, not knowing what we’re looking at.”

As it was, they saw many common sound residents during the tour: Laughing gulls wheeled overhead, a skate flashed briefly in the water and a startled blue heron flew upward out of the marsh grasses. Several pelicans shared a sandbar with a small flock of laughing gulls, all standing in the shallow water.

They also saw plenty of seagrass just underneath the water, which was never much more than a foot deep on the tour.

“The sound is a really good way to test the health of your environment because our seagrass is a little bit endangered and very important to the species that we have,” said Park Ranger Lauren Spier, who led the tour. “If we start to lose it, then we’re going to lose the opportunity for a lot of species to grow up.”

The sound serves as a nursery for many species, including blue crabs, shrimp and a variety of fish. The seagrass provides a place for them to hide from predators and from wind-driven currents.

The wind was blowing steadily at 11 mph, with gusts up to 16 mph, when the park rangers measured it before the program began.

Burgart said the cutoff to cancel a program would be winds of 15 mph or at the discretion of the instructors. Eight rangers are trained to lead the program, and after the first few weeks, two rangers will lead it. Originally from Iowa, Burgart most recently lived in Seattle, Washington, and was the third ranger on Monday, providing extra support to Spier and Chris Knoll, who brought up the rear on the tour.

“With the wind, a lot of smaller creatures were hunkered down,” Spier noted. “If you’re smaller, the wind will just take you. You can even feel that, just on the kayak.”

Originally from Texas, the 25-year-old has lived in five states and worked in several other national parks since graduating from college.

Spier began the tour with a brief caution about not swimming against rip currents in the ocean, advising to instead swim parallel to shore or make noise and wait for help or for the current to stop, since “they don’t go on forever.” Rip currents can move as quickly as 8 feet per second, faster than any Olympic swimmer, she noted. There are no rip currents in the sound.

Then she shared safety explanations, including a brief overview of how to kayak since all the participants had done it before, advising to just stand up if a kayak flips, since the water is shallow, and to blow the whistle attached to the life jacket if anyone needed help.

The tour started against the wind and was slow going until the kayaks reached the shelter of tall marsh grasses forming natural canals in the sound.

“This was just one small section of the sound,” Spier told participants afterward. “There are miles of coastline to explore.”

Cape Hatteras National Seashore was the first national seashore established in the country. It stretches over 70 miles on the southernmost end of the barrier islands known as the Outer Banks, including Dare County’s Bodie Island — South Nags Head — and Hatteras Island, as well as Hyde County’s Ocracoke Island. There are various public beach and sound accesses throughout.

“It was great,” Randy Augustin said of the tour. He enjoyed getting outdoors away from the crowds, and the “kayak with a comfortable seat” surpassed his expectations of typical rental equipment.

“We didn’t see as many osprey as I would have thought we would have seen today,” he noted. “There’s a ton of osprey where we’re at. Every once in a while, you’ll find a random fish in your yard (that an osprey drops).”

Tara Augustin said the family vacations regularly on the Outer Banks and saw the program announced on a few Facebook pages they follow to keep up with the area. That it was free with all gear provided and knowledgeable guides is what sparked their attention.

Knoll hosed off the kayaks after the tour. Originally from New Jersey and in his fourth season at Cape Hatteras, said that if participants are first-time area visitors, he hopes they’ll leave the program “with a better understanding of responsibly enjoying the area.” His hope for returning visitors or locals is that they’ll see “there’s always more to learn” about responsibly enjoying the area.

Burgart said the program encourages appreciation of all the ecosystems present around the national seashore: “They all exist in balance and are all important.”

Jonathan Polk, the national seashore’s supervisory park ranger, expressed a similar sentiment in an email response to Coastal Review.

“We are very excited about this new opportunity because kayaking is a popular recreational activity here at Cape Hatteras National Seashore and a great way to explore habitats such as salt marshes and the waters of the Pamlico Sound,” Polk said. “We wanted to provide the public with a new and engaging experience that would allow them to explore these habitats of their National Seashore that they may not have been able to fully experience in the past.”

Besides kayaking, Knoll also leads a surf fishing program and Spier also leads a “soundside explorers” program. Burgart said the rangers are able to provide a variety of interpretive programs to the public because the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse has been closed to climbing since 2020. The lighthouse was initially closed because of COVID-19 precautions, and then renovations were started in 2021.

Rangers from Bodie Island Lighthouse will be assisting with the kayaking program on Fridays. Salvo is “about halfway between” the two lighthouses, located slightly closer to Bodie, Burgart said.

Registration is required. Call 252-475-9622 after 9 a.m. the Saturday before the desired program date. Each program has 10 available spots. Children must be at least 7 to participate and at least 12 to paddle their own kayak.

Donations may be made to Outer Banks Forever, a nonprofit supporting the three national parks of the Outer Banks, at obxforever.org.

Editor’s note: Some outdated racial terms that today are considered insensitive or offensive are used in this story, not out of disrespect but solely because of their appearance on official records.

Growing up, she was urged to not speak of her Indigenous roots.

“In our family, we were told not to talk about it,” recalled Marilyn Berry Morrison, chief of the Roanoke-Hatteras Tribe of the Algonquian Indians of North Carolina.

This fear, which “has been embedded” from generation to generation, is often still found among local Roanoke-Hatteras descendants today.

“We have active tribal members who don’t want to put in their paperwork to make them an official tribal member,” Morrison said.

Centuries of fear of forcible removals, government-sanctioned land-stealing and even government-sanctioned murder took its toll.

“Many years ago, if you claimed to be Indian or Native American, you were killed, OK? So that fear has trickled on down through generations,” Morrison explained. “Even having President Theodore Roosevelt say that ‘a good Indian is a dead Indian’… it really had a tremendous impact on being called Native American. And that is who we are.”

She has become an outspoken advocate of the tribe and believes others will follow suit.

“I believe in time we’ll get rid of that (fear) once they accept who they are and know who they are, and speak about who they are,” she said. “That will give them the confidence that I feel is what impacts the feeling of fear.”

Morrison has led the effort for official state tribal recognition for the past 12 years — an involved, frustrating process that inherently doesn’t make sense to her.

“We have a rich heritage and have been able to prove and establish who we are, and we just don’t know understand why it is taking so long,” said the Elizabeth City resident, whose parents and both their families were from Manteo.

“Our families never left,” she said of many members and descendants of the Roanoke-Hatteras tribe.

They were the subject of anthropologist Frank G. Speck’s field studies in 1916, when he noted the Indigenous ancestry of the local Berry, Daniels, Pugh and Wescott families, according to the nonprofit Algonquian Indians of North Carolina Inc.’s website. Speck wrote in 1924 that more than 100 Indigenous descendants lived on the islands.

Between the 1890s and 1900s, Morrison’s ancestor, Joseph Hall Berry, along with Lemuel Collins and Thomas Scarborough, bought property in Roanoke Island’s Butt Swamp area — land that “would become the center of the distinct Indian community on Roanoke Island,” according to ncalgonquians.com.

Archaeological research shows that Native Americans have lived in northeastern North Carolina “for at least 10,000 years and probably longer,” according to “Archeological Studies in the Northern Coastal Zone of North Carolina”by David Sutton Phelps.

That’s 41 times the length of the United States’ existence as a country.

And long before conservation efforts were ever dreamed of — or needed —stewardship was simply an innate part of everyday life, Morrison said.

“The forests, the swamps, the rivers, the landscapes were all nurtured by our people,” she said.

“We lived with nature, and everything that we had came from nature — our food, our clothes, our shelter — and we were appreciative of that,” she continued. “Our creation story also centers around the ocean, the sand and the coast.

“Hatteras was our fishing ground, and Roanoke was hunting grounds,” she said. “You have lot of mixture or intermarrying between the tribes, and that’s one reason why we carry two names: Roanoke-Hatteras.”

Algonquian was the language all local tribes spoke; each was part of the Algonquian Nation.

“The North American continent was divided up in nations,” she said. “There was an early treaty, so I’m told, that required each nation to protect a certain portion of the continent. The Algonquian Nation is the east gatekeeper, so it was our responsibility to protect the east land that runs from Canada through the southern tip of Florida.”

She added: “So I guess we didn’t do a good job by letting the Europeans get in and mess up our land.”

The first English venture into North America was at Croatoan, present-day Hatteras.

“The original name was Croatoan, which was changed to Croatan; and then the English for some reason changed it to Hatteras in the early 1700s,” Morrison said.

Historically, Morrison said the tribe gardened, hunted and fished, using bones and shells for utensils and regalia. Tanned animal skin and fur became clothing.

“We also only took from the land what we needed, and there was no waste; so conservation is key,” Morrison said. “Mother Earth was sacred to us, so we didn’t have to worry about trashing. We were a very clean people.”

The Roanoke-Hatteras also worked with natural environmental transitions.

“Everything was free-flowing,” Morrison said. “Water flowed in one direction, so you know not to block that off. It wasn’t until we had all this development that we disturbed Mother Nature.”

Morrison continued: “We are keepers of the land. It hurts to see that they built a dog park on sacred land up at the airport (in Manteo), and it further hurts seeing developers coming in and ruining Nature’s land. That strips the animals of their homes and also kills our forests and wetlands. The greed of man is a downfall.”

She suggests taking small steps to help address climate change.

“If we learn to reduce and reuse and recycle, and buy less stuff — and only buy what you need — that would be a good thing we can contribute to help address this global issue,” Morrison said.

Sharing with Others: A Way of Life

Centuries before the phrase, “Southern hospitality” was coined, it was an intrinsic cultural practice of the Indigenous people here.

In 1584, foreigners arrived at the coast of present-day North Carolina for the first time.

Chief Wingina ruled several tribes then, including the Roanoke-Hatteras, with more than 30 sub-chieftains under him. His wife stood on the shore and invited in these Europeans, according to tribal oral history.

“She welcomed them in the village; and, because they didn’t know what she was saying, she had braves come out,” Morrison said.

The braves swam out and carried these foreigners in on their backs, then washed their clothes and fed them, she explained. Some stayed, but when their rationings were depleted, they left. Following a disagreement about a silver cup, the foreigners beheaded a tribal chief – but not Wingina, who was also beheaded, but later.

“After we had taught them how to survive on our land and opened our homes to them, they in turn beheaded our chief,” Morrison said.

David Stick wrote in “Dare County: A Brief History” that soldier Ralph Lane led 107 men in the second English expedition to the area, staying on Roanoke Island through the winter of 1585-86.

Lane depended on the Native Americans to provide food for him and his men as they searched for gold in the sounds and rivers to the west.

“Despite their friendliness Lane considered the Indians savages and barbarians and treated them in a high-handed manner, culminating in a surprise attack on an Indian village in which a Roanoke chief and several other Indians were killed,” Stick wrote. “From then on the Roanoke Indians refused to give further help to the Englishmen and by spring Lane’s forces were suffering from an acute shortage of food.”

Lane’s attack on the locals who were feeding him didn’t make sense to the tribe then, or now.

“It’s hard to understand what their plight was,” Morrison said. “Many books tell us we were ‘savages.’ We were not the savages. We didn’t scalp. That was not our custom; that was a custom that was brought here.”

Wanchese viewed the Europeans “as being not very good for us, and he also helped Wingina see it that way,” Morrison said. “I know things separated, especially when Manteo was made ‘Lord of Roanoke;’ that didn’t really sit well with us, followed with Wingina being beheaded.”

She added, “Manteo is a touchy subject with me because I look at him as being a traitor. He sold us out.”

The custom of hospitality nonetheless lived on, according to Morrison.

Algonquian practice at hunting quarters was for all to partake of any game killed, so “all fare alike,” F. Roy Johnson wrote in his 1972 book, “The Algonquians: Indians of That Part of the New World First Visited by the English.”

Morrison’s grandfather, commercial fisherman Capt. Josephus “Joe” Berry, staunchly practiced that ethic. His longtime mate William K. “Billy” Brown’s 2006 book includes “the things he learned from my grandfather,” Morrison said. “A number of the things that he learned were Native American customs in regards to trapping, fishing, hunting (and) just how to conserve.”

“As a fisherman, Joe Berry was one of the very best,” Brown wrote in “Mullet Roar and Other Stories by an Outer Banker.”

“Joe had one habit that may have been a weakness or strength, depending on how you looked at things,” Brown wrote.“Whenever Joe found fish, he always called other boats that were in the area and invited them over to share in the catch.”

He continued: “I used to say, ‘Captain Joe, maybe we should catch a few before we call anybody.’ He’d always say, ‘I was not raised that way, Bill. I was taught to share my good luck with others.’ Every captain at Oregon Inlet knew this about Joe and respected his rare generosity.”

‘They Killed Us on Paper’

The 1940 Census lists Capt. Joe Berry and his family members each as “Negro” — including son Wheeler C. Berry, Morrison’s uncle, who would later become a Roanoke-Hatteras Tribe elder.

But racial categories eliminated Indigenous people as effectively as the many other government-sanctioned means, including the Trail of Tears, employed for this purpose.

In Morrison’s father Joseph Berry’s family, “prior to the 1900s, every member in his mother’s and father’s household was listed as white; and then they changed it to Black,” Morrison’s older sisters told her.

“Believe it or not, on my mom’s wedding certificate it says she was white,” Morrison said. “It says in her early years, she was mulatto, and then she became Black. So, when we ask genealogists to work with us, they are ready to tell us, ‘Oh, well, you aren’t Indian.’ How can they tell me who my ancestors are when I know who I am? That’s another way they killed us on paper. The records are not correct.”

Only her cousin Eagle Collins, who is in his 60s and was born in Hawaii, has a birth certificate that includes “Native American” on it, Morrison said.

Her family spans all skin tones — “from the whitest of whites to the blackest of Black,” she said. “We have blue eyes, green eyes, gray eyes, but we’re all the same blood.”

A 1991 article by Susan Greenbaum, “What’s in a Label? Identity Problems of Southern Indian Tribes” published in The Journal of Ethnic Studies, confirms this pervasive issue for Indigenous Southerners.

“In Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, and other southern states, the terms ‘mulatto,’ ‘colored,’ and even ‘black’ were frequently used to designate either full-blooded Indians, or mixtures of White and Indian. After the removals, ‘Indian’ ceased to be an operative census category in most counties in the south,” Greenbaum wrote.

“Indians who remained were categorized somewhat capriciously among the various remaining options,” she continued. “Designations were highly unstable; the same person could shift back and forth between Black, White, and mulatto.”

Greenbaum found in 1896-1902 poll tax records for the Mowa Choctaws in Alabama that 62% of tribal members “had been enumerated as both white and colored at different intervals during that brief period.”

During the country’s era of enslavement, Native Americans were often listed as “free persons of color,” and they sometimes “bought” enslaved Africans in order to rescue them. Europeans attempted to enslave Native Americans, but because they knew the land better than the foreigners, they were able to escape. The Africans, brought from another continent, did not have that advantage, Morrison explained.

One distant relative, Abijah, bought her husband Solomon; “and at her death, she willed her husband to her son, to make sure that he would never be enslaved again,” she said.

