OCRACOKE ISLAND – For more than a century, the iconic, peaked-roof “Greek Revival” structure, which most know as the Island Inn, has played an important part in Ocracoke history. It has served many roles and changed hands many times, with new additions and additional buildings added along the way.

In recent years, however, deterioration and uncertain ownership have left its fate in question. It was not certain if the cost of restoring it was feasible, nor who would take on the challenge. Some feared that when the property was sold, the new owner might decide to tear it down and build a new structure. Now, a nonprofit group is working to preserve the main structure’s historical significance and create an attraction for island visitors.

Last winter, the Ocracoke Preservation Society, which oversees the Ocracoke Museum and several other historic preservation projects on the island, began looking into the idea of purchasing and restoring the Island Inn. On May 7, the group, after much deliberation and soul-searching, bought the property for $850,000. Much of the structure, along with some outlying buildings, were determined to be past restoration, so it was decided to focus on saving and restoring the original building, formerly the Odd Fellow’s Lodge, demolishing the two deteriorating wings and creating separate public restrooms and green space.

On July 16, the demolition work began, bringing heartbreak and anguish to those who loved the grand old lady. Even though saddened, most accepted the necessity of the plan and applauded the decision to restore the original building.

The original part of the Island Inn was built in 1901 by an island native, Charlie Scarborough, on land deeded by Janus and Zyphia Howard. It was at the junction of the main road, now N.C. 12, and the road leading to the lighthouse.

Its purpose was to serve as the headquarters for the Odd Fellows Lodge No. 194, a fraternal order whose mission was printed on a poster displayed inside the building: “We command you to visit the sick, educate the orphan, relieve the distressed, bury the dead.”

The second floor became the Odd Fellows’ meeting room, with as many as 62 men attending weekly meetings. M.L. Pyland, whose idea the project had been, became the lodge’s grand noble and chairman of the bylaws committee. The lodge thrived for 20 years.

The first floor of the building served as a school for Ocracoke’s children, who attended classes there until a new school was built in 1917. Ocracoke native Chester Lynn remembers his grandmother, Annabelle Fulcher O’Neal, talking about going to school there.

After the lodge closed, Ben Neal bought the building and had it moved 600 feet across the street, a task which, because the road was made of deep sand, was quite an undertaking. The Neals used it as their home until they moved back to Morehead City.

It was sold in 1940 for $700 to Stanley Wahab, an islander who had gone off island to become a successful businessman. He turned it into the quite popular Wahab Coffee Shop, with a soda fountain and an ice cream bar.

In 1942, World War II turned the Outer Banks into a war zone, with German U-boats targeting merchant ships that sailed along its shores. As a result, the United States began building a Navy Base on Ocracoke, and Wahab rented the upper floor to construction crewmen working on the base. After the base was completed, the building became an officers’ club, going by the name of the Crow’s Nest, until 1946.

After the war, when the base was decommissioned, Wahab bought some of the old barracks and moved them to the property to use as a dance hall and later as apartments. Later he added to the original structure a second story with dining room, kitchen and more bedrooms, and dubbed it the New Silver Lake Inn. He hired Liz Styron and Muzel Bryant as its first cooks, and advertised “a complete restaurant and excellent cuisine.”

Wahab, who still resided away from the island, hired a Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey to run the place for him. Mrs. Godfrey was on the mainland when she was found mysteriously murdered, and visitors to the inn have reported ghostly sights and sounds ever since.

Stanley Wahab eventually sold the establishment to Doward Brugh, who employed Della Gaskill to cook for the restaurant. Gaskill, author of the book “A Blessed Life; Growing up on Ocracoke Island,” said she enjoyed her job. She recalled preparing fish and all kinds of seafood, cornbread and hush puppies. Before that she washed dishes under Liz Styron when Wahab still owned the inn.

The Island Inn changed hands several times before being bought in 1970 by Bill and Helen Styron, who hired the popular artist Joko to decorate in a nautical or piratical theme. The walls were stained to look like the inside of a ship, nets and buoys were hung from the ceiling, and a large picture of Blackbeard the pirate holding his head was hung on a wall.

When Ocracoker Larry Williams and his partner Foy Shaw bought the place, they added an aviary on the porch with plants and vines, a parrot, parakeets and peacocks. They spent the next 20 years improving the Island Inn and built a swimming pool and an additional 19 rooms on the opposite side of the road.

During the years that the Styrons and later Larry Williams and Foy Shaw owned it, Chester Lynn worked in and later leased the restaurant. He has shared fond memories of the place, including years when, during hurricanes, the restaurant crew would cook all their food to distribute to people on the island.

He still has the old converted pan used to drain hush puppies, of which, he said, there were enough cooked there over the years “to soak up all the water in Silver Lake Harbor.” He also recalled that “every single person who cooked there learned to flip eggs, tossing them up and catching them in the cast-iron skillets. No one ever used a spatula to turn an egg. And,” he added, “for all that clam chowder made there all those years, no one ever opened a can. It was all made with fresh clams.”

It was a popular place, and one day in the ’80s they served 250 for breakfast and 259 for lunch.

In 1992, the Island Inn changed hands again when Cee and Bob Touhy purchased it. They decided not to renew Chester’s lease but took over running the inn and restaurants themselves.

When it went on the market recently, John Giagu, owner of Island Golf Carts, suggested to County Commissioner Tom Pahl that the property needed to be in community hands. Giagu and Pahl formed an ad hoc committee, the Island Inn Preservation Committee. Also on the committee were then Hyde County Manager Bill Rich and Ed Norvell, a Salisbury attorney specializing in nonprofits and preservation organizations.

They approached Phillip Howard, then president of Ocracoke Preservation Society, about becoming the steward of the project. After much deliberation under the society’s new president Ken DeBarth, the group created a committee to oversee the project.

“I am in awe of the organization that OPS just became with this decision,” said Tom Pahl. “It was tough for them to get to that point, but with this, they are really, truly pursuing their mission of island preservation.”

The project is now on its way, with the down payment coming from the simultaneous sale of land across the road to a condo association and to Hyde County. The county purchased the open lot beside the pool to build a new building to house the island’s EMS operations.

In May, the society began payments on the five-year mortgage. The Ocracoke Occupancy Tax Board and the Tourism Development Authority have committed to helping cover the mortgage payments for this year with the expectation that they will re-commit next year. During mortgage period, the society plans to seek grants and do fundraising to make a balloon payment of the mortgage balance and pay for the restoration.

The goal is to create a visitor center with office spaces for nonprofits and an outdoor green space, to be called Odd Fellow’s Park, with parking and picnic tables. The society said it is willing to dedicate part of the property for public restrooms with the hopes that the Occupancy Tax Board will provide funding to build them.

DeBarth, the society president, said the organization is “excited  to become the steward of this historic project. We realize that it will be a long-term process, and we are committed to preserving this piece of Ocracoke history.”

Donations for the project are appreciated.  Checks can be sent to OPS, P.O. Box 1240, Ocracoke, N.C. 27960, with “Island Inn” in the memo line.

OCRACOKE ISLAND – It was a beautiful spring day, two days before the opening of the Ocracoke Fishing Tournament.

Lisa Loos, who had driven with her husband from their home in Winston-Salem for the tournament, was fishing  on the beach when she saw something in the surf.

“We thought we saw dolphins playing off the sand bar and I started walking towards them,” she said. “Then I thought it was a shark because a fin was sticking up. Then we realized it was a whale. As it got close to shore, it started to thrash since the water was not deep enough.”

I learned about it the following morning. Peter Vankevich, co-publisher of the Ocracoke Observer, local artist Susse Wright and I were driving up the beach to see what birds were there. Peter got a call from National Park Service biologist Joslyn Wright, saying that there was a stranded whale near Ramp 67 and a team was preparing to do a necropsy, as an animal autopsy is called. We decided to drive over and learn more.

It was not hard to spot the group of people standing around the large black form lying near the water’s edge. I spoke with Lisa, who said that she and her fellow fisherfolk had called the National Park Service immediately after seeing it. They had tried to push the whale back out as it struggled against the waves, but it was too heavy. A park service ranger arrived in about 20 minutes. The whale died soon after it stranded.

It  was a beaked whale, we were told by Wayne Justice, a team member of the North Carolina Marine Mammal Stranding Network, who had come from the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores to help the park service with the necropsy.

Beaked whales are members of the family Ziphiidae that includes 22 species, 11 of which are found in North America. They live far offshore, diving far into the depths of the ocean. Among air-breathing animals they are the most extreme divers, sometimes reaching depths of 3,000 feet and staying underwater for an hour or more. They are some of the least-known mammals, because of their deep-sea habitat, mysterious habits and apparently low numbers. Most are slender, medium-sized whales with a small head, a distinctive beak-like snout and a single blowhole. They can weigh up to 2.7 tons and reach about 24 feet in length. The body is compressed laterally, and the flippers and fluke are small and narrow with a dorsal fin situated well back along the body.

Most beaked whale species are very similar and difficult to tell apart. This one was originally thought to be a True’s beaked whale, but Paul Doshkov, a bio-technician and lead marine mammal response coordinator with the National Park Service stationed in Bodie Island, later identified it as a Gervais. Named for the French scientist who in the mid 1800s identified it as a new species, the Gervais beaked whale’s scientific name is Mesoplodon europaeus, and it is also known as the Antillean or Gulf Stream whale. It is found far offshore from Long Island, New York, to Trinidad, including the Gulf of Mexico, across to the English Channel, as well as off African and South American waters.

As we waited for all the team members to arrive, Justice explained that during the necropsy they would be searching for any signs of illness or injury that might have led to its ending up so close to shore and eventually dying on the beach.

“You just don’t see beached whales that are healthy,” he said. “There is usually a major illness or sickness that is already in place.  The reality is that they are already too weak, and the currents push them to the beach.”

He added that, “while it is sad to see such a highly intelligent animal in a condition like this, it is an opportunity to learn more about them.”

Peter and Susse had to get back, but I decided to stay and watch the necropsy performed by National Park Service, North Carolina Aquarium and University of North Carolina researchers, many of whom had worked together at other strandings. I was given a paper and pen and asked to take notes.

The whale measured 14.5 feet and weighed 2,065 pounds. It was an adult male with no apparent injuries other than shallow abrasions from being tossed in the surf.

As they cut the skin away, the technicians pointed out the thick layer of blubber that during earlier times would have been cut up and melted down to produce oil for lanterns. Beaked whale blubber is unique from that of other whales in that it is composed almost entirely of lipids called wax esters.

The flesh of the whale was a rich, dark red color, derived from the high level of oxygen needed for long dives when the whale was unable to breathe. The organs were carefully removed and examined. The notes I recorded included an empty stomach, a light load of nematodes in the gastrointestinal tract, small masses in the pancreas and parasites in the liver.

One of the technicians used specialized surgical instruments to remove the ear bones from the whale’s head. They were to be sent to an institution in France for an acoustic trauma study. Sonar operations, such as are used by the Navy, can damage the ears of marine mammals, interfere with their ability to navigate, and cause them to lose their way and end up on distant beaches. There has been a correlation in the past between Navy sonar testing and beached beaked whales.

The cranial section of the vertebral column was removed and would go to University of North Carolina Wilmington for further study.

The team dispersed after the necropsy was completed, and a National Park Service bulldozer arrived to bury what remained of the carcass. I got a ride with park service biologist Joslyn Wright back to the village, where I began reading more about what I had seen.

Beaked whales have an average lifespan of 27 to 39 years. Their ability to dive to great depths is facilitated by a large spleen and liver, as well as the high oxygen content of the flesh. While diving, the heart slows and the blood flow changes.

They feed mostly on squid, according to necropsy studies, but also on fish, shrimp and some crustaceans found near the ocean floor. They find their food, it is believed, through echolocation and use a unique mechanism to suction it into their mouths. There are throat grooves that stretch and expand to move the food into the digestive tract. Because the stomach of this whale was empty, its diet could not be analyzed.

While considered toothed whales, the teeth of females do not develop outwardly but remain hidden in the gum tissue. The males have tusk-like teeth and in most species, there is only one set. It is believed that the purpose of the males’ teeth is not so much for eating as for sexual attraction, like antlers on deer. In Gervais beaked whales, the males’ front, lower teeth protrude.

While beaked whales live too far out at sea to have many interactions with human activity, studies show that they are increasingly threatened by plastic pollution, deep-sea fishing nets and a rising level of toxic chemicals in their blubber. Sonar testing used by the Navy and, should off-shore oil and gas drilling be approved, in fossil fuel exploration, are also of great concern. Test results to determine what led to this whale’s stranding and death are not yet completed.

To report a beached whale or other marine mammal contact the Cape Hatteras National Seashore Sea Turtle and Marine Mammal Stranding hotline at 252-216-6892.

OCRACOKE ISLAND – Blanche Howard Joliff was a young teenager when her father, Stacy Howard, decided in 1934 that he needed another boat. He commissioned a master boatbuilder, Tom O’Neal, to begin building him a fine skiff.

The work was finished by another island boatbuilder, Homer Howard, who added a rounded cabin near the prow. Proud of his well-designed craft – a traditional deadriser with a V-shaped hull at the bow that’s flatter toward the stern – Howard gave it the name of his daughter, Blanche.

Blanche, who died in April at 98, always remembered how happy she was when her father named the boat for her, and how she loved going fishing with him. She bragged, “One day I caught 57 bluefish, and I thought I had done something.” The boat that carries her name is now an outdoor exhibit at the Ocracoke Preservation Society Museum.

Born in 1919, Blanche was delivered at home by Ocracoke’s renowned midwife, Charlotte “Miss Lot” O’Neal. She lived in her parents’ house on Howard Street until the early 1950s, when she met a young man who was looking to build a highway on the island. Upon their marriage she moved to the mainland, coming back once a month to see her family. After her husband’s death in 1994, Blanche moved back into the home on Howard Street where she grew up, where she stayed until shortly before her death.

Blanche’s father was an island fisherman. Blanche’s mother, Elizabeth Ballance Howard, also born on the island, had family connections to Hatteras Island as well.

Blanche liked to talk about what life was like back then for her and her three sisters, Leila, Etta and Lois, as they were growing up.

“Momma kept chickens,” she once said. “They ran around free, and sometimes they’d get into trouble – scratch up someone’s garden. Sometimes when we were young, Etta and I would chase them around and get them squawking. It was the best fun, but then we’d get in trouble.”

Her family ate fish, clams, turtle, chicken and vegetables. You couldn’t get fresh meat because there was no refrigeration.

“Papa had a big garden out back, with cabbage, string beans, collards and sweet potatoes. My mother made the best sweet potato pie,” she said.

One of Blanche’s favorite foods was turtle. She recalls that before they were listed as an endangered species, fishermen in the village would catch sea turtles in their nets and bring them back to the fish house at Mace Fulcher’s Community Store. They would quarter them and give each quarter to a family, who parboiled it.

“You had to cook it a good while, ’til it was tender, and then you cut the meat off the bone,” Blanche explained. “You cooked it with onion, potatoes and a little bit of salt pork. We called it turtle hash, and you had to have baked cornbread with it. You never tasted anything so good.”

The foods they did not grow came mostly from Fulcher’s Community Store, but there were other stores on the island, too. Back then, there were two or three fish houses, which also sold big blocks of ice in the days before refrigeration.

Blanche remembered the ponies that wandered around freely in the village. “Sometimes folks would ride them to the store, tying them outside while they shopped.”

Blanche played hopscotch with neighboring children, and they played in make-believe houses and kitchens, using broken dishes and making pretend desserts with red sand. She recalled pretending a piece of cedar was chicken. They also filled the tops of coffee cans with mud, let them dry, and put them together to make pretend layer cakes.

In Blanche’s early years, nearly all transportation was by water.

She recalled, “There were two freight boats, which went to little Washington (in Beaufort County) or Morehead City, and two mailboats, which came out of Beaufort, and after that from Atlantic (in Carteret County).”

Blanche’s uncle had a horse and cart, and he’d give the girls rides.

“Once, when I was about 5, I went out across the beach with my uncle and aunt to see where the ship, the Victoria S, had fetched up on a shoal,” Blanche recalled. “The ship was still in water, loaded with lumber, but it could not get off the shoal.”

The owner of the lumber, she explained, had it unloaded and stacked on the beach. He wanted to get it shipped to the mainland. Two island men got the idea that they would each buy a flatbed truck and haul the lumber from the beach to the docks where it could be shipped.

“But there wasn’t a road the whole way, so they got permission to cut through the oak and myrtle in front of Blanche’s house and make one. It wasn’t very wide, and there was deep sand. In order to get through the sand, they had to gun their engines and try to plow through it fast. One day the two trucks met head-on at the sandy stretch. This was the first road wreck on the island.”

Meanwhile, the boat her father had named for her was put to good use. For nearly 80 years, the Blanche plied the waters around Ocracoke, passing through many owners and uses. In 2006, the Blanche’s most recent owner, James Barrie Gaskill, donated the boat to the Ocracoke Preservation Society, and the work of restoring the skiff and telling its story began.

The Blanche’s history was compiled by talking to islanders and fishermen who remembered and worked on the boat.

Maurice Ballance recalled when Blanche’s father, and his uncle by marriage, had the boat built. He said that Howard used the Blanche to long-haul, a fishing method in which two boats drag a long net to shore and another boat circles around to bail the fish, for trout, spot and sea mullets.

He also did sink-netting in the ocean for bottom fish and, according to Ballance, “One time, Stacy and Murray Spencer, who was fishing with him, like to got swamped coming in. They were running before the sea. A breaker swamped her and she was half-full of water.”

Stacy later took out fishing parties – visitors to the island who wanted a real fishing experience – on the Blanche.

“That boat’s been through a lot,” mused Ballance. “It was wrecked up some during the storm of ’44, when it broke the stake it was tied to in the harbor and went into a piling. Preacher Dixon and I waded out and cut her loose and retied her, but some boards were damaged.”

After Howard died, the Blanche passed through the hands of several owners until Gaskill’s father, Lum Gaskill, took ownership and rechristened it the “Candyjoe” in honor of his grandchildren, Candy and Joe.

Vince O’Neal, who now owns the Pony Island Restaurant, remembered swimming around the Candyjoe when the boat was tied up near Lum Gaskill’s dock.

“Yeah,” admitted Vince, “we snuck up on her sometimes at night when no one was watching and jumped off. We were kids, you know.”

When Lum Gaskill died in 1975, Ballance took the Blanche to Qwawk Hammock, where he planned to use her for long-hauling. There, someone stole the battery and anchor, so Ballance abandoned his plan. The Blanche sank to the bottom of the creek, and it looked as if the boat would meet the same sad ending as many other old wooden boats.

Instead, Anthony “Moose” Mutro bought it, pulled it up from the bottom and, with his uncle, Irvin Styron, started putting the Blanche back into working shape. In 1977, Mutro transferred ownership of the Blanche to Styron, who installed a rebuilt Chrysler marine engine and added a new cabin and deck. He then put the boat to work mulleting and crabbing, always accompanied by his black Labrador retriever, Pisces.

Ocracoke fisherman Rex O’Neal recalled going crabbing with Styron. “He would go out when other fishermen couldn’t, she was such a seaworthy boat.”

 Capt. Rudy Austin added that “a lot of them would be out crabbing on the other side of the Lehigh, back in the ’80s when crabbing was good. When it got rough and the rest of us were having a hard time in our flat-bottom boats, Irvin would be riding along, crabbing at ease.”

 Irvin’s daughter, Ava often worked with her father. “I ran the boat and he pulled the pots,” she said. “One day while we were fishing pots, I looked up and there were two waterspouts out on the sound. They sat down on the water and it got real rough. I wanted to go in, but Daddy said, ‘We’re going to finish the pots – there’s only 25 left.’ Well, the waves started breaking over the boat and it stalled the engine. The boat was filling up with water. We were scrambling around, trying to get her started again. We got her running and we finished the pots, but I quit when we got back.”

She chuckled as she recalled the incident, adding that she’d quit quite a few times but always went back to work with her father.

Styron’s son, Ray inherited the Blanche upon his father’s death in 1986. He re-named her the “Shoestring,” and with the addition of a short mast and removable outriggers, used her for shrimping.

Eventually, James Barrie Gaskill acquired the Blanche, planning to use it as a pleasure boat. But instead he asked the Ocracoke Preservation Society if they would like to have the boat, and on April 29, 2006, the old deadriser officially became the property of the museum. The Blanche was placed in a cradle, a shelter was built and restoration work began.

The Blanche is now a museum exhibit, honoring both Ocracoke’s commercial fishing tradition and Joliff, the boat’s namesake.

Learn More

• Ocracoke Preservation Society

OCRACOKE – Surrounded by live oaks and red cedars and enclosed by a picket fence on a quiet road in the village lie four graves. There are lots of small, well-cared-for family graveyards on Ocracoke Island, but this one is different. Above it waves a red and white banner – the flag of England. The story behind this cemetery is dramatic and heart-rending, and it continues to this day.

World War II came to the United States in the early months of 1942, when German U-boats began torpedoing merchant ships along the Atlantic Seaboard. North Carolina’s Outer Banks were particularly hard hit. During the first four months, 60 ships were blown up along the North Carolina coast. The Navy was at first unable to adequately protect the shipping lanes, so they requested support from Great Britain. In response, the Royal Navy sent a flotilla of 24 antisubmarine trawlers to help end the destruction. The trawlers had, before the war began, been seagoing, commercial fishing vessels. The men on them, most of whom had been merchant seamen, had joined the Royal Navy and gained experience in fighting U-boats.

Among the trawlers was the H.M.T. (His Majesty’s Trawler) Bedfordshire. Built in 1935, the former fishing vessel was 170 feet long. It had been sold to the British Admiralty when the war began and was now equipped with a 4-inch, quick-fire deck gun, a .303 caliber Lewis machine gun and 80-100 depth charges. It was commanded by Lt. R.B. Davis with a crew of three other officers and 33 men.

The flotilla left England in early February 1942, stocked for an 18-day trip, but they encountered rough, stormy weather along the way. One ship, the Northern Princess, was lost in the heavy seas. The remaining vessels were late reaching their destination, finally arriving in Newfoundland in early March. They made their way south to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York for repairs and restocking. The H.M.T. Bedfordshire then sailed to its new home port, Morehead City, North Carolina, a base for antisubmarine operations. By April 1942, its crew was busy patrolling the waters from Cape Lookout to Norfolk, Virginia.

Wahab Howard, an Ocracoker who was, at the time, the manager of the Ocracoke Electric and Light Co., crossed paths with one of the Bedfordshire officers, Sub-Lt. Thomas Cunningham, in Norfolk. According to a story later told by Wahab’s widow, the men shared a table and conversation in a restaurant there. During the meal, Wahab noticed Cunningham’s unique gold watch and ring.

A month later, while the Bedfordshire was docked in Morehead City, Sub-Lt. Cunningham encountered another Ocracoke resident, Jack Willis. Willis later recalled, “I was with my father in Morehead City when I saw Cunningham. He was in a drug store pretending to shave off his beard with an electric razor. I remember he had a thick black beard.”

Aycock Brown, a civilian special investigator for the Office of Naval Intelligence, also met Cunningham during that spring. In late April he was called to identify four bodies from a British tanker, which had been torpedoed and to oversee the burial. He visited the Bedfordshire, which was ashore at the time in Morehead City, to request British flags to drape over the caskets, and ended up sharing a few rounds of rum and a long conversation with Sub-Lt. Cunningham. Before he left he was given not four but six “Union Jack” British flags.

Officers Davis and Cunningham, along with their crew, sailed back out of Morehead City to Cape Lookout. They were patrolling 40 miles southeast of the Cape when, just before midnight on May 11, the Bedfordshire was spotted by the German submarine U-558. The submarine, captained by Kapitänleutnant Günther Krech, fired two torpedoes, but they missed their target. He fired again. After 36 seconds he heard a detonation and saw the trawler’s stern rise high out of the water. It disappeared, sinking to the bottom and taking all its crew with it.

Three days later, on the morning of May 14, two bodies were pulled out of the surf by Coast Guardsmen from Ocracoke Station. They were transported to a small building behind the Coast Guard Station, where Wahab Howard and Jack Willis identified Sub-Lt. Cunningham. Howard remembered his watch and ring, and Willis his black beard.

“I remember going down to the station to use the telephone,” recalled Willis.”They brought in two men who had washed up on the beach. They had them on the back of a truck. When they pulled up the canvas, I recognized one of them. He had on a turtleneck and looked pretty normal. His beard was still coal black …”

Aycock Brown, the special investigator who had spent an evening of conversation over glasses of rum with Cunningham, was called in to help identify the British sailors and oversee funeral arrangements. He agreed that the first body was that of the sub-lieutenant and determined that the second was that of Stanley Craig, the ship’s telegraphist. Since there had been no distress signals or reports of an attack on the Bedfordshire, Brown’s identifications were questioned when he called headquarters. It was not till May 16 that the ship was officially acknowledged missing in action and presumably sunk.

As Brown prepared to build coffins and have the sailors buried, he discovered that wood was hard to come by on the island. He located two coffin-shaped sink boxes used by hunters to hide in for duck and geese hunting. According to one report, they had been abandoned, but Elsie Ballance recalled that her father, Elisha Ballance, had donated one of the boxes.

“Papa had what they called an old scow flat,” she said. “They came to him and asked him if they could have it to bury those sailors in. He gave it to them, saying that he had boys in the service and only hoped that if it was needed that somebody would do the same for him some day.”

The Williams family donated a small plot of land next to their own cemetery to bury the sailors. Amasa Fulcher, a lay leader of Ocracoke’s Methodist Church, was asked to conduct the service. The Coast Guard provided pallbearers, and the British sailors were buried with honors in the sink boxes. Draped over them were the two extra British flags that Cunningham had given Brown less than two weeks before.

