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A brightly hued eastern bluebird peeks out from a knothole in a tree at the Dare County Arboretum and Teaching Garden in Kill Devil Hills. Male bluebirds tend to draw attention to themselves at their nest cavities in this way to lure potential mates, according to Cornell Lab. Dare County Extension Master Gardener volunteers maintain the arboretum garden at 300 Mustian St. Photo: Kip Tabb

Being able to watch a mother sperm whale give birth to her calf in the eastern Caribbean Sea a couple of summers ago “felt like an encounter with something both impossibly rare and profoundly ancient,” marine biologist David Gruber told Coastal Review.

Gruber, a National Geographic Explorer and City University of New York distinguished professor of biology, is president of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative). He founded the nonprofit based in the U.S. and Dominica in 2020. It’s made up of artificial intelligence and natural language processing specialists, cryptographers, linguists, marine biologists, roboticists and underwater acousticians from a network of universities and other partners, per the website.

He was aboard the organization’s sailing research vessel on July 8, 2023, off the coast of Dominica, where scientists have been observing whales for decades, when the team noticed that all 11 members of a known sperm whale unit had gathered at the water’s surface.

The team soon realized that they were witnessing the exceedingly rare 34-minutelong birth of a sperm whale in the wild and the coordinated care efforts for the newborn by the other adult females.

Project CETI published two reports detailing what the team observed, calling the work in a March 26 press release “the most comprehensive documentation of a sperm whale birth ever recorded and the first quantitative evidence of cooperative birth assistance among non-primates.”

The two studies analyze more than six hours of underwater audio and aerial drone footage recorded during the birth event.

Gruber, in the March 26 release, stated that these findings fundamentally reshape how we understand whale society. “What we’re seeing is deeply coordinated social care during one of the most vulnerable moments of life.”

Researchers said that understanding of labor, birth, postnatal and neonatal behavior is lacking for most cetaceans, with observations of these births in the wild recorded for less than 10% of species. Cetaceans are marine mammals such as whales, dolphins and porpoises.

“Of the described 93 species of cetaceans only nine species have reported birth observations collected in the wild,” the study states. “And reports of birth events of pelagic, deep-diving cetacean species, such as sperm whales, are exceptionally rare.”

Published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, “Description of a collaborative sperm whale birth and shifts in coda vocal styles during key events,” gives a chronological timeline of the birth framed within the context of known whale behavior, communication and evolution.

“Audio data revealed distinct shifts in vocal styles during key moments of the birth, including the presence of vowel-like structures, adding a new dimension to Project CETI’s ongoing work decoding sperm whale communication,” according to the nonprofit.

The journal Science published “Cooperation by non-kin during birth underpins sperm whale social complexity.” The organization explained that the study quantified the behavior of the 11-member unit by using high-resolution drone footage, computer vision, and multiscale network analysis using software developed for the work, combined with previously made scientific observations, including reports of whale births.

“The findings show that female sperm whales from two unrelated matrilines come together during a birth to assist the labouring mother, and both kin and non-kin taking turns assisting the newborn. This provides the first quantitative evidence of birth attendance outside of humans and a few other primates,” researchers state in the press release, adding that the birth attracted the attention of short-finned pilot whales and Fraser’s dolphins.

Gruber told Coastal Review what it was like to witness the live birth.

“To be on CETI’s sailing research vessel, in that moment, felt like an encounter with something both impossibly rare and profoundly ancient,” he noted.

“In marine biology, so much of a career is impacted by luck — being present when ocean life decides to reveal itself,” Gruber continued. “I’ve been fortunate enough to witness things like the first biofluorescent turtle seen to humans, but nothing compares to witnessing a sperm whale come into the world.”

Gruber went on to say that very few such births have been seen by humans, and the last scientifically recorded observation after the birth was decades ago.

“It makes you wonder what Herman Melville would have written had he glimpsed this: not the violence of whaling, but the circle of care and a society revealing itself through cooperation,” he explained about the author of the 1851 American novel, “Moby Dick,” that tells the tale of a whaling vessel’s captain and his quest for vengeance against the whale that took his leg.

“We witnessed culture in action,” when the 11 whales, across family lines, “coordinated to keep a newborn alive, communicating in ways we’re only beginning to understand.”

Gruber said it took more than 50 scientists 2.5 years “to begin to interpret even a fraction of that moment, because Project CETI sits at the intersection of marine biology, artificial intelligence, and network science — fields that must come together if we are to decode these lives,” he said. ”And, in some sense, this is why Project CETI exists: We are one of the few teams in the world continuously embedded with these whales, with the tools, the longitudinal data, and the interdisciplinary lens to not only witness something this rare, but to begin to understand it.” 

Shane Gero, National Geographic Explorer, Project CETI biology lead, and founder of The Dominica Sperm Whale Project, leads the research.

Researchers, who have been tracking since 2005, the mother that gave birth, observed her that day with both her mother and her daughter.

“This is the most detailed window we’ve ever had into one of the most important moments in a whale’s life,” Gero said in the release. “Because this family unit has been studied for decades, we could see what the grandmother was doing, how the new big sister acted, and how each helped mom and newborn, placing this rare birth within a deep social and behavioral context.”

The two studies point to cooperative caregiving during birth being ancient evolutionary behavior.

The behaviors documented in the research “suggest that cooperation during births functions to reinforce social bonds between sperm whales, which underpin their large-scale society. Helping unrelated companions drives them to help in return later. In this way, a foundation of trust and collective success builds their social world,” researchers said.

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An American alligator sunning at North River Wetlands Preserve in Carteret County slides in for a dip recently as March temperatures rose. The 6,000-acre preserve is the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s project to return farmland back to its original state and to use the wetlands to naturally treat polluted runoff. The Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review. Photo: Doug Waters

The Friends of the North Carolina Maritime Museum Beaufort is set to offer a two-week travel opportunity next year to see the birds, wildlife and natural history of Finland.

The nonprofit friends group is partnering with EcoQuest Travel for the trip, “The Birds & Mammals of Finland — Brown Bears, Wolverines and Boreal Birds,” May 16-29, 2027, with an optional six-day, post-trip extension to the Varanger Peninsula in the Norwegian Arctic.

“Finland is an extraordinary country, a throwback to an older wilder Europe,” the friends group said in a press release. “It is a land of great evergreen forests, rugged coastlines, shimmering lakes and stunning wildlife.”

The group said Finland is arguably the best country in Europe to observe brown bears and probably the best place in the world to see the enigmatic wolverine.

“We will concentrate our efforts on these two species, but we are traveling to Finland in the spring which will find us there at the best time to see owls, lekking grouse species and migrating shorebirds,” according to the release.