Because there were laws against Native Americans marrying white or Black people, “that was one way they got around it,” she explained. “And she was not the only one.”

According to oral history tradition, Morrison’s great-great-grandfather, Rev. Zion Hall Berry, planted more than seven churches in northeastern North Carolina — always by waterways — and facilitated escapes for formerly enslaved persons. These churches ranged from Haven Creek Baptist Church in Manteo to Antioch Baptist Church in South Mills to Corner Stone Missionary Baptist Church in Elizabeth City.

Morrison believes in correcting the untruths regarding Indigenous history: “We have a story that has gone untold far too long.”

“Those who are standing in fear need to stand boldly and speak about our culture, our heritage and tradition,” she continued. “We need to start speaking out boldly so we can reconstruct all these lies and start telling the truth about what actually happened. That’s the only way our children are going to be enlightened and learn to grow and be able to pass these truthful stories on to their children in the future.”

The Roanoke-Hatteras Tribe hosts an annual powwow in August that is open to the public, which was cancelled the past two years due to COVID-19. The tribe is planning one for 2022. Other future hopes include creating a museum for public display of tribal artifacts and building a senior center for older relatives.

Morrison said the tribe welcomes monetary or land donations toward these goals. For more information about the tribe, visit www.ncalgonquians.com.

MANTEO — Black Lives Matter.

That was the most common message on signs at the Dare Minority Coalition’s event June 9  in Manteo honoring victims of police violence that drew more than 500 people, most of them white.

“Black Lives Matter” appeared on poster board. It was lettered in marker on cut cardboard. It was painted on the back of pizza boxes.

Both a recognition of lives departed needlessly and a call to do better, the event featured somber and joyous moments, beginning with organizers and attendees singing together “This Little Light of Mine,” which was often sung during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

“We’re here today because it’s needed,” announced Tshombe Selby, an opera singer and Manteo native now residing in New York.

“Ain’t nobody mad but the haters and the devil,” he said. “We’re about love.”

He sang “Make Them Hear You,” a piece that encourages using your voice, which aligned with event themes of voting and speaking out against injustices.

“Then at the end I chose to sing a passage from the Negro national anthem,” Selby said, referring to the spiritual, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” another staple of the civil rights movement. “As we go out, we pray that no harm will come to our families. It’s not easy out here. You got your Facebook warriors, your people working against you, people at the dinner table, complaining people; and we want them to know we can lean on each other.”

Selby said he loves coming home, and that African Americans and Outer Bankers are inherently strong groups of people. After hurricanes, the community rallies for everyone to rebuild. “We always kind of helped each other out because of our isolation.”

The community also assisted his move to New York.

“Everyone has supported me here,” he said. “That isn’t necessarily the case for every child who has a dream here in the Outer Banks.”

Growing up and when returning home on breaks from college, Selby encountered racism. He worked as a bouncer and had intoxicated people, including schoolmates, call him racial slurs to his face. Several times when he was the designated driver for his white friends, other patrons — once, a nightlife proprietor — asked why he was there, using racial slurs.

Selby also referenced the presence of Confederate flags around the community. “It’s saying, ‘We know your plight. We know how this may affect you. We don’t care. Our sense of heritage or what happened in the past is worth more than making a relationship with you today.’”

Income inequality is often discussed, but “what’s the economy worth if you’re making people feel they’re not welcome or don’t belong?”

George Carver, executive director of the all-black Dare Minority Coalition, addressed the severe social media backlash over the statement of solidarity, Black Lives Matter.

“What’s the economy worth if you’re making people feel they’re not welcome or don’t belong?”

Tshombe Selby, opera singer and Manteo native

After the Boston Marathon bombing, people proclaimed, “Boston strong” all over the country, Carver noted. After the Las Vegas shooting, people nationwide said, “’Stand with Vegas,’ not, ‘What about my city?’” At breast cancer events, he said no one is offended that colon cancer isn’t mentioned.

“It doesn’t discredit or diminish any other group,” Carver stated. “It’s just bringing attention to the group in need.”

That black people wanted to speak publicly caused an outcry on social media here, said Ebony Selby, Dare Minority Coalition vice president. “Just announcing this event brought fear and negativity and threats of violence.”

Yet event attendees from all over the county came to stand peacefully in support. Those who made threats didn’t follow through with them.

The large turnout — no official count was taken, but some estimates put attendance as high as 1,000 people — underscored the words affirming the value of black lives in a town of fewer than 2,000 permanent residents.

“I would say welcome to probably the largest protest I’ve ever seen in Dare County,” Ebony Selby announced.

Silence not a solution

Unlike the nationally known recent cases of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, police officers here have not killed any unarmed black citizens. Still, Ebony Selby said the event was needed.

“We have felt disparities in this community for a long time,” she said. “I think it needed to be seen in this county. We do a lot of tiptoeing in this county.”

Corinna Gregory, a Manteo native, said she experiences racism when she goes into stores.

“People are always watching you. Trying to make small talk but really trying to see what you’re going to take,” Gregory said. “Some people don’t even try to hide their real feelings.”

As an eighth-grader, she said a substitute teacher who is a full-time teacher now told her to rewrite her essay about what she wanted to be when she grew up because she called Gregory’s aspiration to become a lawyer “unrealistic.”

Gregory’s children have also experienced racism here.

“My son was told by one of his best friends when he was in elementary school that he couldn’t play with him and the other boys because his skin was too dark,” she said. “Broke my son’s heart because him and this boy had been friends since More at Four.”

“I think people think if we don’t talk about racism, it’s not going to happen,” Ebony Selby said. “I’ve seen that said on social media. People ignore it instead of trying to work on it, because it makes them uncomfortable. That’s the point.”

Racism is not ever comfortable for those experiencing it.

The event, Moments of Silence for Victims of Police Violence, took place on the day of George Floyd’s funeral. Police officers killed Floyd, an unarmed black man, on May 26 during his arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

A moment of silence was held for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the length of time white officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck, suffocating him.

For almost 9 minutes, everyone at the event, including children, covering the College of The Albemarle’s Manteo campus lawn, loop drive and surrounding sidewalks, remained quiet.

A white-haired, white couple held hands, heads bowed to the grass. A dog sneezed. A passing car honked.

“That’s the longest 8 minutes and 46 seconds I believe I’ve ever stood around anywhere,” Dare County Sheriff Doug Doughtie said. “I’m appalled.”

He condemned the “indefensible” act of officers murdering Floyd, as “it goes against everything law enforcement officers represent.”

Audience members cheered loudly.

“That’s not representative of who we are in Dare County or what we stand for,” Doughtie said.

Vance Haskett, chief of the Manteo Police Department, also condemned officers killing unarmed black people in recent months.

“I’ve been reflecting as a white man and a police chief what Black Lives Matters means to me,” Haskett said. “I acknowledge there is definitely racism that African Americans experience. I will not tolerate it in my police department or in my personal life. I applaud and support the Dare Minority Coalition.”

Rashad Daniels, coalition president and Manteo native, said many locals aren’t even aware of the more subtle forms of racism they perpetuate. They assume if they deny or ignore the issues, the community can remain peaceful.

“However, this just masks the problem and causes it to fester in the background,” Daniels explained.

Instead, county schools need to teach more accurate black history, and community forums for open dialogue could help some adults stop perpetuating racism, he said.

“We need you all to listen to the pain of others who have experienced systemic racism, injustice and oppression, and then harness that pain into solutions to help us move forward together,” he told event attendees.

“We have suffered far too long,” said Radasha Gregory, a coalition board member.

“Make racists small,” Gregory implored. “Drown them out. Drown out the voices of hate. Drown out the voices of institutionalized racism. Our voices must be louder!”

A deep-rooted community

Dare County’s nearly 36,000 permanent residents are about 93% white, 2% black and 3% biracial or multiracial, according to the 2018 American Community Survey data at Census.gov. The remaining population include all other races.

Manteo remains the county’s most diverse town, although it’s far smaller than Kill Devil Hills, Kitty Hawk, Nags Head and Southern Shores. With an estimated 1,852 residents, Manteo is about 86 % white, 7% black, 4.5% Hispanic and 1% biracial or multiracial, according to Census data.

Some black families living in Manteo today trace their roots to the Freedmen’s Colony, which the Union Army established on the north end of Roanoke Island in 1862.

Thousands of fugitives from slavery from inland towns crossed the waterways to live freely in present-day Manteo.

Darrell Collins, a Manteo commissioner since 2005, said his mother’s family was part of the Freedmen’s Colony, as were “names like the Scarboroughs, the Tilletts, Meekins, Simmons, Bowsers, Wescotts,” he said. “Some families still are living here today.”

Nearly 4,000 freed slaves resided in the colony in 1865, according to the National Park Service website, and more than 150 freedmen joined the Union Army.

“Make racists small. Drown them out. Drown out the voices of hate. Drown out the voices of institutionalized racism. Our voices must be louder!”

Radasha Gregory, Dare Minority Coalition board member

Teachers came to the island from the North and taught children to read and write during the day and taught the same to adults at night, Collins said.

“One hundred and fifty-eight years later, Roanoke Island is still that safe haven for African Americans who live here,” he said.

Nevertheless, “violence and racial injustice has always been a part of the history of this country,” Collins said, and African American advancement has only ever come with bloodshed.

He cited the deaths of Abraham Lincoln after signing the 13th Amendment, and John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. for their separate stands on civil rights in the 1960s.

“All were killed by the forces they sought to change,” Collins noted. “The young people today are taking up the unfinished business of the past, that we’re all the same.”

Collins emphasized the importance of voting.

“This moment is about change: Political change, change in power. The only way we can make the change is for you to cast your vote. Cast your vote.”

The crowd picked up his chant.

“Let’s not stop with protesting,” Ebony Selby said. “Don’t become dormant after elections. Hold every official accountable. They are our elected officials. We the people are the fourth branch of government. We the people pay the government. They are publicly accessible to they who pay them.”

Moving forward

The coalition has existed since 2018, but Carver said it’s dreaming beyond the county.

“I’m thinking big with my board members,” he said. “We’re going to change the world. It’s going to start here in Dare County.”

He’s developing an app for negotiating people’s more successful reentry into society from jails and prisons by pooling businesses and resources for a broad support system. Carver also hopes to tackle the persistent local issue of affordable housing.

“People who were born and raised here have a hard time buying a house,” Collins agreed. “It’s hard to find an affordable place to live. That’s probably the main issue in the whole county.”

Betty Selby, a decades-long community leader and Manteo commissioner since 2019, said there is a lack of income-based “accessible housing.”

Even beyond the countywide problem of finding homes, she said the black community has fewer “opportunities in the financial arena,” where she noted inequalities in bank loans, finances and grants.

Betty Selby ran for commissioner because she wants to see more “diverse businesses and more communication with both sides of the highway in Manteo,” referencing the black community being centralized on the west side of the highway.

“That’s where they think we should stay,” she said is an attitude of some.

But she stressed that Manteo is making strides in diversity. With her election, there are now two black commissioners on a panel of six. No other boards of commissioners or town councils in Dare County have any diversity.

“Look at the boards,” she said.

The Dare County Sheriff’s Office now has “four or five black officers” and “does a lot of reaching out,” she said.

The sheriff’s office employs 70 full-time deputies, 10 of which are female, according to Maj. Jeff Deringer, who declined to provide racial demographics.

The Manteo Police Department currently has nine full-time officers who are all white. One is female.

The department has hired only one black officer since 1999, said Haskett. That officer retired from his full-time position and is now a part-time paid reserve officer.

The school system started a Spanish dual language immersion program “that’s inclusive,” Betty Selby said, and in recent years hired a black administrator and several black directors for the first time. Black teachers, meanwhile, are still lacking in numbers.

“We’re still getting there with that, so our kids can see people who look like them.”

Everyone needs to boldly address racism, said Michelle Lewis, pastor of Mighty Wind United Methodist Church in Kill Devil Hills and youth director at Mount Olivet United Methodist Church in Manteo.

“Jesus took a stand for the marginalized and the oppressed,” Lewis said. “Speak out; don’t be silent.”

EAST LAKE—The signs are written on the trees.

Dead trees.

Groups of what scientists call “ghost forests” bear witness to climate change, a reality that can be observed by driving U.S. 64 or U.S. 264 through the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.

Stark light trunks and barren branches sharply contrast with remaining green trees. The dead trees line ditches and canals throughout the refuge, pointing to a swiftly changing landscape.

“It’s dramatic,” said Scott Lanier, manager of the Alligator River and Pea Island wildlife refuges.

Lanier was one of three original Alligator River personnel when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began staffing the refuge in 1985 following its acquisition in 1984. Lanier stayed at the Alligator River and Pea Island refuges until 1991, then returned in 2006. He’s noticed a loss of refuge land from climate change.

“More land has become inundated,” Lanier said. Certain places where he once was able to walk are now underwater. The Alligator River refuge “is at a low elevation to begin with, so it displays the effects of sea level rise and saltwater intrusion pretty readily.”

As global warming has led to sea level rise, saltwater has increasingly come farther into the refuge and stayed longer than in the past.

The habitat changes are the most noticeable, Lanier said. Some marshy places have become open water; areas that were previously “shrub/scrub habitat” are transitioning to marsh; and some forests adjacent to water bodies have started turning into shrub/scrub habitat as trees die from prolonged exposure to saltwater.

“You get these wholesale changes, and it’s happening at a rapid pace,” Lanier said. “You can notice those differences in 30 years.”

The pond pines found in the refuge can tolerate wetter ground than the more familiar loblolly pines, but even pond pines can’t handle too much saltwater, he said. Older pond pines have died off along with members of other tree species, contributing to the ghost forests.

Saltwater intrusion, drier land and forest fires

The Alligator River refuge covers about 160,000 acres on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula in mainland Dare and Hyde counties. The refuge is bordered by the Albemarle Sound to the north, the Croatan Sound to the east and the Pamlico Sound to the south. The Alligator River — for which the refuge is named — cuts deeply into the western part of the land.

Emily Bernhardt, a Duke University professor, is leading a team of students who are studying the exact amount of land loss that sea level rise is causing and the habitat changes saltwater intrusion has prompted, Lanier said.

Bernhardt and two scientists from North Carolina State University spoke in a 10-minute video titled, “The Seeds of Ghost Forests,” which was published in May at sciencefriday.com.

Bernhardt explained that commercial farmers wanted to keep the land dry enough to grow corn, soybeans and other crops, so from the 1960s through the ’80s, they drained large swaths of forested wetlands with man-made canals and ditches. “Even though they were made to drain water off, they can do opposite,” she stated. “You can have storms that can push saltwater deep into the interior.”

Climate change causes more extreme weather patterns, such as stronger storms and more intense droughts. When droughts occur, the sounds get saltier, “in part because they’re evaporating and in part because they’re not getting fresh water off the landscape,” Bernhardt said in the video. This, like sea level rise, intensifies saltwater intrusion.

“The thing that’s actually happening is that salt is getting into a landscape and killing individual organisms, be they trees or microbes — so it’s actually happening at a very granular scale,” she said.