A week later, two more bodies were pulled from the ocean by the crew of a Coast Guard patrol boat. They could not be identified, but from their uniforms it was clear that they had come from the Bedfordshire. They were buried next to Cunningham and Craig in coffins made with wood donated by an islander who had been saving it to make an outhouse.

That fall, Cunningham’s widow was distressed to learn that there had been no Catholic service for her husband, who had been a devout Catholic. Aycock Brown was notified and again he came to Ocracoke to oversee a second service. Four white wooden crosses were provided by the U.S. Navy and a Roman Catholic Navy chaplain came from Cherry Point to preside alongside the pastor of Ocracoke’s Methodist Church. There were full military honors, including a long line of Coast Guard and Navy officers and enlisted personnel, a gun salute and the sounding of taps by a bugler. There has been an annual service overseen by the Coast Guard ever since.

Later, two other sailors from the Bedfordshire were found, besides those buried at Ocracoke. One body, identified as that of Seaman Alfred Dryden, washed ashore near Swan Quarter, where it was later buried. Dryden was later moved to a cemetery in Creeds, Virginia, and given a full military service. Another washed ashore and was buried on Hatteras Island. None of the other 29 British servicemen were found.

The submarine that downed the Bedfordshire, the U-558, was bombed by Allied Forces on July 20, 1943. It sank and most of the crew were killed. L. Vanloan Naisawald, author of the book “In Some Foreign Field,” tracked down the survivors after the war was over. The German captain, Günther Krech, was one of five men who escaped in a lifeboat, were picked up by the British, and held as prisoners of war until freed after the war.

The wooden markers put in place by the Navy in 1942 were replaced in 1983 with regulation British gravestones. The originals were stored under a building for years, but in 2005 they were incorporated into a memorial near the cemetery with the names of all the British sailors who died. Last year the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, based in England, took over the maintenance of the tiny cemetery which is “leased in perpetuity” to England and considered British soil.

While the British Cemetery and the annual services honor all the men who died on May 11, 1942, there is a special connection between Cunningham and the island of Ocracoke. Not only had he met two Ocracokers and donated the flags which were draped over the graves, but his widow, Barbara came to know some of the Ocracokers and stayed in touch. Two Ocracoke women, Fannie Pearl Fulcher and Elsie Garrish, visited the Cunninghams in England. Cunningham’s son, born in October 1942, five months after the sinking, and named after his father, has come to Ocracoke to honor his father on more than one occasion. Last year, he attended the 75^th anniversary of the sinking of the Bedfordshire.

“I don’t know if many people knew what was going on here during the war. It was a terrible time and it was a frightening time.” — Della Gaskill, 80, of Ocracoke

In December 1941, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Adolph Hitler declared war on the United States. Not long afterward, German submarine Adm. Karl Doenitz put into action a plan to close off the transport of oil, lumber and other products crucial to U.S. military operations along the East Coast. The plan was called Paukenschlag, often translated as “Drumbeat” or “Drum Roll.”

Between six and eight German submarines, which Winston Churchill nicknamed U-boats, were sent to the coastal waters of the Atlantic Seaboard. Merchant ships traveling along shipping lanes from Maine to Texas were targeted, including those just east of the Outer Banks. In the first four months of 1942 at least 200 ships were destroyed. More than 60 were lost off the North Carolina coast, including at least 14 near Ocracoke and Cape Lookout. Only one U-boat was destroyed during this period when, on April 13, the USS Roper caught the U-85 on the surface and sank it.

Most of the attacks took place at night. The ships made easy targets. Unaware of the lurking submarines, they kept their lights on and radioed their whereabouts to each other and, inadvertently, to the Germans. Many towns and cities ignored blackout regulations and kept their lights on, providing the U-boats with excellent silhouettes of the target ships. So successful was the German plan in the first months of 1942 that it was referred to it by German captains as the “Atlantic Turkey Shoot.”

Most of this carnage was kept secret from the rest of the country, for fear of causing a panic. Not even the people living on the Outer Banks were informed, but they soon came to know of it. Often they saw the great fires where the ships were burning at sea. Even when ships were torpedoed too far out to be seen, flotsam, debris and sometimes bodies washed up on shore. Oil and oiled seabirds littered the beaches as well. Extra servicemen were stationed at the old and the new Coast Guard stations, and the Navy and Coast Guard patrolled the beaches, often riding big horses which they brought with them, or sometimes using island ponies.

The first attack on the Outer Banks came on the night of Jan. 18, 1942, 60 miles off Cape Hatteras. Two torpedoes ripped apart the tanker Allen Jackson, spewing 73,000 tons of oil into the ocean and immediately catching fire. Of the 35 crewmen on board, only 13 survived. They were rescued the next morning by the destroyer U.S.S. Roe. Two more ships were struck that day off Cape Hatteras.

Sailors who were rescued over the next months were housed on the sound side of Ocracoke’s new Coast Guard station in tar-papered barracks until they could be transferred to the mainland.

Many of the island men were away in early 1942, working on Army Corps of Engineers dredges in Philadelphia, Boston and Norfolk, or on Merchant Marine ships. Some returned home and enlisted or were drafted to fight.

By the end of January 1942, about 12 ships had been destroyed along the Outer Banks, and the month of March alone saw 25 losses. One of these was the freighter Caribsea.  Its second mate was a man from Ocracoke, Jim Baum Gaskill, whose parents, Bill and Annie Gaskill,  ran the Pamlico Inn.

Jim Baum Gaskill was 25 when he entered the Merchant Marines and joined the crew of the Caribsea. The ship was torpedoed as it passed near Cape Lookout, and Gaskill was killed. His framed license drifted up on the beach at Ocracoke and was found by his cousin Chris Gaskill. The ship’s nameplate, still attached to a board from the ship, floated into the Pamlico Sound to the dock of the Pamlico Inn. The piece of wood bearing the nameplate was later used to build a cross, which now stands at the Ocracoke United Methodist Church.

Another Ocracoke resident whose ship was torpedoed in Ocracoke waters was Art Bryant. He was a member of the only black family living on the island. Bryant had joined the Merchant Marines when the war started, and he was on the ship Chilore on July 15 when it was torpedoed near Ocracoke and accidentally detonated a U.S.-placed mine. Bryant and the other survivors were brought ashore and he was able to visit with his family.

The Navy realized they needed help in patrolling the Atlantic coast’s shipping lanes, so they asked the British Royal Navy for additional ships. The British sent 24 antisubmarine trawlers along with their crews. One of these, the H.M.S. Bedfordshire, was stationed in North Carolina.

On May 11, while sailing off Cape Lookout, the Bedfordshire was torpedoed by the German U-boat U-558 and sank, leaving no survivors. Three days later, two of the crew, Sub-Lieutenant Thomas Cunningham and telegraphist Stanley Craig, were pulled out of the surf by Coast Guardsmen at Ocracoke. Two more unidentified sailors washed up a week later. All were buried on a small piece of land donated by the Williams family. There has been an annual memorial service at what is known as the British Cemetery ever since.

In response to the attacks, the Navy began in June 1942 construction of the Ocracoke Section Navy Base. This included dredging out the shallow village harbor, known as the Creek and now as Silver Lake, so that the Navy’s patrol boats could be anchored there. The material they dredged out had to be deposited somewhere, and three spoils areas chosen changed the island’s ecosystem.

The Navy built the island’s first paved road, leading from the base through the village to an area near what is now Jackson Dunes and Oyster Creek. Here, on a 47-acre plot, the Navy stored ammunition. The road was informally known as Ammunition Dump Road.

They also operated a radar and sonar tower at Loop Shack Hill, a series of sand dunes just outside of the village, with jamming equipment, radio high-frequency direction finding gear and new listening capacities.

Floating mines and anti-submarine nets were set out in Ocracoke’s offshore waters to protect the base and its ships.

As the early months of 1942 passed, the captains of the merchant ships sailing up and down the coast became more savvy, traveling together, and the U.S. Atlantic Fleet began providing escorts and set up a convoy system to protect them.

As a result, the number of casualties declined and by the time the base was completed in October, most of the attacks had ceased. The base nonetheless began operating, doubling the size of the island’s population so that, according to Della Gaskill, “it was like a little city within Ocracoke.” There were three power plants, a commissary, hospital, officers club and barracks.

In January 1944, the Ocracoke Section Base was converted to an amphibious training base, its purpose being “training personnel in the use of new secret equipment.” These personnel, who came to be known as “Beach Jumpers,” were trained to set up mock or dummy invasions, using such tactics as setting off firecrackers and smoke pots to simulate battle. After their training they were sent to battlefronts of the Pacific. The Beach Jumpers were active from 1943 to 1946 and again from 1951 to 1972. A monument, unveiled on Oct. 23, 2009, near Loop Shack Hill, commemorates these men.

After the amphibious training operations ended in 1945, the Navy base at Ocracoke was used as a combat information center until the end of the war, when it was torn down. The extent of the U-boat attacks, the radar and sonar operations at Loop Shack Hill, and the training of the Beach Jumpers remained classified for years after. Even the existence of the Navy base itself was kept secret from most Americans until the 1990s, and there are only a few remains today to suggest that it ever existed.

An exhibit at the Ocracoke Preservation Museum commemorates the World War II activities which took place at and around Ocracoke.

OCRACOKE ISLAND – On the shelf of the china cabinet in Chester Lynn’s antique shop are three pewter plates that once belonged to Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard the pirate.

Lynn can trace his lineage back to two of the men who sailed with Blackbeard. One, Edward Salter, settled in Bath after his pirating days were over, and his descendents moved to Portsmouth Island. William Howard, who had been the quartermaster on Blackbeard’s ship, settled at Ocracoke.

Lynn, who was born in 1957, has roots both in Ocracoke and Portsmouth Island, and his life’s passion has been the history of these two islands. His head is full of historic stories and his house and antique shop are full of historic artifacts and antiques.

Fig trees have been a part of both islands histories, and they are a part of his life as well. He is presently writing a book about the figs of Ocracoke and Portsmouth.

The earliest record of Lynn’s ancestors on Portsmouth was the 1790 census, which listed Salvanius Dixon, his great-great-great-grandfather. His great-great-grandmother, Mary Salter, was, according to family lore, at her home in Portsmouth during the Civil War when the Yankees arrived. She hid her cow in the kitchen, which was in a separate building, and she threatened the soldiers, telling them that if they went into her kitchen she would “take a knife to them.” They left her kitchen and her cow alone.

Another family story was about Lynn’s great-great-grandmother, Emmaline Salter Dixon, also of Portsmouth, who had a fig tree so high that she would climb up on the roof to pick the figs.

His great-grandmother, Helen Dixon, was living at Portsmouth when she met James Harvey “Hobby” Fulcher, who was from Ocracoke. They were married on Portsmouth Island in 1889 after which, according to the family Bible, eight boats were tied together in what was called a wedding chain and sailed back to Ocracoke in the dark of night. Hobby Fulcher built his bride a house on Ocracoke and before long Annabelle, Lynn’s grandmother, was born there.

Annabelle married a sea-loving island boy, George O’Neal. He told Lynn about a time in 1915 when the wealthy DuPont family sailed to Ocracoke on a huge yacht. They hired two local boys to crew on their trip back to Wilmington, Delaware. George O’Neal was one of the boys. Later he was the co-owner of Ocracoke’s famous mailboat, the Aleta, which in addition to mail, delivered merchandise, people, pigs, or anything else that needed to get to the island from Atlantic in Carteret County. He built a sailboat that he named for his wife, Annabelle and, according to Lynn, “he used to race it in many a race.” Years later, Lynn rebuilt the boat, which had fallen into disrepair, sailed it for a while, and sold it.

During World War II, when a Navy Base was built at Ocracoke, George O’Neal was the head of the dredge that pumped out the harbor for the Navy ships. He and Annabelle had a house near what are now the National Park Service docks. One day when Annbelle and her daughter Audrey Carol, 11 at the time, came home, they found their trees cut, their fence removed, and stacks of dynamite on their porch. Their house had been requisitioned by the Navy. They rebuilt next to the house where Lynn lives today.

When she was older, Audrey Carol, Lynn’s mother, fell in love with a Coast Guardsman who was stationed at the Hatteras Inlet Station. Lynn’s father was from Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., but Lynn has never had any affinity to that side of his family. His “family” is all at Ocracoke, in his mind.

Lynn grew up in the same house on Ocracoke’s Back Road where he lives today, and where he markets antiques, floral arrangements and fig trees. The brightly painted sign at the side of the road says “Annabelle’s,” his grandmother’s name. While he has traveled extensively through his life, he has never lived anywhere else, nor wanted to.

He has fond memories of growing up on Ocracoke. One is of playing the island version of hide-and-seek known as mehonky. “Whole sections of the island would play, and whoever got caught was put in prison. Girls and boys played, sometimes about 15, usually after dark.”

He and his sister spent much of their time at their grandma’s house next door. They used to love to play upstairs in two huge trunks, almost as big as caskets, which came off of one of the ships that wrecked on the shoals offshore.

Lynn also recalls playing at his Aunt Gertie’s, where there were lots of chickens running around in the yard. He liked to jump on the branches of the fig tree, trying to get the figs to fall on top of the chickens.

He has always liked chickens, he said, and over the years has had hundreds. They used to run free at his house before there were so many people nearby and on the road.

A less pleasant memory was a day when he was about 10 and attending the old school. Someone locked him in the bathroom and it took three or four hours for someone to find a hacksaw to cut him out. After that, he said, if he had to use the bathroom he ran home. Later he attended the new school where, he said, “it leaked so badly at first that the students sat in the lobby with beach umbrellas when it rained.”

At the age of 10, Lynn began attending the Assembly of God Church, and he has attended ever since. One time, years later, he brought back two oleander seeds from Israel and planted them in the church yard, where they grow to this day.

He enjoyed visiting Liz Styron, the first cook at the Island Inn, and helped her with her chickens. He also enjoyed her cooking – stewed sea turtle, sailors’ hash and collards, among other things.” She used to wash our clothes on a washboard,” he recalled, “and later I bought her a washing machine. She was so excited you would have thought I’d bought her a Cadillac.”

Liz Styron told him the story of how, in the morning when the Storm of ‘44 started coming in, she had been working at the Pamlico Inn. They had to evacuate, and she had someone grab the stone steam-table crock that was used for making clam chowder and carry it to her house, so she’d be able to feed the people there. The inn was destroyed, and Lynn now has the crock, which Styron gave him.

Lynn has always had a fascination with antiques and with plants. He recalled that he grafted his first rose of Sharon before the age of 10. He could grow anything, he reminisces. His mother told him not to go near her clothespins, for she was afraid they would sprout.

While he does not have a formal education beyond high school and happily admits that he can’t spell worth a darn or speak what the school would call “good grammar,” Lynn is considered one of the island’s most knowledgeable historians. For one thing, he said, he has an almost photographic memory, and he has seen and heard about a lot of Ocracoke and Portsmouth history.

He managed the Island Inn for a number of years and later took care of Myra Wahab after her husband Stanley died. Stanley Wahab had, among other things, built the Wahab Village Hotel, now Blackbeard’s Lodge. In 2003 he opened his antique shop, Annabelle’s, on what was then known as Jack’s Dock in the Community Square. He later moved to his current location in the front rooms of his home on Back Road.

Figs have been a part of Lynn’s life for a long time, and a part of Ocracoke and Portsmouth history as well. The first mention of figs here was by John Grey Blount, who wrote of fig season in colonial records. Lynn has a 1911 picture of Henry Pigot and a fig tree on Portsmouth. He also has a picture of Lola Wahab’s fig tree taken in 1920 at Ocracoke. He remembers when there were three fig trees at Springer’s Point, Blackbeard’s former hangout, which is now protected by the Coastal Land Trust. One fig tree remains.

There are 15 species of fig trees on Ocracoke today, and fig preserves are some of the most sought-after items in gift shops and the grocery stores. For the past 10 or so years, Lynn has been rooting and selling fig trees, both to islanders and outsiders. He estimates that he sells 250 to 325 trees per year, and they end up all over the country. He participates in the Ocracoke Fig Festival, providing information and “helping to keep the facts straight.”

In recent months Lynn has embarked on a new undertaking. He is writing a book about all the fig trees at Ocracoke, old island fig recipes, the proper care of fig trees and fig-related stories about his life here. Island resident David Mickey has been working with him in compiling the stories, and Lynn has also had help from Trudy Austin and Sue Dayton.

Walt Wolfram, a distinguished professor at North Carolina State University, has been assisting Lynn with editing and publishing his book. Recipes include several from Miss Elma, such as her preserves, jam, dried figs and his grandmother Candice’s candied figs. He recalled helping her roll the figs in chocolate, cinnamon or whatever was in the ice box. There is also a recipe for pickled figs.

Lynn’s often serious face cracks into a grin when he tells this story. He wanted his figs to have some acclaim, so he persuaded a National Park Service friend to take two back to the nursery at the White House. He recently received a call saying that the trees, one a pound fig and one a sugar fig, are soon to be planted on the White House lawn. Lynn got a real kick out of that!

I was only five years old when war came to Ocracoke. During the war… the base was here, and it was good that the Navy was here … The mines was placed out in the ocean and the freighters would come by and be blowed up …

We would go upstairs and make sure the door was closed and no light would come through and we would open the shade and set on the floor and watch the fire. It would look like it was licking all the way up to the sky … And my sister and I would watch it because it was something that we had never seen before…

This is just one of many memories Della Gaskill, 80, likes to share about her life at Ocracoke. She has fascinating stories about the activities that took place on the island during World War II, including torpedoed merchant ships and visits to the Navy base, which she describes as “a little city within Ocracoke.”

In November during the Ocracoke Preservation Society’s membership meeting, Della was awarded the society’s Cultural Heritage Award in recognition of the many contributions she has made to the preservation of island history, including a book she completed in 2013.

Born in 1937, Della was delivered by a midwife in the old family homeplace near the lighthouse, an area of the island known as Down Point. There were no paved roads, and she and her sister had to walk to school.

“The mud puddles would sometimes be up to your knees,” she laughed. “We had to make up our own things to do and play with when we were children.”

One of her favorite things to do was sing. Her grandmother, mother, sister and Della would walk along the shore of what is now called Silver Lake and sing hymns for the people who lived there. Another favorite was going to Springer’s Point, a lovely area now protected by the Coastal Land Trust, which she did after church on Sundays with her grandfather.

Della’s father, James Monroe Williams, was a fisherman, as was his father before him, and she grew up around boats and the water. Later, her father and uncle opened a general store that they called Williams Bros. Her parents, her sister Elizabeth and Della all worked there, and Della recalls helping make sandwiches to sell to customers. During the fall and winter, her father took fishing and hunting parties out in his boat. Della helped her mother prepare and serve meals for the men, including clam chowder, oyster stew, baked drum with potatoes and onions, and corn bread.

She was 7 years old when the “Storm of ’44” hit the island. Della and her family had gone over to her grandparents’ house, because it had an upstairs. She recalls that “the water started coming in and the house started lifting up and down.

“If my daddy and my granddaddy and my uncle hadn’t gotten axes and hatchets to beat holes in the floor to keep that house from coming off the blocks, it would have been something,” she said.

Also among her early recollections are watching the Ocracoke ponies that ran wild and often wandered through the village; riding the freight boat to “Little” Washington to go to the doctor’s; and waiting for the mailboat Aleta.

Meeting the Aleta where it docked at the old post office on the harbor was a popular activity for everyone. Della and her sister liked to see what new people had arrived on the boat, collect their family’s mail and visit with folks. She also remembers the “womanless weddings” the island men put on each year for fun, with half the men dressing up like women.

Della attended Ocracoke School until the 10th grade, at which time she stopped to tend to her mother, who was ill. She went back years later to get her GED diploma, of which she is extremely proud.

At 16, she met Owen Gaskill when he came into her parents’ store, where she was working. They were married in 1954 and had a long and happy marriage. They built a house on Lighthouse Road and they raised their son Monroe there.

Della worked various jobs through the years, including at the Island Inn, the Pony Island Motel, and the Trolley Stop Restaurant.

She worked for Sam Jones, well known on the island for building the Castle, now a bed and breakfast inn, and the Berkeley Center, now a wedding and event venue, and for his eccentric and entertaining ways.

“He was good-hearted,” Della recalled. “And he was a card too.”

For 24 years, Della worked for the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Ferry Division, where she enjoyed meeting all the people. She also had a shop in her backyard, where she sold, among other things, plants from her greenhouse, souvenirs and fig preserves.

Owen died in 2000. Della still lives in the house she and her husband Owen built. Her son Monroe and her grandson Owen Parker spend lots of time with her. She still attends the Assembly of God Church where she taught Sunday school for years, and she still makes the fig cakes for which she is famous — she won first place in the Ocracoke Fig Festival competition more than once — and ships them to customers around the country.

Della’s book, “A Blessed Life; Growing up on Ocracoke Island,” tells her story in what North Carolina State University linguist Walt Wolfram describes as “words that resonate with the authentic island voice.”

She reflects in her book that “the Ocracoke that I see today is not the Ocracoke where I was born and raised … But Ocracoke is still Ocracoke with all of its changes. It is my home and I love it dearly.”

The lines from one of Della’s poems captures the intense love she has for her home by the sea:

Looking out across the Sea

What magnificent beauty there is for everyone to see.

The beach is so peaceful in the wintertime,

The tourists all gone, only footprints in the sand left behind …

As I sit on the beach looking out across the Sea,

I am viewing God’s beautiful creation,

not everyone as fortunate as me.

Not everyone can sit on the beach

looking out across the Sea…

Learn More

• Ocracoke Preservation Society

OCRACOKE — A stiff wind skittered across the Pamlico Sound, splashing water across the bow of the 17-foot Carolina Skiff as it plowed into a wave and bounced back up. I clutched the side, holding on for dear life and hoping we’d reach our destination soon. The captain, a suntanned woman, proclaimed that “this isn’t too bad. I’ve seen worse.” I was grateful when 15 minutes later we slowed down and she announced that we were there.

Gazing ahead, I saw an amazing array of stakes, bags and cages spread out across the water. We were approaching the Devil Shoals Oyster Farm, an aquaculture business owned and operated by two Ocracoke women, Heather O’Neal and the captain, who prefers to remain anonymous. I will call her Lady Anon.

O’Neal was already at work, thigh high in water, emptying cages into a bucket with her son. Her husband, Fletcher, and three of their children, including four-year-old Maranda, for whom their boat is named, were in the boat culling under-sized oysters and setting aside the legal ones to keep. Fletcher, who works for the state ferry system, has only recently returned to the water after a year of dialysis and a kidney transplant. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Heather and Fletcher O’Neal work the cages of the Devil Shoals Oyster Farm. Photo: Pat Garber

The farm is part of a five-acre lease that Lady Anon began working in 1998. She had been interested in and researching oyster farming for years when Hurricane Arthur destroyed most of her clam beds in 2014. Cultivated oysters, she had learned, matured much faster than clams and could be harvested in a year or less, providing a quicker return on the investment. While she replanted her clam beds, she would have to wait several years before harvesting them.

The O’Neals had been buying Lady Anon’s clams for their restaurant, Captain Puddle Duck’s Seafood Steamer Pots. Heather already had a dealer’s license and Fletcher had a commercial fishing license. Upon reaching a decision to expand to oysters, Lady Anon invited them to join her, and they became a team.

They visited several oyster farms and talked to aquaculture experts at North Carolina State University and The University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Chuck Weirich, the aquaculturist from North Carolina Sea Grant, visited them and assisted with ideas and start-up equipment. The two women, with the help and advice of county commissioner Bill Rich, received a $15,000 revolving loan from Hyde County, which had received a Golden Leaf Foundation grant for business loans.

They started with 100,000 hybrid oyster spat, or seed oysters, in the summer and later in the fall of 2015. They had placed them in in plastic mesh “nursery bags,” 5,000 per bag. After three or four weeks they were moved and gradually dispersed into “grow-out cages,” 250 to 300 per cage. The bags are attached to rope that is suspended across the lease. They have to be kept clean of sea grass and algae, so that sunlight can get to the oysters. The team culls the oysters and moves them as they grow larger, until they are ready for harvest when they reach legal size. Oyster farming is still new and experimental, and at Devil Shoal three different methods are being tried.

The oysters Lady Anon and the O’Neals are raising are sterile hybrids, which grow quickly and, because they do not spawn, can be eaten all year. Known as triploids, they were bred from native diploid and monoloid oysters.  In the summer months, when regular oysters are flavorless and mushy, triploid oysters remain firm, full and sweet.

Triploids are produced at spawning by a process that causes the egg to contribute two sets of chromosomes and the sperm one set, according to experts at Coast Seafoods Co. Hatchery, a supplier of farmed shellfish. Triploid oysters can occur naturally, but they are rare.

Wild oysters have traditionally played an important role in eastern North Carolina’s marine ecosystem. They filter and clean the water as they feed and provide important habitat for many marine species. Known to scientists as Crassostrea virginica, these marine mollusks are free-floating in their larval stage, but once they attach to a bottom they develop into spat and stay put. When attached to one another they form huge congregates known as oyster reefs, where crabs, small fish, tube worms and other marine animals make their homes.

Oysters have been, until recently, prolific in the waters surrounding Ocracoke Island. Gene Balance, an Ocracoke fisherman and shellfish researcher, says his his grandfather, Elisha Ballance, oystered as his main source of income in the winter. He and other Ocracoke fishermen sailed their skiffs into Pamlico Sound and gathered the oysters using hand-held tongs. They sold them to what were called “buy boats,” which delivered the shellfish to New Bern and Washington, North Carolina.

In recent years, however, oyster reefs have suffered dramatic declines and now occupy only a fraction of their former territory. This oysters produced at this farm do not form reefs, but they do fulfill another need; that of those people who love to dine on oysters, and for the restaurants that serve them.