The tour will arrive in Finland’s capital of Helsinki and travel north to Savonlinna to search for the rare Saimaa ringed seal before heading farther north to the Koli, “our jumping off point for two very remote areas where we will use specially designed hides to look for Brown Bears and Wolverines,” according to the release. “Wolves occasionally show up at both hides and even the mysterious Eurasian Lynx sometimes makes a brief appearance. Being able to observe and photograph these iconic mammals of the north will be a rare and special privilege.”

From there, the group will travel west to Oulu and the Baltic Sea in search of owls, grouse, woodpeckers, songbirds, shorebirds and waterfowl.

Then for the final leg, it’s northeast to Kuusamo in the boreal forest to search for “specialty birds” such as the  willow ptarmigan, black grouse, capercaillie and boreal songbirds.

Those who do not depart for home head on to Arctic Norway to explore two new habitats with chances to see such iconic Arctic species as willow ptarmigan, bluethroat, Eurasian dotterel and long-tailed jaeger on the tundra; and king and Steller’s eiders, yellow-billed loon, Lapland longspur, snow bunting, gyrfalcon and huge colonies of alcids, or auks, on the Arctic Ocean.

For more information, contact JoAnne Powell at joannepowell1208@gmail.com.

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A snapping turtle climbs from the water for a snack recently at Sandy Run Park in Kitty Hawk. The park at 4343 The Woods Road offers public access to the Kitty Hawk Woods Maritime Forest, a half-mile nature trail with a pair of gazebos, canoe or kayak access, a nature observation tower, a catch and release fishing pier, picnic tables, benches and interpretive signage. While Sandy Run Park is home to friendly turtles, visitors are asked to not feed them. Photo: Kip Tabb

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A male pileated woodpecker, or Dryocopus pileatus, searches for a snack Sunday in the bark of a pine tree in Nags Head Woods Preserve, one of the largest remaining maritime forests on the East Coast, according to The Nature Conservancy. This woodpecker, which feeds on insects in trees and logs, is one of more than 150 bird species visitors may spot at the preserve, and at least a third nests here, according to the conservancy. Photo: Kip Tabb

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A siege of herons takes refuge Monday from high winds near Russell Creek in Beaufort. Photo: Dylan Ray

Guest Commentary

To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues.

“They swam all the way to Ocracoke?”

I suppose I should not have been so incredulous upon learning that National Park Service employees were having to track down rogue coyotes on Ocracoke Island. During my time conducting surveys of colonial waterbirds across the North Carolina coast, the impacts of coyote predation on young chicks was impossible to not take seriously. Their presence posed a constant challenge for federal, state, and municipal authorities. It’s not only birds that are affected; coyotes, with their acute sense of smell, pose a serious threat to sea turtle nests as well.

Invasive species often pose a serious challenge for ecosystems that have not evolved alongside them, and the havoc they wreak often vastly outstrips the pace at which the environment can adapt to their presence. While we have come to think of coyotes as a part of our everyday lives here in the eastern U.S., they are actually only native to the Southwest.

As wolves were killed en masse and driven out of the eastern U.S., coyotes migrated eastward to fill in the ecological role that was left wide open. As they did so, they picked up genes from the retreating wolves along their way. Now native red wolves are restricted to the Albemarle peninsula of North Carolina, a remnant of a once-dominant population that would have kept the coyotes from ever reaching the barrier islands simply by virtue of their presence.

While red wolves and coyotes are somewhat similar in appearance, coyotes are solitary mesopredators (mid-level carnivores that are still threatened by apex predators) that are characteristically opportunistic when it comes to food sources such as sea turtle eggs. Red wolves on the other hand are cooperative pack hunters that go for much larger game than coyotes, and will drive coyotes away or attack them under normal ecological conditions.

I bring the expansion of coyotes up as one example of how North Carolina’s barrier islands have changed since the onset of European colonization in the 16th century. The changes have been numerous, catastrophic, profound, and formative all at the same time.

One of these changes are the wild horses that roam these dunes, in locations ranging from Corolla to Beaufort. I have enjoyed many meals from childhood to present dining on the Beaufort waterfront, looking across the narrow intracoastal waterway to find horses grazing on the Rachel Carson Reserve. For locals, they are a sight as ubiquitous as spotting dolphins in the waterway. Entire businesses and marketing promotions of the area have fixated on these horses as a unique part of the area’s culture and appeal.

I am presently a researcher with North Carolina State University studying the crystal skipper. The crystal skipper is a butterfly species only found on a 30-mile stretch of the North Carolina Crystal Coast from Bear Island to the Rachel Carson Reserve.

The Rachel Carson Reserve just so happens to be a location with resident horses, making it the only place where horse and skipper populations interact.

People frequently come to the Rachel Carson Reserve to hike or relax on the beach, whether they come by way of ferry or their own watercraft. As my coworkers and I work in our highlighter-yellow vests, visitors are frequently drawn to us with inquiries about where they can spot the horses. Their assumptions aren’t wrong, I have been coming here for years at this point and I can direct them where to go to have a good chance of seeing them. They are often surprised, however, to find us unenthusiastic about the horses when we are directly asked about them.

We usually address the visitors on the Rachel Carson Reserve surrounded by centipede grass, the only grass that remains after the horses have eaten their fill. Seaside little bluestem, the sole grass species the crystal skipper lays their eggs on and eats as a caterpillar, is nowhere to be found in the areas the horses frequent. It’s heart-wrenching to watch the horses stride into the one small section of the Rachel Carson Reserve that still contains a viable crystal skipper population, consuming who knows how many eggs and caterpillars as they satiate their hunger on seaside little bluestem. In a sharp contrast to the horses, the crystal skipper is not only from here, it is only found here.

Who are these horses for? For tourists?

I doubt the desire to see the horses would increase as people grow in their knowledge about the horses’ condition. When I am asked about how healthy the horses are here, I feel as though I am lying by omission if I don’t tell the truth as I see it.

For tourism boards?

North Carolina’s coast is replete with breathtaking sites and awe-inspiring nature, I doubt horses in particular are needed to promote the area.

For a rare and imperiled butterfly species found nowhere else on Earth?

Certainly not for them.

One could easily ask who the crystal skipper is for, to which I would reply that it is for the very island ecosystems that created it in the first place, whose selective pressures picked the genes that gave rise to its very body plan. Secondarily, the crystal skipper is for the people who live and visit here who are able to appreciate its beauty and intrinsic link to the land.

For all the problems I have highlighted here, I do believe that there is a solution to this problem that addresses the concerns of all involved. To anchor this solution in how I began the article, I once again want to return to the subject of Ocracoke.

Horses remain on the island but have been corralled into a pony pen, easily accessible to anybody visiting the island. These horses are given a proper diet, bereft of the hardy and sandy grasses that stitch the island together against the advances of the wind and waves. This keeps the island’s ecology and structure intact, enables visitors and residents alike to see this part of Ocracoke’s history, and keeps the horses protected from careless visitors.