“The thing that’s actually happening is that salt is getting into a landscape and killing individual organisms, be they trees or microbes—so it’s actually happening at a very granular scale.”

Emily Bernhardt, Duke University

Drier land also contributes to the potential for raging forest fires.

These are different than the prescribed burning the Fish and Wildlife Service does about once a year on the Alligator River and Pea Island refuges. “Fire is a part of the life history of these pocosin forests,” Lanier said, and the habitats in the refuge need fires at different intervals.

But when people drain the forests, “fires can be catastrophic then.”

This has been seen already.

In 2011, the Pains Bay wildfire burned more than 45,000 acres, partly on southeastern refuge land and partly on the East Coast’s most active bombing range, which is located in the middle of the refuge, Lanier said. The fire shut down all operations on the bombing range, which the U.S. Air Force owns and the U.S. Navy also uses.

“It actually took Hurricane Irene to finally put it out,” Lanier recalled. “We ran into a period of drought and the peat soils were drained, water tables were low … we had a lightning strike and away (the fire) went.”

Contrast that with a fire prior to 2011, when a lightning strike set off a blaze in the refuge that burned out naturally after consuming 300 acres at most, Lanier said. “It behaved the way a pocosin fire should behave in a natural area.”

That’s because it was in the refuge’s most natural area, meaning it wasn’t ever ditched or drained, he said, noting the importance of restoring the refuge’s hydrology.

Pocosin is an Algonquin word for “swamp on a hill,” Lanier said. The pocosin forests have deep peat deposits — soils made of thick, decomposed plant matter built up over thousands of years that store huge amounts of carbon.

“Carbon contributes to global warming,” Debbie Crane, communications director for The Nature Conservancy, said in an email. “Peat soil is about 50 percent carbon.”

When the soil is dry, it emits carbon into the atmosphere, she explained. Rewetting the soil to restore the natural water patterns not only prevents that, but also prevents large-scale, damaging wildfires, which emit even more carbon.

A recent fire in the refuge, sparked by a lightning strike on July 3, sent a thick smoke cloud over much of Dare County and even the southern end of Currituck County.

The fire burned 160 acres until it was officially put out on July 10, according to Lanier. “It is normal for the refuge to experience natural-caused fires such as this when we go through dry periods,” he said. “All of the weather indices that we monitor were pointing to a high probability of a fire.”

Planning ahead

The Nature Conservancy was instrumental in helping the Fish and Wildlife Service acquire the refuge initially and remains a consistent partner.

“We know as the sea continues rising, that place out there is not only going to change, but we can potentially lose a good part of it.”

Scott Lanier, Manager, Alligator River and Pea Island National Wildlife Refuges.

The service, The Nature Conservancy and other conservationists are working with state agencies and any individuals interested in preserving wildlife to acquire lands located immediately west, and then farther west of the current refuge.

“We know as the sea continues rising, that place out there is not only going to change, but we can potentially lose a good part of it,” Lanier said. “We want to create corridors to link together, so as the sea rises, wildlife has a place to go.”

The refuge is home to a vast array of animals, including American alligators, neotropical migrant bird species, the endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers and red wolves, “one of the most endangered mammals in the world,” Lanier noted.

It’s also home to one of the largest American black bear populations in the eastern U.S. “We probably have one bear per about 4 square miles,” Lanier said. Four square miles is 2,560 acres, so that’s more than 60 bears.

In the meantime, The Nature Conservancy helped design and install six water control structures and four ditch plugs in recent years. The water control structures allow water to drain off the refuge at a more natural rate and also prevent saltwater intrusion from taking place on “wind tides,” when a strong, steady wind pushes the sound up into the refuge. “When you have a hurricane, all bets are off,” Lanier noted.

Also, to help minimize the effects of wind tides and erosion caused from higher sound water levels, The Nature Conservancy built 1,400 feet of oyster reef on the refuge around Point Peter Road. That project began in 2010 and wrapped up earlier this year, Crane said.

The conservancy and refuge also partnered to help restore hydrology in the 40,000-acre bombing range. The Air Force uses the range for target practice, and although the bombs pilots drop are inert, “because of the kinetic energy when dropping them, it can still cause fires,” Lanier said.

He and other refuge employees hope that by experiencing the beauty of the refuge, people will realize its importance and want to help preserve it. Canoe tours are offered several days a week during the summer at a cost.

Dani Canning, a refuge summer intern, led a tour on July 18. She gave a brief overview of the refuge’s wildlife and explained how the refuge was typically the northernmost range for alligators, but with warming temperatures, they’ve recently been seen closer to the Virginia line.

Jasmine Paesmans participated in the tour with her husband Patrick Randour and their three daughters. They’re from Belgium, so she enjoyed the different scenery and was excited to spot a small green snake in the water while paddling.

“We don’t have this kind of park in Belgium; it’s too small,” Paesmans said. Their family and friends, also from Belgium, planned to hike a trail in the refuge immediately after the canoe tour.

“These pocosin wetlands offer incredible ecosystem services,” Lanier said. “They help with being a buffer with large storms like hurricanes, serve as filters for water and preserve water quality.”

CRESWELL — Tucked away from the traffic, Pettigrew State Park’s charm is found in its unique combination of scenery, wildlife and history.

A main feature of the park is Lake Phelps, which is the state’s second-largest natural lake, and a rarity for eastern North Carolina: It’s not stream-fed. As a large rainwater collection, Lake Phelps is thus among the state’s cleanest lakes, according to the park website.

The lake measures 7 miles east to west and 5 miles north to south, with a circumference of 21 miles, according to Charlotte Davis, a Pettigrew park ranger. “Despite the size of it, it’s pretty shallow,” Davis said, noting the average depth is 4.5 feet and the deepest section is 9 feet.

The park is 5,830 acres, said Jim Trostle, another park ranger, not including the 16,600-acre lake. The main park land is by the lake, but separate sections of property are along the Scuppernong River and outside of Columbia. “We’re very spread out,” Trostle said.

Visitors have sometimes expressed surprise that there are no alligators in Lake Phelps, but despite its many boaters and swimmers, the park has never received an alligator sighting report.

“Most of the time, our lake’s really clear, when it’s not white-capping,” Davis said. This does not create plausible “ambush” conditions for alligators.

Park visitors may very well encounter bears, however, which is news to many of them.

“For some reason, people are surprised there are bear here,” Trostle noted. “They always think of them being in the mountains.” He sees them “almost daily.”

Davis said it makes sense the bear population is significant at Pettigrew. “There are nuts and berries in the woods, fish in the lake (and) crops in the fields,” she said. “People come from everywhere to hunt bear” in land surrounding the park – no hunting is allowed on park grounds.

Time and land use are believed to have shifted the lake’s location.

“We think the lake might be moving slowly westward,” Trostle said. “In part, that may be storm-driven.”

From looking at maps of the lake’s coastline dating back 150 years, “we know it’s shifted,” Trostle said. Staff observations also lead them to believe the lake is slowly moving: “Part of the trail that’s usually not flooded had water on it for months,” he said.

Human activities also contribute to changes, Davis stated.

“Over the years, the use of the land has changed,” she said. “All this used to be swamp. The early settlers called it the ‘Haunt of Beasts.’”

Before much of the land was converted into farmland for plantations, the swamp, dense vegetation and bountiful bugs kept early settlers away.

But the bane of some people’s existence is the subject of scientific research now.

Trostle said a group from Old Dominion University in Virginia is conducting a study in the park on climate change effects, as measured by Gulf Coast ticks: “To see if their range is expanding.”

Algonquin Artifacts

Unlike newly arrived Europeans, Native Americans frequented the lake and surrounding forests for seasonal hunting and fishing. Algonquin artifacts spanning 11,000 years have been found in the area, with some dated back to as early as 8,000 B.C.E., according to the park website.

A wildfire in the mid-1980s was fought with water from Lake Phelps, which took the water level down to as low as 1 foot in places, according to Christy Maready, park administrative associate.

“Artifacts became visible — clay pots and canoes,” Maready said.

Thirty Algonquin dugout canoes, including some whole canoes and some parts, were found, and about 13 were removed, she said. The largest canoe, measuring 36 feet, is now housed in the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. The oldest was carbon-dated back 4,000 years. Native Americans sunk their canoes in between seasons.

“They would purposely sink them, as a way of preserving them,” Trostle said of the canoes. “They don’t get bugs in them either (underwater). They didn’t have a way to haul them.”

Two of the cypress canoes were displayed at Pettigrew State Park when Davis, 35, was young, she recalled. They are currently at an East Carolina University lab being restored, and once Pettigrew receives a visitor center, the hope is to bring them back, she said.

This fall will mark the Pettigrew’s 32^nd annual Indian Heritage Week. Area schoolchildren —usually fourth-graders — come learn about the lifestyle of the area’s original residents and help work on burning and scraping out the inside of a replica canoe another park ranger crafted, Davis said.

The park headquarters showcases a variety of Algonquin artifacts, including fishhooks and projectile points, such as those used for spears.

Trostle turned a stone ax head over in his hands. “This was probably a week’s worth of work,” he said, explaining how the Native Americans repeatedly chipped little pieces off the stone then sanded it smooth. A display case also features reproduction clay cooking pots and a mortar and pestle set, among other artifacts and informational displays.

Also in the room with the artifacts are stuffed species of mostly local origins — everything from bears to tundra swans to nutria. An elk hails from the western part of the state, and a boar came from Johnson County. Just one animal remains a point of contention.

“People say they’ve seen them (here),” Davis said, referencing a stuffed mountain lion. “I’m open minded. I have a lot of family who are farmers; but they’ve seen something.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it on a trail cam,” Trostle quipped, citing the lack of photographic evidence.

Wind, Waves & Recreation

Lake Phelps is wind driven. Winter generally brings a north wind.

“A north wind means the south side of the lake is rough, (but) we’re fine,” Davis said. Summer often heralds a south wind, where the tables turn, and the lake by park headquarters is choppy.

A public canoe trip on Lake Phelps scheduled for June 21 was cancelled because of waves of 1-2 feet. “Today’s the first day of summer, and it’s a south wind,” Trostle noted, laughing about the wind switching that morning exactly.

Park staff schedule at least one public canoe trip every month during the summer. Canoe the Scuppernong, slated for June 8, was cancelled due to thunderstorms. The next venture, also on the Scuppernong River, is set for July 19. The park hopes to eventually have a system to be able to rent out its eight, two-seater canoes, Davis said.

Spring and fall are the busiest seasons at Pettigrew, with visitors hiking, paddleboarding, kayaking, boating, fishing and camping.

“Last summer a lady paddleboarded almost the entire circuit of the lake — 21 miles,” Davis said.

“We’re a trophy bass lake,” Davis added. Fishermen are limited to keeping five bass, but bass must be thrown back if they’re smaller than 14 inches or larger than 21 inches, she explained. Fishermen also regularly catch yellow perch, bream and catfish.

Many people take advantage of the park as an economically friendly way to visit the beach. A $28 campsite easily beats a $250 hotel room on the Outer Banks, Davis said. “Instead of going to the beach and spending lots of money, they stay the night (here), go to the beach and come back for the night.” These visitors come from all over the state, but also from other countries, Davis said, naming Canada, Switzerland, Germany and Australia.

Pettigrew State Park has 13 regular campsites and a group camp that can accommodate 30-35 people. Scouting, church and family groups often use that camp, Davis said.

“Astronomy is big here,” Trostle noted. “Some of the darkest skies in Eastern North Carolina are here — there’s not a lot of light pollution.”

A Rocky Mount-based astronomy club frequents Pettigrew, offering free, informal programs for visitors.

“They’ll bring their huge telescope and tell people about what they’re looking at in the sky,” Trostle said. This year, one such event was planned for April, and one is being organized for the fall.

Summertime brings visitors as well, “but there comes a point in time when it just gets too muggy,” Davis said.

Winter brings the birders.

Tundra swans take refuge for the winter in the many lakes in eastern North Carolina, including Lake Phelps, Pungo Lake and Lake Mattamuskeet, Davis said. They generally show up in late November or early December and stay until February. Last year, 28,778 tundra swans were seen in a 15-mile radius. “Some years it’s been in the 35,000 range,” Davis said.

Tundra swans are joined by snow geese, which numbered 34,435 last year, and a variety of ducks. The tranquility of the lake can morph into cacophony at times.

“Especially when they’re flying right on top of you, they can get very vocal,” Davis said. “During the winter, people are amazed at how much waterfowl we have.”

Symbiotic Relationship

The park enjoys a symbiotic relationship with Somerset Place, a former plantation that the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources maintains as a State Historic Site. Somerset Place is located within Pettigrew’s boundaries, and is a hike of only a few minutes from the park headquarters down a quarter-mile wooded boardwalk trail that skirts the lake. Park employees built the boardwalk themselves rather than contracting it out. “it was a labor of love,” Davis said.

Some people are drawn to take the free tours exploring how life was on a 19^th century plantation and end up visiting the park as well, while others start at the park and end up at Somerset, Davis said.

Pettigrew State Park is named after James Johnston Pettigrew, a Civil War Confederate general whose plantation was next to Somerset, Maready said. The Pettigrew Family Cemetery can be reached by hiking a roughly mile-long trail from the park’s headquarters.

Two other state parks receiving similar numbers of visitors as Pettigrew each year: Weymouth Woods Sandhills Nature Preserve in Southern Pines, with 67,000 visitors, and Mayo River State Park in Rockingham County, which sees 74,000, Davis said.

Interested large groups of visitors can request use of the state’s two big canoes, which are 29 feet long and hold up to 14 people each. The state parks share these and send them as available based on advance scheduling. School groups, scouting groups and 4-H camps in nearby counties regularly schedule these canoes at Pettigrew, Davis said.

Park programs are free, weather-dependent and require advance registration. Park headquarters is located at 2252 Lake Shore Road in Creswell. The office number is 252-797-4475.

Sara Hallas, center, works with students at First Flight Middle School.

MANTEO – School kids in nearby Kill Devil Hills will have more opportunities to get outside and learn about the coastal environment thanks to a $5,000 federal grant that the N.C. Coastal Federation recently received.

The federation received one of the 18 grants in the Southeast that are designed to teach kids about the watersheds where they live by taking them out on field trips and having them take part in a service project. Teacher training is also a grant requirement.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provides the money, which is distributed by the Florida Office of Environmental Education. Five thousand dollars is the most an applicant can receive.

The federation will use the money to organize two trips to Jockey’s Ridge State Park this school year for eighth-grade students at First Flight Middle School in Kill Devil Hills, instead of just the annual spring trip the federation had been implementing.

“This is my sixth year working with the school,” said Sara Hallas, a coastal education coordinator for the federation.

The real-life examples and hands-on activities at Jockey’s Ridge during the annual trip help students understand their science vocabulary, instead of memorizing it and moving on, she noted.

“They really appreciate when an outside instructor will reinforce some of the same things they’ve been learning,” she said.

The grant funding will benefit 200 eighth-grade students and three science teachers.

The plan is to use the shoreline restoration project at Jockey’s Ridge as an outdoor classroom, “so they can see the plants and animals that are in this habitat and apply their knowledge that they’ve learned in the classroom.”