“We wanted people to have access to fresh local seafood,” Heather explained. “The wild oysters don’t seem to be doing so well, and there aren’t enough out there. The oysters we are raising tend to take on the taste of the waters where they grow, so they have the flavor for which Ocracoke oysters are famous.”

The idea of raising oysters is not a new one. W.K. Brooks of John Hopkins University extolled the possibilities in a document that was read before the Fishermen’s Convention in Raleigh in October 1884. He wrote that “Here then is the opportunity of North Carolina. In her great land-locked sounds and tidal rivers there is a great undeveloped source of wealth … oyster farming … the possible revenue from this source is so great as to seem almost fabulous …

Troy Alphin, who works out of UNC Wilmington today, also believes in the possibilities. He works with potential oyster growers to help them select productive oyster-growing sites and navigate through the rules and regulations.

“North Carolina is a public trust state, so the water, from the high tide line down, belongs to the public. But in order to grow oysters on an oyster farm, you have to get a lease and rights to manage that piece of property,” Alphin said. ”

The permitting, he explained, is handled by the state Division of Marine Fisheries. Some people need permits to lease the bottom and others lease the actual water column lease if they suspend the oysters in cages.

“We have the space and we have the water quality in a lot of areas, so we could potentially grow this industry by leaps and bounds over the next decade,” Alphin said.

Jay Daniels, owner of Bodie Island Oysters on Roanoke Sound, in a 2014 interview for Coast Watch, remarked that “North Carolina has the second-largest estuarine system in the country, but produces less than one percent of its cultured oysters.” He is hoping to see that change.

The team of oyster farmers working at Devil Shoals is as interesting as their business. Lady Anon gave up an office job in the northeast 40 years ago and moved to Ocracoke, where she went to work on the water. She has worked on trawlers and crabbed and fished, but clamming has been her mainstay. She raised two daughters in the meantime and has been assisting in oyster restoration experiments with the state. She is a member of the Ocracoke Working Watermen’s Association.

Heather O’Neal, 42, of Engelhard came to Ocracoke to work at the state ferry. She met Fletcher O’Neal, an Ocracoke native, and they were married and now have five children. She works at Ocracoke School and has, with her husband, been operating their Captain Puddle Ducks business for six seasons.

Now, on this balmy day in early May, many of the oysters are ready, and the restaurants are already waiting for them. They will be delivered tonight, and restaurant diners will enjoy fresh oysters straight from the water to the plate.

OCRACOKE — Stepping out onto my front porch, I did a double-take. Looking again, I confirmed what I saw. A hummingbird was hovering nearby and perusing my late blooming lantana. It was unusual to see hummers here, even in the summer; and this was late December. Hummingbirds were not supposed to be here in winter. Ruby-throated hummingbirds, the hummers which live in the eastern part of North America, were supposed to be far south, wintering in Mexico. Or, so I thought.

A few weeks later another Ocracoke resident mentioned his surprise at seeing a hummingbird in his yard. Then, listening to the radio, I heard an intriguing snippet of news. In recent years not only ruby-throats but several western species of hummingbirds had been observed wintering in North Carolina. “Look in any bird guide,” the voice on the radio said, “and you’ll find no mention of hummers here in winter, but they’re showing up more and more.”

Susan Campbell, who bands hummingbirds for the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, is considered by many to be among the hummingbird experts in the state. A former member of Hummer/Bird Study Group, she has been studying hummingbirds in North Carolina for 15 years and has seen the number of winter residents reported increase dramatically.

Campbell believes that the ruby-throated hummers we see in summer still fly south and that the winter birds are arrivals from farther north. The first wintering population of ruby-throats was documented in Dare County, according to Campbell. These hummers seem to prefer coastal North Carolina where the Gulf Stream keeps temperatures warmer, so that more insects are present. Lake Mattamuskeet, which has lots of water and lush vegetation, has an inland wintering population, not large but unexpected since it is an inland location.

Many of the western species have changed their migration patterns from vertical — south to Mexico and Central America — to horizontal, flying east to North Carolina and other southern states. Up to 14 western species have been documented in North and South Carolina, Virginia and other southern states. Many return to the same wintering areas year after year. Rufous hummingbirds, a species of the Northwest, are the most numerous, followed by black-chinned. Other species documented include broad-billed and calliope along the coast, Anna’s, buff-bellied and broadbills in the New Bern area, green-violet ears in the mountains, broad-tails near Gibsonville, and green-breasted and mango near Charlotte. The state’s first Allen’s hummingbird was spotted in Manteo in 2003.

Hummingbirds, family Trochilidae, live only in the Western Hemisphere. Their common name comes from the humming sound their wings make as they vibrate, up to 70 beats per second or faster. Audubon naturalist John Terres calls the bird “a living helicopter,” describing its ability to fly sideways, backwards, straight up and down and hover in one place. Hummers are swift fliers, having been clocked at between 25 and 50 mph, and they fly long distances when they migrate.

Among the smallest of birds, they are bright and colorful, especially the males, which may have iridescent throat feathers called “gorgets.” Hummingbirds have needlelike bills and extendable tongues, which allows  them to sip the nectar in flowers. While they are primarily nectar feeders, they also eat all kinds of insects. They have an extremely high metabolism and, according to the Birder’s Handbook, have to consume their weight in nectar daily. They may become torpid at night or in cold weather, a mechanism that helps them conserve energy by lowering heart rate, breathing rate and metabolism.

According to the National Audubon Society, “to date 10 species of western hummingbird have been documented while visiting North Carolina during the non-breeding season. Identification of these birds is difficult since most are nondescript females or juveniles, and they tend to look very similar. Identifying them is often based on the color, shape or size of just a few feathers.”

While this is all new territory for ornithologists, there are several theories about what is going on. Curtis Smalling of Audubon North Carolina says that “there is definitely more movement than there used to be, and patterns have changed. Whether it is because of climate change, loss of habitat or other reasons is not certain. The number of rufous hummingbirds wintering in North Carolina has gone up exorbitantly.”

It may be that there were always hummingbirds here in winter and no one realized it. Cornell University’s “Project Feederwatch” makes the following observation: “It is possible that more people are now keeping an eye out for hummingbirds in winter and maintaining their hummingbird feeders year-round, so the likelihood of seeing and reporting a hummingbird in winter has increased.”

“Hummingbirds at Home” is an Audubon project dedicated to studying and trying to help these errant hummers. “There is a growing mismatch between flowering times and the arrival of hummingbirds in their breeding areas and we don’t know how this is going to impact hummingbirds,” according to the website. The purpose of the site is to collect data on how hummingbirds interact with nectar sources in order to better understand what is happening, and what effect providing nectar feeders has on hummingbirds. This is considered “the first step towards ensuring the survival of these miraculous birds in the face of climate change.”

Participants in the program are provided with guidelines for documenting their sightings, whether they’re in natural gardens or at feeders. Everyone is encouraged to participate by going to this website.

The N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences sponsors an “Adopt a Hummingbird’ program, in which hummers banded by Campbell can be adopted for $20 to help fund additional research. Checks can be sent to Friends of the Museum Hummingbird Fund at Box 27611-6928. Campbell encourages anyone who sees a wintering hummingbird to call her at 910-585-0574 or email her at susan@ncaves.com.

The extreme cold North Carolina saw last winter had an effect on the wintering hummers, according to Campbell. People reported to her that, particularly along the coast, the hummers they fed did not show up after the cold snap. Whether they flew further south or died is not known. The population of the far more cold-hardy rufous hummers does not seem to have been affected by the cold.

Whatever the reasons we in North Carolina are seeing more hummingbirds in the winter, it is a treat for those of us who love watching the amazing little birds. What better way to get through the cold, gray days of winter than to put up a hummingbird feeder and enjoy their antics!

Reprinted from the Island Free Press

OCRACOKE – In this time of Instagram and email, when communications are reduced to micro-seconds, it’s hard to image a time when people actually wrote letters that took days, maybe weeks to get to their recipients. If you lived on Ocracoke Island, the only way to send or receive that letter was by boat.

“We always waited for the mail boat to come in,” recalls Della Gaskill, remembering when she was a girl growing up on Ocracoke. That was something that we enjoyed, going and seeing the people who were on it, because it carried some passengers and also some freight for the island people and for the stores. We enjoyed doing it just to get away from home and see what we would get that evening in the mailbox.”

According to Elizabeth Howard, Ocracoke’s postmistress in the 1940s and ‘50s, “when the mail boat used to come in, everybody that could get down there, and who had the time, would show up. They were anxious to see who came, to see if they had gotten any mail and to see their friends and relatives who would also be there.”

The Aleta carried mail and passengers between Ocracoke Island and Atlantic in Carteret County during the 1940s and ‘50s, and was, in the words of a Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum press release, “central to coastal communication.” A round trip from Ocracoke to other islands and back could take up to 10 hours.

Today Ocracoke’s beloved mail boat lies at the bottom of the South River in mainland North Carolina, no doubt providing a fine habitat for fish and other marine life. She lives on, however, in the memories of those who once peopled her decks as they traveled to and from Ocracoke or gathered on the dock to greet her, collect their mail and welcome the passengers she carried. She lives on in books that describe her short but memorable history, and now she is the focus of a new exhibit at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras.

The exhibit, entitled “With Love, Aleta,” will open on April 1. It is written as a story, with Aleta speaking in the first person about the era when she delivered mail to the island. While the text is written on the fourth-grade reading level, to inspire young people to have a self-guided museum experience, the exhibit appeals to people of all ages. It introduces people to historical topics, making them relevant to every day. It consists of more than 40 panels, including vintage post cards and “mail art,” created by people who still love old-fashioned “snail mail.”

“With Love, Aleta” provides a backdrop for Sandcastles, a maritime craft program offered weekly from mid-May through September that will focus on communication this year. It is, according to Mary Ellen Riddle, education curator at the museum, “a perfect way for young folks to wet their feet regarding maritime history and culture… It is fun, engaging and relevant to everyday life.” There will be a postcard contest, and winning cards will be displayed at the museum in 2016.

The story of the Aleta is an interesting one. Much of the following information is from Ellen Marie Fulcher Cloud, whose father was the owner and captain of the Aleta for a number of years, and from island native Phillip Howard, who publishes history accounts on his Ocracoke blog, as well as from other local sources.

The Aleta was built at Atlantic in 1923 by Ambrose Fulcher, for Howard Nelson who, according to Phillip Howard, named her for his sister. Forty-two feet long with a Caterpillar diesel engine, she was similar in design to the shad boats built on Roanoke Island. Capt. Nelson used her to run the mail between Morehead City and Atlantic. Later, when the road was paved to Atlantic and mail carried by vehicle, he sold the Aleta.

During prohibition days, she became a booze runner until being seized by federal agents and auctioned off. Dee Mason of Atlantic bought her to use as a buy boat, transporting seafood.

When Capt. Wilbur Nelson obtained the mail contract in 1938, he bought the Aleta and for six years ran mail, freight, ice and passengers from Morehead City to Ocracoke, stopping at communities along the route as well as Atlantic, Cedar Island, Hog Island and Portsmouth. It was a 24-hour trip, stopping at Ocracoke overnight, before starting the same route back to Morehead City.

A memorable trip aboard the Aleta was described by Dorothy Byrum Bedwell, who lived at Portsmouth until 1940.  She wrote in her book, Portsmouth: Island with a Soul, published in 1984, that “the mail boat was not designed for partying, and safety requirements were not as critical then as they are today. Those who imbibed while underway caused real hazards.

“Once…when my mother and brother were making the trip to Ocracoke, a tipsy lady, trying to walk the narrow strip of deck around the cabins tumbled overboard as the mail boat was traveling abreast of the inlet where the tide is most powerful. My brother, an expert swimmer, dove in after her and pulled her back aboard. The mail boat captain was so genuinely grateful for the rescue of his passenger that he assured my brother free passage up and down the sound from that time on.”

At Portsmouth Island, Carl Dixon would pole out to meet the mail boat. Betsy Nelson Bykerk wrote, for a Friends of Portsmouth Facebook page:

“I remember these stops. I’d listen for the Aleta to start chugging down as we got closer to Ocracoke and passing Portsmouth. If I remember right, often times poles would also come out to help with what I only guess was sandy areas that were present as we got closer to Portsmouth. I remember watching the process of the exchange closely and the friendly shouting back and forth. This has always been a very clear scene to me. I was so focused on the Aleta that my mind can to this day picture and feel the memories of getting to sit on top or being in the cabin and the little portholes. The door to walk through and step down and I believe step into a door on the left for the bathroom (potty) or whatever it’s called on a boat and again the sound of the engine and the chug, chug, chug. I can see it, I can smell it, I can hear it. I love these memories.”

In later years, Henry Pigott picked up the mail from the Aleta when she went by on her way to Ocracoke. Ben Salter in his Portsmouth Island: Short Stories and History, published in 1972, recounted what would happen next: “He would pole out in a small skiff, get the mail, any passengers and give the captain a list for groceries for the people on the island. The merchants at Ocracoke would fill the orders and send them back by someone coming over or on the Mail Boat’s next day.”

After it arrived on Portsmouth by skiff, the mail was taken into the village on a wheelbarrow. Lum Gaskill was the last to bring in the mail this way. But finally, “there were only three residents on the Island and the U.S. Postal Service decided it could not justify the expense of delivering the mail to this isolated Island,” according to Ellen Cloud in her 1996 book Portsmouth: The Way It Was. “The entire population (three people) got together and signed a petition to keep Lum from being ‘let go.’ How would the residents get groceries and supplies? How would they get their mail? Regardless of their efforts to keep Lum, their only connection with the rest of the world, the service was terminated.”

In 1945, Elmo Fulcher, who had worked with Nelson as his mate, bought the boat with George O’Neal.  A dock had been built at the Ocracoke post office, where the Aleta tied up.

A 1948 article written by Charles Killebrew for the Raleigh News & Observer describes the trip, four and a half hours each way, stopping at Portsmouth Island to serve the 15 people then living there. It described the cabin as small, with comfortable seating for 10 to 12 people, but Capt. O’Neal said he would take as many people as he had life vests for. He carried 60 women one time, he said, and they were “all over the boat.” O’Neal told the writer that he ran every day of the year, missing only a couple for storms, and had never had to be towed by the Coast Guard. He had, he added, on several occasions had to tow them.

Capt. Elmo’s daughter, Ellen Marie, tells this story about her father on her website: “Capt. Elmo was known for his knowledge of the local waters. He needed only the stars or a pocket watch and a compass to navigate the sounds of eastern North Carolina. George Jackson tells about a day that he ran on the mail boat with my father, when the fog was so thick they couldn’t see the bow of the boat. He will be quick to remind you that the trip from here to Cedar Island is a pretty straight stretch, but when you enter Core Sound and head for Atlantic, N.C., there is a lot of turning and winding. He tells how Capt. Elmo used his pocket watch to time his distance from one marker to another and using his compass to set his course for the next marker, blowing the fog horn to warn other boaters of their location. George goes on to tell how he heard the Captain back down on the engine, while giving the boat a turn to the left and idle the engine. He asked Capt. Elmo what was going on and why had he stopped the boat. The reply was, ‘Well George, we’re here, we’re at the dock in Atlantic.’ George stuck his head out of the window, and could see nothing, but he could hear a car running and people talking on the dock.”

Capt. Elmo and George O’Neal continued running the mail route until 1952, after which Ansley O’Neal received the contract, continuing the service until it became obsolete in 1964.

The Aleta docked first at the Post Office and later at Willis’ Store and Fish House, next to the community store. It became a popular place where folks gathered to meet the Aleta. Betty Helen Howard Chamberlain has fond recollections of going there when she was around four years old. Every Sunday after church, she and her mother, Elizabeth Howard, along with most of the village, would go to meet the mail boat. Betty Helen would get a cup of ice cream, and her mother would pour Coca Cola over it, making it fizz.

Says Alton Ballance, an island native: “I can just barely remember when the 42-foot mail boat Aleta used to bring mail to Ocracoke.  My father used to run with some of the captains and fill in for them when they had to be gone. I guess I’ve watched it many times pull up to the dock in front of our house and unload passengers and mail. It would leave the island around 6:15 a.m., arrive in Atlantic three and a half hours later, and arrive back at Ocracoke at 4:30 or 5:00 p.m.  Some people would get there well before 4 o’clock. While they were anxious for the boat to get there, they didn’t mind killing the time talking to other people and keeping up with what was going on around the island.”

After they stopped carrying the mail, Capt. Elmo bought out George’s part of the Aleta and converted her to a shrimp boat, which he worked until his death in 1979.

The Caterpillar diesel engine in the boat was the oldest one still in operation back in the 1960s.  The Caterpillar Co. found out somehow about the engine in the boat and sent representatives to Ocracoke to take pictures and see for themselves that it was actually still a working engine. They published an article about the boat. When asked how he had kept it working all those years, Capt. Elmo replied, “She’s my baby and I work on her every day, wake her up every morning and tuck her in every night.”

The Aleta then passed on to Murray Fulcher, whose son Keith shrimped with her in Pamlico and Core sounds. Murray later tore off the cabin, planning to use her as a run boat for his fish house. He took her across the sound to South River to have work done on her, but the work was never accomplished. She was finally hauled up the river and sunk, and there she remains, the cost of restoring her deemed cost-prohibitive. There is a model of the Aleta, made by George Jackson, at the Ocracoke Preservation Museum, and of course, there is now the exhibit at the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

OCRACOKE – It was not a pretty sight for David Mickey and Sue Dayton the fall day they came upon a large dark object on the beach. Walking closer, they identified what they had spotted as a dead bottlenose dolphin.

Disturbed, they called the Marine Mammal Stranding coordinator for North Carolina’s central coast, Vicky Thayer. She came to the island and, with Mickey’s assistance, performed a necropsy on the animal. Mickey and Dayton had just moved to Ocracoke and this was their introduction to the series of dolphin strandings in mid-Atlantic waters last year.

Over the next couple months, two more dolphins would be found stranded on the island.

According to Thayer, the number of strandings varies from year to year, but there has been an increase of bottlenose dolphin deaths from July 2013 to June 2014 in North Carolina, due in part to a virus known as dolphin moribillivirus. Of the three dolphins that were stranded on Ocracoke Island last winter, one tested negative for morbillivirus and results from the others are not completed.

The deaths were part of the largest number of strandings of bottlenose dolphins and small whales ever recorded on the East Coast, said William McLellan, state stranding coordinator at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. A similar morbillivirus outbreak took place in 1987-‘88, killing up to half the bottlenose dolphin population in the mid-Atlantic during an eight-month period.

Concerned, Mickey and Dayton helped arrange for Keith Rittmaster, the natural science curator at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, to visit Ocracoke and give a presentation on his work with whales and dolphins. Rittmaster has been involved with many strandings, also known as beachings, that have occurred here over the years.

Entanglement in fishing line, nets and anchors; ingestion of trash, including life jackets and milk jugs; injuries from propeller blades on boats and ships; shark attacks and sting ray barbs; and viruses, bacteria and parasites are among the causes of death in marine mammal strandings described by Rittmaster. He accompanied the descriptions with slide depictions of the many beached whales and dolphins he has studied.

Whales, dolphins and porpoises, known collectively by scientists as “cetaceans,” have intrigued humans for centuries, as evidenced by the nearly full house Rittmaster’s presentation attracted. North Carolina’s coastal waters are home to at least 33 species of marine mammals; and, of the ten “great” whales that exist, eight have been documented offshore here, according to N.C. Aquariums.

There are toothed whales, known by the scientific name odontoceti, of which the sperm whale is the largest. There are also baleen whales, or mysticeti, including humpback, blue, North Atlantic right, fin, sei and minke whales. Baleen whales are so called because instead of having teeth, they have racks of baleen — hanging sheets of fringed keratin that filter and trap small fish, shrimp, and krill.

Two species of pilot whales, several species of dolphin and one type of porpoise swim off North Carolina’s shores, of which bottlenose dolphins are the most frequently seen. Harbor porpoises and Atlantic spotted dolphins are also abundant.

Two factors play a role in the great diversity of marine mammals off our coast, explained Rittmaster. Warm water of the Gulf Stream, coming from the south, mixes with the colder water of the Labrador Current, streaming from the north, near the N.C. coast. It is also where the inner and outer continental shelves meet, with the same result.

North Carolina’s coastal native people probably took advantage of the beached whales that washed ashore, using their meat and blubber. It was not until the Europeans arrived that the animals were hunted for their blubber that was boiled to extract its oil. This brought several species to the brink of extinction. Oil from the sperm whale was used for lubrication, that from the humpback for lighting and oil from the lower jaw of dolphins for lubrication of fine machinery and watches.

Today cetaceans are protected by the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act and the International Whaling Commission. The most endangered species, the North Atlantic right whale (called so because in former times it was the “right” whale to hunt) appears to be making a slight comeback. This winter 14 right whale calves were born off the Southeast, a number that relieved conservationists who feared there would be fewer.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently proposed expanding the designated critical habitat for the endangered right whales, including a portion of the southern N.C. coast where they have calves and nurse. Overall, the rule would expand their critical habitat to almost 30,000 square nautical miles.

Scientists are worried about the Navy’s sonar testing off the N.C. coast, which they think can adversely affect cetaceans. Thirty-four whales of three different species were stranded and died along the Outer Banks in January 2005 following offshore Naval testing using sonar. While there was no definitive proof that the tests caused the beachings, they were, according to McLellan, “investigated as an acoustic event, and it could not be ruled in or out.” Sonar tests are also, he added, “levels of harassment,” that may contribute to aberrant cetacean behavior.

We could depress you with any number of videos about stranded dolphins and whales, but here’s one that shows happier times for dolphins. It shot from a drone just off Atlantic Beach.

There are many reason why marine mammals beach themselves, Thayer explained. “People want a simple answer, but it’s not that easy,” she said. “It’s very difficult to determine cause of death and there have not been many cases worldwide that have been definitively attributed to acoustic trauma. Numerous factors can combine to cause marine mammal strandings, although the burden of proof should be on the group causing the potential harm.”

Joel Reynolds, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, thinks differently. “There is no question that sonar injures and kills whales and dolphins,” he said in 2008. According to the defense council, sonar can cause bleeding around the brain, ears and other tissues and large bubbles in organs, similar to the bends, which sometimes kills divers who surface too quickly.

The magazine Scientific America writes that sonar sound waves travel hundreds of miles under water and retain intensity of 140 decibels 300 miles from their source. “Evidence shows that whales will swim hundreds of miles, rapidly change their depth, sometimes leading to bleeding from ears and eyes, and beach themselves to get away from the sounds of sonar,” notes an excerpt.

Seismic air guns, which cause similar effects as sonar, are proposed to be used off the N.C. coast, starting this year, to search for potential reservoirs of oil and natural gas. McLellan says that seismic exploration along North Carolina’s coast was conducted last by the National Science Foundation and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University to look at the ocean floor and channels and study continental drift.

Thayer says that efforts are made to insure that cetaceans are beyond a tolerable radius of seismic air gun use, a radius in which air guns are assumed to have the potential of altering cetaceans’ health or natural behavior. But, she explains, marine acoustics and its relation to cetaceans is complex. Beyond having direct physical effects on cetaceans or their behavior, seismic exploration and related activities — boat use, leaks, spills — may have indirect effects by affecting cetaceans’ ability to find and capture food, hear approaching predators and find mates.

The Federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved opening an area of the Atlantic Coast from Delaware to Florida for the seismic blasts, saying if precautions are followed, then the seismic exploration “should not cause any deaths or injuries to the hearing of marine mammals or sea turtles.” The N.C. Division of Coastal Management is currently evaluating three permits for such testing.

Some federal scientists, are worried about what such extreme pulses of sound can do. “It’s been pretty well documented that seismic surveys have disrupted animal behavior and animal communication,” said Danielle Cholewiak, a senior acoustics researcher for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Jessica Weiss Taylor, who leads the Outer Banks Center for Dolphin Research, said, “There is a likely chance they (dolphins) would be affected by the seismic testing.”

The environmental group Oceana says the seismic blasts threaten to injure or kill thousands of Atlantic marine mammals, and even pose a threat to the area’s fisheries.

The American Petroleum Institute maintains that the seismic blasts are safe: “Operators already take great care to protect wildlife, and the best science and decades of experience prove that there is no danger to marine mammal populations.”

A federal environmental impact statement released in February stated that most effects to sea life would be “negligible or minor, and no major impacts were identified.”

According to Doug Nowacek, associate professor of conservation technology at the Duke University’s marine lab in Beaufort, air gun blasts may be heard underwater over distances of more than 2,000 miles. “If there’s a survey in Virginia, under conducive sound travel conditions, you’re going to hear it in southern North Carolina easily.”

Nowacek says there has been far too little data collected on the effects of the seismic air guns, and he is cautious of industry assertions that air guns are harmless.

Whales and dolphins are beloved and iconic symbols of the world’s oceans. Understanding what causes them to strand and die is not easy, in spite of the work being done by Rittmaster, Thayer, McLellan and others. Preventing anthropogenic cetacean deaths should, however, be a high priority for everyone. A sustained prompt response to strandings is needed to better understand the various impacts that influence their survival.