It would be impertinent and wrong of me to dismiss the cultural and tourist value that the horses provide simply because I am approaching the topic as a conservationist. That said, if you are able to get a close look, the horses’ taught skin stretched over their hips and ribs represents a sharp contrast to the horses that folks are generally used to seeing.

If folks are going to come to see the Crystal Coast, I want them to see the best of the Crystal Coast, where we steward our ecological resources well and care for the animals in our charge.

Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or our publisher, the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

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A Venus flytrap shows off its perhaps little-appreciated blooms, which are often overlooked, as compared with the other, better-known, insect-trapping attributes of this carnivorous plant that’s native only to a roughly 90-mile stretch of the North Carolina coast between Wilmington and Morehead City. Photo: Mark Hibbs

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A recent visit to Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge offered little in the way of migratory waterfowl viewing for which it’s known but did yield this glimpse of a whitetail doe through the trees. The refuge, which was established in 1934, spans some 50,000 acres, including the 40,000-acre Lake Mattamuskeet, the largest natural lake in North Carolina. Photo: Kip Tabb

Snapped an image of the North Carolina coast worth sharing? Submit your photo.

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A gull keeps watch from atop the North Carolina Department of Transportation Ferry Division’s vehicle ferry Kinnakeet as it plies the Neuse River between Minnesott Beach and Cherry Branch. Photo: Mark Hibbs

Snapped an image of the North Carolina coast worth sharing? Submit your photo.

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Danielle Carey of Holly Ridge recently submitted this image of various shorebirds congregating on a sand bank in the Sneads Ferry area as if time for a shift change. “This was my first time taking this lens out on the water, and I felt like it was the one day I wasn’t seeing any birds out” Carey told us in her submission. “On our way back, I spotted this little sandbar with a whole variety of birds. I was so excited, and although I aim to capture birds in flight, I loved that I was able to capture a moment where one was taking off, and another was landing at the same time.”

Snapped an image of the North Carolina coast worth sharing? Submit your photo.

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Wild horses cross tidal waters from Town Marsh to Bird Shoal along Beaufort’s barrier islands, which are part of the Rachel Carson Reserve, in Carteret County. The cluster of islands includes Carrot Island, Town Marsh, Bird Shoal, and Horse Island, and the horses are descended from those brought to the islands by a Beaufort area resident in the 1940s, according to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. The state manages the horse population for its health and for the health of the environment, but the herd is otherwise left to fend and forage for itself. Photo: Dylan Ray

This week, Sept. 20-27, is National Estuaries Week, an annual opportunity to raise awareness and encourage protection of these natural resources,

Sponsoring organizations Restore America’s Estuaries, National Estuarine Research Reserve Association and the Association of National Estuary Programs are partnering with the National Environmental Education Foundation to highlight estuary conservation projects as a part of National Public Lands Day Saturday, Sept. 27.

National Public Lands Day is a single-day volunteer event for public lands on the fourth Saturday in September. Groups hosting a clean-up or restoration project may submit the project description via an online form to be featured in a 2025 National Estuaries Week Project Map.

National Estuaries Day was first observed in 1988 as a way to promote the importance of estuaries and the need to protect them.

“Estuaries — where salty seawater mixes with fresh water draining from the land — are one of many coastal habitats in which we work. Estuaries provide homes for fish and wildlife and support recreation, jobs, tourism, shipping, and more,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Estuaries are called “nurseries of the sea,” because numerous marine animals reproduce and spend the early part of their lives in estuaries, which include habitats like marshes, seagrass beds and oyster reefs.

“Most of the fish and shellfish we eat — including salmon, herring, crabs, and oysters — spend some or all of their life in estuaries. Estuaries provide habitat for nearly 70 percent of the United States’ commercial fish catch and 80 percent of recreational catch,” NOAA explains in a release highlighting National Estuaries Week.

These natural resources provide a home for species that help improve water quality. Oysters are filter feeders that trap and remove pollution from the water. A single oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water per day.

In addition to being a home for marine life, nearly 40% of Americans live on or near a major estuary, which also serve an economic role. An analysis by Restore America’s Estuaries found 39% of jobs are connected to estuaries and support 47% of economic output.

Another benefit to estuaries is that “habitat like salt marshes and seagrass beds serve as natural infrastructure. They protect communities from flooding and erosion by soaking up water and dissipating storm energy,” NOAA said.

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A male luna moth, or Actias luna, finds a perch in the branches of a Japanese maple near Russell Creek in Beaufort. The easily identified species flies mostly at night and is found statewide this time of year in and near hardwood forests, wooded residential areas and, on North Carolina’s barrier islands, in maritime forests. Adult luna moths do not feed and live off food they consumed as caterpillars for the moths’ seven- to 10-day lifespan.

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Least terns are excellent fish-catchers, and when feeding their young, can deliver about two fish per hour. Males also catch and display fish during courting, which is what we assumed is going on here. There’s only one problem with that theory: After showing it to the female for a few seconds, when she finally showed interest, he flew away. Photo: William Birkemeier

Second in commentary photo-essay series, Tabb’s Trails, with coastal reporter, photographer and hiking enthusiast Kip Tabb.

It was a close thing, whether Jockey’s Ridge would be leveled for a development five decades ago.

If you find yourself at what is now the 426-acre Jockey’s Ridge State Park in Dare County, head north out of the parking lot and up one of the steepest dunes there.

In about a quarter mile, the disintegrating asphalt of a 50-year-old road is stark evidence that, if the late Carolista Baum had not stood in front of a bulldozer on Aug. 15, 1973, to prevent the sand dune system from being developed, a truly unique geological treasure would not exist today.

The North Carolina State Park System in 1975 established Jockey’s Ridge, what it calls the tallest living sand dune system on the Atlantic Coast. The Friends of Jockey’s Ridge State Park has organized a four-day, family friendly event starting Thursday to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the state park. The friends group supports the state park in Nags Head.

Related: Take a hike Saturday to celebrate National Trails Day

Details and the itinerary for all programs being offered at no charge can be found on the nonprofit organization’s website.

Jockey’s Ridge is a remarkably complex environmental wonder.

It is a harsh environment. Where the sand is deepest and most active, nothing grows. But one of the ironies of what is left of the road is the roadbed stabilized the sand, and as the asphalt cracked, opening the soil to the elements, small thickets of pine took root.

There are self-guided trails in Jockey’s Ridge State Park.

The Soundside Nature Trail is a 1.2-mile loop that begins at the main parking lot by the visitor center, and the Tracks in the Sand Trail is a 0.6-mile loop trail beginning at the Soundside parking lot.