Hallas envisions students visiting the site in the fall and spring, collecting information and comparing it between the seasons.

The shoreline restoration project at Jockey’s Ridge State Park has been a wonderful outdoor classroom for local students.

Students will learn about watersheds, coastal habitats and how the shape of the dune changes based on the dominant wind directions in the seasons. They will perform water quality testing, plant and animal identification, fish catch and release and some identification of animal tracks, she said.

The three teachers attended a professional environmental training workshop given by the federation this week, where they “learned more ways to incorporate these environmental lessons into their regular lessons throughout the school year,” Hallas said.

“We can’t wait,” said Liz Gray, one of the science teachers, said before the workshop.

The completed shoreline restoration project at the park itself was made possible through grants.

Pictures since 2008 when students started on the oyster reef work show a change that is “pretty dramatic for everyone that sees it,” Gray said, adding that the pictures are shown each year to the students.

“Some kids haven’t even been to Jockey’s Ridge before even though they live here,” Gray added.

“It was also interesting to see after Hurricane Irene hit in 2011 how that section really took a hit, but it would have been a lot worse if that oyster reef was not there,” Gray said.

“It’s always a good animal show when we go,” she continued. “When they see the living creatures they can get their hands on, from plankton all the way up to small fish, it helps motivate them.”

Interacting with the local fauna also helps them understand why the habitat is important; and the oyster reef calms the energy of the sound’s waves in a noticeable way, Gray added.

Last year, students learned how to distinguish grasses from bushes, as well as some parameters to judge if a body of water is healthy, she said.

“I’m very glad to have this supplemental funding to help us continue this program,” Hallas said.

“It’s pretty expensive to take the students anywhere just because of the sheer numbers of students,” Gray noted.

Hallas plans for students to contribute to the maintenance of the living shoreline by collecting marsh grass seeds during the fall trip, slated for Nov. 13, and grow the seeds in the classroom over the winter.

During the spring trip, they could plant “their new grasses that hopefully they grow successfully, adding to the project itself,” she said.

SOUTH MILLS — The placid waters of the Dismal Swamp Canal steadily reflected the towering trees and clouds, only slightly disturbed by an intermittent breath of wind that carried brief showers of yellow and brown leaves down to the surface.

The Dismal Swamp Canal is oldest man-made waterway in the country still in use, and is part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.

A couple simultaneously walked their dog and stretched their legs on a short nature trail by the canal.

Another couple rode to the dock on bicycles, then stepped aboard their boat, asking a curious toddler if she had a home. While she nodded, they enthusiastically explained that this boat was their home.

Boats are moored on the canal by the Dismal Swamp Welcome Center.

The unassuming Dismal Swamp Canal Welcome Center, established in South Mills in 1989 off U.S. 17 North, remains the only such facility in the country greeting visitors by both a major highway and historic waterway. Its parking lot is connected to that of the Dismal Swamp State Park. The state park opened to the public in 2008 and protects 22 square acres of forested wetland.

The larger portion of the swamp lies in Virginia and is the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge contains Lake Drummond, a 3,100-acre natural lake at the heart of the swamp that was named for its credited discoverer, William Drummond, the first governor of North Carolina (1663 to 1667).

The Dismal is the largest remaining swamp in the eastern United States.

State park visitors walk across a gated bridge that opens in three pieces to allow boaters passage.

Across the canal is the state park’s visitor center, with an exhibition hall of stuffed local mammals—including black bear, a bobcat, a nutria and a gray fox—a display of snakes and a display of four songbirds with corresponding buttons that activate recordings of their unique voices.

On Saturday, October 5, about 15 participants went on an insect safari led by Park Ranger Tony DeSantis. He led the adventure once a month during the summer months, and this was the last expedition this year. Mosquitoes, ticks and other pesky blood-suckers are of course are easily found in the swamp, but other lesser-known fauna are found there, too.

William Byrd II, a wealthy Virginian plantation owner, was one of several men commissioned to survey the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina in 1728. Byrd’s vibrant descriptions of the flora, fauna and difficulties encountered were recognized as often exaggerated, if not entirely fictional, but they effectively painted a picture of rugged northeastern North Carolina.

His March 17, 1728, journal entry stated:

“Doubtless, the eternal shade that broods over this mighty bog, and hinders the sunbeams from blessing the ground, makes it an uncomfortable habitation for any thing that has life. Not so much as a Zealand frog could endure so aguish a situation. It had one beauty, however, that delighted the eye, though at the expense of all the other senses: the moisture of the soil preserves a continual verdure, and makes every plant an evergreen but at the same time the foul damps ascend without ceasing, corrupt the air, and render it unfit for respiration. Not even a turkey buzzard will venture to fly over it.”

One of the first sights on the insect safari was, ironically, a turkey vulture soaring above the treeline.

DeSantis expertly whipped his net above plants and found a weevil and a bright green plant hopper—which literally hops from plant to plant—among his catch.

On a leaf, he identified a spotted cucumber beetle, which eats not only cucumbers, but myriad vegetation. “They can be a pest to farmers,” he said. A sighting of an adult two-lined spittlebug prompted his explanation of its name. “A group of these bugs—their larvae or nymphs in this case—get on plants, get the juice and make this frothy mess,” he said. “It looks like spit.”

A young participant asked about a brown seed-pod-encasement she saw on the ground. DeSantis said it was a rotten pawpaw, which is a fruit that ripens around mid-September. “People make them into breads, make them into custard, eat them raw,” he said of ripe fruit, adding the taste is almost like a banana. The seeds of the rotten fruit will grow into new trees, he said.

Park Ranger Tony DeSantis pulls a seed out of a decaying pawpaw to show a young safari participant.

Further down the nature trail, he pointed to a kudzu bug.“They eat the kudzu, which is good, but they eat a lot of other stuff we don’t want them to eat,” he said. “I don’t know if they were brought here purposefully to eat kudzu or not.”

DeSantis pointed to an orchard orb-weaver spider and a caterpillar, noting caterpillars also spin webs for themselves. With nets, he caught a dance fly and crab spider and a participant caught a sweat bee.

The alien-looking dance fly, the strikingly green sweat bee and the tiny crab spider—so-named because of its legs positioned all out to the sides—were inspected in clear magnifying boxes, then released.

A dancefly is seen through a magnifying box, appearing more alien than insect.

In the nearby goldenrod, he noted how the plant attracts all types of bees and wasps. Butterfly activity this year has been less than usual, he said, after releasing a small snail. “I’ve seen very few [Hessel’s] Hairstreaks and skippers…lots of swallowtails, though.”

He shook a nonnative plant called a rattlesnakeweed, which made a noisier version of the sound produced by a rattlesnake.

A large robber fly made an appearance. Although not sure how they were named, DeSantis said, “They’re big predators.”

According to a 2010 article in the Virginian-Pilot, the Great Dismal once included more than 1 million acres and stretched as far east as Back Bay in present-day Virginia Beach. The “great” originally possibly referenced the size, and “dismal” was then a common term for a swamp or morass.

Over the years, fortunes were made, earned and lost in the swamp.

Moses White, whose Pasquotank County mill operated until the 1950s, is rumored to have made more than $1 million from harvesting juniper timber in the swamp, according to www.dismalswamp.net. George Washington was one of the first and most famous business supporters of the swamp, which he called “paradise,” the website reported. He and several other prominent Virginians and North Carolinians formed two companies that hoped to drain the swamp, harvest the trees and use the land for farming. The company purchased 40,000 acres of swamp land for $20,000 in 1763, according to www.dismalswampwelcomecenter.com. Washington suggested the north-south canal be built, and the Washington Ditch, still bearing his name, was one of the first monuments to him. The company later gave up on draining the swamp, but cut many of the cypress trees for use in shipbuilding and harvested cedars for shingles.

The extensive ditching and logging have made the swamp drier today than it was historically, www.ncparks.gov notes. Another change is that today’s Dismal is dominated by red maple instead of the bald cypress and tupelos.

An outdoor sign says slaves constructed the 22-mile canal from 1793 to 1805. By connecting the Albemarle Sound to the Norfolk Harbor, businesses could ship goods without having to travel the treacherous Ocracoke Inlet. Moses Grandy, a Camden County slave, ran shingle flats in the swamp in the early 1800s. Such low, flat-bottomed boats were used to transport shingles out of the swamp, and slaves walked towpaths and pulled them with a rope. Grandy eventually earned enough money to buy his freedom, and dictated his autobiography in London in 1842.

The Dismal Swamp is recognized as a part of the Underground Railroad. While some slaves like Grandy worked their way to freedom, runaway slaves used it as a stopping-point on their way north, while others lived as outlaws within the hard-to-navigate area.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp was published in 1856 as a follow-up to her 1853 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most well-known abolitionist tract ever written. Dred’s title character is an escaped Chowan County slave.

Far from the desolate vacuum Byrd describes, the swamp can yield a slew of stories, sights and creatures. One need only look and listen.

MANTEO — Friday, Sept. 27, brings a celebration by the water, for the water and for the people who love the water.

“We just thought, as an organization that works to protect water quality, we can’t do it without the help of the community,” said Ladd Bayliss, a coastal advocate with the N.C. Coastal Federation. “We are able to do it because of people who live and work on the water.”

Bayliss spearheaded organizing the second annual Fish Fry and Shrimp Boil, which will take place outside the N.C. Coastal Federation’s Manteo office on Sept. 27, from 4:30 to 7 p.m.

Whether you swim, surf, boat, fish or only look at local waters, the event is packed with local seafood and family friendly fun. It brings together people from all walks of life who appreciate the importance of water quality to both the economy of our barrier islands and to personal health, Bayliss said.

The fish fry is about “getting community together to celebrate what we have as far as the water quality goes,” she said.

Tickets cost $10 for adults and $5 for children under age 12.  The ticket price includes local flounder and shrimp, side dishes donated by area restaurants, desserts and a choice of drink, including beer or wine. Parking will be free.

Advance tickets are strongly recommended. They are available at the Lone Cedar Café in Nags Head, Café Lachine in Nags Head, Front Porch Café in Manteo or the federation office, 128 Grenville St. in Manteo.

Federation staff hope attendees will enjoy themselves and “recognize how big of a job it is to keep it clean and also to recognize that together, problems that affect water quality are not as big when we work on fixing them as a community,” Bayliss said.

Between 200 and 250 people attended last year’s event, and the federation printed 300 tickets this year.

The proceeds benefit the nonprofit’s operating costs, so they can continue working in the community, Bayliss said.

Land fishing with N.C. Aquarium staff and cornhole will be ongoing during the fish fry.

Fishprinting will take place from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. Captain Marty will tell a fishing tale at 6 p.m., and the puppet show “Captain Jack” will take place at 6:30 p.m.

Coastal Kayak of Corolla is donating a trip around Shallowbag Bay for a limited number of people, on a first-come, first-serve basis, Bayliss said. The 20-minute kayak trip begins at 5:30 p.m.

A raffle will be held, with the drawing at 6:45 p.m. Participants must be present to win prizes that include local seafood.

Troy Outland, a Manns Harbor-based commercial fisherman, is donating all the fish for the event.

“I really got to know Ladd over the past year,” Outland said. “She has been really helpful for our commission.”

The Manns Harbor Commission has been working with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission to complete work on the Manns Harbor Boating Access Area by the Manns Harbor bridge.

“We’ve been working with Dare County commissioners on this also,” Outland said. “They’ve been really helpful in trying to get this facility built for us.”

The commission includes commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen who work for charter boats, a boatbuilder and a member of the Manns Harbor Civic Association, he noted, to purposefully “not have just one point of view but different points of view.”

Work on the first phase of the project was completed in December, and it was built as a multi-purpose access site for the Croatan Sound for commercial and recreational fishermen, as well as for the general public.

The final phase of the project includes additional commercial fishing facilities and a kayak and canoe launching area.

“Some docking is in pretty bad shape,” Outland explained. “The land is very low to the water on our side, so any time we have any minor storm, we have flooding on our side of the marina.”

Outland started fishing part-time in 1967 at age 15, he said, and has been fishing full-time for about 35 years.

A Currituck native and now Manteo resident, Outland said the fish fry is for a good cause.

“I hope a lot of people will show up and have a good time; that’s what it’s all about,” he said.

While it is difficult to compete with foreign markets, he said local seafood’s taste is discernible.

He is donating currently in-season, local southern flounder to the fish fry.

“Once they are able to taste fresh, local seafood, hopefully they are willing to pay a little more price for it,” he added. “I encourage everyone to eat fresh, local seafood over imported seafood.”

For more information, call the federation at 252-473-1607.

ELIZABETH CITY – It’s a perverse irony that the River City Community Development Corp. is sandwiched between Taco Bell and Sonic. The smell of food pervades the tiny parking lot. Many kids in the nonprofit’s YouthBuild program, however, come hungry because eating is a luxury.

“We do serve the poorest and most vulnerable young people in the region,” said Angie Wills, the YouthBuild program manager, adding that the program partners with a local food bank and regularly serves students meals onsite.

YouthBuild has been in Elizabeth City since 1999, helping the city’s neediest. It recently turned its attention to helping the environment as well. For those efforts, the program won a Pelican Award this year from the N.C. Coastal Federation.

Dorothy Stoneman started the educational and job training program in Harlem in the 1970s.

“She saw a lot of dilapidated buildings, trash, blight,” Wills said. “She saw youth standing around and thought it would be the perfect marriage. She took high school dropouts and made them a part of their community.”

YouthBuild students help build an oyster reef at Jockey’s Ridge State Park.

YouthBuild has more than 270 sites nationally for disadvantaged students ages 16 to 24. It provides PACT (Pre-Apprenticeship Certificate Training)—the Home Builders Institute’s construction curriculum.

“We in turn take them out into the community, rehabilitate low-income housing,” Wills said.

Students seeking a high-school diploma are referred to a community college.

YouthBuild goals are broader: GED certificate attainment; numeracy and literacy gains; low recidivism; placement in jobs and post-secondary education; and retention in those placements.

“It’s about empowering them to take control of their own lives,” Wills said. “That’s something even at 22 or 24 they’ve never had to do.

“They get here at 16, and you think, ‘Oh they’re such a baby,’ but they have been there and done that,” she said. “They’ve tried everything else. There is really nowhere else to go. It’s more for us a transformation program.”

A case manager works with students to address their individual barriers to success. Staff regularly schedule motivational speakers, and many community leaders serve as mentors, Wills added.

Students look at social, political and civic issues, and, “if you were in the penal system, how you got there,” Wills said. “If you used to sell drugs, that’s a form of entrepreneurship, just illegal. So how can you turn that into something more wholesome, where you’re giving back to the community?”

As an AmeriCorps site, students become automatic AmeriCorps members and earn an education award for college if they complete 450 community service hours in one year.

Angie Wills

“The community now looks at you differently,” Wills said of students completing service hours. “You’re no longer a liability, depending on welfare. Now you’re not only gainfully employed, you’re paying taxes, you’re enrolled in school.”