 What to do if you see a stranded marine animal

The Marine Mammal Center recommends these steps if you come across a beached seal, whale or dolphin:

• Don’t touch, pick up, pour water on or feed the animal. They are wild animals and can bite. They also are easily stressed by humans.
• Don’t return the animal to the water. Seals temporarily “haul-out” on land to rest. Harbor seal mothers often leave their pups ashore while they’re feeding at sea. A beached whale, dolphin or porpoise should be reported immediately.
• Observe the animal from a distance of at least 50 feet. Keep people and dogs away.
• Note physical characteristics such as size, presence of external earflaps and fur color. This helps us determine the species, what rescue equipment and volunteers are needed.
• Note the animal’s condition. Is it weak and underweight? Are there any open wounds?
• Does the animal have any obvious identification tags or markings?
• Determine the exact location of the animal in order to provide accurate directions to rescuers.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recommends calling these numbers if you come across a stranded marine mammal or sea turtle:

• Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Avon, 252-216-6892
• N.C. Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Network hotline, 252-241-7367
• N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries, Morehead City, 252-241-5119
• N.C. Maritime Museum, Beaufort, 252-504-2452
• OBX Marine Mammal Stranding Network, Outer Banks, 252-455-9654
• University of North Carolina Wilmington, Marine Mammal Stranding Program, 910-254-5713

Chris Jordan photographed this tragic albatross chick that died from eating plastic garbage fed to it by its parents. The parents pick up the garbage from the polluted ocean surrounding the Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, 2,000 miles from the nearest people. A Heavy Toll on Wildlife From the Center of Biological Diversity Thousands of animals, from small finches to great white sharks, die grisly deaths from eating and getting caught in plastic. Fish in the North Pacific ingest 12,000 to 24,000 tons of plastic each year, which can cause intestinal injury and death and transfers plastic up the food chain to bigger fish and marine mammals. Sea turtles also mistake floating plastic garbage for food. While plastic bags are the most commonly ingested item, loggerhead sea turtles have been found with soft plastic, ropes, Styrofoam and monofilament lines in their stomachs. Ingestion of plastic can lead to blockage in the gut, ulceration, internal perforation and death. Even if their organs remain intact, turtles may suffer from false sensations of satiation and slow or halt reproduction. Seabirds by the hundreds of thousands ingest plastic every year. Plastic ingestion reduces the storage volume of the stomach, causing birds to consume less food and ultimately starve. Nearly all Laysan albatross chicks — 97.5 percent — have plastic pieces in their stomachs. Their parents feed them plastic particles mistaken for food. Based on the amount of plastic found in seabird stomachs, the amount of garbage in our oceans has rapidly increased in the past 40 years. Marine mammals ingest and get tangled in plastic. Large amounts of plastic debris have been found in the habitat of endangered Hawaiian monk seals, including in areas that serve as pup nurseries. Entanglement deaths are severely undermining recovery efforts of this seal, which is already on the brink of extinction. Entanglement in plastic debris has also led to injury and mortality in the endangered Steller sea lion, with packing bands the most common entangling material. In 2008 two sperm whales were found stranded along the California coast with large amounts of fishing net scraps, rope and other plastic debris in their stomachs.

OCRACOKE — Paddling along the shoreline of Ocracoke Island a few weeks ago, I saw what looked like an armor-clad knight waving from a hummock of spartina grass. I stopped and stared in shock, then bewilderment.

I looked through my binoculars and realized I was looking at a group of silvery helium balloons, tied together, caught in the branches of a small dead cedar tree and swaying in the sea breeze. These balloons, which would probably find their way into Pamlico Sound, were part of a huge and ever-increasing problem threatening North Carolina’s marine environment: plastic pollution.

When balloons fall into the water they resemble jellyfish, which are a favorite food of sea turtles.  When they mistakenly eat them, the sea turtles die.  Plastic bags and bottles can be equally deadly to marine life.

Off the coast of North Carolina lies what is known as the North Atlantic Gyre. It’s a large system of rotating ocean currents, often driven by strong winds, that’s centered near Bermuda. It includes the Sargasso Sea and the Gulf Stream. Within its center, drawn in by the currents, lies what Lisa Rider, coordinator of the N.C. Marine Debris Symposium, describes as a plastic soup. This floating mass of plastic is not the only area of North Carolina waters that is awash with plastic pollution, however.  The waters in our sounds and rivers are also filled with plastic debris, she said.

According to Rider, who is also assistant director of the Onslow County Solid Waste and Landfill Department, plastics are becoming more and more of a problem. Not only bags and bottles, but plastic straws, spoons and fast-food containers add to the deadly mix. Cigarette butts, which contain plastic in their filters, are the majority of the plastic litter, Rider notes. She says that there are no naturally occurring organisms that break down the polymers in plastic, so they never biodegrade. The sun may break them down into tiny pieces called micro-plastics, which makes them even more dangerous because they are then more easily consumed by marine organisms.

The ecological effects of plastic pollution is not the only concern. There are also economic consequences as well. Plastic-littered beaches are not good tourist draws, and boat engines can be fouled by plastic. The commercial fishing industry is affected when consumed plastics move up the food chain to edible fish, reducing the catch. One of the goals of the symposium is to develop an award for businesses that reduce their plastic production and use.

While industrial and agricultural plastics pose problems, the main focus is on what are called “single-use plastics,” particularly plastic drink bottles and plastic bags.  According to Ethan Crouch, chairman of the Carolina Beach Plastic Bag Committee, plastic bags have a 20 minute lifespan for consumer use. They are the cause of death, however, for about 100,000 marine mammals each year. The goal of the committee is to educate the community about the problems these bags cause, Crouch said

Scott Mown, who is with the Division of Environmental Assistance and Customer Services in the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources, oversees the state recycling program. Its main focus, he says, is on plastic bottles. The concern is making sure that plastic bottles and other recyclables are collected and distributed to the recycling centers. Otherwise they end up in the ocean or in land fills. There is a statewide ban on depositing plastic bottles in landfills, but he says that it is very difficult to enforce.

The program encourages community recycling, including curbside collection and, in beach communities, collection bins at beach access roads. They have worked with such seaside communities as Sunset Beach and Indian Beach, but want to expand to other beach towns.

Out of 550 municipalities in the state, 315 now have curbside recycling. Others have drop-off centers where people can deposit their plastics and other recyclables.

Mown added that, while recycling is the main focus, the state also encourage source reduction, which means producing fewer plastics. Among their recommendations is replacing plastic bags with re-usable shopping bags and plastic bottles with refillable water bottles.

Another North Carolina department concerned with plastic pollution is the Division of Coastal Management. Paula Gillikin, a manager at the division’s Coastal Research and National Estuarine Research Reserve, conducts most of her work at the Rachael Carson Preserve, near Beaufort. She focuses on plastics on the shoreline, though they do some underwater cleanup. Most of the plastics, she believes, float to the reserve from other places — washed up from upstream businesses, waterfront homes and blown out of people’s boats. Along with bottles and bags, she notes, much comes from the restaurants, including Styrofoam food containers and plastic forks.

Gilikin’s group conducts several cleanups a year, trying to use ecosystem-friendly bags and containers, such as bags made from cornstarch instead of plastic. They try to incorporate education into their cleanups and tours. In every cleanup, she noted, they find at least one balloon.  A few years ago she and her co-workers conducted a social science survey, to see what users of the Rachael Carson Preserve thought were the most common debris. Bottles and bags came in first. Caps and lids are also common, as well as small pieces of plastic.

Bonnie Monteleone, a marine scientist with the Plastic Ocean Project at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, says that plastics constitute approximately 90 percent of the trash floating in the ocean. Plastic in marine waters, she explains, act like sponges, absorbing PCBs, DDT, and other “nasty chemicals,” many of which are now illegal but still remain in the environment as part of the plastics. Small fish that consume these plastics are eaten by larger fish, which may in turn be eaten by humans. We may inadvertently be consuming toxins which have been prohibited for decades, Monteleone noted.

Her art exhibit made entirely from plastic pulled from the sea can now be seen at UNC Chapel Hill.

A newly released study, conducted by the Natural History Museum at the University of Plymouth in England, found that there was more plastic pollution than previously suspected. According to zoologist Lucy Woodal, “Plastic waste is breaking down into fibers, invisible to the naked eye, and sinking to the sea floor. The number of fibers near the ocean bottom is up to four times greater than in shallow or coastal waters.”

More than half of these fibers, she noted, are rayon, with polyester, polyamides, acetate and acrylic making up most of the rest. Scientists estimate that there are a total of 269,000 tons of plastics in the world’s oceans.

Thinking about the disturbing statistics, I paddled my kayak to the shore. I pulled it on the sand and trudged through the grass and debris to the balloon-ensconced tree. Along the way I also picked up a plastic water bottle and a broken Styrofoam container, both cushioned in the grasses. I pulled the balloons down and stashed them in the bow of the kayak before continuing on. It wasn’t much, but at least I had taken a small step in reducing the pollution, and maybe saving an animal’s life.

Reprinted for the Island Free Press.

OCRACOKE — “What a story, if only the live oaks could talk.”

That is the caption Earl O’Neal of Ocracoke wrote for a photograph of the Outer Banks, as portrayed in his latest, almost completed book: A Historical Almanac of the Outer Banks; A Long Voyage Over the Last 488 Years.

The book, co-written with Mel Covey of Hatteras Island, is a pictorial history of the Outer Banks and includes Portsmouth, Beacon and Shell Castle islands.

The same statement could be applied to Earl O’Neal himself — what a story.

In O’Neal’s yard on Back Road is a special live oak, named the Buttonhole Tree by his deceased wife, Dee. It could probably tell some great tales about O’Neal and all his undertakings throughout his life, if it could only talk.

Earl O’Neal Jr., 85, has island roots on his father’s side that go back to the early 1700s and include many of the original Ocracoke families. The son of Earl Williams O’Neal and Luisa Gutt, an immigrant from Prussia, he grew up in Philadelphia. He spent his summers at his father’s home island and was christened at the house of his grandfather, “Pop-Pop Ike” (Isaac Willis O’Neal), in Ocracoke at the age of 5 weeks.

O’Neal’s memories of those summers include sitting on the porch with his grandfather, who told him stories of the sea and taught him to tie knots; going out to the duck blinds to hunt ducks and geese with his Uncle Rashe and his father; and fishing for bluefish and trout off the side of the mailboat, The Ocracoke. He recalls with delight the still warm, light rolls with butter his grandmother Helen made and eating 18 of them before dinner one day. Movies at the Wahab Village Motel, dances at the Spanish Casino and sailing in his Uncle Wahab’s sailboat are some of his other treasured memories.

Also etched into O’Neal’s memory is his Pop-Pop’s Model T (or A) car, which he says his grandfather had driven through the side of Old Bob’s stable on the day he got it. Later, when the three-year-old O’Neal  was at the morning service of the Northern Methodist Church next to his grandparent’s home, he saw the car go by and yelled out, loud enough for all to hear: “There goes Pop-Pop’s car!”

O’Neal laughs as he tells this story: One dark, moonless night, when he was about 6 years old, he went flounder gigging with his dad, Oscar Jackson and Sam Keech in a sailboat. They sailed out the creek and anchored in shallow water. Then they took their kerosene lanterns and flounder gigs and proceeded to gig about 40 fish, which they strung on a big line, carried between two of the men. At that point, they realized that they had forgotten to leave a lantern on in the boat. They were unable to find it in the pitch dark and, finally, had to wade to the shoreline and find their way through the trees and underbrush to walk home. Someone went back for the boat the next day.

O’Neal’s father went north to find work, as did many Ocracoke men in the early 20th century. He had a job as a rigger’s helper at the Philadelphia Navy Yards, and according to O’Neal, he opened his home to friends and relatives from Ocracoke who came looking for work during the Great Depression. O’Neal grew up in a row house that was only 12-feet wide. He got a job at the age of 8 running errands for a candy store, and by 12, he was unloading lumber trucks for a company called Arctic Refrigeration.

He joined the Navy Reserve in 1948 and during the Korean War enlisted in the Army Signal Corps. He was selected as one of the first eight people to work at the Army’s experimental nuclear power plant in Idaho.  He went on to earn a diploma in nuclear engineering from the University of Virginia and worked on ways to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, such as the generation of electricity.

Early on, O’Neal had met a young woman, Delores Grace Collins, at a Philadelphia trolley stop and had fallen in love. They married in 1955. O’Neal and Lori, as he fondly called her, spent their two-week honeymoon at Ocracoke, where, “Lori, Uncle Rashe and I had a great time and spent a lot of time at the beach.” O’Neal adopted Lori’s daughter, Sharen, and they later had a son, Mark.

O’Neal and his wife, who came to be known as Dee to most islanders, moved to Ocracoke in 1990, building a home where his grandparents’ house had stood. He has since devoted himself to learning and writing about all aspects of Ocracoke history.

He is the author of a number of books, covering such topics as the Coast Guard and Navy base during World War II, the history of island families and an autobiography titled One Boy’s Life. He designed Ocracoke’s Civil War marker that is part of the Dare County Civil War Trail and was instrumental in the placement of two World War II markers on the island. He lectures about island history and has served as chairman of various Ocracoke boards and committees. He was a director of the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras and an associate for the Outer Banks History Center in Manteo.

O’Neal in 2009 was awarded North Carolina’s highest civilian honor, the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, for service to his community.

While he has suffered some health setbacks recently, sending him to Florida for the winter, O’neal hopes to return to Ocracoke in the spring to finish his book and to continue exploring and writing about Ocracoke history.

OCRACOKE — “Raptor over pole four, just above the wires!”

Four sets of binoculars swerved to find the tiny dot, moving southward.

“It’s approaching pole three, closer to the water now. Looks like a kestrel.”

Perched on the top of a dune, four people — two men and two women — sat in canvas chairs with binoculars pressed to their eyes. Their rapt gazes were focused on the distant specks which they identified as raptors — birds of prey. When someone called out an approaching raptor, all binoculars turned to watch it.

Gil Randell, a silver-haired man, was usually the one to identify the birds. Based on its size and the erratic pattern of its flight, he knew the one approaching was an American kestrel, the smallest falcon in North America. The identification was confirmed when the bird flew nearer, satisfying Randell’s wife, Jann, who then recorded the sighting in a notebook.

The few people on the beach took little notice. With the busy summer season over, most of the crowds have left Ocracoke Island. There were still, however, a few groups of people walking along the ocean beach, searching the sand for sea shells, gazing across the ocean, perhaps watching the graceful squadrons of brown pelicans as they glided in formation above the waves. All seemed to be enjoying the beautiful early fall morning, but few, if any, were aware of the great autumnal event taking place behind them.

Barely visible to the naked eye, great rafts of birds were following an ancient route, flying above the waters of Pamlico Sound, to their wintering grounds to the south.

Few, however escaped notice by the hawk-eyed Randells. Residents of Mayville, N.Y, they are avid hawk watchers in their home state. Each spring they participate in the Ripley Hawk Watch on the south shore of Lake Erie, and Gil is on the board of the Hawk Migration Association of North America. They own a house on Ocracoke and come down during the fall migration season, spending several hours each day sitting on this dune with their binoculars and notebooks.

They began watching and recording their sightings on Sept. 12 this year, missing only a few days due to weather. Their biggest day was Oct. 4, when they recorded 122 peregrine falcon sightings. By late October, they had identified 11 species of raptors, some 700 birds.

Peter Vankevich, who retired from the Library of Congress and now lives on Ocracoke, was also peering from binoculars. He helped start in 1981 the Ocracoke Christmas Bird Count, which is part of an annual national effort to have citizen scientists help monitor bird populations. He has not missed a year since and in 1988 expanded it to include nearby Portsmouth Island.

I was the fourth member of the group. An avid bird lover, I had little experience in identifying raptors in flight. The day proved to be an incredible learning experience. The Randells pointed out nine species of migrating raptors that day, including three kinds of falcons (four peregrines, 14 kestrels and three merlins), two species of accipiters (two Cooper’s and three sharp-shinned hawks), three harriers, two ospreys, seven turkey vultures and a bald eagle.

They explained that unlike songbirds, raptors generally migrate during the day, when they can take advantage of air currents known as thermals. Buzzards in particular like to ride the thermals, but falcons are the least reliant on them. Some scientists say they have seen peregrines migrating at night, when there are no thermals. Turkey vultures, according to Gil, are the only ones that seem to move during ferocious winds, at which time they fly very low to the ground.

By definition, migration is the movement of animals from breeding grounds to non-breeding grounds, and from areas of low or decreasing resources to ones of high or increasing resources.

This usually means traveling south in the fall to areas of warmer temperatures where there is better feeding, and north in the spring when warming temperatures lead to burgeoning new food sources. Whales, sea turtles, fish, antelope and even certain butterflies undertake amazing journeys, as well as many species of birds.

While not all birds migrate, most songbirds, shorebirds and raptors in North America do. Some move short distances, from lake to lake or up or down a mountain, while others are partial migrants, crossing one or several states. Even within species that are long-distance migrants, a few individuals may stay all winter, and some move because of unusual weather or to find food resources.

Bird migration has puzzled naturalists for centuries. Early European naturalists speculated that when swallows vanished from their summer breeding grounds, they buried down into the mud like frogs. Some even thought that migrating birds flew to the moon. Modern science has provided many answers, but there are still many unsolved questions. How do the birds know when to leave? It is believed that they are triggered in part by changes in daylight and a decline in food. Escaping the cold may be a factor, but many birds, including hummingbirds, can survive freezing temperatures. There may well be a genetic predisposition to migrate, but there is enough variation from year to year and from flock to flock to indicate that the birds make some of the decisions themselves.

It is the long distance migrations that pose the biggest puzzle to scientists. Peregrine falcons have been known to migrate from the Arctic Circle to Argentina, and in 2008 one osprey flew from Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts to French Guinea in South America, a trip of 2,700 miles, in 13 days. First year birds migrate to winter homes they’ve never seen, often unattended by adults, and fly back in the spring. Raptors, which generally mate for life, often separate during migration but reunite at the spring breeding grounds. How do they find each other? How do they know where to go and how to get there? Theories include following the stars, using magnetic fields, an internal compass, a genetic code, even smell.

All migratory birds are protected by the Migratory Bird Act of 1917, which makes it illegal to capture them or kill them without a license. As changing climate and habitat threaten the survival of many species, scientists use a number of methods to study their movements, including banding, radio transmitters, satellite telemetry and radioisotope analysis of feathers.

Hawk watch organizations also help to understand migration patterns by monitoring population increases and decreases. There are currently no registered organizations in eastern North Carolina, the nearest being Kiptopeke Hawk Watch, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and the South Carolina Coastal Migration Survey just north of  Charleston. A hawk watch began operating on Hatteras Island in the 1980s, but it was last active in 2007. So now, to quote Jann, what happens between Virginia and South Carolina is “uncharted territory.”

While our main goal was to watch raptors, we were also pleased to observe a number of palm warblers and a scattering of monarch butterflies embarking on their own, equally fantastic, journeys south. We were disturbed, however, when someone called Peter to report a grounded peregrine falcon near the north end of the island. The bird was taken to a wildlife rehabilitator, and it was later learned that its body weight was extremely low. The bird could not be saved.

The death toll during migration is high. Birds migrating over water may hit bad weather or winds that sweep them far out to sea, where they eventually drown. Some hit cell phone towers, high buildings or industrial wind turbines. Others weaken and starve along the way, as was probably the case with this peregrine falcon.

Indeed, the miracle is that any of these birds can and do survive these annual epic journeys, fraught with danger, providing for the continued survival of their species. Watching them, as we did, was a privilege to be treasured.

This monarch is tagged with a sticker from Monarch Watch, a conservation organization, to help report its migration. It is believed that the number of monarchs has plummeted nationwide. Photo: Sam Bland

September in Eastern North Carolina is the beginning of one of Mother Nature’s great annual events: the fall migration of the monarch butterflies. All over the United States these lovely insects are on the move, with the eastern population heading to groves of fir trees in Mexico where they will congregate by the millions. They may travel up to 40 miles in a day.

In recent years, however, monarch populations have plummeted nationwide, and it is believed that their numbers have dropped from near a billion to less than 33 million. Orley “Chip” Taylor, a professor at the University of Kansas and the director of Monarch Watch, a monarch conservation organization, says that we may be on the brink of an immense ecological disaster.

Monarchs, he says, are a keystone species, symbolic of other wildlife that are endangered by the loss of habitat in this country. Seventy percent of all vegetation requires pollination, and there will be a biological cascade of effects if these species are destroyed. Butterflies and other pollinators are necessary to maintain the infrastructure of all wildlife, he said.

As a result of the monarch’s decline, leaders of the United States, Canada and Mexico discussed the wellbeing of monarchs at a one-day summit in February, agreeing to form a working group for the conservation of the species. They declared the monarch an “emblematic species which unites our three countries.”

Danaus plexippus, as the monarch is known to entomologists, belongs to the subfamily, Daninae, the milkweed butterflies. In their larval stage they feed entirely on various species of milkweed, wildflowers with a bitter, poisonous juice. Adult monarch butterflies continue to eat and store the noxious glycosides found in milkweed, making them distasteful to would-be predators.

In the monarch’s caterpillar form, it munches on poisonous wildflowers called milkweed. Photo: Larry Lynch, National Wildlife Federation

Monarch butterfly migrations have fascinated people for centuries. However, where the butterflies went in the winter was a mystery until the 1970s, when 60 million to a billion butterflies were discovered resting among the oyamel fir trees in central Mexico near Cerro Pelon. Much about their life history is still a mystery, and tagging projects across the country are trying to learn more.

It is believed that it takes four generations to complete an annual migration. Adult butterflies leave Mexico in the spring, and after mating, the females seek out milkweed plants to lay their eggs on. The first three generations travel north, each laying eggs on milkweed plants before dying at about six weeks old. The eggs hatch into smooth, ringed, black, green and yellow caterpillars, which feed on the milkweed and then spin bright green chrysalises, which pupate into butterflies, continuing the migration. The fourth generation forms a chrysalis later in the summer and may live up to eight months, completing the trip back to its wintering grounds.

On August 26, three organizations — the Center for Biological Diversity, the Center for Food Safety, and the Xerces Society — along with monarch researcher Lincoln Brower, petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the monarch butterfly as “threatened” on the federal Endangered Species List. This listing would make it illegal to purposefully kill a monarch butterfly or modify its habitat without a permit.

Part of the problem lies to the south, at the wintering grounds in Mexico. Matt Collington, the environmental education manager at Airlie Gardens in New Hanover County, says that while 70 acres at the wintering site are protected as a world heritage site, the butterflies are effected by the “edging effect.” Logging all around the site by farmers, cutting down rainforests, removes the buffer zone that protects it, leading to colder, harsher winters that the butterflies cannot survive.

Brower, a distinguished professor of zoology emeritus at the University of Florida and a research professor of biology at Sweet Briar College, has been studying butterflies since 1954. He has another theory. His research leads him to believe that the main cause of the decline lies to the north, where agricultural practices have practically wiped out the milkweed upon which monarchs rely.

Natural areas where milkweed grows have been plowed and planted with crops, mainly corn and soybeans. Most have been genetically altered to survive spraying with herbicides such as Roundup, while the milkweed is killed by such spraying.

Orley “Chip” Taylor

Taylor blames the chemical glyphosate, contained in the pesticide Roundup, as one of the main culprits. He explains that the production of biofuels in this country has led to a huge increase in the price of corn, resulting in the plowing of natural lands and wildflowers. From 2008 to 2012, he says, 24,000 acres of wildlife habitat — an area the size of Indiana — was plowed and converted to corn fields. As a result, President Obama distributed a memorandum on June 20, reasserting the necessity of conserving pollinators, including monarch butterflies.

Kathy Mitchell, who is in charge of the Monarch Project at the N.C. Aquarium in Manteo, adds that she thinks that the reason for monarch decline includes agricultural use of herbicides and homeowner use of pesticides, especially neonidcotoids — synthetic compounds derived from nicotine — and residential mosquito control programs, which have caused hive failures of bees as well.

The butterflies that migrate through eastern North Carolina usually arrive in May or June. Martha Flanagan, the coordinator of the Living Conservatory at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, says that a small stable population of monarchs stays if resources are favorable and do not continue migrating. The fall migration usually peaks in October.

According to Taylor, many of the monarchs that migrate along the Outer Banks get caught up in tail winds from the ocean and die at sea. Those that make it may winter in Florida or head farther southwest.

Here, in North Carolina, not only corn fields but massive hog farms have displaced wild areas where such plants as milkweed, goldenrod and other butterfly food sources used to grow. Mitchell remembers seasons when monarch caterpillars were so thick on the milkweed plants in the Manteo aquarium’s wildflower gardens that they were breaking the stalks. She says she did not see any monarchs this spring, however, and that few have been spotted in Currituck, Edenton or southern Virginia. She remarked that 2013 had the lowest numbers of monarchs in years, and that there have been fewer butterflies in general.

Harry LeGrand,  author of Butterflies of North Carolina, says that, “2014 is by far the poorest year for butterflies (including monarchs) that I have witnessed since I began butterflying in 1991.”

He attributes this to unusual weather patterns and extremely cold winter temperatures but acknowledges that only time will tell. LeGrand thinks that the main cause of nationwide monarch losses is the logging of firs in Mexico and that practices leading to milkweed loss are, in comparison, “tiny drops in the bucket.”

On the positive side, says Collington, there is great interest among homeowners who are anxious to help out butterflies by planting milkweed and other native species in their yards.

“Conservation and restoration of milkweed needs to be a top priority,” says Taylor.

The Natural Resource Defense Council is asking state and county highway departments to plant milkweed and refrain from mowing and using herbicides. At the North American Leaders’ Summit in February, one of the commitments was to create a “milkweed corridor” from Canada to Mexico.

What You Do to Help?

People can refrain from using chemical herbicides in their yards and gardens, allow native plants such as milkweed and goldenrod to grow, plant the host and nectar plants needed by monarchs in yards, schools, parks and roadsides, and encourage others to do the same.

According to Melanie Doyle, conservative horticulturist at the Fort Fisher Aquarium, there are 20 species of milkweed native to North Carolina. Monarchs migrate through the Outer Banks from September through November; and according to Doyle, they do lay eggs on the milkweed plants and these eggs do hatch. They also feed on the nectar of seaside goldenrod, narrowleaf or swamp milkweed, sunflowers, wild asters, black-eyed Susans, coneflowers and a host of other flowers.