Depending on where the hike is going, the conditions can be strenuous. Hiking conditions are fine sand and steep inclines. It’s not necessary to be an athlete, but reasonable physical condition is important.

Visitors can explore all areas of Jockey’s Ridge State Park, but there are some things to know while there.

Take water with you, especially in the summer as conditions can be extremely hot and there is no drinking water anywhere, and insect repellant is a good idea.

When hiking in the thicket at the base of the main dune, be respectful of nature. There are a surprising number of trails and no need to create a new one.

Among the dunes where the soil has stabilized, flowering plants thrive and insect life is abundant.

There are a surprising number of flowering plants that flourish in Jockey’s Ridge, perhaps none as spectacular as a mound lily yucca.

As the flowers come into full bloom this time of year, pollinators and other insects swarm to the plants, such as the trumpet vines, which are prolific on the hillocks throughout the park.

The trumpet vines are just one of many flowering plants in Jockey’s Ridge where pollinators can be spotted, including red-spotted purple butterflies.

As the foliage thickens in spring and into summer, the sound of songbirds, like the gray catbird, is a constant chorus. Usually deep in the foliage, they are heard but not seen, but sometimes they’ll make an appearance.

Following a prescribed burn in April of this year, the largest thicket, which could almost be considered a small maritime forest, is showing signs of regeneration as summer approaches.

The wooded area on the Roanoke Sound is in the wind shadow of the largest dune in Jockey’s Ridge, and extends a little over a half mile from the parking lot and recreational beach at the southeast corner of the park.

The colors of a blue grosbeak spotted on a branch in the burn area, according to Cornell University’s All About Birds website, indicate a breeding male. The species is “uncommon but widespread across the southern United States.”

If the hike is going to be fairly long and include the Roanoke Sound shoreline, there is considerable underbrush and walking through while barefoot can be painful.

Waterfowl are a frequent sight as well. In a cove off the trail, two mallards shared a quiet moment. The drake kept bringing its foot to its head in what appeared to be an attempt to scratch something by his beak.

The North Carolina Mountains-to-Sea Trail crosses the state, connecting the eastern terminus in Jockey’s Ridge State Park on the Outer Banks and the western terminus in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

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A mother black bear and three cubs stroll along Creef Cut Wildlife Trail in Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, located on the Albemarle Peninsula in eastern North Carolina. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in a press release featuring the photo, recommends staying at least 1,000 yards away from bears. Use binoculars, scopes and telephoto lens to get a better look. Check out BearWise, an online resource that offers practical tips in the event of a bear encounter. Photo: Karen Lebing, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Eastern and coastal North Carolina are home to some truly enormous trees. Towering bald cypresses with buttressed trunks, ancient live oaks with branches spreading out almost endlessly. The kinds of trees that leave people stunned. And though the person beholding the tree might not know it, the magnificent thing in front of them could be, or one day become, a champion.

Designated giants

The “Champion Tree” designation is a simple concept with a big purpose. The idea is to find the largest individual specimen of any given tree species, which is then named the champion of that species. The purpose goes far beyond measurements and rankings, however.

As first envisioned by the American Forestry Association in 1940, the Champion Tree Program, previously called the National Register of Big Trees, was intended to identify and conserve the nation’s largest remaining trees, which were at risk during an era of economic expansion and aggressive timber harvesting. It was also hoped that the program would increase the public’s appreciation for trees and encourage community science in forestry.

Today, anyone can nominate a tree for the National Register of Champion Trees, the annual publication of the Champion Tree Program. Nominated trees are reviewed and measured by an expert under the supervision of the University of Tennessee’s School of Natural Resources, which assumed official responsibility for the Champion Tree Program in 2024, and the champions are thereby sorted out for each species.

As of last year, when the most recent national register was published, North Carolina boasted 10 national champion trees, two of which are in the coastal plains: a pond pine in Bladen County, and a silky camellia in Gates County.

In order to find champions within their borders, state forestry services eventually established their own champion tree lists, such as North Carolina’s, which took shape under the auspices of the North Carolina Forest Service in the 1970s.

This means that North Carolina has a state champion tree for each species native to the state, and any state champion tree that is not bested in size by one of the same species in another state can be named the national champion.

Looking for the big ones

For 25-year-old Luke Ferreira, a big-tree hunter originally from New Bern, the sense of appreciation and the scientific mindset that spurred the original Champion Tree Program are always close at hand when he goes looking for giants.

“In some of the pretty remote places we go, I wonder, has anybody ever even seen this tree before?” Ferreira said in a telephone interview. “That’s what makes it worth it to me. Sometimes you come across something that takes your breath away.”

Ferreira, who now lives in Clayton, frequently ventures back to eastern North Carolina to look for and measure large trees.

“I’d say we definitely have more champions or potential champions east of I-95 than west of it,” he said.

When Ferreira finds a large tree, he calculates its size according to the method prescribed by the national Champion Tree Program. Each inch of a tree trunk’s circumference, as measured 4.5 feet above the ground, counts as one point, as does each foot of the tree’s height. The average spread in feet of the tree’s crown is divided by four, and this score is added to the point score for trunk circumference and height, yielding the overall score by which tree sizes can be compared.

Using these methods, Ferreira determined that a water hickory he and a friend discovered in a Craven County swamp was championship material. They nominated it to the state champion list, which prompted the N.C. Forest Service, following its protocols, to send out a county ranger to verify the tree’s dimensions. The ruling? With a 210-inch circumference, a height of 124 feet, and a 71-foot crown spread, it was the new state champion water hickory.

It should be noted, however, that those measurements yield 352 points according to the official Champion Tree Program method. The current national champion water hickory is listed at only 330 points, so Ferreira says he will be nominating the tree to the national list soon.

It might sound straightforward, but in reality, measuring tree sizes is a tricky business. The National Register of Champion Trees publishes a Measuring Guidelines Handbook that is 86 pages and includes two appendices and countless diagrams, so it may deter some beginners.

Luckily for Ferreira, trees aren’t just his hobby, they’re also his profession. Ferreira is a safety coordinator with Bartlett Tree Experts, so he has plenty of experience identifying, measuring and even climbing trees.

“I use a reel tape to measure the crown spread and the circumference, and then we use clinometers for height,” Ferreira said, referring to a device that calculates the height of distant objects with the help of a little trigonometry. “But if the tree isn’t too remote, I will sometimes tape drop it, where I climb up and drop the tape all the way down.”

Dying down, growing back

North Carolina’s big-tree database was taken offline in recent months before being made accessible again in early May. Andrew Pleninger, urban and community forestry program head at the N.C. Forest Service, oversees the state’s champion tree list. Pleninger said that the access issues stemmed from coinciding technical difficulties and the regular, laborious review such a program requires.