Two GED teachers are housed in the building, both carrying 40 years of teaching experience.

If students want their certificate, Wills said, they will get it: “The teachers are just that good.”

One young lady, Johnetta, had tried on her own for two years to pass the GED test, but passed after just 22 days in YouthBuild, Wills said, smiling with pride.

In the main classroom, she put on a DVD of Johnetta speaking to an audience in Raleigh.

From ages 7 to 9, she was put in 32 different foster homes, after having been taken away from her parents, Johnetta told the audience. With two kids of her own now, her desire to have them stay with her and to not go through what she did inspired her to continue her education.

The center’s staff met the federation’s executive director at a meeting and mutually decided the programs should partner, said Sara Hallas, the federation’s educator in Manteo.

For the past year and a half when the program is in session, Hallas has alternatively gone into their classroom one month, and the next month, students have gone to a project site for hands-on service learning.

“Our youth need to know what’s going on with environment,” Wills said. “We’re so close to the coast, we need to expose them to this. It’s been a really good relationship.”

Thirty to 40 YouthBuild students have volunteered with the federation.

Students in the YouthBuild program in Elizabeth City perform a variety of service projects to develop skills. Photos: YouthBuild

“We train them in low-impact development, installing rain gardens and designing rain gardens, so that’s another skill set they have,” said Erin Fleckenstein, coastal scientist and manager of the federation’s Northeast Region office.

As students repair low-income housing as part of their service hours, implementing low-impact development techniques will help reduce runoff, Hallas said.

Students helped install rain gardens at First Flight Middle School and Kitty Hawk Elementary School, contributed to the living shoreline project at Durant’s Point and helped build the oyster reef in the sound behind Jockey’s Ridge State Park.

“Some students, even though they’re only an hour and a half away, had never been to the coast before,” Fleckenstein said. “They were excited to be there. We were excited to see them.”

Naomi Davis, a 25-year-old former YouthBuild student, recalled taking a boat to Durant’s Point and planting seedlings.

“I didn’t think I’d like it,” Davis said. “But it was fun, even though it was hot.”

She starts studying business administration at College of the Albemarle (COA) this semester and credits YouthBuild with changing her life.

“The teachers are so nice. They take chances for us,” Davis said. “It feels like family, even the students. I got to know everyone on a personal level.”

Phillip Blount, another former YouthBuild student, echoed her sentiments.

“It’s not like your normal school,” the 21-year-old college sophomore said. “It’s more like a family-type of thing.”

He spoke to the valuable life lessons he learned there: Managing money, building up credit, that hard work pays off, the importance of respect and other “skills you’re going to need to know to get a job and do well.”

The federation has gotten a grant to plant a rain garden at the YouthBuild Center this fall, Hallas said. Students will also soon install a greenhouse behind the building that last year’s students built.

Ranger Abe Hartsell talks to visitors at Cape Hatteras National Seashore about sea turtles. Photo: Corinne Saunders

BUXTON – Ranger Abe laid out the display items on a wooden bench in the pavilion of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore’s Hatteras Island Visitors Center: a large loggerhead sea turtle shell, a baby sea turtle preserved in a jar, a sea turtle skull and a transparent, cube-shaped container of Ping-Pong balls.

About 45 people – from Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio and various parts of North Carolina – gathered recently in the welcoming shade to listen to Park Ranger Abe Hartsell talk about one of our coast’s most beloved visitors, sea turtles.

The seashore will offer the free 30-minute program every Monday and Friday at 11 a.m. until Sept. 2.

Ranger Abe noted that a sea turtle lays 80 to 100 eggs, which incubate for about 60 days before the babies hatch and “scurry toward the ocean.”

The sea turtles then go through “the lost years” in the open sea—so-named because it’s hard to track them. They eat, get bigger and find a mate, Hartsell said.

“Their ultimate goal is to make it back to the beach to lay eggs of their own,” he said.

Hartsell led an interactive game to demonstrate the obstacles sea turtles face throughout their lives. Everyone drew numbered Ping-Pong balls from the container.

“If the mother digs too deep, it will be too cold, and the eggs don’t develop properly,” he said. “If she digs too thin, it could actually fry the eggs. If you drew a number eight, you didn’t hatch.”

Participants returned No. 8 balls to the plastic container.

“Sea turtles like to come out at night,” he said, since sand gets too hot during the day.

They need to make it to the ocean to find food, and use the moonlight reflecting off the ocean to guide them. Artificial lighting such as streetlights can lead them in the wrong direction,” Hartsell said. “If you drew a number seven, you’re getting confused. “Put your ping-pong balls back.”

Some studies show that half of the hatchlings will head the wrong way, he added.

Predators on the beach could also intercept turtles trying to reach the ocean. He asked what predators hunt them.

Two small hands feel the leathery toughness of a turtle shell. Photo: Corinne Saunders

“Seagulls?” guessed a young boy.

“Birds don’t really hunt at night,” Hartsell replied, noting that foxes, raccoons and crabs do.

Raccoons can bite right through the soft shells of the newly hatched, and “ghost crabs love baby sea turtles,” he said, holding up an enlarged picture of a ghost crab.

“Their favorite part is the brain,” he said. “They will kill just to eat the brains. They’re like the zombies of the beach at night. Unfortunately, some of us got our brains eaten.”

No. 6 balls were returned.

“Other predators are waiting in the ocean to gobble us up,” he continued. “We’re slow swimmers. If you drew a number nine, you got eaten by a fish.”

He congratulated those still holding balls at this point, noting the quickly filling container in front of him. But the game had not concluded.

“It’s starting to get light out,” he said. “We have some birds waiting to eat us. Pelicans dive right down and scoop us up. We have fish coming from below, birds from above; it’s pretty tough.”

The remaining sea turtles in the audience were allowed to grow bigger. They soon learned that size, however, is not always advantageous.

“Sometimes when you get too big you get stuck,” he said, explaining how larger turtles can get caught in fishing lines and fishing nets.

Sea turtles breathe oxygen, so those stuck in nets and unable to make it to the surface will drown.
More balls were returned.

“Some of us were caught on accident; some were caught on purpose,” he stated, holding up the loggerhead shell.

He explained that while some cultures people eat turtles and some poachers take more than fishing limits allow, the shell is what poachers are typically after, for jewelry-making.

“If you drew a number three, you’re dangling from someone’s ears.”

Hartsell then held up a glass jar with a translucent form swirling in its water. “Sea turtles love to eat jellyfish. So this is a plastic bag; it looks like a jellyfish.”

Plastic bags and other trash can suffocate them outright, or build up in their intestine over time. Since they can’t pass plastic, it eventually kills them, he said.

Children touch skulls and shells and inspect a baby turtle preserved in a jar. Photo: Corinne Saunders.

Also like humans, sea turtles can get sick from tumors.

The game concluded with only two people still holding ping-pong balls.

“We started with 100,” Hartsell noted. “Only two made it. I’ve been told one in 100 is the sea turtle success rate.”

If participants see a turtle nest, he said to think about the one percent that will survive to lay eggs of their own.

“It’s like winning the lottery for them,” he said.

The staff at Cape Hatteras National Seashore has monitored sea turtle activity in the park since 1987.

Loggerheads and green sea turtles are classified as threatened under federal law. Leatherbacks, Kemp’s Ridleys and hawksbills are listed as endangered.

The Outer Banks is the extreme northern nesting limit for four of the five species. The hawksbills nesting range is farther south.

Of the 222 documented turtle nests at the seashore in 2012, 219 were loggerhead nests, according to park data.

For the first time ever, the National Park Service this summer is offering sea turtle nest excavation programs. Two to three days after a natural hatch, a press release explained, biologists dig up the nest, count eggshells and collect unhatched eggs for research. Live hatchlings are sometimes found, too.

A park ranger will simultaneously present a program on sea turtles.

Notice of programs will usually occur a day in advance, so those interested in excavation programs are encouraged to regularly call the program hotline at 252-475-9629.

The Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge has one of the largest populations of black bears in the eastern United States, like these two that posed for Sam Bland. 

EAST LAKE – The caravan of cars wound its ways through the wilds of Dare County as dusk approached. The drivers hailed from Maine and Connecticut, Texas and Ohio, Virginia and Manteo. They had all come to see bears.

The folks at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge provide that opportunity with their free Bear Necessities program each Wednesday through August. Participants meet at the parking lot of the Creef Cut Wildlife Trail at U.S. 64 and Milltail Road in East Lake.

Before taking off in search of black bear, they were met there by Kate Hankins, an intern with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency runs the refuge.

She gave them history about the refuge system, noting that President Theodore Roosevelt created the first national wildlife refuge in Florida in 1903 to protect birds from hunters who wanted the feathers for ladies’ hats. There are now more than 560 national wildlife refuges in the country, 10 in North Carolina.

Refuges are different from national parks, Hankins noted. The parks were created to cater to humans, while refuges are “wildlife first,” she said.

The occupied range of black bears in North Carolina has expanded dramatically since the early 1970s. Map: N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission

The Alligator River refuge, Hankins told the expectant group, is home to the largest population of black bears in eastern North Carolina and one of the largest in the eastern United States.

Black bears are typically shy of humans. For this reason, feeding wildlife in general, but especially bears, is discouraged. If bears start coming toward people, it is not good for either species, she said.

“Our bears are mostly herbivores,” Hankins noted, explaining that they eat berries, grubs, roots and insects. “They’re not like our red wolves that will go attack a deer.”

A large mounted black bear skin was draped over the “DO NOT FEED OR DISTURB BEARS” sign, and participants were allowed to touch it and wear it and take pictures.

The bears have two layers of fur, Hankins said. Guard hairs on top keep them dry and a dense under layer keeps them warm.

She pointed out how large the nose and ears were, and how their senses of smell and hearing are much better than those of humans.

“Not all black bears are black,” Hankins added.

All in the refuge are, she explained, but environmental factors are thought to contribute to the fur color. Cinnamon, whitish and brown black bears also exist, Hankins noted.
Bear cubs stay with their mother for more than a year, she said, and many “yearlings” have been seen in the refuge. Staff members have also seen “really little fluff balls just coming out of the den,” she said.

“They’re very strong family units. Don’t walk between a mother bear and cub,” Hankins advised.

“You may have noticed the barbed wire along 64,” she said at one point, gesturing across the street.

Hankins explained that the barbed wire on the guardrails is part of a study to see where and what animals cross the road. The interns walked a section of the roadway and collected fur that was caught on the barbed wire — bear fur on the top wire and fur from smaller mammals like raccoons on the lower wire.

The animals have habits and trails they usually follow, Hankins said. The study will help determine where to build underpasses or other crossings for wildlife if the road is widened.

The caravan of cars through the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge is in search of bears. Photo: Corinne Saunders

Then, it was to look for bears. A refuge truck led the way and another brought up the rear. Participants drove in their own vehicles on the gravel roads of the refuge.

The evening was quiet, with the slow crunching of gravel as the main background noise. Layers of light gray clouds rolled into the formerly sunny sky.

Horseflies and deerflies, attracted to moving objects and carbon dioxide, bumped into vehicles repeatedly, often hitching a ride for several minutes at a time as the caravan of cars moved through dense forest into open emerald-green fields, stopping several times along the way. Less-menacing dragonflies darted by.

People in the lead refuge truck and in the first car said they saw several bears in the woods—a mom with two cubs and, separately, another adult bear—that all were quickly spooked and ran off before the people in later vehicles could catch a glimpse.

The scenery included towering pines, irrigation ditches and farmland with meticulous rows of young, bright green crops.

Before the final turn of the drive, two bears were spotted at the far end of a field, on the edge of distant woods. Many participants stepped out of their cars and took turns with binoculars and cameras to try to see the bears.

The interns apologized that more bears had not been seen along the drive; it was an atypical outing in their experiences so far, they said.

But the bears are surely out there, and those interested can drive by themselves or show up for another Bear Necessities program, which ends at 7 p.m. You can then stick around and listen for red wolves howling. That program begins at 7:30 p.m. at the same location.

For more information, call 252-473-1131.

Other Cool Stuff Worth a Look

• Animal Planets Top 10 black bear videos
• History of the national wildlife refuges
• Profile of the black bear

The group looks on as creatures are pulled from a seine net during Seine the Sound at Jockey’s Ridge State Park. Photo: Corinne Saunders

NAGS HEAD — About 30 people gathered last week for the free, family-friendly Seine the Sound program that the N.C. Coastal Federation is sponsoring every Thursday this summer at Jockey’s Ridge State Park.

“Our goal is to explore what might be living in this environment,” announced Sara Hallas, the coastal education coordinator for the federation’s Manteo office.

The nonprofit group’s slogan, “No wetlands, no seafood,” provides a good summary of the program, where participants learn that the majority of seafood – before hitting their plate – grows to maturity in the safer waters of the state’s coastal estuaries.

“An estuary is defined as where the freshwater meets the sea,” Hallas said.

As two little boys were able to explain, the sound is a mix of freshwater and saltwater, and is called brackish.

Hallas explained that this body of water is Roanoke Sound and that the Roanoke Island tree line is visible to the west. The sound is part of the larger Pamlico Sound, she noted, and connects to the ocean about 20 miles south, at Oregon Inlet.

“The stronger southwest wind today is blowing the water in,” Hallas said.

Pamlico Sound, she said, is the second-largest estuary in the whole United States. The largest, as a boy correctly responded, is the Chesapeake Bay.

Hallas then inquired, “Do you guys think we’re going to catch super-size, large fish today?”

Several kids responded, “No.”

Hallas told them they were correct. The sound is nicknamed “the nursery of the sea” because so many babies live in it, she explained.

Dragging a seine (pronounced “sane”) net through the water, Hallas explained, will catch a variety of fish.

Kids volunteer to help Kandi Zinn and Scott Crocker with the seine net.

A boy studies the refractometer as his father helps him hold it steady. Photos: Corinne Saunders

While Kandi Zinn, a park ranger for Jockey’s Ridge State Park, and Scott Crocker, northern sites manager for the N.C. Coastal Reserve, along with an intern, took a seine net out in the sound, Hallas took a water sample.

“This is a refractometer,” she said. “It refracts light through and tells how salty the water is.”

On a scale of zero to 100, freshwater is zero and ocean water is usually 30 to 35.

When asked what the salinity of the sound would be, several kids responded, “somewhere in-between.”

The refractometer was passed around, and participants of all ages eagerly studied it. A little boy squinted in the sunlight, trying to read the number.

The salinity was determined to be 10, which is 10 parts per 1,000.

This is the lowest salinity in which oysters can survive, Hallas said. She explained that sometimes they grow to tolerate it, but North Carolina has increasing salinity the farther south you go, and therefore more oysters as you go south—where they also grow faster.

“In order for a live oyster to grow, it must attach itself to something, usually another oyster shell,” Hallas said.

She encouraged participants to visit the northern end of the park, to see a wetland restoration project where several groups, including the federation, built an oyster reef and planted marsh grass.

Zinn and Crocker brought the seine net to shore and placed it on the sand. They scooped sound water into several clear buckets and small aquariums, and participants helped place creatures into them.