The N.C. Aquarium’s monarch conservation plant sale offers three species of native milkweed, and the N.C. Coastal Federation’s native plant sale sells several nectar plants. Milkweed seeds can be obtained online from the organization Monarch Watch, as well as at other sites.Brower emphasizes that it is not too late to save the monarchs but that action must be taken now “while there is still time!”

Reprinted from the Island Free Press

Blanche Howard Jolliff at her 93rd birthday party. Photo: Ocracoke Current

OCRACOKE — Blanche Howard Jolliff is 94 years old and she recalls many things from her childhood on Ocracoke Island: Riding in a horse-drawn cart across the beach to see a shipwreck; dining on sea turtle hash; going out in her daddy’s fishing boat that he named for her; and eating her mother’s delicious sweet potato pie.

Blanche is the daughter of Elizabeth Ballance Howard and Stacy Howard, both native Ocracokers.  Born in 1919, she was delivered at home by Ocracoke’s renowned midwife, Charlotte “Miss Lot” O’Neal. She grew up on Ocracoke, living in her parents’ house on Howard Street until the early 1950s, when she met a young man who was looking into building a highway on the island.

The newlyweds moved to the mainland, but Jolliff came back about once a month to see her family. After her husband’s death in 1994, she moved back for good, and she lives once more in the home on Howard Street where she grew up.

Blanche’s father, Stacy Howard, was an island fisherman. He came from an old island family that’s been here since the early 1700s. His father, P.C. Howard, had a home on what is now known as Howard Street, across from his father’s home. P.C. raised Stacy and the rest of his family in the traditions of the Southern Methodist Church, also on Howard Street. In the early 1900s, Stacy had a house built near his father’s and grandfather’s homes.

Jolliff’s mother, Elizabeth Ballance Howard, was the daughter of Aaron and Lois Anne Williams Ballance, whose “old home place” was Down Point, nearer to the lighthouse. The Ballances, according to Jolliff, were originally from Hatteras. Elizabeth and Stacy married in the early 1900s.

Elizabeth Howard made the best sweet potato pies on Ocracoke.

Stacy Howard came from an old line of island fishermen. Photo: Ocracoke Preservation Society

Stacy Howard often talked about shipwrecks on the islands. He told about a time in 1899, when he was about 5 years old, when the ship, the Pioneer, came into the inlet with cargo and wrecked on the beach. Clothes, shoes, fruits and vegetables were everywhere, and people would find one shoe, then search for its match. Stacy’s father, P.C., came home with a big cheese.

Jolliff recalls hearing about another occasion when a ship came ashore near Nags Head, and top hats were all over the beaches. Someone auctioned them off, and island boys bought them and wore them.

Things got tough on Ocracoke that after the Civil War, Jolliff said. Railroads replaced schooners as the primary way of moving goods. The jobs that those schooners had provided jobs for many Ocracoke became scarce, she said.  Like many Ocracokers, Jolliff’s father often went north to work on dredges in Pennsylvania and Delaware. When the rivers froze, he and the others would come home. Back at Ocracoke for the winter, Stacy took out hunting parties in his boat, especially before the Depression in the 1930s.

Looking back over the years, Jolliff describes what life was like back then for her and her three sisters — Leila, Etta, and Lois — as they were growing up.  “Papa had a big garden out back, and Momma kept chickens,” she said. “Everybody did back then. They hatched them out at first, and later ordered them in the mail, and they came in boxes. My mother took care of them, feeding them twice a day. They ran around free and sometimes they’d get into trouble–scratch up someone’s garden.”

There were all kinds–dominiques and red ones and buff ones — raised for the eggs and meat.

“Sometimes when we were young Etta and I would chase them around and get them squawking,” Jolliff remembered. “It was the best fun, but then we’d get in trouble.”

She also remembers the ponies that wandered around freely in the village.  “Sometimes folks would ride them to the store, tying them outside while they shopped,” she said.

As for cows, she says there were four places where they were raised and where milk was sold. Blanche’s family went out to a place on the Back Road to buy their milk.

When Jolliff was very young, her mother made all their bread. By the time she turned, Will Willis was bringing bread from the mainland on the daily mail boat. Her mother continued making rolls—hot and very fluffy—nearly every day. Her family ate fish, clams, turtle, chicken and vegetables. Without refrigeration, fresh meat was a rarity. Everyone had a vegetable garden, with cabbage, string beans, collards and sweet potatoes.

“My mother made the best sweet potato pie,” Jolliff said.

She also made pineapple cakes, and Blanche’s sister Leila loved to make chocolate cakes.

One of Jolliff’s favorite foods was turtle. She recalls that before they were protected by federal law, fishermen caught sea turtles in their nets and brought them back to the fish house at the Community Store. They would quarter them and give each quarter to a family.

The turtle was parboiled for “a good while” to make it tender, Jolliff said. “Then you cut the meat off the bone. You cooked it with onion, potatoes, and a little bit of salt pork,” she said. “We called it turtle hash, and you had to have baked cornbread with it. You never tasted anything so good.”

The foods they did not grow came mostly from Mace Fulcher’s Community Store, but there were other stores on the island too. Jolliff remembers that Uncle Ike had one at the old post office building, and Albert Styron had one Down Point.  Clarence Scarborough ran a store at what is now the beauty parlor, and Walter O’Neal had a store and dock on The Creek. Travis Williams ran a store near what is now the Harborside, and James and Charlie Williams had one across from Della Gaskill’s house.

The house on Howard Street where Blanche grew up and lives still. Photo: Pat Garber

Back then there were two or three fish houses. There was no refrigeration in those early days, but big blocks of ice, used for keeping food cold, could be bought at the fish houses. When Ocracoke got electricity in 1938, the Ice Plant opened down on the docks, but it didn’t last long, just a few years at most, as Jolliff recalled.

Most people back then heated with fireplaces, and Jolliff remembers a visit to her father’s first cousin’s house when, at age 8 or 9, she “froze on one side and burnt up on the other.” Jolliff’s family had a coal stove and chromium stove which burned wood in the early years, pellets later on. Her mother ironed clothes with a flat iron, which was heated on the wood stove.

While growing up, Jolliff played hopscotch with neighboring children, and they played in make-believe houses and kitchens, using broken dishes and making pretend desserts with red sand. She recalls pretending a piece of cedar was chicken. They also filled the tops of coffee cans with mud, let them dry, and put them together to make make-believe layer cakes. They played with dolls, which they usually got for Christmas, often bought at Fulcher’s store but sometimes ordered from Montgomery Ward, Sears & Roebuck, Charles Williams and, later, J.C. Penney.

In Jolliff’s early years almost all transportation was by water. She remembered that “when I was young there were only two or three vehicles on the island. There were two freight boats, which went to Little Washington or Morehead.  There were two mail boats, and one went one day, one the next. The first one came out of Beaufort, and after that from Atlantic.”

Jolliff’s uncle had a horse and cart, and he’d give the girls rides. “Once, when I was about 5, I went out across the beach with my uncle and aunt to see where the ship, the Victoria S, had fetched up on a shoal,” she said. “The ship was still in the water, loaded with lumber, but it could not get off the shoal.” Blanche thinks that they eventually dynamited it to get rid of it.

That shipwreck Jolliff said, led to the first road and vehicle wreck on Ocracoke.  “The owner of the lumber had it unloaded and stacked on the beach,” she said. “He wanted to get the lumber shipped to the mainland. Two of the island men got the idea that they would each buy a flatbed truck and haul the lumber from the beach to the docks where it could be shipped.

Ocracoke Islanders salvage the wreck of the three-masted schooner Nomis, which ran aground on the island in 1935. Photo: Ocracoke Preservation Society

“But there wasn’t a road the whole way, so they got permission to cut through the oak and myrtle in front of Blanche’s house and make one. It wasn’t very wide, and there was deep sand. In order to get through the sand they had to gun their engines and try to plow through it fast. One day the two trucks met head-on at the sandy stretch, and this was the first wreck on the island.”

No one, fortunately, was hurt.

As more cars were brought to the island, people would drive down the lane in front of her house, now Howard Street. There was a big oak there, she recalls, and sometimes the cars would run into the tree. Because it was still sandy, on more than one occasion, she remembered people knocking on the door and wanting to borrow a shovel to dig out their cars.

As a teenager, Jolliff would sometimes go to Washington, N.C., on the freight boat. She was friends with Capt. David William’s daughter, Virginia, and they would go together. Virginia had a friend who lived there, and she would meet them at the dock. Then they would spend the night at her house.

During World War II, there was a naval base at Ocracoke, and “lots of men were stationed here doing work so that the boats could get in and out of the harbor,” Jolliff said.

“The men brought their wives, and people rented them rooms,” she explained. “I wasn’t really afraid during the war, but it was sad—they found so many bodies, and the torpedoes sounded awful, so loud…The sky would turn a deep pink—it was that close—and then we heard them afterwards. We had black-out curtains so that the lights wouldn’t be seen on the beach.”

Many of Jolliff’s cousins and friends went off to fight in World War II. Thurston Gaskill’s youngest brother, Jim Baum Gaskill, was on a freighter that was torpedoed within sight of Ocracoke. Most of the men died, including Jim Baum, she recalled.

When she was 22 years old, Jolliff took a job working at the Post Office. One day an interesting man came in to get his mail. Guthrie Jolliff had come to Ocracoke with an engineer and a planner to look into building a new road—N.C.  12—down the island.  He continued going to the Post Office, and before long he and Blanche were seeing a lot of each other.

They got married and moved to Hertford County, and later to Belvidere. They tried to come back once a month, so that Jolliff could see her family. In 1994 Guthrie died of a heart attack. Blanche made plans to move back to her family home, but she “had to wait two years after a hurricane shook it up and it had to be repaired.”

Looking back, Jolliff remembers that “Ocracoke was a good place to live.”

“Parents didn’t have to worry about their children then. There have been a lot of changes, but it’s nice to recall it. Childhood was a happy time.”

• Listen and watch Blanche tell stories

Having grown up on the water, Ballance loved fishing, oystering, clamming and mullet fishing. He had a fish camp down at Oyster Creek and a wooden skiff. He often went out with his friends, usually accompanied by a brown paper sack containing Tums, snacks, Red Man Tobacco and a few cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

OCRACOKE — The last of a generation of Ocracoke Island men who were true “old salts” died recently, but Edgar Maurice Ballance will be remembered on this island with love and respect.

Known locally as Morris, Ballance was born to Elisha and Emma Gaskins Ballance in 1927.  He was one of nine children, born at home in a big white house on Back Road.

His early playmates included Ronald “Conk” O’Neal, Powers Garrish and Nathanial and Carl Jackson. They enjoyed fishing and swimming and, according to his friend Thomas Midgett, who was like a son to him, playing practical jokes. Midgett recalls a story Ballance told him about visiting two old ladies with O’Neal. As they sat on the porch, stomping on a stink bomb, one of the ladies turned to the other and asked, “Did you forget to put the lid on that slop jar?” Another stunt was stealing someone’s chicken, cooking it, serving it to them and accepting their thanks without ever telling them they were eating their own chicken.

After graduating from Ocracoke High School in 1944, Ballance began seeing an island girl, Maude Ellen Garrish. She was five years younger than Ballance, but they went to the movie theater and to Old Jake’s, a gathering place for young people. Ballance also took her around the island in his sailing skiff, which he named after her. They were married in 1950 at the Methodist Parsonage on Howard Street. Balance was drafted into the Army the following year and sent to Germany. His daughter, Judy, was born while he was there. Later he was stationed in Newport News, Virginia, where his family joined him.

After returning to Ocracoke, Ballance built their first house, now known as the Emma Ballance Cottage, on Back Road. He later built a number of houses on the island, including the one where he and Maude Ellen have lived in recent years, and where he died. According to Martin Garrish, who learned many building skills from him, “Maurice was a master carpenter.”

Ballance loved music. He learned to play guitar when he was young, and he was part of the original Ocracoke musical group, the Graveyard Band, which played from the 1920s to the ‘50s.

Ballance loved music. He learned to play guitar when he was young, and he was part of the original Ocracoke musical group, the Graveyard Band, which played from the 1920s to the ‘50s. Later he played with his cousin, the famed musician Edgar Howard; Charlie Garrish; Jule Garrish; and others, entertaining people at talent shows and home gatherings. Ballance’s nephew, Kenny Ballance, who gave the eulogy for Maurice, said he had to put all his breakable objects away when Ballance was playing at his house because he stomped his foot so hard.

Ballance shared his knowledge with island musicians such as Martin Garrish and Aaron Caswell, who carry on the tradition today. Martin Garrish says, “Maurice was a true musician. I didn’t realize how great he was until I got older. He had a unique style like no one else I’ve heard.”

Around 1961 the Ballances bought land from Stanley Wahab, and Ballance built a dance hall. It had a juke box, and Ballance and several other musicians played there a couple nights a week. Out front was a snack bar where Maude Ellen sold hot dogs and hamburgers. When he was offered a job with the state Department of Transportation’s Ferry Division, Ballance sold the dance hall, which eventually became what is now the Variety Store. He became the port captain supervisor at the Hatteras ferry terminal on the north end of the island, working there 32 years until his retirement.

The Ballances’ daughter, Judy, married Michael Lawson in 1984, and they had two boys, Brandon and Marcus. They were the joys of their grandparents’ lives. “Pop,” as they called Ballance, built tree houses for them and a little camp back in the woods and took them fishing out in his boat. He also entertained their friends, who also called him “Pop.” His grandson Brandon relates that Ballance told them stories about how it was when he was growing up—living off the land, growing all their vegetables, putting seaweed in the gardens. Kenny Ballance said that Ballance taught his grandsons honesty, respect and to lend a helping hand to anyone who might need one.

Having grown up on the water, Ballance loved fishing, oystering, clamming and mullet fishing. He had a fish camp down at Oyster Creek and a wooden skiff. He often went out with his friends, usually accompanied by a brown paper sack containing Tums, snacks, Red Man Tobacco and a few cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Midgett and Balance would clean the fish and carry them around to all the older people.

“If there was a speckled trout, he’d always save it for Miss Lishie,” Midgett recalls. “She loved speckled trout.”

Ronnie O’Neal, Conk’s son, remembers a story Conk and Ballance told about the day they were oystering down at Qwork Hammock and had a couple bags over the limit. They saw David Fletcher, the state Marine Patrol officer, approaching and slipped the bags over the side.

Maurice Ballance with his buddy Ronald “Conk” O’Neal.

They called out to Fletcher, “Can we give you a bushel of oysters?

“No thanks!” Fletcher responded, “but on my way back I may stop and pick up one of those bags you dropped into the water.”

Ballance never liked to kill anything in vain. Midgett said that if a bullnose skate or a horseshoe crab or a cormorant got caught in his nets, Balance would carefully cut them out and set them free. If the cormorants were “waterlogged,” as Midgett calls it, Ballance would keep them in the boat and carry them to shore to recover.

Another thing Ballance didn’t like was wearing shoes, at least not in the summer. Even as a grandpa he was always barefoot once the weather turned warm.

“One thing Maurice was,” asserts Midgett, “was honest.” Another thing, according to Ronnie O’Neal, was loyal. He was always a good friend to his parents and was always there for them. Their nickname for him, in fact, was “Loyal.”

A big reader, Maurice educated himself on every subject he could, according to Kenny Ballance, and he enjoyed sharing all of his knowledge with his family. “Art, science, engineering…he knew a little about any subject,” says Midgett. “He was a smart man.”

Like so many Ocracokers, Ballance loved cats, and the first thing he did in the morning and the last at night was to feed his cats, both at his home and at his camp. “We have a cat now,” says Maude Ellen. “Cottonball. He found it as a kitten and brought it home. He loved Cottonball.”

He also loved trees, especially live oaks, and he often lectured against cutting them down, citing how long it took one to grow and what amazing plants they were. Kenny Balance said he never trimmed any limbs when his Uncle Maurice was around. Midgett relates that when out for a walk, “a lot of times he’d pick up acorns, dig a hole with his foot and push one in. ‘Maybe some of them will make it,’ he’d say.”

Ballance died on July 11 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, cared for at home by his family and friends.

A biologist extracts the blue blood of a horseshoe crab. One of the most heated environmental issues of the East Coast in recent years has been over this ecologically, economically and medically essential species, according to Jim Berkson, director of the Horseshoe Crab Research Center at Virginia Tech University. Photo: Tess Malijenovsky

What do conch fishermen, little shorebirds known as red knots and the flu vaccination your doctor offers every fall have in common?

All are linked together by their dependence on one of the oddest and most fascinating creatures to inhabit Atlantic coastal waters, Limulus polyphemus, known more commonly as the horseshoe crab.

Considered to be living fossils, horseshoe crabs have been around for more than 350 million years without stingers, venom or harmful pincers. These ancient arthropods are not actually crabs, being more closely related to spiders and other arachnids than to crustaceans. Every spring around the full and new moons when the tides are highest, horseshoe crabs creep from the depths of sea floor to spawn high on the beaches along the East Coast.

Fishermen harvest them for bait, the medical world uses their blood to detect bacterial contamination and shorebirds rely on their eggs for food. Stress on this species and possible effects on those dependent on it have scientists concerned.

“The battle over this ecologically, economically and medically essential species has become one of the most heated environmental issues on the East Coast in recent years,” said Jim Berkson, director of the Horseshoe Crab Research Center at Virginia Tech University.

While the Delaware Bay is renowned as the largest spawning area for horseshoe crabs in the world, the crabs are often seen in the coastal waters of North Carolina.

Horseshoe crabs have been harvested in America since the 1850s, first ground up for fertilizer and livestock feed and, more recently, to serve as bait for eels and whelks, or conches. In 1992 when the Atlantic cod fishery collapsed, fishermen of the Delaware Bay discovered that horseshoe crabs were excellent bait for welks. The annual horseshoe crab harvest for bait increased from a few hundred thousand to 2.5 million, said Larry Niles, a New Jersey biologist in a National Geographic article.

Horsehoe crabs are also used in cancer and neurophysiological research, for surgical implants such as pacemakers, and in prosthetic devices. Their blue blood — its color due to its high concentration of copper — contains a compound called LAL, or Limulus amebocyte lysate, which can detect tiny traces of bacterial contamination and trap them in inescapable gel-like clots. Every injectable drug or vaccine certified by the Food and Drug Administration is tested using LAL from horseshoe crabs. It is a simple, nearly instantaneous test; if there is no clot, there is no contamination, and the solution can be considered free of bacteria.

A Red Knot with tags on its legs, which are used to track the species’ declining population. The bird flies 18,000 miles a year and depends on the eggs of horseshoe crabs to refuel at its pit-stop along the East Coast. Photo: Sam Bland

As important as their role in medicine, horseshoe crabs are even bigger players in ecology. Their protein-packed eggs are a vital source of nutrition for migrating shorebirds, and in particular for red knots. These robin-sized birds fly 9,000 miles from the southern tip of South America to the Arctic and back every year, making stopovers along the mid-Atlantic coast to refuel. They time their flights so that they arrive just as horseshoe crabs lay their eggs.

Smaller numbers of red knots stop along the Outer Banks before making it to the Delaware Bay region. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to add the bird to the federal endangered species list as a “threatened” species. Its population, the agency says, has declined by as much as 75 percent in some places. Public hearings on the proposal held this spring along the coast.

The birds’ decline can be traced in part to a decline in their food source – horseshoe crab eggs – as well as habitat loss and climate change. If the bird becomes listed as threatened in North Carolina, state and local governments would have to take them into consideration for beach re-nourishment projects.

Marin Hawk, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission coordinator for horseshoe crabs, says that the northeastern crabs in are in serious decline, in part due to over-harvesting and poaching. North Carolina is included in the fishery commission’s southeast division, which works with N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries to oversee the harvest of horseshoes crabs.

Here in North Carolina, horseshoe crabs are believed to be healthier, says Hawk. According to the state Division of Marine Fisheries’ biologist Tina Moore, horseshoe crabs in this state are considered a sub-population, along with those in South Carolina and Georgia, based on genetics and tagging. Their abundance trends are considered stable with some increases. There are, however, no reliable estimates as to what their numbers actually are, or how their spawning practices affect red knots.

Horseshoe crab blood is blue due to its high concentration of copper. It contains a compound, known as LAL, that can detect traces of bacterial contamination and trap them in clots. Every injectable drug or vaccine certified by the FDA is tested using LAL from horseshoe crab blood. Photo: Tess Malijenovsky

A commercial license is required to harvest horseshoe crabs. In this state most are harvested for bait, primarily to catch eels and whelks, or conchs. They are considered by-catch, caught in gill and pound nets or in crab trawls while watermen fish for other species, mostly around the inlets of Pamlico and Core sounds. The harvest quota for the state is 24,000 crabs, and for individual fishermen, 50 per trip. Last year, according to Moore, 17,000 crabs were reported.

North Carolina fish houses buy horseshoe crabs from fishermen. Hardy Plyer, manager of the Ocracoke Fish Co., says that there are some fishermen at Ocracoke who bring in crabs, beginning when the weather warms up in the spring. Last year, he says, they met their quota in about three months.

Ocracoke sells the crabs to Wanchese Fish Co. where, according to the manager Mikey Daniels, they are frozen, trucked to Virginia and re-sold to fishermen on the Eastern Shore to use as bait in conch pots. Daniels often maintains an educational tank where he keeps live crabs for visitors. He is interested in the possibility of setting up a bleeding facility.

Skip Kemp, who teaches in the aquaculture program at Carteret County Community College in Morehead City, is also interested in the possibilities of bleeding horseshoe crabs and has several students who want to pursue it. There is a permit in place for biomedical harvesting in North Carolina, but there has not been a bleeding facility here since the early 2000s.

Today it is estimated that a quarter million live crabs are captured each year in the U.S. and delivered to bleeding facilities. Bleeders pierce the tissue around the heart, draining up to 30 percent of the animal’s blood, which may sell for up to $15,000 a quart. The crabs are captive for 24 to 72 hours before being returned and released. LAL manufacturers estimate that less than 3 percent of horseshoe crabs handled die after the bleeding procedure, while studies by universities and government agencies estimate an 85 to 90 percent survival rate.

The LAL industry says the bleeding causes no long-term injury. Studies done by one of the bleeding facilities, Associates of Cape Cod, show that crabs can survive multiple bleedings like human blood donors and that, when returned to their spawning areas, continue to breed without ill effect.

What concerns scientists is that many of those who do survive are not returning to their spawning grounds and producing more offspring. It may be that the capture and bleeding leaves them lethargic and slow and less likely to follow the tides back to their spawning ground. It also may make them anemic and less likely to breed.

Last of two parts

OCRACOKE — I decided to complete the next part of my “Walking with Thoreau” expedition in mid-March. Gasoline prices had skyrocketed a few days before, so I did not feel right about asking anyone to drive me to my taking-off spot at the Pony Pens. Instead, I headed up N.C. 12 on my bicycle, anticipating a good workout and an enjoyable ride. It was both.

From my bike seat I had an excellent view of things not often noticed in my truck. Past the campground I noticed, to the west, tall dunes and a little path. I pulled over and hiked up to the top. From there I surveyed a world of miniature mountains folding into the distant Pamlico Sound — a sight that seemed quite remarkable to me. Thoreau wrote about how similar hills at Cape Cod were formed, saying: Beach-grass during the spring and summer grows about two feet and a half. If surrounded by naked beach, the storms of fall and winter heap up the sand on all sides, and cause it to rise nearly to the top of the plant… and continues to ascend… Sand hills formed in this way are sometimes one hundred feet high and of every variety of form, like snow-drifts, or Arab tents, and are continually shifting.

Thoreau describes “a grass-like seaweed (Zostera)” in his book “Cape Cod,” while Garber describes the eel grass (above) that is more commonly seen on Ocracoke Island. Photo credit: New England Boating

A little farther on I noticed another path, and following it, I found myself on the shore of Pamlico Sound. Piles of grassy seaweed, known as eel grass, were tucked up against dead trees and other jetsam. In writing about Cape Cod’s western shore, Thoreau wrote that it was nearly as sandy as the eastern, but the water was much smoother, and the bottom was partially covered with the slender grass-like seaweed (Zostera), which we had not seen on the Atlantic side.

Back on the road, I pedaled into the parking area across from the pony pen, glancing over at the two horses that stood behind the fence. I allowed myself a moment of regret that the famed wild ponies of Ocracoke no longer ran wild, to be captured and ridden by the islanders. On his June 1857 walk at the Cape, Thoreau described a scene that was probably common on Ocracoke two centuries ago, when islanders transported ponies to Hatteras: Saw them swim three horses across from Saquish Head to the island, a quarter of a mile or more. One rows a small boat while a man holds the bridle. At first the horses swam faster than the man could row, but soon they were somewhat drawn after the boat.

Leaving my bicycle tucked behind a yaupon tree, I began walking. Before long I sat down on a small dune and, pulling out Thoreau’s book, read: Before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned; and between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobing and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit.

I had been paying attention to that area between high and low water mark as I walked, where Thoreau’s chaos does indeed still reign. More specifically, I had been watching the formation and dissipation of sea foam — countless bubbles that each wave creates and hurls onto shore. Sometimes the bubbles left artistic patterns in the sand before the next wave washed them away. Thoreau referred to this froth when he wrote the following: The foam ran up the sand, and then ran back as far as we could see […] as regularly as the master of a choir beats time with his white wand.

It was Sunday, nearing 11 a.m. now, a time when many head for church. I am not a church-goer, nor am I affiliated with any formal religion, although I respect the beliefs of those who are. For myself, this great expanse of sand and sea is as holy a place as I could imagine, and I agreed with Thoreau, who wrote in that All genuine goodness is original and as free from cant and tradition as the air. It is heathen in its liberality and independence on tradition.