On the technical side, Pleninger said the web application hosting the database with the champion tree list was malfunctioning, prompting him to take it offline. Meanwhile, he and his staff have been working to reinspect all the existing state champions, to make sure everything on the list is accurate and up to date — a task delayed by staff shortages.

“It’s a good, popular program, and I’d like to continue to support it,” Pleninger said by telephone. “Tuning it up is one of our tasks right now.”

Maintaining champion tree registers with any kind of regularity is surely a large undertaking. Hundreds of trees, some of them in isolated mountain hollers or remote and unnavigable swamps, have to be checked to make sure none have fallen to storm, disease or axe.  

As Ferreira put it, “Once something becomes big enough to be a champion, it’s already close to the end of its life anyway.”

Even the loss of a limb can cost a tree its champion status. In a cemetery in Clinton, there stands a flowering dogwood that as recently as 2021 was the undisputed national champion.

“I was amazed at how big it was,” Pleninger said of the graveyard sentinel, which was once 33 feet tall and boasted a 40-foot crown spread. “I saw pictures of it before I went, and I thought, this is not a dogwood.”

However, the old tree has since lost one of its two main limbs, reducing its size significantly. It is no longer the national champion, and is likely not even the largest flowering dogwood in North Carolina anymore. However, a recent visit to the cemetery off of N.C. Highway 24 in Sampson County proved that the tree is still alive and still impressive. Time and decay may have robbed it of its title as champion, but it’s not yet too old to bloom in spring.

Caring for champions

The graceful leviathan at the heart of Wilmington’s Airlie Gardens isn’t just North Carolina’s state champion live oak, it’s probably one of the state’s best-known trees. It has served as a backdrop for hundreds of weddings and many thousands of photos, and it is frequently the object of concerned check-ins from the public.  

“The number one question we get after every storm is, ‘how’s the Airlie Oak?’” said Janine Powell, Airlie’s director of donor relations. “After Hurricane Florence, the first thing we did was put a picture of her up, and you could see Spanish moss and branches all over the lawn, but she’s still there.”

In an interview conducted in the shade of the sprawling oak, which is thought to have sprouted sometime around the 1540s, Powell spoke affectionately of the tree, as if it were a grande dame. That sense of care is reflected in the way Airlie Gardens looks after their champion.

When a large branch sagged to the ground in 2019, arborists from Bartlett Tree Experts were hired to thoroughly evaluate the Airlie Oak’s health and recommend measures to protect it for future generations. A customized brace to stabilize the sagging limb, support cables for the other limbs, a grounded copper wire to protect the tree from lightning strikes, removal of Spanish moss to let in more light, aeration and fertilization of the soil. The list of treatments the tree has received reads like a testament to the love of its caretakers.

“It’s amazing how much it revitalized her,” Powell said. “She just looks better. If I look at photographs from 2014 to now, oh my gosh.”

When asked what it means for Airlie Gardens to contain a state champion tree, Powell didn’t hesitate. “For the Gardens, it means the world to us,” she said. “Just knowing that it’s been around for so long.”

To raise funds for the care of their champion and the rest of their grounds, Airlie Gardens has partnered with Penderlea Farms to sell saplings grown from the acorns of the Airlie Oak.

These “historic live oaks,” according to Powell, are intended to help educate the public on the natural shape that live oaks require to be resilient (and beautiful) in their natural coastal environment.

Through the recognition of a specific remarkable tree, they are encouraging people to think about all trees a bit more deeply. Appreciation, protection, education — they’re all there, the original hallmarks of the Champion Tree Program.

Featured Image

An anole sends out a message to potential mates by flexing his throat to reveal a show of color in a Beaufort garden. Photo: Dylan Ray

Featured Image

Daddy longlegs, scientifically speaking, a member of the Leiobunum genus, stretches its legs recently on the leaf of a sweetbay magnolia, or Magnolia virginiana, a native species on the North Carolina coast. Often called harvestmen — there are at least 6,600 suborders of the species — and mistakenly identified as spiders, the insect is an arachnid that has been found everywhere on Earth except Antarctica. Photo: Mark Hibbs

Often mistaken for moss, lichens are actually quite different.

Like mosses, lichens are found all over the world, with somewhere between 12-18,000 known varieties. The number is probably way more, as new specimens are being discovered every year. America has 3,600 different named lichens, while North Carolina has 1,500 all on its own.

Often, lichens grow on trees or rocks or on the ground, the same way mosses do. Lichens provide many of the same functions as mosses. Birds and animals utilize lichens and mosses for food or shelter. Some lichens are invaluable to humans as natural antibiotics, antivirals, antioxidants, antifungals and even dyes.

Different lichens produce different chemicals, which aids scientists in correctly identifying the lichens, and are often responsible for the variety of colors. Lichens can be green, gray, yellow, orange, purple, blue, red … pretty much any color you can imagine.

Unlike mosses, lichens are not plants. A complex entity that consists of several organisms living in a symbiotic relationship, lichen can grow anywhere from Antarctica to the most desert of deserts.

The most outstanding part you see when you look at a lichen is the fungus that makes up the main structure. Smaller and harder to see, there’s usually green algae of some type, which can sometimes be responsible for the color as well, and often cyanobacteria, or blue algae.

The lichen, algae, and cyanobacteria are photobionts. That’s a fancy word for fungus living in symbiosis with one or more partners.

Lichens grow in one of three main types: foliose, fruticose, and crustose. Foliose has a top and a bottom, like a regular leaf. Fruticose often looks like tiny cupped trumpets, although it can also look like hair or tiny, twiggy shrubs. Crustose is just that: a crust.

If you’ve ever tried to scrape lichen off of something — your car, your house, your favorite shrub — you know it can be as tenacious as Superglue on your fingers … or that bumper sticker one of your kids slapped on your car and you didn’t notice until it had become at one with the paint job. While lichen technically has no roots, it can tag down via rhizines, fungal filaments that attach the lichen to its chosen surface. Others hang on by means of a holdfast, like an umbilical cord.

Lichens aren’t just pretty gewgaws. A great indicator of environmental health, lichens also remove heavy metals and pollutants from the air, trapping them in their fungus.

One of the first species to appear in an area, lichen often pave the way for other organisms. Growing in three stages, or succession, the crustose lichen appears first, followed by foliose, and finally by fruticose.

The crustose is completely flat and appears spray painted on a surface. Foliose then grows on top of the crustose, followed by the cherry-on-top fruticose. If you’ve ever been walking in the woods and noticed non-bark-colored patches on trees or rocks, some looking like alien life forms, you’ve probably been looking at lichen.