Kids watched raptly as they inspected the findings.

Hallas pointed out anchovies, crabs, croaker—a fish that earned its name because it actually croaks—and pipefish, which are relatives with and have the same animal classification as the seahorse. Small spot were also found.

“These can get up to a pound,” Crocker said. “Three-quarters of a pound would be a pretty good size. You can see the spot right behind the gill plate.”

Crocker said that when they get bigger, spot travel in the ocean in schools and make runs in fall, when pier and surf fishermen sometimes catch two at a time.

Sara Hallas talks about pipefish, which resemble seaweed, as seen in this aquarium. Photo: Corinne Saunders

Holding up a blue crab and gesturing across the widest part of its shell, Hallas added, “If you were fishing, the length of the carapace must be 5 inches across to keep a blue crab.”

She explained that blue crabs molt, coming out of their shells, and have a soft exoskeleton for 24 hours, during which time they are called soft shells. The crabs hide under rocks and sand until their shells harden.

Crocker held up two juvenile crabs – one male and one female. He noted that the shell on males’ bellies is shaped like the Washington Monument, while females have a dome shape.

“Females will always have red-tipped claws because ladies paint their fingernails,” he added; males are all blue when mature.

A few kids volunteered to help with the second seining. When they brought the net back, a few new species were identified:  Silversides – similar to bay anchovies – and a spadefish, which is the logo of N.C. Aquariums.

Last week, comb jellies, which have teeth folded inside so they can’t sting, were caught and released as well, Hallas said. Jellyfish are seasonal, usually found in the sound in large numbers in the summer and fall, and are a food source for sea turtles.

“The diamondback terrapin is really the only brackish water turtle common in North Carolina,” Hallas said. The more familiar loggerheads prefer the ocean.

She advised that if participants do a catch-and-release on their own, to look in marsh grasses, where many fish are camouflaged.

Many are counter-shaded, she said, with darker backs and lighter bellies. Sharks and orcas are counter-shaded for the same reason: In the water, “looking up gets lighter and brighter, looking down gets darker.”

Bob and Nancy Wall of Pennsylvania brought their 8-year-old grandson to the program after seeing it on the online calendar for Jockey’s Ridge State Park.

“He had a good time,” Nancy indicated with a smile, as the boy splashed in the sound.

The couple said they did not know pipefish lived here. As scuba divers for 21 years, they traveled all over the world and saw pipefish in Micronesia, but didn’t expect the species here.

The couple also expressed new knowledge of the blue crab. They previously thought blue crabs and softshell crabs were two different species.

“We didn’t know about them shedding their shells,” Nancy said.

You, too, can learn some interesting things about our coastal waters. Just show up at the park 9 a.m. today and each Thursday through August.

Last of two parts

RODANTHE –Take the driving tour of N.C. 12 that we featured yesterday on a Wednesday this summer and stop at the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge for a guided walk on the beach. You’ll be rewarded with a close-up look at one of the most dynamic and changing landscapes in the world.

The N.C. Coastal Federation, along with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is offering family-friendly weekly beach walks at the refuge each Wednesday this summer from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.

Enjoy the secluded beach while learning about barrier island migration and local plants and animals with Ladd Bayliss, a coastal advocate with the federation. A scavenger hunt appeals to kids of all ages, and guide books are provided to help them identify shells they find or marine creatures they spot.

The free walks begin at the oceanside parking lot, just south of the new inlet that a storm created a few years ago in this shifting landscape.

Federation Coastal Advocate Ladd Bayliss, left, takes the Boyer family on a guided beach walk at Pea Island.

On the inaugural walk recently, Bayliss showed maps of the area to the Boyers, a family from Georgia. She explained how local waters such as the Alligator River and Albemarle and Pamlico sounds drain to the ocean through nearby Oregon Inlet and how barrier island geology makes the  islands susceptible to erosion and break-throughs by the ocean.

More than 80 percent of the coast’s barrier islands, Bayliss notes, have been breached by the ocean at some point in their histories.

That’s what Hurricane Irene did in August 2011 when it broke through at the S-curves north of Rodanthe and also opened New Inlet at Pea Island, thus taking out the only road access to Hatteras Island in two places.

A temporary bridge over New Inlet has been the solution since then for the troubled section of roadway, with plans for a permanent bridge to be finalized in the coming months.

This ghost crab was one of the many critters seen on the beach walk.

New Inlet long ago was a breach close to the current one that closed up, briefly reopened in the 1930s and closed up again. Hurricane Irene’s “new” New Inlet was close enough to end up being referenced by most locals as simply as New Inlet.

N.C. 12 at the S-curves was overwashed time and time again by storms over the past fall and winter, including Hurricane Sandy in October and several nor’easters, and the best solutions for that area of Hatteras Island are still being studied, discussed and debated at the state level.

Bayliss produced an aerial map from the early 1990s that showed N.C. 12 running east of the old ranger station, just beyond the sand dunes. Now the road runs west of the old station, she explained, producing another aerial map.

“Barrier islands migrate west and south,” she said.

When the federal government’s Works Progress Administration built the sand dunes from the Virginia state line to Ocracoke in the 1930s, instead of protecting the islands, the dunes stopped the natural overwash that created the islands’ movement, she said. This ended up making the islands smaller, because the sand was swept away instead of re-nourishing the other side of the island.

A large ghost crab scuttled by, commanding the group’s attention.

Bayliss explained how ghost crabs live in holes on the beach but must go to the ocean at least once a day to wet their gills. She added that they can run up to five feet per second.

Sarah Boyer, the elder of the two children, happened across a cormorant’s body that was partially buried in the sand.

Bayliss noted that the bird swims underwater and “its hooked bill actually stuns fish.”

As the wind whipped across the ocean and then the beach, Bayliss explained how Pea Island got its name.

“Beach pea was everywhere,” she said. “Over the winter, snow geese populations would eat it. It had so much energy.”

Walking under the New Inlet bridge, the high-tide line was visible and several tidal pools remained. Still, the bridge for the most part spans dry sand—at least currently.

Barrier islands are characteristically dynamic.

“The water was waist-deep last summer under the New Inlet temporary bridge,” Bayliss noted.

Pea Island visitor Daniel Boyer has a staring contest with a ghost crab.

A storm or strong high tide could once again push a great deal of water under the bridge.

Bayliss hopes beach walk participants will learn “how this is a living, breathing system and everything we do to alter it, even doing things we have to do, like roads…is something that has to be compensated for elsewhere.”

Humans’ actions cause sometimes unforeseen reactions by nature, as demonstrated by the installation of sand dunes.

Immediately west of the temporary bridge is a roped-off, protected area where least terns, a type of shorebird, nest.

The smallest of the terns, least terns resemble diminutive gulls and nest on the ground, in large colonies for safety. They put their chests on the ground, and then dig sand with their feet to make their nests, often in areas strewn with shells, Bayliss said.

She provided binoculars, and Sarah and Daniel Boyer looked at least terns darting through the air.

Bayliss held up a small shell, noting its name: Coquina.

“Coquina Beach is right up that way,” she gestured to the north.

The kids borrowed two guide books from her to identify shells they had collected, which included one Sarah found called a false coquina.

Their father, Ken Boyer, said appreciatively of the beach walk, “I learned some stuff I wouldn’t have picked up otherwise.”

Participants are encouraged to bring water and sunscreen and to wear shoes appropriate for walking on soft, hot sand.

Rhana Paris, outreach coordinator at the N.C. Aquarium on Roanoke Island, turns the beach of Jockey’s Ridge State Park into an outdoor classroom and teachs students about water quality. Photo: Corinne Saunders

Justin Barnes, a ranger at Jockey’s Ridge State Park, holds up an aquarium he used for fish caught in a seine net. The fish were later released. Photo: Corinne Saunders

NAGS HEAD —
The first group came sprinting down the final sand dune on the back side of Jockey’s Ridge, so eager to begin they literally couldn’t contain themselves.

Group after group of eighth-grade students from First Flight Middle School completed the roughly 15-minute hike from the museum at Jockey’s Ridge State Park to the edge of the sound on Friday, May 3, where they dispersed to various leaders waiting along the shore.

They were about to spend 2.5 hours doing restoration work and hands-on learning about the diverse ecosystem surrounding them.

The sun shone and the wild spring wind was mostly blocked by the dunes.

I had traveled to the site minutes before with Park Ranger Justin Barnes in the park-owned Polaris—a four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicle sometimes used to transport handicapped visitors or dignitaries to the top of the dunes.

Also riding in the Polaris were Dewey Hemilright, a commercial fisherman of 25 years based out of Wanchese; and Rhana Paris, the outreach coordinator at the N.C. Aquarium on Roanoke Island.

My three travel companions all led groups of students in specific explorations, as did N.C. Coastal Federation staff members and other volunteers.

The school has close to 200 eighth-grade students. “It took us three days to get them all out,” said Sara Hallas, a regional educator for the federation.

Sixty eighth-graders were bused to Jockey’s Ridge May 3.

The Nature Conservancy, Jockey’s Ridge State Park, N.C. Aquariums and Jennette’s Pier, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, Hemilright and other volunteers helped the federation over the three days.

Erin Fleckenstein, right, talks about a yucca plant with some eighth-graders at First Flight Middle School. Photo: Corinne Saunders

Erin Fleckenstein, coastal scientist and the manager of the federation’s Northeast Region office in Manteo, explained the need for restoration work to two curious passers-by. She told them how the nearby Villa Dunes subdivision had, in the 1970s, begun expansion plans by removing all the nearby vegetation and even creating a roadbed before Carolista Fletcher Baum led the charge 40 years ago to create a state park.

In 2009, restoration work began. Grant funding was provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the NOAA’s collaboration with the Southeast Aquatic Resources Partnership, the Carlson Family Foundation and the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Program.

Project partners are Jockey’s Ridge State Park, N.C. Coastal Federation, The Nature Conservancy and the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries.

They used recycled Christmas trees and sand fencing to build mini-dunes, then built an oyster reef in the nearby shallow sound water, Fleckenstein said. Oysters clean the water by filtering it, and oyster reefs encourage new oyster growth.

Once the sand and water were more stabilized, they planted marsh grass in between.

As Fleckenstein told a group of students later, “sand fencing helps slow down the sand so it doesn’t suffocate our marsh grass.”

More marsh grass will be planted in coming months, but it is still growing in a greenhouse now, Hallas said.

Students focused on repairing mesh bags full of recycled oyster shells the first two days and invasive plant removal on this final day, Hallas explained.

The oyster reef is hundreds of bags of oyster shells stacked in a row, with a break in the reef every 100 feet so water can come in and out.

Two students help Park Ranger Justin Barnes with the net in a catch-and-release activity to study local fauna.

Marsh grass was planted in between the oyster reef and the shore as part of restoration work. Photos: Corinne Saunders

A football team from up north on alternative spring break and local eighth-graders helped in the initial phase of the reef, forming a human chain and passing bags to be stacked to create the reef, said Aaron McCall, northeast region steward for The Nature Conservancy.

Now the focus is reef maintenance.

Bill and Frances Smyth, volunteers who live in the Alligator River area, helped with the day’s project of invasive plant removal. The focus was rattlebox, a non-native species that spreads rapidly.

The Smyths participate in such federation projects in part to learn about preserving shoreline and native plants, so they can translate the knowledge to how they maintain their own property, Frances said. They also like the young leadership of the federation, she added.

Ernest Boyce, another volunteer, also helped with rattlebox removal. He saw the project on the federation calendar and took time off from his work at East Carolina University so he could help.

“This is my first time hands-on helping them,” Boyce said. “I’m trying to do more than just write a check.”

McCall spoke to his group of students about oyster reef ecology. The oyster reef is home to baby flounder, trout, eel, striped mullet, crab and shrimp. He took a bag from the reef and shook it above sand to show students a variety of these creatures before placing them back in the water.

As the students saw baby eel twisting in his palm and juvenile crabs scuttling toward the water, even those who had been reluctant to become involved were gripped with enthusiasm.

Barnes, meanwhile, was leading a catch-and-release program nearby. Taking a seine net, he caught shrimp, baby croaker and other fish near the oyster reef. He put the catch in a small clear aquarium for the students to study up close before returning the animals to the sound.

Hemilright has partnered with Hallas in a school program called Provider Pals. He gives a presentation to students explaining “if we don’t have clean water, we don’t have seafood.”

He showed his group a sword his buddy crafted from a swordfish bill, as well as mako and dusky shark jaws.

“Look at the rows of teeth,” he pointed out. As soon as one falls out or breaks off, another in a long line-up of back-up teeth within the jaw replaces it.

Paul Seyler studies a baby crab he found in the oyster reef. Photo: Corinne Saunders

Paris spoke to her group about lunar-driven ocean tides and wind-driven sound tides. The wind had blown the sound out today, but she pointed to the visible high-tide line.

Paris explained the sound is brackish water—a mix of saltwater and freshwater. She led the students in testing the sound’s pH, which turned out to be a neutral seven; DO (dissolved oxygen), which was seven or eight parts per million; and nitrates (nitrogen), which was two.

Paris noted it is desirable to have a low nitrates reading, but good there is a high DO, since fish breathe the oxygen in the water.

Hallas told me her students completed a runoff matching activity. When I arrived at her group, they were categorizing plastic animals by species and figuring out which were marine mammals and why. They were also deciding which marine mammals could be seen locally, such as river otters and bottlenose dolphin.

Fleckenstein’s group sketched flora of their choice. As I approached, I heard her tell a student she drew a yucca plant, which will have white flowers in the summer. “You guys are great scientific observers,” she said.

Every so often, the groups would switch, allowing the students to participate in a variety of fun, educational experiences.

I asked three students what they had learned.

“I learned about all the different plants, saw all their vibrant colors, and you can eat some of them,” said Natashia Moore. “But I didn’t, because people step on them and animals poop on them.”

“I learned how the marsh is important and how it cleans out the water,” said Kayli Martin. “We think it is a poopy thing but it actually helps clean.”

Morgan Brinkley agreed. “A lot of people think it’s just the marsh, but it’s really helpful to where we live.” She also liked “how they use natural things to protect it.”

It seems the oyster reef behind Jockey’s Ridge has become a thriving natural habitat, and also an effective outdoor classroom.

Related Stuff Worth a Look

• Plants and animals of the salt marsh
• Values of an oyster reef
• What’s a ‘living shoreline’?

NAGS HEAD — After nearly four years of restoration work and $5 million, Bodie Island Lighthouse opened to the public for climbing on April 19 for the first time in its 141-year history.

Although that morning was chilly and rainy, all 352 available tickets for the free climb were given out by noon. People will be able to climb the lighthouse every day until Columbus Day but for a fee.

Bodie Island offers “one of most commanding views from an Outer Banks lighthouse,” said Charlie Kolb, lead interpreter for Bodie Island District of the National Park Service. “It’s all water—the ocean, marshes, sound.”

Kolb said he and his staff won’t be surprised if tours are full all summer.