Walking farther down the beach, I glanced leeward, noting absently the row of telephone poles that stood at regular intervals along the island. Thoreau’s trek took place soon after a similar invention was installed on Cape Cod. He wrote, referring to a treeless area, that the new telegraph wires are a godsend to the birds, affording them something to perch on.

The tentacles of a Portuguese man-of-war can still deliver a painful sting even after they wash on shore dead. Photo credit: Jo O’Keefe

As I neared the airport I came upon what looked like a small blue balloon, and I reached down to pick it up. Seeing it more clearly, I realized that it was not a balloon at all but a small Portuguese man-of-war — a colony of organisms, or a siphonophore, that looks like a kind of jellyfish and whose tentacles can retain their powerful sting even when dead and dried up, as this one was. Despite their sting, jellyfish are a favorite food of leatherbacks and other sea turtles. A hydrogen balloon, released at a birthday party and blown into the ocean, may look like dinner to a passing leatherback, but it is a death sentence as well. Sea turtle necropsies have, I knew, revealed alarming numbers of turtle stomachs stopped up and entwined with balloons.

Thoreau wrote about a similar topic in 1849: You might make a curious list of articles which fishes have swallowed,–sailors’ open clasp-knives, and bright tin snuff-boxes, not knowing what was in them,–and jugs, and jewels.

As I approached the Airport Ramp a new sound met my ears, and I watched a single-engine plane take off, flying close over my head. I wondered what Thoreau would have thought of that sight. I hiked across the ramp to the road, bidding farewell to the place where, in Thoreau’s words, A man may stand there and put all America behind him.

On the final day of my expedition, I set out to walk the southernmost part of Ocracoke Island. I rode my bicycle down South Point Road, passing through the vast expanse of saltmarsh that straddles both sides of the sandy lane. As the wind grew stronger and the sand softer near the road’s end, I gave up riding and walked my bike to a spot where I could lay it down behind a dune.

The road emerged here into a vast expanse of sand spreading in all directions and disappearing finally into the sea. The dunes and vegetation that reached nearly to the ocean farther up the beach were far away; the electric poles following the highway out of sight. Standing here, I could imagine myself in a great sand desert, and I compared this vista to Thoreau’s description of the great flats on Cape Cod, of which he said: All the aspects of this desert are beautiful, whether you behold it in fair weather or foul, or when the sun is just breaking out after a storm, and shining on its moist surface in the distance, it is so white, and pure, and level, and each slight inequality and track is so distinctly revealed; and when your eyes slide off this, they fall on the ocean.

Thoreau frequently mentioned these little shorebirds in his book, “Cape Cod”: “If I were required to name a sound, the remembrance of which most perfectly revives the impression which the beach has made, it would be the dreary peep of the piping plover.” Photo credit: Sam Bland

The beach here was marked with a few tire tracks, as this was a favorite area for surf-fishing, and even this early I saw a few fishermen with their lines out. Further up, however, was a zone that was closed to traffic because of nesting shore birds. The signs were reminders that this was a national seashore, and that there were angry debates going on about driving on these beaches and its impact on their wild inhabitants. The creature that caused most of the stir was the piping plover, which is listed under the Endangered Species Act as a threatened. Thoreau frequently mentioned these little shorebirds in his book, saying that … if I were required to name a sound, the remembrance of which most perfectly revives the impression which the beach has made, it would be the dreary peep of the piping plover.

Thoreau wrote that the seashore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world. As I watched the waves roll in, I was reminded of the images I had seen on CNN of the tsunami that had devastated northern Japan. When the waves approached, I simply walked higher up on the beach to avoid soaking my shoes. That option had not been available to the thousands who died in that tragedy.

The Ocracoke Lighthouse, built in 1823, is a favorite attraction on the island. Photo credit: Sam Bland

Thoreau’s words, written in 1849, described what that ocean could become: […] this same placid ocean, as civil now as a city’s harbor, will erelong be lashed into sudden fury [...] It will ruthlessly heave these vessels to and fro, break them in pieces in its sandy or stony jaws, and deliver their crews to sea monsters. This gentle Ocean will toss and tear the rag of a man’s body like the father of mad bulls, and his relatives may be seen seeking the remnants for weeks along the strand.

Through the sand hills I glimpsed one of Ocracoke’s favorite attractions, the Ocracoke Lighthouse, built in 1823. Thoreau took note of the lighthouses he saw on Cape Cod, and spent a night at the Highland Light, built in 1798. He described accompanying the lightkeeper on his rounds: At rather early candle-light he lighted a small Japan lamp […] and told us to follow him. He led the way first through his bedroom […] then into the lower part of the lighthouse […] thence we ascended by a winding and open iron stairway, to a trap-door in an iron floor, and through this into the lantern.

A few yards farther on I saw a plastic water bottle lying in the sand, dropped perhaps in carelessness or tossed out an SUV window. Plastic bottles may, like balloons, entice sea turtles or fish to eat them. Otherwise, they may become part of the huge plastic masses that float like dead continents in the ocean. Thoreau spoke of finding a bottle at Cape Cod in 1849. His bottle would have been made of glass.

I picked up a bottle half buried in the wet sand, covered with barnacles, but stopped tight, and half full of red ale, which still smacked of juniper,–all that remained I fancied from the wreck of a rowdy world […] but as I poured it slowly out onto the sand, it seemed to me that man himself was like a half-emptied bottle of pale ale, which Time had drunk so far, yet stopped tight for a while, and drifting about in the ocean of circumstances, but destined erelong to mingle with the surrounding waves, or be spilled amid the sands of a distant shore.

Portsmouth Island, which can be seen from the southern tip of Ocracoke Island, has a ghost town preserved in Cape Lookout National Seashore. Photo credit: Sam Bland

The crash of surf was less distinct here, the waves lower and longer. I was approaching Ocracoke Inlet, the channel that separates Ocracoke from Portsmouth Island, where a busy town once bustled with life. Now it is a ghost town, preserved as part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore, its prosperity destroyed when violent storms caused the inlet to silt up and ship traffic went elsewhere. I wished to dip my toes into the waters of that inlet before turning back, and, in Thoreau’s words, to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks […] where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid.

It was with shock, therefore, that I realized that the previously mentioned no-trespassing fence had curved around to close off the beach before me. I would not be able to complete my walk to the end of Ocracoke. I did not begrudge the piping plovers their safe nesting grounds, but I felt somehow cheated. I turned around and, now pressing into a strong wind, headed back along the beach to South Point Road. Stopping one last time, I stared out across the ocean, a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle.

Then, collecting my bicycle, I went home, far the richer for the time I had spent walking with Thoreau.

First of two parts

The breakers looked like droves of a thousand white horses of Neptune, rushing to the shore, with their white manes streaming far behind; and when, at length, the sun shone for a moment, their manes were rainbow-tinted. — Henry David Thoreau

Sitting on a dune near the north end of Ocracoke Island, I studied Thoreau’s words, written more than 150 years ago, about the coastline of Cape Cod. I could have written the same today about the view that stretched before me.

I used to walk Ocracoke Island’s ocean beach each winter, having someone drop me off near the Hatteras ferry on the north end of the island. I’d walk all day, alone, and then bum a ride back to the village on the other end of the island. There is something primeval about seeing the ocean and shoreline expand before you without the refuge of a truck waiting nearby. I would make mental notes and later record them in my journal.

A 1908 edition of Thoreau’s book “Cape Cod.” Photo: University of Rochester

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American author and poet.

It was after I began reading Thoreau’s classic account, “Cape Cod,” and realized that he had done exactly the same thing, walking the length of the Massachusetts cape, that I thought of walking the length of Ocracoke again. This time I decided to carry Thoreau’s book with me and compare his experiences with my own.

Cape Cod is much longer than Ocracoke Island, so Thoreau broke his walk into several segments, taking his first walk in 1849, his last in 1857. I decided to break up my walk similarly to have more time to sit down along the way and reflect on his and my experiences.

Thoreau wrote, as his reason for walking, that, Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean […] I have spent, in all, about three weeks on the Cape; walked from Eastham to Provincetown twice on the Atlantic side, and once on the Bay side also, excepting four or five miles, and crossed the Cape half a dozen times on my way; but having come so fresh to the sea, I have got but little salted.

It was on a brisk day in January that I set out to walk, having asked my friend Rita to join me for the first part. We rode to the north end of the island, leaving my truck at the Pony Pens; she parked near the ferry station. We started out along a path through the sand dunes. With heavy cloud cover and a brisk wind rushing down the beach, it was ferociously cold.

On Thoreau’s first day of walking, along the Plains of Nauset, he and a companion met a storm. We walked with our umbrellas behind us, since it blowed hard as well as rained, with driving mists. Having seen plenty of storms at Ocracoke, I had no desire to encounter one today. I hoped the weatherman had been right when he said the rain would hold off until night.

“Are you sure you want to do this, Pat?” Rita asked me. I wondered myself, but told her that I would kick myself if I gave up.

This map of Cape Cod was one of the many maps of the cape that Thoreau drew. Drawing: Cape Cod Free Library

I gazed at the body of water separating us from Cape Hatteras. This inlet has opened and closed several times through the centuries, the last time being in 1846, when a storm breached the island. Now the Hatteras Inlet provides access for boats heading from Pamlico Sound to the Atlantic Ocean, and is a corridor for ferries traversing the short distance between the islands. We caught sight of an Ocracoke-bound ferry wending through the channel and also a fishing trawler heading through the Inlet and out into the ocean.

Fishing was one of the topics Thoreau wrote about, saying that it had replaced the production of salt, which once provided livelihoods for Cape Cod residents. Soon after passing the Highland Lighthouse, he described how he saw countless sails of mackerel fishers abroad on the deep, one fleet in the north just pouring round the Cape, another standing down toward Chatham.

Across the inlet we could see the water tower of Hatteras Village as well as that long stretch of sand known as the Point that extends from Cape Hatteras almost to Ocracoke. Thoreau said, referring to the name Cape Cod, that, I suppose that the word Cape is from the French cap; which is from the Latin caput, a head. My dictionary says that a cape is “a piece of land projecting into water.” I guessed that the strip of sand we stood on was technically a cape.

Rita and I walked along a scraggly shoreline where small, twisted and lifeless trees protruded from banks, and Sargassum weed, blackened by its tumultuous journey to land, draped the sand. We hopped across a stream of flowing water that gushed from a small pond where several species of ducks dabbled. We wandered across salt flats, picking up shells and bits of jetsam, and came across the remains of several jellyfish, what locals here call “jellyballs.” Even in death their bell shape and lovely translucence drew my attention.

Thoreau wrote of coming across similar forms on Cape Cod, saying that The beach was also strewn with beautiful sea-jellies; which the wreckers called sun-squall, one of the lowest forms of animal life, some white, some wine-colored, and a foot in diameter. I at first thought that they were a tender part of some marine monster, which the storm or some other foe had mangled. What right has the sea to bear in its bosom such tender things as sea-jellies? Strange that it should undertake to dangle such delicate children in its arm.

Finally Rita and I arrived at the sea. The elevation at Cape Cod is higher than Ocracoke’s, but otherwise Thoreau’s description could have been ours: […] crossing over a belt of sand on which nothing grew […] we suddenly stood on the edge of a bluff overlooking the Atlantic […] The waves broke on the bars at some distance from the shore, and curving green or yellow as if o […] so many unseen dams, ten or twelve feet high, like a thousand waterfalls, rolled in foam to the sand. There was nothing but that savage ocean between us and Europe.

Pat Garber walked the beach of Ocracoke Island (above) and said, “I studied Thoreau’s words, written more than 150 years ago, about the coastline of Cape Cod. I could have written the same today about the view that stretched before me.” Photo: Sam Bland

It was nearing time for Rita and me to part ways, so we found a protective dune to shield us as we ate our tuna fish sandwiches. She returned to her car and I, clutching my jacket tightly around me, set out in earnest, following this majestic ribbon of sand where, in Thoreau’s words, everything told of the sea.

The wind was at my back, not a hard wind but one that sent fine grains of sand scattering ahead of me, low to the ground, and produced the illusion that the land itself was in motion.

Thoreau described the wind as he and his companion trekked across what he called the Cape’s wrist; a migrating sand-bar in the air, which has picked up its duds and is off, to be whipped with a cat, not o’nine-tails, but of a myriad of tails, and each with a sting to it […] The sound of the breaking waves was like music, a very inspiriting sound to walk by, filling the whole air, that of the sea dashing against the land.

Brown pelicans are often seen “surfing” the air current above waves along North Carolina’s coast. Photo: Sam Bland

Before long I noticed that a pod of bottlenose dolphins was making its way along the shore, their graceful forms rising and falling just on the other side of the breakers. The ocean was a busy place here with brown pelicans riding air currents above the waves, herring gulls splashing into the waves and gannets — big, elegant white birds with black wing tips — diving a little farther out. The fishing must be good here, I decided. I set my pace to keep up with the dolphins, slowing down when they ran into better fishing, hurrying up when they moved ahead of me. I stayed beside them for about a mile, at which time they and the feasting birds disappeared. I think my traveling pals must have turned around and returned to the richer fishing grounds.

Thoreau’s encounter with cetaceans was not so pleasant to read about. Whaling was legal in 1849 and an important source of income on the Cape. Thoreau described the harvest of “blackfish” (probably similar to what we call pilot whales, a kind of dolphin) which he came across near Provincetown: In the summer and fall sometimes, hundreds of blackfish, fifteen feet or more in length, are driven ashore in a single school here. I witnessed such a scene in July, 1855 […] I counted about thirty blackfish, just killed, with many lance wounds, and the water was more or less bloody around […] The fisherman slashed one with his jackknife, to show me how thick the blubber was,–about three inches; and as I passed my finger through the cut it was covered thick with oil. The blubber looked like pork, and this man said that when they were trying it the boys would come sometimes round with a piece of bread in one hand, and take a piece of blubber in the other to eat with it.

“Trying” the blubber meant, I knew, heating it to render the oil. Here on Ocracoke, dolphins had been harvested in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their blubber “tried” for lamp oil. Try Yard Creek, one of the saltwater creeks that partially bisects the island, which I would be passing today, received its name from this practice.

Wildlife is abundant on Ocracoke Island. Garber writes about the animals she sees along her beach walk, such as a pod of bottlenose dolphins fishing in the breakers. Photo: Sam Bland

Other than Rita, I saw no other humans since leaving the village. Having the beach to myself was wonderful, and I found my thoughts reflected in Thoreau’s description of his1857 walk: […] that solitude was sweet to me as a flower. I sat down on the boundless level and enjoyed the solitude, drank it in, the medicine for which I had pined.

The shore I walked now was barely recognizable compared to the one I traversed before, but that came as no surprise. Ocracoke’s shoreline changes shape with every storm that churns her sands. Barrier islands are always on the move, migrating westward toward the mainland and sharing sand up and down the beaches. It is not a new phenomenon, as reflected in the following observation made by Thoreau: As I looked over the water, I saw the isles rapidly wasting away, the sea nibbling voraciously at the continent. Later in the book he remarked, Perhaps what the Ocean takes from one part of the Cape, it gives to another,–robs Peter to pay Paul.

There were not as many birds along the stretch of beach I approached now. I saw a great black-backed gull sitting near the dune line, and swooping across the water, too far away to identify, a few gulls searching for fish. Thoreau wrote about gulls he saw on the beach at Cape Cod in October, 1849, saying Mackerel-gulls were all the while flying over our heads and amid the breakers, sometimes two white ones pursuing a black one […] and we saw that they were adapted to their circumstances rather by their spirits than their bodies. Theirs must be an essentially wilder, that is less human nature, than that of larks and robins.

As I followed the shoreline, I became intrigued by a proliferation of what looked like artistic drawings in the sand in varying shapes and colors. They were somewhat circular but very irregular, sometimes connected, with two or three rings composed of differing colors of sand. I had seen them before and knew that their formation was due to interactions of wind, water and slope with sands of differing weights and textures. With such variety and somewhat ghoulish shapes, it was easy to imagine an artistic sense of humor behind their design.

This 1901 postcard shows pilot whales, a type of dolphin, stranded or driven onto a beach at Cape Cod, similar to what Thoreau saw at Provincetown.  Photo: American Antiquarian Society

Thoreau did not describe the same sand art I saw, but a similar phenomenon which I have often noted in my beach explorations. Talking about beach grass, he wrote: As it is blown about by the wind, while it is held fast by its roots, it describes myriad circles in the sand as accurately as if they were made by compasses.

Farther down the beach, I came upon the timbers of an old shipwreck, its bones laid open to view by recent wind and water. I turned to Thoreau’s words, written in 1849: The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not vomit up […] perhaps a piece of some old pirate’s ship, wrecked more than a hundred years ago, comes ashore to-day.

As I neared the place where I had left my truck, I noticed that the sky had grown darker. My brisk walk and heavy jacket had kept me warm, but now I felt raindrops patter against my jacket. So much for the weatherman’s prediction of a dry day! Oh well, as Thoreau had begun his day walking in the rain, it seemed fitting that I end mine the same way. He had written: The reader will imagine us, all the while, steadily traversing that extensive plain […] and reading under our umbrellas as we sailed, while it blowed hard and mingled mist and rain.

I was anxious to reach shelter, but I took a moment more to stand and gaze out across the water. The tide was coming in, and each wave, as it thrashed its way toward land, seemed intent on out-racing the last. Beyond this stretched the unwearied and illimitable ocean.

Wednesday: “The foam ran up the sand… as regularly as the master of a choir beats time with his white wand.”

Reprinted from the Island Free Press

Scallop fishermen scooped up brown algae from Chesapeake Bay. The brown tide all but wiped out the bay’s scallop fishery. Photo: NOAA

OCRACOKE — Fish kills, decreases in shellfish, murky brown water and loss of underwater grasses — these are things no one wants to see in their coastal community waters. But these are the effects of brown alga that are becoming more and more common in the estuaries of the eastern United States. Brown algae blooms, also known as tides, have, in the last 30 years, become a huge problem in such states as New York, Virginia, Florida and Texas.

The Labrador Current, a huge river of frigid water winding down through the ocean from the north, converges with the Gulf Stream, flowing with warm water from the south, just offshore of Hatteras and Ocracoke islands. Both streams pass through waters where brown algae flourish — Aureococcus anophagefferens to the north and Aureoumbra lagunensis to the south.

Is it just a matter of time before North Carolina’s estuaries are infected?

Nathan Hall gave a talk and slide show last week at the Ocracoke Community Center to explain what brown algae is and the dangers of having it show up in Pamlico Sound and other N.C. waters. The program was the last of four scheduled by the National Park Service to share knowledge with the public.

Hall works out of the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Sciences at its Coastal Environmental and Microbiological Processes Laboratory, trying to learn more about brown algae and how to prevent it from invading the state’s waters.

The first recorded brown algae bloom occurred in 1985 in the bays of New York. Five years later, there was a bloom in Texas of a separate but similar species of brown algae. Since then they have had repeated blooms and the two species have spread south, east and north, traveling most likely in the currents of the Labrador and Gulf Streams.

Nathan Hall says no one really knows why brown tides haven’t appeared in North Carolina. Photo: UNC

Algae, explained Hall, are a kind of phytoplankton — tiny unicellular plants that drift in the water. Like other plants, they require light and mineral nutrients, and they conduct the process known as photosynthesis by which they convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. Phytoplankton, including most algae, is an important part of the food web. There are several hundred species in Pamlico Sound, and they produce 80 percent of the food there. Tiny floating animals, known as zooplankton, feed upon them, and they are eaten by fish, shellfish and other species that live there.

Brown algae are much smaller than most phytoplankton and they can often out-compete and replace them. They do not contribute to a healthy food chain. In fact, their presence can lead to massive die-offs. What marine biologists call grazers — zooplankton, clams, oysters and other shellfish — stop growing and eventually die when they eat brown algae, or in the presence of it, cease to eat at all and starve. In New York’s Peconic Bay, commercial scallop harvests dropped to near zero when brown algae blooms showed up in the late 1980s and they have not yet recovered. Hard clams, or quahogs, likewise disappeared in Great South Bay off Long Island when brown tides began in the mid-1980s.

Clams, like oysters and other shellfish, are important natural water filterers that help keep estuary waters clean. Studies show that the time it took to filter Great South Bay dropped from three days in 1976 to three months in 2005 because of the clam die off. Laboratory tests of oyster larvae showed that few of those feeding on brown algae survived, and even fewer developed into adult oysters.

A researcher samples brown tide in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon system. Photo: Florian Koch, NOAA

Brown algae blooms drastically reduce light penetration, causing seagrass, an important marine habitat that requires a certain amount of light, to die. As seagrass beds disappear so do the many forms of life that depend on them. Studies at the Indian River Lagoon in Florida indicate that seagrass beds covering nearly 75,000 acres in 2009 dropped to fewer than 30,000 acres in just two years, after the onset of a brown algae bloom.

Large amounts of algae lead to oxygen depletion in coastal waters, which in turn leads to fish die-offs. Algae do not conduct photosynthesis at night but instead use up oxygen. When they die, their decomposition also reduces oxygen, especially near the bottom of estuaries. Reported fish kills in Florida’s water jumped nearly 400 percent during a brown tide in 2012.

Water infused with brown algae turns brown and murky, and while brown algae poses no known health threat to humans, it does not entice one to swim or kayak in it.

What causes brown tide blooms and how do they out-compete other phytoplankton? Hall was quite clear in his answer.  “We don’t know, but we do know that we don’t want them,” Hall said.

He and other scientists study the algae through such methods as pigment analysis, which tells how much and what kinds of phytoplankton are present; DNA analysis, which identifies species; and with satellite imagery, which shows how much is present over large areas. They go out in small boats to collect water samples, attach monitoring equipment to ferries, including the Hatteras Ferry, and use profiling buoys to check water at different depths.

They have learned that their small size gives brown algae an advantage, especially when light or nutrients are in low supply, because they have a larger surface area relative to their mass, which allows them greater absorption. They know that in a healthy pre-tide ecosystem there is a balanced mix of light, varied algae, nutrients, and grazers, whereas in a brown tide the brown algae dominates and reduces the other factors. They know that when brown algae form a small percentage of the total algae, grazers eat them as readily as other algae with no bad results, but when a brown tide is dominant, they stop eating or die.

Brown algae seem to have a higher tolerance for salinity than most other species, so that if drought raises the salinity of a body of water, they are more likely to survive. Like other algae, the brown species thrive in nutrient-rich water, particularly in the nitrogen and phosphorus found in fertilizers and animal waste. Agricultural and run-off and sewage are two of the main causes of algae blooms and subsequent fish kills.

Scientists know that once a brown tide is in effect, it is self-propagating, eliminating other kinds of algae. They do not know for sure, however, what causes brown tide blooms to begin.

“It’s the old chicken and egg problem,” Hall said. “Which comes first?”

Brown tide lives up to its name. Quantuck Bay on eastern Long Island under normal conditions, left, and under brown tide conditions when the brown tide alga dominates. Photos: Christopher Gobler, N.Y. Sea Grant

North Carolina’s Albemarle and Core sounds may have too much fresh water to encourage a major brown tide. But the Pamlico, which is the second largest estuary in the country and the most important nursery for Southeast fisheries, has salinity levels, temperatures, depths and nutrient loads similar to estuaries that have had brown tides.

OCRACOKE — Old-timers here believed that when an Ocracoker was going to die, the island’s roosters would crow repeatedly in mournful tones. On Sunday morning, March 9, the roosters along O’Neal Drive crowed non-stop, even as the news arrived that Wayne Teeter, a man who was “as Ocracoke as you could get,”  had just passed.

Teeter, 69, died in Carteret General Hospital in Morehead City. His funeral was Friday at the Assembly of God in Ocracoke.

Teeter was, according to his friend Jerry Midgett, “a true Ocracoker, who didn’t put on airs. What you saw was what you got.”

Wayne Teeter ran the Pony Island Restaurant and Tradewinds Bait and Tackle Shop and owned Ocracoke Crab Co. Photo: Ada Teeter

Involved in all aspects of Ocracoke life, Teeter was a commercial fisherman, a hunting guide and ran at various times the Pony Island Restaurant and the Tradewinds Bait and Tackle Shop, He also owned the Ocracoke Crab Co and served as a Hyde County commissioner. For those who didn’t know him in any other capacity, Teeter could be recognized as the owner of Blackbeard’s Ice Chest, which sits on the edge of his yard and dispenses ice for fishermen and beachgoers.

The son of Frank and Iona Teeter, Teeter was born in 1945 and grew up with his brother Carl, nicknamed Toad, in a house near Ocracoke’s British Cemetery.

Phillip Howard, owner of the Village Craftsmen, recalls playing with Teeter when they were young. “Running around, exploring Springer’s Point, swimming in the creek and gigging for flounder in Pamlico Sound,” Howard remembers.

Teeter had a Banker pony named Beauty, and during the 1950s he was a member of the Ocracoke’s mounted Boy Scout troop.

He attended Ocracoke School but did not finish his formal education. He often told people that “one of the biggest regrets of my life was that I dropped out of school in ninth grade.  I should have quit in the seventh.”

Teeter served in the Coast Guard for 10 years and greatly valued his service. Fishing and the Coast Guard were, according to his widow, Ada, his great loves.

While in the Coast Guard Wayne married Belinda Styron, an Ocracoke girl with a beautiful voice, and they lived in Morehead City until his discharge. They were together until her death in 2002.

Teeter eventually began spending time with Ada Fulcher, an island girl whom he had known all his life, and they were married nearly 10 years ago. “One day we took a walk,” she recalls, “and we never stopped walking.”

Returning to Ocracoke after the Coast Guard, Teeter ran several businesses as well as resuming the fishing career he loved. Rudy Austin recalls that they began pound netting and fishing for striped bass, called rockfish locally, together in the late 1970s. Wayne also fished off the beach, using dories to net speckled trout, drum and rockfish. He also was a clammer and crabber.