Extremely slow growing, at sometimes less than 1 millimeter a year, lichens take a long while to establish themselves. For untold years, the prevailing theory was that lichens were parasitic and harmful to fruit trees and such. That view is changing — almost as slowly as lichen grows.

Sure, lichen grows on dead trees, helping them decompose back into soil. Lichen is powerful enough to turn stone back into soil, albeit at a slower pace than we’ll ever notice. But does lichen really hurt live trees? Scientists are slowly coming around to a “no” answer.

Much like painting a tree trunk white as people used to do, lichen can help protect tree trunks from harsh weather, whether it’s sunburn or cold or biting winds. Lichen gives insects and lizards and things we don’t even know about places to hide, to shelter, to find food and moisture.

As epiphytes, meaning they get their nutrients from air and rain, lichens cause no damage to their living host. They might look harmful with their creepy appendages and scary monster skin and troll hairdo, but the benefits far outweigh the negatives. Due to their algae’s ability to photosynthesize, or turn sunlight into carbohydrates, lichens can, in turn, absorb those same carbohydrates from their alga. In return, the lichen protects its alga.

Lichen can reproduce asexually by shedding bits of themselves and letting the wind or critters spread them about.

This is where falling limbs and hurricanes come into play. Some lichens are capable of reproducing by spores. The spores can only germinate if they land near suitable alga, so this is a less surefire method.

Many birds, such as hummingbirds, use lichens for nest making. Squirrels and voles eat lichens and use them for nesting material. Snails and slugs eat lichens, which don’t digest in their stomachs, thus spreading bits of lichen to new locations, pre-fertilized.

Reindeer moss, or Cladonia rangiferina, which isn’t a moss at all, grows on the ground. Around here, it’s patchy at best, taking root in sunny spaces dominated by pine heaths. Other places, like the Arctic and Canada and Scandinavian countries, it grows prolifically and is the main food source for caribou, also known as reindeer.

Reindeer moss is fascinating, not only because it’s fun to play with, but also because it can withstand the harshest climates. Thriving on nutrient-poor, acidic soils, it can tolerate temperature extremes. Reindeer moss fixes nitrogen in the soil, and due to its low growth habit and bristly texture, catches bits of leaves and debris, which, in turn, enriches the soil.

If you’ve ever noticed, most pictures of lichen contain some moss. That’s because lichens need moisture to prolong their growth cycle, and mosses holds moisture.

While some countries have a long history of eating lichens in various forms, even to making flour out of it, not all lichens are edible. Some are poisonous to humans and animals.

Utilized for a variety of purposes that include deodorants, perfumes, antibiotics, toothpastes, and salves, lichen are a bigger part of our lives than we realize.

First in a new commentary feature, Tabb’s Trails.

Verdant and beautiful, coastal North Carolina boasts hidden treasures of nature. For the most part, the maritime forest reserves and parks that are found throughout the area require no special equipment or knowledge to explore, just a willingness to spend some time enjoying the environment’s beauty and the unexpected surprises it offers.

Sandy Run Park on the The Woods Road in Kitty Hawk is a 16-acre town park. The trail is a completely level, half-mile loop around a pond and marsh that is half boardwalk and half gravel and packed soil.

For birdwatchers, it is a small slice of paradise with a remarkable variety of birds in the trees and feeding in the ponds. For families with children, it is as good an introduction as there could be to the beauty and fascination of the natural world.

Spring has returned to Sand Run Park in Kitty Hawk.

Regular visitors for the past four or five years, the osprey pair have been busy repairing their nest that was destroyed in a storm last September.

As the weather warms, the winter residents leave, and there is perhaps no winter bird as ubiquitous as the yellow-rumped warbler. It’s rare to see one after April 1.

By Outer Banks standards, it was a snowy winter with one storm covering Sandy Run with more than 6 inches of snow. Among the reeds in the marsh a downy woodpecker found a meal.

During spring, summer and fall, the waters of Sandy Run are most alive. If there is symbol for the park, it would be the yellow-bellied sliders. There are also large snapping turtles and an occasional painted turtle, but it’s the yellow-bellied sliders that can be seen everywhere in the ponds.

For families with children, lettuce is a great snack for the turtles.

With abundant fish, frogs and food, blue heron are regular residents, but they are not the only member of the heron family to call Sandy Run home.

Especially in the spring and summer, green heron perch on tree limbs and deadfall.

Woodpeckers have been working on the trees for years. Red-bellied woodpeckers are the most common, although downy woodpeckers are seen from time to time, as well as an occasional pileated woodpecker.

Talkative, highly visible and ever-present, tweeting cardinals are year-round residents.

In the summer, the dense foliage of a maritime forest surrounding a coastal marsh teems with life. The intense red of trumpet vines seems to attract pollinators in extraordinary numbers.

Part of Duck Pond Creek, Sandy Run is a catch-and-release-only fishing site with three kayak launches. The creek connects with Kitty Hawk Bay, although paddling to the bay includes a carry on foot across The Woods Road.

For as long as there have been humans, our species has gone through long periods of great knowledge about ourselves and the world we live in, an understanding that we, being humans, periodically and promptly forget and have to painstakingly relearn.

Knowledge can be lost for a variety of reasons: War with its accompanying disruptions, population-decimating diseases, or the climate becoming inhospitable to humans and animals alike. Centuries-long droughts, or excessive flooding, earthquakes, volcanoes, heat and cold have been the downfall of many a civilization.

Losing and regaining knowledge is cyclical.

Partially because of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve been in a long forgetting stage with centuries of hard-won knowledge pushed aside for the sake of convenience.

For untold centuries, skills were passed down from one family member to another, from master craftsmen to eager apprentices.

The Industrial Revolution, along with various wars and famines and pestilences, has changed many present-day civilizations from nomadic herders and more settled farmers to city dwellers.

There’s nothing wrong with living in a city, but herders and farmers need more land in order to produce food — not only land, but also the intimate knowledge of such.

Family farms, although dwindling in number, still produce vast quantities of our food. Other than farmers and herdsmen, too many people have no understanding or knowledge of the skill and effort involved, and sadly, even more think food comes out of the back room at the grocery store.

In reality, our food, whether it’s animal or vegetable, has to be raised. Whether it’s calves, or chickens, or vegetables, there’s a tremendous amount of time involved — and care. Animals have to be fed and cared for. Vegetables have to be planted and harvested. All of this has to be processed and shipped.

All of it is a labor of love.

Farmers have a deep and abiding passion for their land and what their land produces. They have to, for their job is no 9-to-5, heated and air-conditioned, cushy, paper-pushing profession. Farming is 24-7-365 and intensive.

Where am I going with all this?

Circles. Circles and cycles.

Hopefully we’re coming to the end of the forgetting cycle!

While many are willfully oblivious, many more are coming back around to respecting and revering the land that feeds them.