Four miles north of Oregon Inlet, 156-foot-tall Bodie Island overlooks Cape Hatteras National Seashore. This means it stands as “one of the few U.S. lighthouses where the view is very close to what it would have been,” noted Joel Proper, the park ranger who led my one-person tour on an overcast morning a few days after the official opening.

Stepping inside the lighthouse through the original thick wooden door, Proper showed me the room to the left where lighthouse keepers once greeted guests and the room to the right where barrels of kerosene oil had been stored.

Kerosene was the main fuel for the light over the years, although whale oil, rapeseed oil and even lard had previously been tried.

“Keeping lard warm was a challenge,” Proper noted.

Bodie Island got full electricity in 1932, and the lighthouse’s characteristic—2.5 seconds on, 2.5 off, 2.5 on, 22.5 off—has been the same ever since. The light is visible for up to 19 miles.

Inside the lighthouse base, a plaque reads, “Body’s Island.”

Folklore insists that a family named Body once owned the surrounding land, but nobody really knows. Proper prefers another explanation—the human bodies that continually washed ashore with the tides.

“There were more shipwrecks off the N.C. coast per square mile than any other coast in the world,” he said. “In 1872, when they referred to it as ‘Body’s Island,’ there could be a connection.”

On that note, we began our ascent. The 40-mile-an-hour wind was a persistent echoing presence. Stopping for a quick rest on a landing, Proper pointed out visible former cracks in the walls that had been re-grouted and painted during renovations.

The historical recipe of lime paint recipe was researched and is now again being used on the walls at Bodie Island, he said. Latex paint was previously used, which did not allow the bricks to breathe.

At the top, the door to the balcony was open and wind gusts howled in. Proper and I spoke of respect for lighthouse keepers making that climb during hurricanes and other strong storms that would bring easily double the wind speed.

The view was majestic. It reaffirms that here, the water defines the land.

In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration added the sand dunes—a lightly colored, curvaceous stretch by the tumultuous Atlantic today—in an attempt to contain the ocean, and Duck Pond immediately below was dammed by the nearby hunt club to create waterfowl habitat.

But not much has changed since Cape Hatteras National Seashore was established in 1953.

It took three attempts for Bodie Island Lighthouse to remain standing.

Ascending the Bodie Island Lighthouse is like climbing a 10-story building, but you’re rewarded with a stunning view. Photo: Corinne Saunders

The first quickly started resembling the Leaning Tower of Pisa because of an unstable foundation. It was built in 1848 by the early Lighthouse Board, comprised of ship captains, not engineers, Proper explained, and was soon abandoned.

The second lasted from 1859 to 1861, when Confederate troops retreating to Roanoke Island blew it up so Union soldiers wouldn’t have the vantage point.

The first two lighthouses were south of Oregon Inlet, but because Oregon Inlet itself was moving southward, the third was built to the north and was completed in 1872.

It is a twin of Currituck Beach Lighthouse; both were built according to the same architectural plans, including the 214 steps in each, and just given different light patterns and paint jobs.

Bodie Island was transferred to the Coast Guard in 1939, then to the National Park Service in 2000.

Two large cast-iron chunks fell from the top of the tower in 2004. There were no injuries, but the base of the tower was closed.

Restoration work began in 2009, with initial funding of $3 million.

The light was turned off for the first time in its history, and the lighthouse was found to have settled only two inches in 141 years.

Developed by French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel, the first-order Fresnel lens is the biggest of all lighthouse lenses, standing 12 feet tall and with an interior diameter of more than six feet. It was removed so all 344 multi-faceted glass prisms could be cleaned and its metal pieces could be adjusted.

Additionally, during renovations, all the metalwork on the balcony and inside the lighthouse was fixed and repainted.

The climb up the spiral staircase is strenuous,the Park Service warns. Photo: Corinne Saunders

Rusted stairs were taken to a foundry, where stronger alloy was added to the melted metal. The stairs were recast, but because the original metal remains in them, “we can still call them historic stairs and maintain the 1872 connection,” Proper said.

As paint was peeled off lighthouse walls, cracks became evident, and funds were insufficient to repair everything.

After a new assessment, a $1.89-million contract was awarded to United Builders Group of New Bern, which began the second renovation in March 2012.

Thus, the elaborate scaffolding required to renovate Bodie Island had to be put up and taken down twice.

Cracks were re-grouted, the windows were all replaced and support beams under the balcony were strengthened. Stairs were strengthened where they are bolted to the wall, electrical lines were replaced, a fire detection and suppression system was installed and marble flooring was repaired in the oil house.

Ascending Bodie Island Lighthouse is “equivalent to climbing a 10-story building,” said Patrick Gamman, district interpreter for Hatteras, Ocracoke and Bodie Island. “In our culture, if it’s over two stories, we take the elevator.”

At Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, a 12-story climb, three to four people have to be carried down each year.  As many as 1,400 to 1,500 visitors climb each day in the summer.

Unlike Hatteras, Bodie Island won’t have self-guided tours. With a ranger setting the pace and safety talks before the climb, Gamman expects more anxiety walk-outs, but few or no carry-outs.

The Park Service will follow the engineers’ recommendation to set a maximum number of 380 climbers a day at Bodie Island.

The refuge visitors’ center occupies a striking building on Roanoke Island. Photo: USFWS

MANTEO– Don’t let the ponderous name deter you. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s fairly new visitors’ center in a striking gray building on the north end of Roanoke Island offers a quality, hands-on, museum-style learning experience about the 11 wildlife refuges that the service manages along the N.C. coast.

The sign on the side of the building reads ”Coastal North Carolina National Wildlife Refuges Gateway Visitor Center.”  Even the less official name, the National Wildlife Refuges Visitor Center, is a mouthful.

Thankfully, the experience inside is a lot more captivating for adults and tiny visitors alike. It’s a winter dream come true for cold-weather tourists and locals: You’re out of the elements except on the short trail. In summer, the center will provide a respite from the heat and vicious mosquitoes.

The center, which opened last summer, is staffed by knowledgeable volunteers and was built with many eco-friendly features, including the obvious water bottle fill-up built into the water fountain.

The price of a visit is also right: Free, but donations are gladly accepted.

“Are you here for the preschool program?” the volunteer on duty asked me as we entered the building. It was our fourth visit, and my two-year-old gets excited anew each time we arrive. This time, a baby bear, about 4 feet tall, mounted standing up in a clear rectangular box, immediately captivated her.

“No, I didn’t even know about it,” I admitted.

The center’s nature trail provides a refreshing way to start the day. Photo: Corinne Saunders

The group had just left through the back door and was on the trail, the volunteer said, and we could probably catch them. So we hurried through the door, down the ramp and into the woods. A few steps later, we met the group. A somewhat surprised but gracious park ranger handed my daughter a magnifying glass and explained they were looking at different leaves.

The kids, ages 1 to 4, studied leaves, bark and recently sprouted baby pines through their lenses, with the youngest occasionally tasting theirs for good measure.

For a blustery March day, bundling up and meandering the half-mile, pine needle-blanketed path seemed a refreshing way to start the morning. Tall ancient pines blocked much of the wind I’d felt over the bridge and allowed patches of sunshine to fall to the trail floor.

Cindy Heffley, visitor services specialist, led the expedition, and two other park rangers brought up the rear. With such a ratio—six kids, three parents and three park rangers—even safety sticklers would be forced to relax.

Heffley pointed out bumps on some leaves, where she said insects laid their eggs and the leaves grew a protective covering “like a scab” over them. “But it doesn’t hurt the plant,” she added

Informational signs interspersed on the trail presented some facts historical in nature—about Roanoke Island’s first blacks, for example—and others more scientific, with pictures of local plants like bitter gallberry and wax myrtle and animals such as warbler varieties.

Back inside before the group dispersed, the kids examined various leaves that had been strewn on a classroom floor and took home the ones they wanted to keep.

The preschool program takes place Fridays through May 31, from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. or from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. “for the early nappers,” Heffley said.

After the program, my daughter and I wandered through the center’s exhibits. “Can You Find Me?” features a falsified natural habitat containing mounted turtles, birds, deer, bears, a wild turkey, snakes, a squirrel and a raccoon, to name a few. We saw 3-D molds of bear scat and deer droppings, and felt the furs of a bear, deer and the surprisingly soft river otter.

We pushed buttons to light up migration ranges for several bird species on a map. We moved our heads to view from different angles an optical-illusion map, which showed northeastern North Carolina’s current sea level and what one-, two- and three-foot sea rises would look like.

Hands-on, interactive exhibits are an easy way to learn about the wildlife refuges. Photo: USFWS

We peeked at the semi-enclosed movie theater area, its walls lined with black-and-white photos, with wooden benches set facing a screen. Pushing a button begins one of three short documentaries, including one on Buffalo City, once the largest community in Dare County but now a ghost town in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.

A prescribed burns display, including a “phone” on which you can listen to audio about controlled refuge burns, was next. Such interactive devices and plentiful buttons in the facility never fail to spark the imagination of the younger crowd.

A walk-through exhibit on flooding and draining refuges featured mounted ducks, one frozen in mid-underwater dive, loving the plentiful water on the “fall” flooded side. The opposite display had mounted rabbits, turtles and wading birds enjoying the low water level of spring.

Nearby, we saw a replica of a water control structure that would be used to flood or drain wildlife refuges and took a turn spinning its red metal wheel.

Intermittent howling from the far corner punctuated the factual narrators’ voices on various displays and led us to the mounted red wolves exhibit. My daughter’s favorite part was the button that lit up an underground den, revealing two wolf pups at play.

The pups were adorable, even though the adults exuded more menacing looks. Still, their authoritative body positions commanded respect.

While known for usually wearing her hair piled on her head in a loose bun, often with glasses and pens stuck in the mix, Carolista Fletcher Baum is captured here with her hair down, in front of the sand dune she helped save. Photo: Outer Banks History Center; photographer, Drew Wilson

NAGS HEAD — One summer day 40 years ago, Carolista Fletcher Baum stood firmly in front of the lead bulldozer threatening to flatten the East Coast’s tallest sand dune until the operator turned it off and left.

That night, she returned and removed the distributor and rotor caps and key locks from the fleet of bulldozers, according to later accounts, single-handedly kicking preservation efforts into high gear.

Her action sparked a statewide movement that led to the creation of Jockey’s Ridge State Park two years later. Baum provided the spark and was the movement’s recognized leader, but many others helped along the way.

“We pulled it off,” said Marlene Roberts Brantley, who was involved from the beginning with the nonprofit People to Preserve Jockey’s Ridge that Baum started. “Everybody played a part.”

Edward Greene, owner of The Christmas Shop in Manteo, dove wholeheartedly into the effort after seeing a newspaper picture of Baum’s audacity and learning of the circumstances, he said. Like many locals at the time, he had not realized that the land was privately owned and under threat of development.

“She was not a large person—and she was standing in front of the bulldozer giving the impression ‘I’m not moving,’” Greene recalled.

“In all probability there would be no Jockey’s Ridge State Park today if it had not been for Carolista Fletcher Baum and her husband, Walter,” the late David Stick wrote in his historical account People to Preserve Jockey’s Ridge, 1973-1980.

But they hadn’t been the first to try.

Marlene Roberts Brantley

Edward Greene

When he was elected president of the Nags Head Chamber of Commerce in 1964, Stick tried to make Jockey’s Ridge public domain. He “failed miserably,” he wrote, because the landowners were “reluctant to even discuss the idea of selling their Jockey’s Ridge interests at the time when Nags Head real estate was finally booming.”

In the winter of 1971-72, developer John High of Rocky Mount sought the Nags Head Planning Board’s approval to build condominiums on the northwest edge of Jockey’s Ridge, Stick chronicled.

Photojournalist Henry Applewhite and real estate broker Philip Quidley published an article in The Coastland Times about the proposed development. Soon after, Stick received a telegram from their loosely organized “Friends of Jockey’s Ridge,” requesting help in preventing the dunes’ destruction.

The Friends convinced the N.C. Division of State Parks to send out a representative. But there was no money to buy the land, and the group dissipated.

“Percy Meekins owned the property, so we were in conflict with him,” Greene remembered. “Rather than building development around the foot of Jockey’s Ridge, we decided it needed to be saved for future generations. We decided we needed to get petitions together and appeal to the state.”

Baum served as president of People to Preserve Jockey’s Ridge. Luther Hodges, a former governor, was first vice-president. Greene and Brantley were the other officers. Walter Baum, Stick and Nags Head Mayor Carl Nunemaker were also part of the 15-member board of directors.

“She was a good front person,” Brantley said of Baum. “Walter Baum was kind of the quiet hand behind the scenes. He probably has never really gotten proper credit for what he did.”

“David was extremely helpful”, she continued. “He knew everybody in the state, federal level.”

Brantley said she was a fulltime, unpaid employee of the organization that first year, putting in about 40 hours a week.

She returned to work in 1974 but she and Baum, an accomplished jeweler who owned stores in Nags Head and Chapel Hill, spent every weeknight working on the project.

“By then we had coin canisters in a lot of businesses; we were getting donations, counting coins,” Brantley recalled. “The five children—my two and her three—got along very well.”

The children were regular, albeit sometimes reluctant, volunteers.

On the back outside wall of the visitor center at Jockey’s Ridge State Park, an original 1970s sign is displayed. The bottom line reads “Sponsored for the People by the Outer Banks Chamber of Commerce.” Photo: Corinne Saunders

The group sold “SOS”—“Save Our Sand Dune”—T-shirts and bumper stickers, plus $5 certificates to “own” a square foot of Jockey’s Ridge.

“Why can’t we just play on the dunes?” Ann-Cabell Baum Andersen, the eldest of Baum’s children, recalled wondering as she and her sister Inglis and brother Gibbs headed to the hot watermelon-pink hut that was the center of their fundraising and petition-signing recruitment efforts.

“Everyone who lived in Nags Head or on the Outer Banks knew that hut,” she said with a laugh, explaining it was painted with leftover paint from their bathroom in Chapel Hill.

“We didn’t know not every mom would take up a cause and fight for it just because that was the right thing to do,” Andersen noted.

The granddaughter of novelist Inglis Fletcher, Baum grew up in a prominent family in Edenton and spent every summer of her life in Nags Head. She was a statuesque woman known for her beauty, charm and flair, with a raspy voice and warm, brown eyes. “My mom was hot pink, fuchsia, purple, bright blue,” Andersen told a magazine writer once. “Not white.”

She was also determined. When Baum severed her right two middle fingers making jewelry, she taught herself to write letters left-handed. When Ann-Cabell developed pneumonia, Baum’s phone calls and letters continued from her daughter’s bedside. The sand dune, it turned out, had consumed her, as it had a motel and several houses foolishly built in its path over the decades.

Newspaper reporters notice such things. They wrote admiring stories of the lady who was pestering everyone in the state to save a sand dune. Of course, those stories only helped the cause.

The Christmas Shop was another headquarters. Greene made announcements over his PA system, and local attorney Leonard Logan’s daughter and Brantley’s son manned an SOS booth outside the store.

The money generated went to buy stationary and stamps for the writing campaign, Greene said.