While running the Tradewinds, Teeter took duck and goose hunting parties to Portsmouth Island in his boat. He was the first fisherman, remembers Midgett, to plant and maintain clam beds behind the island.

Austin looks back with pleasure on a trip he and Teeter took, along with Peter Stone and Sambo Drake, in the late 1970s.  They delivered Stone’s 20-foot Sea Ox from Ocracoke to Florida, following the Intracoastal Waterway. “That was a good time,” Austin recalls.

Young friends: That’s Phillip Howard on the pony, Wayne Teeter in the striped shirt and Earl Gaskins. Insert: Wayne Teeter in the Coast Guard. Photos: Phillip Howard and Ada Teeter

Ben O’Neal, one of the pallbearers at Teeter funeral, drove the fish truck at Teeter’s Ocracoke Crab Co. for 10 years. He remembers that “Wayne always liked to give. He wanted to make money at the fish house, but he’d rather have one of the fishermen make money than himself.”

Danny Wynne, who sold his fish at Teeter’s fish house, said that Teeter had time for everybody, even the small fishermen who only had 50 or so pounds of fish. ”He helped out a lot of fishermen,” according to Danny.

Along with their home on Ocracoke, Teeter and Ada built a small house, “Teeter’s Camp,” on land Ada owned down Core Sound at the Straits in Carteret County. They also bought a pickup truck camper and began traveling around the United States.

Their yard always sported an impressive raised garden, with collards, onions, potatoes and other vegetables, as well as a few fruit trees. Teeter loved their garden, Ada, says, even though he never worked in it. She did the gardening, but she did it mostly for him.  He also loved to cook, says Midgett — “fish, ducks, geese, you name it,” and added his wife, he loved to eat.

Teeter also loved children and always took time with them, according to his friends. He had two step-daughters and two step-grandchildren, along with a niece and nephew and great nephews and nieces.

Always trying new activities, Teeter in the last few years had a crab shedding business in his garage, selling soft-shell crabs. He had just been out to his pound nets, floundering, says Ada, before his death, and he was getting ready to start shedding crabs again.

“He was one of a kind,” said old friend Earl Gaskins. “He always looked at the bright side of things.”

First of two parts

The winter marsh can appear impenetrable from a distance, but channels will take you inside where a whole world awaits.

OCRACOKE — Summer at Ocracoke finds lots of kayakers plying their paddles along the shores of Pamlico Sound, as residents and tourists alike take to the water. As the temperature fall, the experience of kayaking changes, but there is still plenty to see and enjoy while paddling around the island in the winter.

Warmer, water-proof clothes are a good idea on most days in the winter, and a wet or dry suit is ideal.  One advantage of kayaking in the winter is the absence of mosquitoes and flies.  If you go at high tide you will be less likely to run aground, but even at low tide there are channels that provide easy paddling. And don’t forget to bring your binoculars!

Pamlico Sound, which divides Ocracoke from the mainland, is one of the largest estuaries in the United States. It is home to all kinds of fish, skates, small sharks and turtles and attracts numerous species of ducks and other water birds. Its shallow, brackish waters make it an ideal nursery for fish, shrimp and crabs, and the salt marshes that line its shores are alive with mussels, marsh crabs, snails and secretive birds.

As you paddle across the water, look for patches of eelgrass waving softly underneath your kayak or piled up along the shores. You may see this same grass, dried to a grayish-black, piled up along the shore where wave and wind action has driven it. Eelgrass forms an underwater garden which is essential to the health of the sound.

Looking higher, you may see great strings of cormorants flying to and from the reefs where they feed. Cormorants are capable of diving to great depths in their search for fish. Social birds, they gather in the evenings. An occasional loon, dressed in the soft browns of its winter plumage, might be diving and surfacing in the dark waters, or you might hear its haunting but melodious cry. Most people think of loons as northern birds, but many winter on the N.C. coast. 

Canada geese, brants, pintails, black ducks and mergansers are among the many kinds of waterfowl that winter in the waters of the Pamlico. They’re easy to see with binoculars. Brown pelicans may be seen gliding in elegant formations along the surface of the water, and herring and ring-bill gulls are common.

There is much to see on the open waters of the Pamlico, and they are a great place for getting up speed and building muscles. The hidden creeks that lead into the salt marshes are, however, my favorite places to kayak.

From a distance the salt marsh looks like an impenetrable curtain, but creeks, often indiscernible until you are almost upon them, lead you into a hidden world. The marsh grasses take on a dark grey hue in winter. Spartina and black needle rush are the main components of the marsh. Near the waterline ribbed mussels cling to their roots, and on warm days small snails called marsh periwinkles climb up the stems.

The plaintive cry of the common loon is a familiar sound of the winter estuary.

Some of the creeks wind through maritime forests, where live oaks, yaupons — a kind of wild holly, wax myrtles and junipers, or cedar trees, grow together in a lush ecosystem. The bright red berries of the yaupon and the softer blue fruit of the cedars and wax myrtles attract yellow-rumped warblers and other songbirds.

Belted kingfishers are among my favorite winter residents, piercing the air with their distinctive call or diving kamikaze-like from a branch into the dark waters to emerge with a fish in its beak.

 Diamondback terrapins, some of my favorite warm weather favorites, bury down into the mud when temperatures drop, but on warm winter days they can be seen sunning on logs or popping their heads up through the water. In the early 20^th century these medium-size turtles were threatened with extinction when terrapin stew became a huge fad in New York. They are still rare in many places, but can often be seen at Ocracoke.

Late fall and winter are oyster-harvesting time, so if you are lucky to paddle up upon an oyster rock, you are allowed to take enough of the tasty mollusks for an oyster roast or stew. Be sure to follow the law and make sure the oysters are safe to eat. If you look carefully, you can see all manner of life that make their life among the oyster ecosystem: slipper shells, snail-fur, tube worm castings and the tiny pea, or oyster, crab

A good place to put your kayak in is at the public docks behind the Ocracoke Museum. Ride the Wind Surf & Kayak rents kayaks and has its own spot for launching at the edge of Silver Lake Harbor. Driving north along N.C. 12, there are several places you can slide a kayak down along one of the creeks. With four-wheel drive you can also drive down one the sandy lanes in the Cape Hatteras National Seashore to the Pamlico Sound and put in. You need to buy a permit to do this.  Be careful if you launch your kayak during duck-hunting season. There are a number of duck blinds in the shallows of the sound.

Wherever you go, don’t forget your life-preserver. It’s required by law.  

Happy paddling.

Tuesday: A winter’s hike on Ocracoke Island

OCRACOKE — Legend has it that Blackbeard buried his treasure on the island of Ocracoke, and every once in a while some enthusiastic believer goes treasure hunting for a stash of gold. He’s not likely to find buried gold, but there is most definitely treasure to be found on these barrier islands.

The beaches of our coast are often littered with interesting shells and other sea life, driftwood and odd flotsam– all gifts to the person who know what to look for.

Atlantic auger

The objects that litter the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean and Pamlico Sound are usually washed up by the tide and waves. They may come from a few feet out from the shore or from hundreds of miles away. They may be relatively new or thousands of years old. They may be naturally occurring, or include such man-made items as sea glass, pieces of old shipwrecks or even a note in a bottle, washed up on the beach from far away.

The best time to go beachcombing is at low tide, when the water has receded and the most of the beach is accessible. Use a tide chart, often found in local newspapers and bait and tackle shops, to learn when low tide is. The tides are lowest when there is a full or new moon. Early morning is also a good time to go, before other folks get out and pick up the prize shells. Shelling is especially good after a storm or hurricane, especially if the wind was blowing from the east.

Beaches along the Outer Banks offer the best beachcombing and shelling because long stretches of them are protected and they are closer to the Gulf Stream, that highway of water that flows along the Southeast coast. South of the Outer Banks shell collecting is fitful because the beaches are largely developed beaches and that the Gulf Stream is further offshore. If the Scotch bonnet is one of your target shells, as it is for many collectors, Portsmouth Island and Core Banks not to mention Ocracoke are your best bets for finding it.

Among the many kinds of shells, or mollusks, seen on the ocean beaches are calico scallops, lightening and channeled whelks, American cockles, Atlantic surf clams, and common jingle shells. Some of the favorite finds include moonshells, olive shells, American augers, and several species of wentletraps. Sawtooth pens, their shells so thin and fragile that you can almost see through them, can occasionally be found whole, and sometimes a stretch of beach will reveal dozens of tiny, colorful coquina shells. Scotch bonnets, the state shell of North Carolina, can often be found, and a lucky beachcomber might come across a prized emperor or queen helmet. Not too long ago one fortunate beachcomber found the paper-thin shell of a paper nautilus, a relative of the octopus, pushed by storm waves from its home in the deep sea.

Make sure that the shell you pick up is unoccupied before you take it home. Hermit crabs often use moonshells and whelk shells as mobile homes. They are not the kind that can be purchased in gift shops, and if you take them home they will soon die.

Most people search for perfect shells, but some of the most interesting ones are often battered and broken. Oyster shells come in all kinds of sizes, shapes and colors that may appeal to an artistic eye for use in jewelry-making or wind chimes.

Also of interest are the remains of other sea creatures. The carapace, for example, of blue, calico, or horseshoe crabs or the egg cases of whelks or skates are always nice finds. Several kinds of sea stars, often called starfish, sometimes wash up on the beaches in multitudes after storms and can be dried for display.

The southern end of Ocracoke, known as “South Point” is a good place to find sand dollars, a kind of echinoid with a lovely five-petaled design which bleaches white when dry.  The lucky beachcomber might happen upon that rare find, a perfectly coiled and dried sea horse, carried ashore from the Gulf Stream.

Occasionally the remains of a sea turtle or a great whale will wash ashore. Fascinating as it is to see them, do not take them with you. It is against the law to possess parts form endangered species, and there is a stiff fine for having them in your possession.

The beaches at Portsmouth Island, part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore, provides especially good opportunities for shelling, as they are less often visited by beachcombers. To get to Portsmouth you have to take a boat ride from Ocracoke and walk to the beach, or you can take your 4-wheel-drive vehicle on a ferry from Atlantic and drive north along the ocean shore.  It is worth the trip, as people often return with bucketfuls of whelks and other desirable shells.

Jane Chestnut is one of Ocracoke’s most ardent shell collectors. A resident of the island for 15 years now, she began coming to Ocracoke when just a child, picking up shells and other items she found. She learned to love beachcombing with her grandmother and her mother, who often left their home in Rocky Mount to vacation at Atlantic Beach.

Jane and her husband often go shelling on the Ocracoke beach, and when possible take a boat to Portsmouth Island. Jane makes jewelry using her shell treasures and sells it at Ride the Wind Surf Shop, her and husband’s surf shop. Not only does she use the shells themselves, she uses molding compounds to make molds of the shells and fashions silver casts of the originals. She also uses the shells in other designs, including a spectacular glass covered coffee table, which contains intricate designs, all fashioned out of shells she has found. She makes mirrors bordered with scallop shells and Christmas ornaments from sand dollars and white scallop shells.

Some of Jane’s favorites include helmet shells, tulip shells, wentletraps and bittersweets. Once she found a real treasure, a dried sea horse, at the beach near the Pony Pens, and after one storm her husband found a 14-inch horse conch. Atlantic carrier shells, whose middles contain a gooey substance to which other bits of shell cling, are also some of her favorites.

The treasures that can be discovered walking the beaches of North Carolina’s Outer Banks are endless, but if you really want to enjoy them, take the time to learn the natural history of the creatures that left them behind. The Ocracoke Museum has on display an extensive shell collection, donated by Ruth Cochran’s family, with interesting bits of information about each mollusk. The N.C. Coastal Federation also has a shellfish collection on display at its headquarters in Ocean in Carteret County. Or you can read more about them in any of a number of books on Atlantic seashores. Behind each shell, each piece of flotsam, each skeletal remain, is a story, and these stories are the real treasures to be found on the beaches of Ocracoke and Portsmouth Islands.

Seashell Resources

• N.C. Aquariums
• N.C. Shell Club
• Our State magazine

A commercial fisherman works the still waters around Ocracoke Inlet.

OCRACOKE — Off the coast of eastern North Carolina lies the remote, uninhabited island of Portsmouth, renowned for birds, seashells, surf fishing and history. Getting there from neighboring Ocracoke requires a boat ride through the serene beauty of Ocracoke Inlet. Along the way, you may learn about pirates’ lairs, Civil War forts and an effort to save one of the last remaining brown pelican rookeries in the state.

Part of Cape Lookout National Seashore, Portsmouth Island has beautiful ocean beaches and soundside marshes that stretch its 22-mile length. Superior fishing, beachcombing and shelling await those who visit.

History also beckons. At its northern end, not far from the island of Ocracoke, stands what is left of a once vibrant and important port. Big sailing ships once stopped there for “lightering.” Their cargo would be transferred to smaller boats that could safely transverse the shallow inlet and Pamlico and Core sounds.  Commerce faded and fishing replaced shipping as the primary occupation for the islanders.

The U.S. Life-Saving Service opened a station on Portsmouth in 1894, which played a vital role in the community for 50 years. Steadily the population declined, though.  Only 17 residents lived on the island in 1956. The last two left in 1971.

The National Park Service took over the island when the seashore was created five years later. Now a ghost town, the village is maintained as a cultural resource, with a visitors’ center and public access to the old church, the lifesaving station and several of the old homes.

Rudy Austin

There is no state ferry service to the old village on the northern end of Portsmouth, but Austin Boat Tours, owned by brothers Rudy and Donald Austin, carries passengers from Ocracoke to Portsmouth on a regular basis. The Austins captain two 24-foot skiffs, each capable of carrying up to 15 people. The ride to Portsmouth takes about 15 to 20 minutes, but it is much more than just a boat ride. The Austins, who grew up on Ocracoke, are a wealth of information about all things related to the islands, and they are more than happy to share their knowledge. Don’t expect a canned speech, though. The Austins are born storytellers, and they entertain their customers with their wit and knowledge.

Rudy, the elder brother, explains that their father, Junius Austin, began the business years ago. He had, for 20 years, been the caretaker of the Portsmouth Life-Saving Station, which became a hunting and fishing club after it closed. Junius sometimes took people to Portsmouth in his skiff, but business increased and prospered after the seashore was established. Rudy and Donald took over the business after their father died. Rudy’s son, Wade, sometimes helps out.

Deserted Portsmouth Village offers a taste of life long ago on North Carolina’s barrier islands. Photo: Friends of Portsmouth Island

Now they run the boats seven days a week in the summer, weather permitting, and on demand at other times. “But I’m not going over in any thunder squalls,” Rudy said emphatically.

They also take out school and church groups, sometimes using both boats. At the end of December each year they transport assorted bird watchers to the island for the annual Christmas bird count, a nation-wide citizen-science bird monitoring project.

“They’re an interesting group,” says Rudy. “Some come from as far away as Michigan.”

Every other year the brothers ferry people across for the Portsmouth Homecoming, sponsored by the Friends of Portsmouth Island.  A lot of people go, including the descendants of the residents who once lived there. “It’s a great way to encourage young people to get involved,” Rudy notes.

As the boat leaves Silver Lake Harbor in Ocracoke, the captain might mention that the harbor, then known as the “Creek,” was shallow and unnavigable before the Navy dredged it for its ships in World War II. He might follow up by describing what happened when the war came to the Outer Banks, with German submarines attacking merchant ships in plain sight of the islanders.

Then he’ll point out Hog Shoal, alive at low tide with a variety of water birds. He may steer the boat close to Beacon Island, famous for the number of brown pelicans, terns, and other sea birds which nest there each spring. The island is itself rich with history, having been the site of the Civil War fort, Fort Ocracoke, which was burned by federal troops in 1861. Erosion from storms has eaten away at the island, and it is now the focus of a joint project by the N.C. Coastal Federation and Audubon North Carolina, which are using oyster shells to build a protective reef around it. James Barrie Gaskill, an Ocracoke native and a federation board member, is leading the effort.

A brown pelican watches over her chicks on Beacon Island, one of the last pelican rookeries in the state. Photo: Todd Miller

Volunteers plant grasses to restore the salt marsh at Springer’s Point on Ocracoke Island.

In the distance, you can be seen what is left of Shell Castle, once a significant island in itself. Wharves and warehouses, used by the ships that passed through Ocracoke Inlet, lined its shores. Before the Ocracoke Lighthouse was built in 1823, there was a wooden lighthouse there. The island, which built up around a huge oyster reef, has almost disappeared.

“Things change,” says Rudy. “Everything changes.”

The boat ride may include a swing by Ocracoke’s South Point, with a chance to see Blackbeard’s hideout, Springer’s Point, and Teaches Hole, where he anchored his ship. The 122-acre Springer’s Point Preserve is owned by the N.C. Coastal Land Trust and boasts over a mile of estuarine shoreline, parts of which are eroding because of waves generated across Pamlico Sound and boat wake from a nearby navigation channel. Local people, the land trust and the federation are working to restore the site.

Whatever route it takes, the ride is sure to be interesting and informative. “We try to educate the people on birds, turtles, dolphins, shells, whatever they want to know,” Rudy says

Approaching Portsmouth, the boat slows to navigate the shallow and winding channel. The steeple of the church is visible in the distance, as well as Haulover Dock, now under repair by the Park Service. The captain hands out maps and directions to guide visitors to the beach and the village, with instructions to be back in a little more than three hours. For those who want to go to the beach, Rudy says with a laugh, “I tell them walk to the ocean and turn left. If you turn right, we may not see you again for days!”

To take the ride to Portsmouth Island, book ahead and then come to the dock behind the Ocracoke Waterman’s Exhibit, next to the Community Store in the heart of the village. The round trip ride to Portsmouth costs $20 a person, and the entire excursion lasts four hours. Be sure to bring bug spray and water if the weather is warm, and be prepared for a memorable, rewarding adventure.

Related Stuff

• Blackbeard: Ocracoke’s most famous visitor
• Brown Pelicans: A conservation success story
• Destruction of Fort Ocracoke in 1861
• History of Portsmouth Island
• U.S. Life-Saving Service

The map shows the widespread distribution of the invasive form of phragmites. Source: The University of Georgia – Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health Phragmites Profile Here’s some facts about phragmites from the Chesapeake Bay Program. Appearance Feathery seed plumes at the top of round, erect stems. Young plants have purplish-brown seed plumes that turn tan or whitish as the plant matures. Sheath-like leaves that grow 2 feet long and taper to a point at the tip Gray-green foliage during the growing season. In autumn, foliage turns brown and most leaves drop off, leaving only the feathery plumes. Can grow to 15 feet tall Habitat Grows in fresh and brackish wetlands and along river banks and shorelines Also common in disturbed places such as ditches, roadsides and dredged areas Forms large, dense stands that crowd out other plants Range Grows throughout North America The invasive species is native to Europe and Asia Reproduction, Life Cycle Feathery plumes begin to appear in June. By August, they are filled with seeds. Plants cross-pollinate in late August and early September In autumn, phragmites sheds its seeds. Wind and water spread the seeds. By the first frost, the plant’s food reserves move from its leaves to its rhizomes. The leaves die and fall off, leaving only dead brown stems and plumes. Also spreads rapidly by rhizomes. Phragmites rhizomes form a dense underground network that can be several feet deep and spread several feet horizontally in a single season. New seedlings begin to grow in early spring of the next year Other Facts Also known as common reed or reed grass Phragmites comes from the Greek word Phragma meaning “fence” Unlike many native wetland plants, phragmites is not a valuable food source for waterfowl

Driving along the winding lanes that border marshlands in eastern North Carolina, you might notice a tall, lovely grass, its feather-like tassels rustling gently as it sways in the breeze. It looks natural in its wetland setting, as if it has always been there; and in fact it has lived here for thousands of years.

Something, however, is now different.

A century ago the reed would have been part of a complex ecosystem comprised of many plant species, supporting a wide variety of animal life. Today it most likely dominates its habitat, forming a monoculture that is unnatural and uninviting for many of the animals that live in the marsh. The reed now acts as an invasive rather than a native species, destroying other natives and creating a vista that is nearly barren of other life forms.

Phragmites australis, otherwise known as common reed, is a species of wetland grass usually found in low-lying areas where there is a large amount of water in the soil and ample sunlight. It can grow from three to 13 feet high, reaching its maximum height between the ages of five and eight years. It has cane-like stems, large feathery plumes and an extensive root system of thick, white, leathery rhizomes that may be close to the surface or buried deep in the soil. Its flowers are arranged along the canes in spikelets with tufts of silky hair-like fibers. A perennial, it spreads by dispersing its seed and branching out from its horizontal underground stem, or rhizome, which can break off and re-root.

Each plant produces stands of clones which are genetically identical, noted Jack M. Whelston, a professor at Clemson University, and can exist for over a thousand years.

It isn’t surprising then that the common reed is one of the most widely distributed flowering plants in the world, growing naturally on most of the continents and now throughout the continental United States, barring Alaska, and in Canada. Why and how it changed its behavior in the United States from that of an uncommon native marsh resident to that of a non-native has puzzled scientists for years.

Some 50,000 species of non-native plants and animals have been documented living in the United States, some introduced on purpose, others by accident. Some, such as dandelions and Queen Anne’s-lace, often referred to as exotics, can co-exist with native species without doing any real harm. Others, labeled as invasive, can wipe out native species and destroy whole ecosystems. Examples are the Japanese vine kudzu, found in the Southeast; zebra mussels, which are devastating the Great Lakes; and Burmese pythons, now proliferating in the Everglades of Florida. Invasive species have been responsible for massive die-offs of elm, chestnut and other native trees. It is estimated that the economic cost of invasive species in this country is $120 billion a year, and phragmites is now included.

Recent research has come up with some answers to the mystery of the “uncommon” common reed in America. According to the N.C. Forest Service and a report by the state Department of Transportation, genetic testing shows that there are native and non-native families of phragmites growing in our coastal marshes. It is the non-native plants that are overtaking wetland ecosystems.

They probably arrived accidentally in the late 18^th or early 19^th centuries, perhaps in the ballast of ships coming from Europe. Once here, they began spreading out across the continent, displacing the native plant and other native grasses, and forming monocultures where there had been healthy ecosystems.  They are presently moving into the Great Plains, where they threaten to alter important habitat for several endangered species of birds.

Through genetic research scientists have identified as many as 11 haplotypes or strains of Phragmites australis, which may help to explain the deviant behavior.  The invasive, European variety is now far more common now in North Carolina than the native plants. They can be found growing in tidal and non-tidal brackish and saltwater marshes, along river edges, on the shores of lakes and ponds, in disturbed areas and pristine sites. They are especially common in roadside ditches. Described by Whelston as “ecosystem engineers,” they can alter entire aquatic ecosystems as they spread, reducing the productivity of fish, shellfish, birds and other wildlife. They do provide shade, some food and nesting sites for a limited number of species.

The European strain of these plants is grown commercially in Europe and used for thatching, livestock feed and cellulose production. Ironically, European phragmites is in decline in their original territory, causing concern because of their economic value.

It is difficult to distinguish the non-native from the native reeds without genetic testing, but generally, large stands of phragmites, such as one often sees growing along roadsides, can be assumed to be the European invasive. Phragmites may also be confused with the native giant cordgrass, spartina cynosuroides.

While it at times can be pretty, phragmites invading many of our coast’s marshes, creating a sterile monoculture.

Eliminating or controlling non-native phragmites is now a priority with North Carolina’s wetland management organizations and many environmental groups, but the job is difficult and labor intensive. Attempts to eradicate it have included burning, cutting, draining, flooding, disking, mowing and using insects and herbicides. Some of these methods have worked in the short term, but were ineffective over the long run.

Using the herbicide Glyphosate, which is labeled for use in aquatic sites, has been found to be somewhat effective. Using herbicides in wetlands, however, presents an environmental risk, so must be done with great care. The forest service has had success treating the reeds with Glyphosate in late summer and early fall, followed by prescribed burns and successive treatments for several more years. It is imperative, the agency stresses, to follow up with monitoring to prevent the reeds from re-invading.

As always, the first step in addressing an environmental concern is identifying the problem and preventing its spreading. The invasive phragmites australis already had a head start before it was identified as what it was, but now, as scientists learn more about it and how to remove it, perhaps North Carolina’s wetlands can be spared the worst of its effects.

OCRACOKE — A gusty winter wind tugged at my jacket as I scrambled along the shore of Pamlico Sound, gathering up handfuls of dead, grayish seagrass and stuffing them into a brown paper sack. I filled four bags before turning back and heading home, pleased with myself and day-dreaming about a spring garden.

I would soon tuck the eelgrass in the sacks around my dormant plants. The mulch would protect them and eventually break down into a nutritious fertilizer. I have been mulching my flowers and vegetables with seagrass, washed up on soundside beaches, since I moved here years ago. Its value as a garden-enhancer, however, is tiny compared to the grass’ immense importance to our coastal environment.

If you look out across the great expanse of Pamlico Sound, you can see buffleheads swimming and diving, least terns plummeting into the dark waters or the head of an occasional diamond back terrapin popping above the water’s surface. There is little indication from above, however, of the wealth of life that may lie below. Only a few feet below the surface, expansive beds of eelgrass and shoal grass form underwater gardens where life flourishes. The estuaries of coastal North Carolina have about 200,000 acres of these aquatic plants. Known to scientists as submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV, they play an important role in safeguarding the entire coastal ecosystem.

Shoal grass beds are less common in North Carolina estuaries than eelgrass. Photo: Seagrass Recovery

More than 150 species of fish and marine invertebrates – 30 are important commercial species — use these grasses as adults or juveniles. The grass beds are nurseries for blue crabs, pink shrimp and spotted sea trout and provide habitat for juvenile fish and small species such as mummichogs and pipefish.  The beds form hunting grounds for larger predators such as flounders, red drum and rays. Shellfish such as bay scallops attach to the surface of these seagrasses before reaching adulthood. Waterfowl such as brant and widgeons depend on eelgrass as an important food source.