People are relearning how to care for the soil, how to plant and grow their own food, how to pay attention to the weather and the seasons to maximize their land’s potential. They are recognizing that most weeds have a purpose, whether as medicinal or as food, or even just a measure of the health of your soil.

All of those are seemingly simple things that our grandparents took for granted. After two world wars, and having been exposed to other cultures and other ways of life, people eagerly left their agrarian roots and flocked to concrete jungles. That’s because farming was, and is, such unrelenting hard work. After our guys — and gals — came back from overseas, many had no interest in staying on the family farm and working themselves to death, opting instead for city life, and an easier life.

But with that ease comes a cost, one many are unwilling to bear any more.

Sure, it’s easier to go to the store and buy a bag of potatoes, or apples, but those who grow their own know nothing tastes like fresh, in-season produce.

We’ve become accustomed to having produce available year-round. Most folks have no idea when a particular vegetable or fruit is in season and at its peak of flavor, much less how to get it to that stage.

Does growing your own mean only eating what’s grown locally? Not necessarily. What if a certain type of fruit won’t grow in your area? Should you do without? Cherries, for instance. They will only grow well in areas that have cold winters.

While most people nowadays have no desire to spend 12 to 18 backbreaking hours a day taking care of never-ending chores such as chopping cotton and suckering tobacco and hoeing gardens and milking cows, many are opting for a simpler lifestyle that includes learning more about sustainable farming in a small area, or even in containers, and keeping a few chickens in their backyard.

Also, people are again learning how to keep and use a sourdough starter. Some are even getting involved in sourdough to the extent of buying countertop mills to grind their own wheat berries into flour. Far more nutritious — just like homegrown vegetables — fresh-milled flour contains all the nutrition lacking in store-bought flour, due to its over processing and shelf-life-extending preservatives.

While during the past few decades, we had excelled in forgetting how to do things like permaculture, we are now seeing a resurgence in relearning what our grandparents knew.

They wouldn’t have recognized the word permaculture, but they lived it. Everything had a purpose. Nothing went to waste. Cleaning out the barn stalls or the chicken coop served the dual purpose of removing manure in order to keep the animals’ pens clean, and then using that manure as fertilizer. Whatever wasn’t eaten or preserved out of the garden was fed to the chickens and hogs, which then fed the humans.

Life has a rhythm, and our grandparents’ knowledge of where their food came from and how it had been raised was a great part of that rhythm. Those same core values are making a comeback, and we’re better off for it.

In search of easier and faster, we’ve lost that rhythm, that oneness with the land. We’ve lost nutrition and substituted chemicals. We’ve traded honest physical work for working out at the gym, or vegging in front of the TV.

It’s past time for us to get back to the learning stage. Here’s hoping my next few articles will help you, inspire you, and possibly guide you a bit in making your way back to being closer to the land, to understanding more about gardening, and being more self-sufficient, to living a healthier life, and maybe making your soil a little healthier and more productive as well.

Like lush emerald — or sometimes even citron — throw rugs or afghans, moss covers fallen trees and the forest floor in vibrant patches. It drapes over stream-bound boulders like a velvet cloak and fills cracks in sidewalks better than any man-made caulk. It makes excellent terrarium filler. It feels amazing under bare feet.

But what is moss?

Having been around for millions of years, despite its appearance, moss is neither lichen nor fungus. It is, instead, a bryophyte. Nonflowering, in order to reproduce, bryophytes produce spores. Bryophytes have stems and leaves of a sort, but no true roots.

Hair-like structures called rhizoids, while they don’t penetrate down into the soil the way roots do, attach the moss to various surfaces such as soil, bark or rock. Rhizoids also help mosses conduct and retain water as well as nutrients.

As children, we love the magic of moss. It offers all the sensory input even the most imaginative child craves: vibrant colors, velvety texture, lush carpet and pillows.

Say the word “moss,” and everyone knows exactly what plant you’re talking about. Mosses live on every continent, even Antarctica. It can take extremes of conditions, from snowy mountaintops to deserts. Moss can be found growing on trees, on walls, and it’s the perfect plant for green roofs. Because it can subsist on much less soil and nutrients than most other plants, weight isn’t as much of a concern when using moss for “green” roofs.

Moss can tolerate temps from subzero to extremely hot. Mosses produce their own antifreeze so they actually thrive in cold conditions. Too much heat and they just dry out, hunker down, and wait for enough moisture to revive them.

There are more than 12,000 species of moss, each one uniquely adapted to its living conditions. Because it grows pretty much everywhere, humans have utilized mosses for untold centuries for a variety of reasons.

Green roofs, generally consisting of a waterproof layer covered in soil and plants, are not new, just an old idea that’s come back around. Pretty much waterproof itself, once moss tags down, it makes a great roof covering. It’s also a form of insulation.

Dried moss can be used as diapers, or feminine hygiene products. It makes great tinder. Moss can be used to soften bedding areas, or to line boots.

Able to absorb 20 times its weight in water, moss also has antibacterial properties and has long been used for bandages or wound dressings.

Moss, mixed with mud or clay, is useful as chinking between logs in cabins or stone buildings.

Part of moss’ contribution to ecosystems includes helping with erosion and retaining moisture. Green roofs can prevent up to 65% of stormwater runoff.

Moss is a food source, as well as a habitat or spawning ground for many types of amphibians. Birds use moss to “feather their nests.”

Mosses recycle nutrients and provide seed beds for seedlings. By absorbing excess moisture, they create a better environment for the plants and trees around them.

A closeup look at moss is like looking at a miniature rain forest. In a manner similar to rain forests, moss is a bio-indicator of the health of the environment, going so far as to change shape and density or disappear entirely if conditions get too bad.

Among the first plants to reestablish an ecosystem after a disaster such as a wildfire or volcanic eruption, mosses help stabilize the soil. The way they hold moisture and retain nutrients encourages and enables other plant species to come back as well. The act of holding moisture allows mosses to also control humidity, and sometimes temperature as well.

Moss can keep the ground cooler in shady forests, or it can have the reverse effect. Sphagnum moss reflects sunlight, so it keeps the tundra cooler and helps prevent the permafrost from melting.

Moss tends to grow in shady areas with moist, slightly acidic soil. While many people loathe moss, lumping it in the same category as dandelions, it’s a great choice for a damp, shady area of your lawn. And it doesn’t need mowing!

Nearly impossible to eradicate, moss can be deterred by tilling and liming the soil. But, if moss is growing in a certain part of your yard, then conditions are exactly right for it to thrive, which means most sun-loving grasses likely won’t survive in that area anyway.

If you love moss, and want to encourage it to grow, there are several ways it can be accomplished. Moss is a creeper, not a leaper, so keep in mind it’s kind of slow growing. Optimal conditions will encourage faster growth, so keep it moist.