Jockey’s Ridge placemats were printed and sold to restaurants, and colored screen prints were sold in gift shops.

“We had a full Dare County campaign going,” Greene said.

Named for the woman who stopped the bulldozers, W Carolista Drive is the entrance street to Jockey’s Ridge State Park. Photo: Corinne Saunders

Stick noted, however, that even though spirits were high because of people’s widespread support, the money generated fell far short of what was needed to buy the land, making the state’s involvement vital.

The nonprofit sent petitions with more than 50,000 signatures to Raleigh, along with countless other pages of correspondence. Baum drove to the capital every day for three weeks straight, speaking with every legislator she could buttonhole. She persuaded songwriters to sing about Jockey’s Ridge and invited filmmakers to the dunes. Her efforts even motivated poet Carl Sandburg. “Save the dunes,” he said. “They belong to the people. They represent the signature of time and eternity. Their loss would be irrevocable.”

The N.C. General Assembly finally listened, appropriating the money to buy the first 152 acres in 1975. Along with land donations and other purchases, the park would soon total its current 426 acres.

Later that summer Ann-Cabell and her siblings stole out of the house at sunrise one day and trudged to top of the highest ridge. There, they triumphantly tromped around, dragging their feet through the sand in organized lines. They returned home and woke their mother. Baum walked to the door and saw a message drawn in the dunes that she helped save. “Happy Birthday, Mom.”

She died in 1991. The park she helped make remains and has become the most-visited state park in North Carolina.

“It was the smallest park the state had ever created, period; but it was extremely timely and, you know, we needed it, so it worked,” Brantley said. “Because of all the development, it doesn’t get as much sand and re-nourishment as it used to, but it’s still there.”

Students at Manteo Middle School tested water in the wetland and in the adjacent canal.

Volunteers planted three types of saltwater plants to create the wetland.

MANTEO – It took a couple of years of busting up concrete, moving dirt around and digging holes for plants, but the first saltwater wetland in the state and maybe on the East Coast that’s designed to  treat polluted stormwater is now open as a town park.

Manteo partnered with the N.C. Coastal Federation several years ago to identify, design and install methods to treat stormwater from existing developments, in an effort to clean up the waters of Shallowbag Bay.

The town’s stormwater system was designed to collect runoff from streets, parking lots, yards and buildings and send it through outfalls directly into Shallowbag Bay.

“It’s some pretty dirty stuff and is affecting the water quality of the bay,” said Erin Burke, town planner. “Our board of commissioners recognizes that and is committed to improving that.”

Now completed and opened as a nontraditional park, the project at the corner of U.S. 64 and Grenville Street is the first saltwater stormwater wetland in the state and possibly on the East Coast, said Erin Fleckenstein, coastal scientist and the manager of the federation’s Northeast Region office.

Wetlands use native plants to slow and purify runoff, which often carries bacteria from animal droppings. Because runoff from rain is freshwater, stormwater wetlands are usually of freshwater variety. Federation scientists, however, found inspiration in naturally occurring swales that sometimes fill with water and act as saltwater marshes.

“We came to them (the town) and said, ‘Try a saltwater wetland,’” Fleckenstein said. “Saltwater is more toxic to bacteria than freshwater.”

The town approved, and engineers from Withers & Ravenel of Raleigh and N.C. State University helped develop the plans.

The quarter-acre of saltmarsh now treats runoff from a 41-acre watershed in Manteo that is about 64 percent hard, impervious surface and includes commercial properties and U.S. 64.

If as expected it proves itself over time as the better option to treat stormwater and to provide habitat, the wetland could be a tool for other towns and developers to use.

“Stormwater runoff is the leading cause of water quality impairment that causes shellfish beds to close,” Fleckenstein said.

The town bought the property known as Buck’s Seafood—a small strip mall that included China King—in 2007 with grants from the Dare County Tourism Bureau. It tore down the building and parking lot in 2008.

The new wetland was doing what it was designed to do — hold water — after rains in August.

The N.C Department of Transportation supplied the money to build the wetland, and a grant from the N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund helped the town place a conservation easement on the land.

Construction began in 2010, followed by planting the next year.

“We recruited volunteers and planted these one-inch marsh plugs a foot and a half away from the other ones,” Fleckenstein said. “We have been very happy with how it has filled in.”

The wetland includes three species of native N.C. plants bought from local growers: salt meadow hay, black needlerush and saltmarsh cordgrass.

Fleckenstein said it takes 36 to 72 hours for the stormwater to move through the wetland, which was contoured for habitat and because the various types of marsh grasses survive at different water levels. During that time, the plants absorb the nutrients in the stormwater and both ultraviolet light and salt break down the bacteria it contains.

Part of the wetland’s design is a pump controlling saltwater flow into the marsh. It can either allow stormwater in or it can pull in water from an adjacent canal when the water level is low. At first it was manually controlled, but in 2012, a probe was installed to automatically trigger the pump.

“The marsh plants like to keep their feet wet,” Fleckenstein said. “They like variation in water levels, especially as young plants. Once their roots are established, they can handle flooding more.”

The design also strives to eliminate invasive plants such as native cattails and nonnative phragmites, because habitat value is lost when such plants move in, Fleckenstein said.

The saltwater wetland is a type of habitat that is being lost along the coast, Fleckenstein said, and yet it is crucial as a nursery area for estuarine species, such as blue crab, mullet, red drum and other juvenile fish species. Wading birds have been spotted in the wetland, and the town installed a purple martin house.

Mary Ann Hodges, a science teacher at Manteo Middle School, has brought two groups of students to the wetland to help cement textbook lessons in their minds through hands-on experiences.

Erin Fleckenstein

She did basic water quality testing with the middle-school science club and more advanced water quality testing with her eighth-grade students. They compared the water quality of the wetland to that of the canal beside it, which leads to Shallowbag Bay.

“We found the water quality in the wetland area is much better than in the ditch right next to it,” Hodges said, which “means the plants are doing their job.”

State stormwater rules affect new development around water bodies, to keep them as clean as possible, but they are not retroactive. Existing developments don’t have to comply with newer, stricter rules. To ensure that water bodies remain protected, ways must be found to control runoff from exiting development, Fleckenstein explained.

Besides the wetland, the federation has helped install a rain garden and cistern at the Manteo Town Hall and rain gardens at Festival Park, Front Porch Café and local schools.

In the next couple months, Manteo’s second stormwater treatment project will get underway: a mechanical treatment of the outfall at the boat ramp at the north end of Queen Elizabeth Street, Burke said.

While not as effective as the wetland’s biological treatment, this oil-water grit separator will slow down runoff and capture trash like cigarette butts and large particles such as gravel, dust and dirt, Burke explained.

The board is able to implement that project with a grant from the N.C. Division of Water Resources. They hope to do one stormwater-related project every year as time and budget constraints allow, she said.

More information is available at Town Hall, and a map at the wetland park site explains the process.

BUXTON — Jim and Marcia Lyons have volunteered with the N.C. Coastal Federation on and off for about 10 years, and their devotion to the recent living shoreline project at Durant’s Point in nearby Hatteras earned them a Pelican Award from the federation.

Sarah Hallas, coastal education coordinator for the federation’s office in Manteo, said it is sometimes hard for the small staff to have the presence in remote Hatteras that they would like. The Lyons, residents of Buxton, consistently help spread the word of federation projects and bring new volunteers to workdays there.

They are both very dedicated to protecting “their area of Hatteras that is very special and unique,” Hallas noted.

Durant’s Point is a privately owned strip of land that shelters Hatteras Harbor, and it was eroding at a rate of five to 10 feet a year. “If that was to wash away, the harbor would be next,” Hallas said, noting numerous commercial fishermen are based in the harbor, which is also culturally and ecologically significant.

Jim and Marcia Lyons have been steadfast federation volunteers and are dedicated to protecting the natutal resources of Hatteras Island.

The living shoreline approach to shoreline stabilization involves controlling erosion with the least environmental impact; in fact, it actually creates estuarine habitat.

Creating a living shoreline for Durant’s Point began in March 2011, after grant funding was secured.

“We planted there the last two spring seasons, [and the Lyons] were instrumental in getting thousands of marsh grass plugs in the ground,” Hallas said.

Marcia had formerly helped plant marsh grasses in a similar living shoreline project in Ocracoke, and said she loves that the federation promotes the natural way of stabilizing shorelines, as opposed to wooden bulkheads or stone walls.

“It’s so much work to get the permits and all that beforehand,” Marcia stated. “I was really excited when it happened here.”

One of the federation’s main goals, Marcia noted, is raising awareness of the values submerged aquatic grasses and tidal grasses in salt marshes bring to whole estuary. The grasses provide habitat for aquatic life while buffering the land from the winds and tides.

Since Durant’s Point is only accessible by water, Jim’s use of his boat to transport people and supplies was also crucial to the project. The federation didn’t have a workboat at that time, Hallas said.

Jim also helped transport a graduate student, Rachel Gittman, who was doing studies of underwater grasses in that area.

“I helped take her out whenever she came, which was a lot,” Jim said, noting that he thought it was fun to work with both the young researcher and the federation.

“It was a lucky set of circumstances; lucky for me, lucky for Rachel, lucky for the coastal federation,” he said. “I’m very honored. It was a lot of hours, (but) not really a lot of difficult hours.”

Jim, a Norfolk, Va., native who moved to Buxton in 1973, said he has always been involved in fishing, hunting and surfing, and he knew Jan DeBlieu, who worked for the coastal federation, very well.

“We helped Jan with some research for a water quality study [years ago],” he said. “We went to eight or nine workshops, talked about estuarine concerns. I took water samples from Hatteras Island.”

Jim believes that an “estuarine environment can be a healthy, productive resource that can benefit everyone if managed properly.” The water “has certainly given me lots of enjoyment,” he said.

The local waters’ organically raised food can perpetuate itself forever if taken care of, he said, and “should be incredibly productive.”

But since 1973, he has seen a decline in the Pamlico Sound’s food production.

Many of his friends are commercial fishermen, which he describes as fishing by proxy for the numerous people who like to eat seafood but do not necessarily want to go catch it. For the fishermen’s livelihood and the health of the area in general, he says it’s essential to protect water quality and habitat.

The living shoreline project at Durant’s Point helps do just that.

“It’s nice to think we can protect shorelines and actually increase biodiversity and biomass with the right kind of structures conducive to small animals [and] vertebrates.”

His wife agrees.

A native of Boston, Mass., who moved here in 1976 and worked for the National Park Service for 32 years, Marcia said she has always loved coastal systems and salt marsh systems.

“They are great places for exploring, great places for education,” she said.

One of her favorite activities while working for the Park Service was taking people out with nets and exploring the shallow waters. “It was always like a little treasure hunt,” she recalls. “People were always surprised how productive (the waters were).”

Sharing a love for the local wetlands, Jim and Marcia Lyons regularly put their beliefs to work in preserving the environment.

COLUMBIA — Pat Armstrong retired from teaching science at Columbia Middle School at the end of the 2011-2012 school year. What does she do with her first year of retirement? Promptly volunteer to help the teacher who was hired in her stead.

Pat Armstrong

Armstrong earned a Pelican Award, presented Aug. 4 by the N.C. Coastal Federation, for her industrious creation of the school’s rain garden. A rain garden is designed to lessen stormwater runoff and flooding through strategic use of plants to absorb the water.

The annual Pelican Awards recognize those who effectively preserve and protect the coast. Although the award might have served as a final feather in the cap of a different teacher, Armstrong plans to keep getting her hands dirty.

“She volunteered this year to help with Science Olympiad and the rain garden,” said Jana Rawls, principal of Columbia Middle School.

Armstrong was the Science Olympiad sponsor for eight years and the school’s science club sponsor. Both of those activities’ hours were mostly outside of the school day, Rawls said.

Science Olympiad is a competition involving 15 to 20 events that include everything from a written anatomy test to tower building to designing a “mouse trap vehicle.” Pairs of students compete in a selected event, and the regional competition takes place at East Carolina University.

The challenge is “you never know exactly what to study for,” Armstrong said. Because they study with experts in the field related to their event, students in more metropolitan areas enjoy the advantage of having a larger pool of experts from which to draw.

Nonetheless, her students earned a medal “every year since I started,” Armstrong noted — a fact that speaks volumes to her devotion to their learning.

Four years ago, Armstrong began incorporating environmental programming into her eighth-grade class curriculum, including planting and caring for the rain garden.

“She’s very dedicated to her students, always going out of her way to find different ways to keep them engaged,” said Sarah Hallas, coastal education coordinator for the federation’s northeast regional office.

After having Armstrong as a teacher, “just in general, the students walk away with more knowledge,” Rawls observed. “She’s very passionate about what she does.”Hallas worked with Armstrong to create lesson plans about hydrology for eighth grade. The federation acquired money for the mulch, topsoil and plants, and Armstrong decided the location of the plants and developed a maintenance program. She assigned teams of eighth-grade students 3-by-3-meter sections of the garden to weed and maintain as part of their science project grade.

Armstrong and Hallas together organized an educational day during the last school year that focused on climate change and marine mammals, Hallas said.

“She had gone through some climate change workshops that year; I had had some climate change training, [and] we did team up to make that happen at her school,” Hallas said.

Science education has always been important to Armstrong.

A graduate of Roanoke Rapids High School, she earned a B.S. in vocational home economics teaching from ECU in 1971.

Her original dream in college was biomedical research, but after barely passing a biomedicine course, she changed her major.

“Science is still what I migrated back to,” she said. “It’s the area I’m most interested in. There’s a lot of science in home economics.”

Pat Armstrong supervises the planting of the school rain garden.

To illustrate her point, the name of that major has been changed in recent years, actually, to “family and consumer sciences.”

Not finding any openings in her field after graduation, she took a position as a secretary with a gas company in Roanoke Rapids. However, a home ec teaching position came up with Tyrell County Schools in August that same year, and she applied immediately.

“That’s what brought me to Columbia,” she said, adding with a laugh: “My father didn’t even know where Columbia, North Carolina, was.”

She was a 22-year-old teaching home ec to mostly 18-year-olds who were taking the course solely for an elective credit. The classes included boys who would routinely take apart the sewing machines instead of trying to learn anything, so she was eager to teach something else.

“I spent many afternoons putting sewing machines back together,” she said.

Armstrong transitioned to teaching girls’ health and physical education the next year.

Through the N.C. Department of Public Instruction, she added certifications for teaching science and social studies for grades 6 to 12, as well as academically gifted and career explorations classes.

In 1976, she resigned for several years to raise her three daughters.

Armstrong returned to school, only to become a “roving English and social studies” substitute teacher, who did not have a classroom and had to move her materials after each class. It was the most challenging three months of her career.

She taught a self-contained sixth grade – meaning she taught all the subjects – when sixth grade was still in the K-6 school. Later, when the middle school was created, she taught mostly science.

Armstrong and her husband live in Columbia, as do their daughters, two grandsons and a young granddaughter Armstrong regularly watches.

Also in Columbia is Armstrong’s scholarly legacy: numerous students who had a genuinely invested science teacher.

And come spring, look for her diligently weeding the rain garden.