The grasses also enhance the health of other marine habitats by providing oxygen for coastal waters, reducing turbidity and lessening the effects of turbulence. Their roots stabilize the bottom and the grasses themselves reduce storm damage to shoreline by lessening wave action. Eelgrass is also an efficient biological filter that removes harmful pollutants from the water.

Changes in seagrass coverage can be a sensitive indicator of water quality and overall estuary health, said Mark Fonseca, a scientist with NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center in Beaufort. He calls them “the canaries of the estuaries.”

There are at least 50 species of seagrasses, but here in North Carolina’s estuaries the main ones are Zostera marina , or eelgrass, and to a lesser degree Halodule wrightii, or shoal grass. Coastal North Carolina is a unique blend, for it is on the southern-most boundary of the eelgrasses and the northern-most extent of shoal grass. Most beds in the state occur in waters less than six feet deep because of their requirements for light. They need clear water to survive.

Seagrasses are not true grasses, being more closely related to lilies. They are flowering plants. The flowers of eelgrass are enclosed in sheathes at the leaves’ bases and their fruits are bladder-like and will float. Shoal grass is among the most grass-like of the different species. Sea grasses live in a harsh environment, with their roots fixed in a bottom of sulfide-ridden sediments toxic to most plants, forming underwater meadows.

A small scallop clings to a blade of eelgrass. Photo: John Carroll

During the 1930s there was a massive die-off of eelgrass in northern Atlantic waters. Ninety percent of the beds were lost to what was called the “wasting disease.” Its causes are still not fully understood. There has been some recovery since then, but seagrasses are still a matter for concern. Here in North Carolina, the more eastern beds of grasses, which have high salinity, seem to be stable with possible exceptions in southern estuaries. Beds nearer the coast, however, in the western parts of Pamlico, Albemarle, and Currituck sounds, have been in decline since the 1970s, with losses of 50 percent or more in these low salinity areas. Studies show that grasses are declining on a national and global level.

While the reasons for the decline are not fully understood, scientists think that runoff from the mainland is the main cause. It overloads the estuaries with nutrients and sediment overload, which leads to excessive amounts of nitrates in the water and a reduction in light. Warmer water temperatures are also believed to contribute, causing reduced grass shoot density, a decrease in leaf and root development and alterations in internal carbon and nitrogen compositions. Disturbance by channel dredging, filling submerged bottoms and trawling in areas of grass cause further decline, and the effects of climate change and sea level rise are now being assessed.

The Rachel Carson Reserve near Beaufort has been the site of a seagrass restoration effort whose partners include the N.C. Coastal Federation. Photo: N.C. Coastal Reserve.

The distribution, abundance and density of seagrasses vary seasonally and from year to year, making it more difficult to monitor and protect, noted Patricia Smith, a spokeswoman for the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries. Mounting concern over the health and well-being of the grass beds and the life that depends on them has led to new efforts to protect them. State agencies have been mapping the beds since 1981, and recent mapping efforts using sophisticated GPS devices have identified at least 139,000 acres of SAV along 75,000 miles of coastal shoreline.

In 2006 an agreement was signed by 25 state agencies, universities and conservation groups, creating the N.C. SAV Partnership, dedicated to promoting conservation efforts to protect the state’s submerged grass beds.

The N.C. Habitat Protection Plan, which was updated in 2010, identifies the protection of the grasses as a priority. It has determined that “the monetary value of the ecosystem services provided by SAV, such as waste management, food production, and climate regulation are very high.” The plan contains new information on the ecological understanding of eelgrass and shoal grass, including the light and water quality conditions needed for healthy grass beds.

Plans to protect and improve the grass habitat include the maintaining strong rules to control stormwater, a modified definition for seagrasses and revising rules for building docks. Certain kinds of fishing gear are prohibited in grass beds, including trawlers, oyster and clam dredges, hand tongs and clam rakes more than a foot wide. The state does not permit shellfish leases or the seeding of oyster cultch in grass beds SAV and rules prohibit new dredging and filling in areas with grass beds.

Seagrasses are also protected by the U.S. Corps of Engineers, which in 2012 implemented new regulations which forbid the disturbance of grass beds.

With the current levels of concern and the actions being taken for their protection, it is hoped that North Carolina’s underwater gardens of eelgrass and shoal grass will remain stable or increase, thus ensuring the many benefits they provide

OCRACOKE — Ocracoke Island is surrounded by historic, shallow-water oyster beds, which have provided the island with protection from waves during storms and delicious seafood for islanders and visitors.

In recent years, however, oyster reefs have suffered a dramatic decline, reducing them to a fraction of their former expanse. This decline has been occurring all along the coast, but Ocracoke’s losses have been especially alarming. “The oysters thrive for a short while” says James Barrie Gaskill, a commercial fisherman on the island and a board member with the N.C. Coastal Federation, “but they are dead before their fourth year.”

A collaborative effort by state officials, environmental groups and local fishermen is underway to understand and reverse the losses. Currently, the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries is working with Ocracoke watermen on a new approach to restoring healthy oysters in the area.

James Barrie Gaskill is among the Ocracoke commercial fishermen who will help the state create oyster reefs.

Their efforts began with a meeting in early January at the Ocracoke Waterfront Museum, where state biologist Clay Caroon listened to fishermen from the Ocracoke Working Watermen’s Association share their opinions and suggestions about the best sites for new reefs. The fishermen mapped out sites that they thought would work, and the NCDMF took the information with them.  The fishermen told Caroon that they would help create oyster reefs in productive and workable areas near Ocracoke.

Oyster reefs are valuable marine habitat. They filter and clean the water as they feed, and provide important habitat for many marine species. Common oysters, a species of marine mollusk known to scientists as Crassostrea virginica, are free-floating in their larval stage, but once they attach to a bottom they develop into small oysters called spat and stay put. They often attach to one another and form huge congregates known as oyster reefs.

The state has been creating oyster reefs up and down the coast, and it currently has 10 oyster sanctuaries in Pamlico Sound, where no harvesting is allowed. Barges lay out oyster shell or marks, called cultch, which attract oyster larvae to attach and eventually develop as oysters. According to Caroon, the division’s long-term oyster sanctuaries that are in high salinity areas like Ocracoke do well for the first few years. After three or four years, however, they begin to fail, and the oysters die. It is believed that predation by crabs, boring sponges, oyster drills, and fish, particularly sheepshead, are mainly responsible.  The recent failure of the state’s Ocracoke Oyster Sanctuary, near the Le-High shipwreck, is attributed primarily to infestation by boring sponges and oyster drills, which thrive in high salinity.

The division also seeds oysters for public use. They have conducted such projects in the Ocracoke area since the 1980s, the last being in 2010. These cultch planting sites, different from the sanctuaries, produce fast-growing oysters which can be harvested in 18 to 24 months.

“This Cultch Planting Program,” said Caroon, “is funded specifically for public harvest. The ecosystem enhancement is an added benefit.”

To make the program successful, “we rely on fishermen and the public,” Caroom said.

What makes this approach different is the decision to seed the cultch in many small areas of sand and to scatter the shells and marl very thinly, in hopes of reducing infestation by boring sponges and oyster drills. Large, high-density beds seem to lead to more die-offs. , so what they want is lots of sites without such high density. With multiple sites the watermen can then have more places to work. The oysters should be harvested in about two years, before they die.

The state uses barges to distribute oyster shells and marl to create reefs.

One of the considerations in planting the cultch is the presence of submerged aquatic plants such as eelgrass and shoal grass. Eelgrass, often referred to locally as seaweed, is an important component of the sound’s ecosystem, providing habitat and food for marine species such as crabs, shrimp and finfish. The oyster beds are supposed to avoid grass beds, but some of the best oyster beds have, according to local watermen, been in or near grass beds.  The sites they are looking for are sandy bottoms with grass growing around them.

Many of these are in shallow waters which previously could not be reached by barges, but NCDMF now has a shallow-draft barge which makes them accessible. Once the sites are harvested and cleared of shells, Caroon said, they could be replanted, if deemed productive.

David Hilton, an Ocracoke fisherman and a former member of the Marine Fisheries Commission, is president of the Ocracoke Seafood Company. He is excited about the agreement. He said that after working for several years to get a permit for seeding oysters, the watermen’s association finally succeeded last summer. The association now has an oyster bed behind the island, east of Oyster Creek, where fishermen planted two to three truckloads of cultch last summer.

Ocracoke waterman Gene Ballance, who has been mapping old oyster beds in Pamlico Sound for about 10 years, is also optimistic. He says he has been seeding oysters for years, but with limited success. He more recently began working with the N.C. Coastal Federation, the Audubon Society and the N.C. Land Trust to restore oyster reefs as protection against storm destruction, in areas off Springer’s Point and on Beacon Island.

This spring Iky Oneal, Stevie Wilson, Ballance and other local fishermen will head out into the Pamlico Sound in their skiffs, working with the state to search for small shallow areas with sandy bottoms that appear to be good oyster territory. Using GPS location devices, they will record the sites, and state will mark them with PVC pipes. When the water temperature reaches about 70 degrees, ideal for setting spat sometime between April and June, state biologists will return to Ocracoke. Using a newly purchased shallow-draft large, they will distribute oyster-shell cultch in the designated sites, in hopes that oyster larvae will attach to the shells and grow into harvestable oysters.

Ocracoke fishermen and Marine Fisheries officials alike are hopeful that this time their efforts will succeed, and Ocracoke’s historic shallow-water oyster beds will once again provide winter-time jobs for local fishermen, as well as cleaner water and marine life habitat.

OCRACOKE — On a chilly morning in January, an unlikely group of men, women and children congregated around a large wooden table in a rambling old building on an Ocracoke Island dock. Warmed by an old-fashioned pot-bellied wood stove, they studied the array of oddly shaped objects on the table.

Their common interest was drawn to what scientists know as Crassostrea virginica, or the eastern oyster.  The group had come together to start a research project that will study the larvae, or spat, of local oysters.

They gathered around the old pot-bellied stove in Ocracoke to learn how to save the oyster. Photo: Pat Garber

Ocracoke resident Elizabeth Hanrahan, coordinator of the Ocracoke Foundation’s “Outdoor Classes” project, had teamed up with Troy Alphin and Marc Tarano to organize the meeting. Alphin is with the Center for Marine Science’s Benthic Ecology Lab at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Tarano is with North Carolina Sea Grant. Their mission is to train volunteers to participate in the university’s project to monitor baby oysters, or spat. It’s part of a multi-faceted approach to learn more about the causes and solutions to the recent decline in North Carolina’s oyster populations.

Jennifer Garrish, Ocracoke School’s science teacher, was among those huddled around the table. She is encouraging her students to fulfill their community service hours required for graduation by participating in the project. James Barrie Gaskill was also at the table along with Robyn Payne. An Ocracoke commercial fisherman and a N.C. Coastal Federation board member, Gaskill has been actively involved in oyster restoration. Payne is president of the Ocracoke Foundation, which provided the space for the meeting. An assortment of local men, women and children interested in oyster restoration filled out the group.

Along with being a popular food and a valuable source of jobs, oysters play several important roles in marine ecosystems. They filter water as they feed, and studies show that one oyster can filter 25 to as much 50 gallons of water a day in their quest for food. In the process they cycle nutrients and nitrogen through the water and clean the water of pollutants. Oyster reefs provide habitat for a large array of marine life, including algae, barnacles, mussels, sea squirts and tube worms. Small fish and crabs take refuge among the shells, feeding and providing food for other sea life. As biogenic structures, oyster reefs provide erosion control for the marshes and lessen the damaging effects of waves during storms.

North Carolina’s oysters have been declining as a result of over-harvesting, increased stormwater runoff and the resulting pollution, disease, habitat destruction and the influx of invasive species. Locally, siltation, salinity, water temperatures and infestation by boring sponges effect oyster survival.

Oyster restoration has, therefore, become a high priority in state and university research. It has been determined that the best way to bring oysters back is to build reefs from oyster shells, known as cultch.  Oyster restoration projects coordinated by the Ocracoke Working Waterman’s Association and the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries at Ocracoke include placing loose and bagged oyster shell at promising sites located by local watermen.

Before oyster restoration can begin, it is important to understand the oyster’s life cycle. Oysters release pheromones and gametes — eggs and sperm — into the water. The newly formed oyster larvae float freely at first and may travel relatively long distances in their first 10 to 14 days, depending on the tides and currents. They must then find a place to attach, or “set,” however, or they will die. Their favorite material for attaching is oyster shell, which they identify by touch and by “tasting” the bottom. When the oyster larvae touch an oyster shell, they stop. These tiny oysters are called spat

The oysters continue to grow, some as singles and some in clusters. Oysters which live in clusters have more protection from predators such as blue crabs, whelks and large oyster drills. They also have more effective reproduction. Although the eastern oyster does not have a deterministic lifestyle and may live a decade or more, most oysters in Ocracoke waters die, according to Gaskill, by the time they reach four years of age.

Oyster spat as seen through a microscope. Photo: Skip Kemp

UNCW has been studying North Carolina oysters since 1993, and Troy Alphin, Martin Posey and Tarano first started the volunteer project in 2007. Since then, there have been more than 70 different monitoring sites in North Carolina. Today there are 47 active sites, with 186 volunteers, including four or five school groups. The majority of sites have been along North Carolina’s southern coast, so setting up the new sites in the more northerly waters of Ocracoke is an important step.

In order to know where to put the oyster cultch, said Alphin, it is necessary to know where and when the larvae are in the water column, the density of larval set, how much habitat is available and variation in settlement patterns. His oyster spat monitoring project focuses on the last of these. It is designed to determine the “density of set,” which means how many oyster spat settle in a certain area in a certain length of time.

The study, Alphin explained, uses old ceramic tiles, which have been found to attract oyster spat at about the same rate as oyster shell. The tiles are tied together in a “spat racks.”  Each site requires two racks with tiles, a thermometer for testing air and water temperature and a hydrometer for testing water salinity. The cost of outfitting a site is $45 to $50.  A waterproof notebook is provided for making notes.  The first spat rack is set up in waters and at levels where oysters are believed to attach, and left for six weeks before being retrieved and recorded. After four weeks the second rack is set nearby, also for six weeks, and then examined. This process is repeated over and over.

Researchers want to know how many live oysters, how many “oyster scars” — left by dead oyster spat — how many barnacles, how many barnacle scars and what associated fauna are to be found on the tiles after a six week period. This will tell them where, when and how densely the spat are in the water column. Volunteers are also asked to record such things as cloud cover, rough seas and the presence of worm tubes, Bryzoans, sponges, hydrozoans and sea squirts on the tiles.  UNCW then makes the data obtained from the study available for other researchers and state officials to use.

“The result is a completely unique data set that provides a picture of when and where oysters recruit along the north, central, and southeastern coast of North Carolina,” Alphin noted.

Learn More

• Federation’s oyster habitat restoration program
• Oyster reefs could combat global warming
• From lifeless shells to a vibrant reef
• Restoration is good for business

OCRACOKE — Ocracoke Island had an unexpected visitor last week. Announced by the pings from her tracking device, maybe the most famous – legendary, even — shark outside of Hollywood swam along the island’s shore and briefly entered Ocracoke Inlet.

The Northern Atlantic great white shark, which has attained Internet fame as “Mary Lee,” is 16 feet long and reportedly weighs an amazing 3,456 pounds. She is one of 36 sharks—22 of them great whites–being tracked by scientists from the research facility, Ocearch. The mature female had been captured, outfitted with a tracking beacon on her dorsal fin and released on Sept. 17 off Cape Cod, and the world has followed her travels ever since.

Mary Lee has swum up and down the East Coast, going as far south as Jacksonville, Fla. Every time she rises to the surface, the beacon on her dorsal pings a satellite and a dot appears on people’s computer screens. Millions have logged onto the Internet to eagerly see the latest whereabouts of Mary Lee. Newspapers write about her coming visit, and bloggers note what she eats and speculate where she’ll next appear. A Google search for “Mary Lee shark” results in over a million hits. She even has her own Twitter account, and her Facebook page has more than 20,000 fans. It seems safe to say that no shark since that malevolent creature in “Jaws” has so captured the public’s attention.

Mary Lee is tagged aboard the Ocearch research vessel. Photo: Ocearch

A Web site tracks the movements of Mary Lee every time she comes to the surface. Photo: Ocearch

“It’s thrilling that she’s become a rock star,” said Chris Fischer, one of the researchers at Ocearch. The shark he named after his mother has become, he said, “the most historic and legendary shark” ever tagged.

Fischer said that when one of the sharks being tracked swims too close to populated areas, he gives notice so that people can stay safe. That is what he did when Mary Lee approached Ocracoke on Jan. 21.

Ocearch first contacted the Hyde County Sherriff”s Dept., which called the Cape Hatteras National Park Service office at Ocracoke. Josh Vann, who took the call, immediately put it on Facebook. He then drove the beaches to make sure there were no surfers in the water, and he warned several fishermen who were fishing in the surf.

“She was very close to Ocracoke, North Carolina, either right on the beach right in front of it or actually inside the sound, nearby,” Fisher told CNN the next day. “A few hours later, she popped out off shore. She was very near there.”

It was Mary Lee’s second close encounter to the N.C. coast. She hung around the Cape Fear River for several days in early December.

Ocearch is a non-profit dedicated to studying the giants of the ocean. Begun by Fischer, who hosted the Emmy Award-winning television series, “Offshore Adventures,” it provides support for leading researchers and research institutions to conduct shark studies. Its 126-foot mother ship, the M/V Ocearch, is equipped with a 75,000-pound hydraulic lift, a research platform and a lab.

Researchers hope to learn more from Mary Lee and their other tagged sharks, particularly their medium- and long-range movement patterns. They are also interested in their reproductive behavior, the behavior of juveniles, identifying places where they might gather in large numbers and general life history. This knowledge will be useful in conservation efforts to protect sharks, which are declining worldwide.

Sharks are among the most awe-inspiring, feared and misunderstood creatures on Earth. They belong, along with rays and skates, to the class of fish, Chrondrichthyes, or “cartilage fish.” Their structure is supported not by bone, but by cartilage, a flexible, elastic material full of cell spaces. They have tough, abrasive skin and are, contrary to common lore, quite intelligent. Of the more than 300 species, most are too small to pose a threat to humans and some are benign plankton-feeders. Great whites, Carcharodon carcharias, are among the potentially dangerous species.

They are found in the coastal waters of all the great oceans. They belong to the Lamnidae family and are also known as “mackerel sharks,” because of the shape of their tails. Contrary to the great white in “Jaws,” the sharks seldom attack humans, preferring a diet of fish and marine mammals such as seals.

They are also not actually white, but may range from off-white to dark gray-brown, with white undersides. They have a circulatory modification known as a rete mirabile, or “wonderful net,” that allows them to maintain a higher body temperature than the water around them. This gives them extra energy for high speed chases and attacks.

Ocracoke is no stranger to visits from sharks. In July of 2011 a young girl was bitten by a shark while swimming off the island’s beach. She made a full recovery. Farther north, off Cape Hatteras in 2004, a man was attacked and killed by a shark. Spiny dog sharks are common inhabitants of the island’s waters in winter, often filling the fishing nets of commercial fishermen and providing a winter livelihood. Long-liners catch mako, black-tip, dusky and sandbar sharks in Ocracoke’s offshore waters, and huge whale sharks and basking sharks occasionally wash up on the beach. In May of 1997 islanders streamed by the Fish House to see a ten-foot, six-inch great white caught accidentally by a long-liner fishing for smaller sharks.

Great whites and other sharks, at the top of the ocean’s food chain, play a crucial role in maintaining a balance in marine ecosystems. Over-fishing threatens a number of species. With up to 25 percent of the great sharks facing extinction, research such as that being done with Mary Lee could play an important role in preserving them.

OCRACOKE — The Ocracoke Working Watermen’s Association on Jan. 19 will host a training session for a project to monitor baby oysters, or spat. Students and volunteers will be trained to collect and count oyster offspring.  The project, sponsored by North Carolina Sea Grant, is part of a larger effort to understand why North Carolina’s oyster population is in decline.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, scientists have puzzled over why the entire batch of 100 million free-swimming baby oysters at Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in coastal Oregon  have died. The conclusion they reached is alarming, at the least. The struggling larvae were unable to form their protective shells because of highly acidic pH levels in the ocean. High acid levels decrease carbonate ions needed for shell production.

The acidity is the result of excessive carbon dioxide, or CO2, in the ocean, absorbed from the Earth’s atmosphere. The CO2 is the by-product of the burning of fossil fuels –coal and oil, primarily — which also causes global warming or climate change.

In late October, 2012, Hurricane Sandy, later dubbed a “super storm,” grabbed headlines and awoke the American public to the reality of carbon dioxide-induced climate change. Scientists and climatologists had been trying to raise awareness for years, but it took a major disaster to make most people accept its imminent presence and danger.

Few people are aware even now, however, of what some scientists call the “evil twin” of global warming; ocean acidification. This equally serious threat is already showing up in the Pacific Ocean and polar seas, where the cold, nutrient-rich waters from the deep are naturally more acidic than surface waters. While the full brunt of ocean acidification is not expected to hit for decades, it is expected to affect marine ecosystems globally and might even factor into North Carolina’s oyster decline.

Climate scientists define ocean acidification as the ongoing decrease in the pH of the Earth’s oceans, caused by the absorption of human-caused carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It was once believed that this was a good thing, as it buffered the full effects of global warming on land. Scientists now think differently.

A decrease in pH means an increase in acidity, which can be catastrophic for ecosystems. Acid rain provides an illustration. Emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide from vehicle exhaust and coal-burning power plants are carried by the wind, often for hundreds of miles, and deposited as acidic rainwater. It can peel paint, corrode steel and erode stone buildings and statues. Acid rain has damaged crops, weakened or killed plants and raised pH levels in freshwater lakes so high that fish and other aquatic animals have died. Acidification may be invisible to the eye, but some of upstate New York’s most beautiful lakes are lasting testaments to its deadly qualities.

Before people began burning coal and oil, ocean pH had been relatively stable for 20 million years, according to scientists at the Natural Resources Defence Council, an advocacy group. Over the last 250 years, roughly coinciding with the Industrial Revolution, oceans have absorbed 503 billion tons of CO2, causing a 30 percent increase in ocean acidity. At current rates, ocean acidity is predicted to more than double by 2100.

Corals and coral reefs are severely threatened by processes such as ocean acidification: A, “Healthy” coral reef with living Acropora palmata and good water quality. B, Degraded coral reef with dead A. palmata and poor water quality. Processes such as ocean acidification are rapidly transforming healthy reefs into degraded reefs in Puerto Rico and other Caribbean and western tropical Atlantic Ocean regions. Photos: Ryan Moyer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

This could have serious consequences for near-shore bottom-dwelling ecosystems and for calcifying organisms such as crustaceans, molluscs and echinoderms, such as star fish and sand dollars. Corals, which require very high levels of carbonate, are at even greater risk. Coral reefs, which provide habitat for one fourth of all marine species, could at the present rate of acidification be extinct by 2100.  Pteropods, a kind of plankton that lives around the world and are a major part of the marine food chain, are also especially vulnerable.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been studying falling pH in the ocean and its impact on marine ecosystems for three decades. Its studies have revealed lower reef-building rates in corals, the loss of protective shells in free-swimming zooplankton and lower survival rates of larval marine species including fish and shellfish. The studies predict that there will be substantial socio-economic effects, including decimated fisheries and reduced protection against storm surges as coastal reefs disappear.

The study of ocean acidification is a relatively new science, and all the ramifications are not yet clear.  A September 2012 issue of Scientific American stated that rising CO2 in the oceans affects the mental abilities of some marine life. It cited impaired ability in clownfish to discriminate kin and predators and mollusk larvae wandering farther afield into unsafe waters, making them more susceptible to predation. Other studies document depressed metabolic rates in jumbo squid and depressed immune systems in blue mussels.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute recently conducted a study that revealed unexpected results. It found that while corrosive carbonic acid (formed from dissolved CO2) destroys the shells of clams, oysters, scallops and conchs, CO2 appears to increase the production of calcium carbonate, needed for shell-building, in such crustaceans as lobsters, blue crabs and prawns. Clearly, scientists are a long way from understanding all the effects of CO2-saturated oceans.

In late 2012, scientists from 37 countries met in Monterey, California to discuss these issues. “The Ocean in a High-CO2 World” symposium looked at possible solutions, including spreading vast amounts of limestone on the ocean surfaces. Lime is alkaline and would buffer the acid. The state of Washington recently established a blue-ribbon panel to come up with a plan to cope with ocean acidification, the first state to do so. It outlined 42 steps, including adaptation, remediation, monitoring and reduction.

The warm coastal waters of North Carolina and other states on the Eastern Seaboard have not yet shown the effects of rising pH. Nathan Hall, a researcher at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, said that there are already such huge variations in acidity due to pollutants and runoff from the land that, while the long-term effects of ocean acidification are alarming, they are not yet measurable here.

Ocracoke waterman Gene Ballance, who works closely with oyster research and restoration, says that he does not believe acidification has been considered as a cause of oyster decline in Pamlico Sound.  Susan Massengale, a spokeswoman with the N.C. Division of Water Quality, explained that the issue is in the research stage in North Carolina and that the state is waiting until “the science catches up with itself.”

Scientists at National Resources Defense Council, however, think “this change is happening fast, and it will take fast action to slow or stop it.”  All experts agree that the only definitive solution to ocean acidification is to reduce the amount of CO2 humans release into the atmosphere.

Ocean scientist Lisa Suatoni says that our CO2 emissions “may soon challenge marine life on a scale not seen for tens of millions of years.” Oceanographer Jean-Pierre Gatluso predicts that unless the present trend is interrupted, “the oceans will become hot, sour and breathless.”