Moss often grows in clumps or in a sheet-like manner, so you can carefully lift the edges and peel some up — make sure it’s on your property or if not, get permission — and transfer your gleanings to the area where you’re trying to establish it.

Another way to encourage moss to grow, especially if you’re trying to get it to grow on rocks or brickwork — an anathema to moss haters — you can make a slurry and pour or paint the mixture on. In a blender, mix about 1 to 1.5 cups of chopped moss and 2 cups of buttermilk or plain yogurt, something to encourage the growth of spores. Let the mixture sit a couple days, and then spread that moss — literally!

Moss on a living tree usually won’t do the tree any harm. Maybe you’ve noticed moss growing up the trunk of a live oak or on thick live oak branches, covered with feathery tufts of resurrection fern (Pleopeltis polypodioides) like hair on a troll doll. By retaining moisture, moss helps fallen trees decay faster and become nurse logs, home to endless fungi and insects, which in turn feed larger critters. Upon returning completely to the soil, these logs may eventually only be marked by a bed of moss. Moss that gives new seedlings a perfect nursery in which to grow and thrive, perpetuating a new generation of forest.

A wild bird rescue organization in Brunswick County is offering a reward for information leading to the culprits who’ve been mangling brown pelicans.

The $10,000 reward, a first in Sea Biscuit Wildlife Shelter’s nearly 20-year history, signifies a breaking point for shelter founder and Oak Island resident Mary Ellen Rogers.

“What I want to do is make them stop,” she said.

No one has been able to pinpoint exactly who “them” is behind what has become a common winter occurrence of dead and severely injured brown pelicans washing ashore on North Carolina’s predominately southernly beaches.

Over the course of a decade, a noticeable number of dead and injured pelicans have been found on shores from Emerald Isle to Topsail Island and down to Brunswick County beaches.

“We get them every year and it’s very depressing,” Rogers said.

The uptick is usually within the same two-month timeframe of each year, January through February, when trawling is closed off other states’ coasts, but remains open off of North Carolina’s beaches. This gives out-of-state commercial fishers two extra months of work they would not have otherwise working off their state shores.

Pelicans are attracted to catch being scooped up in nets from commercial fishing boat trawlers.

Rogers said you can see a “cloud” of these birds gliding overhead of a trawler earning a day’s catch. The problem comes in when a pelican wants in on the catch being hoisted from the sea because this is when it likely becomes caught in the net.

A fisherman, or several for that matter, might use a tool to puncture a hole in the birds’ wing or grab it by the end of its wing, swing it in a circular pattern until the wing breaks, then toss it overboard.

The latter is indicative of an overwhelming majority of injuries dozens of brown pelicans suffered last year, when 60 washed up dead on the shores of the island Rogers calls home.

All but two of the 15 pelicans she sheltered last year had the same injuries to their left wings, just above the elbow.

Rogers describes the visibly graphic injuries as torsion fractures, which occurs when a bone is broken by a twisting motion that leaves it looking like a corkscrew.

A Florida-based wildlife pathologist confirmed one of the critically injured pelicans that washed ashore in Oak Island last year suffered such a fracture, Rogers said.

Though an adult pelican can have a wing span of more than 6 feet, they typically weigh no more than 8 pounds because their bones are hollow, which means, when broken, the bone cannot be pinned.

In other words, there’s no fix to this type of injury in a pelican. So, injured birds that wash ashore alive have to be euthanized.

“We have to do something,” Rogers said. “I can’t just keep complaining about it every year. I just want the injuries to stop.”

She told Coastal Review Monday in a telephone interview that only one dead pelican has been found on Oak Island’s beach since Jan. 1. But she suspects she’ll be getting more calls of reports of dead and injured pelicans as February temperatures steadily hold at those warmer from the previous month.

Rogers hopes the pot of money filled by private donors will entice someone to come forward with evidence needed to nab those responsible for the injuries.

The reward is advertised on posters Rogers tacked up at Oak Island marinas on Oak Island and in Holden Beach fish stores, places where out-of-state commercial fishers might stop to gas up and pick up odds and ends.

The signs were posted in mid-December, shortly after Rogers organized a meeting with local law enforcement, wildlife officials and representatives with the U.S. Coast Guard to discuss the ongoing problem.

Pelicans are a migratory species that fly south in winter and return in late February to nesting areas in North Carolina, including on small islands in the Cape Fear River, and Pamlico and Bogue sounds. They can also be found in the state throughout the year.

Pelicans are protected under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which prohibits people from injuring, killing, possessing or harassing these birds without a permit, Miranda Turner, a wildlife health biologist with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission’s Game and Furbearer Program, said in an email.

“Penalties for breaking the (act) can vary widely depending on whether the person knew that what they were doing was illegal, how many birds were taken, and more,” she wrote.

Those include misdemeanor charges, fines up to several thousand dollars, and prison.

The reward Sea Biscuit Wildlife Shelter has posted will remain in effect through March 1.

Anyone with information leading to the arrest and conviction of those intentionally harming pelicans in the waters off Brunswick County may report so by visiting NC Wild TIP (Turn In Poachers). Witnesses may dial 911 as a secondary reporting measure.

Guest commentary

To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues. 

Each winter, as lights and decorations are packed away, holiday trees are typically discarded or sent to landfills in most areas. But in the Wilmington region of North Carolina, the Cape Fear Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation has been doing something different.

For the past 11 years and this past Saturday, this chapter has led the community in repurposing Christmas trees to rebuild dunes in critically eroded stretches of the coastline. These efforts not only help restore the natural landscape, but also educate the community about one of North Carolina’s most pressing challenges: protecting our coastline in the face of sea-level rise and intensifying storms.

The threats facing Cape Fear’s beaches are not unique. Across North Carolina, rising seas and worsening coastal erosion jeopardize the Tar Heel State’s ecosystems, communities, infrastructure, and economies. Climate change has led to higher tides, more frequent flooding, and even homes collapsing into the ocean due to severe erosion and storm damage.

North Carolina’s coastal property owners and communities have typically addressed chronic erosion and storm damage through beach renourishment or replenishment. This short-sighted “solution” disrupts natural sand movement and processes, frequently smother adjacent ecosystems and wildlife, and can cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, or more, to maintain in the long term. One storm event can easily wipe out a multimillion dollar project in a matter of a few hours, leaving North Carolina’s coastal habitats at risk of permanent loss due to sea level rise and flooding.

This is where nature-based solutions come in.

Nature-based solutions restore and conserve ecosystems by leveraging natural processes and resources to enhance biodiversity, protect habitats, and promote resilient communities. They also help mitigate disaster risk, including the effects of sea level rise, flooding, and storm surge.

In the case of the Cape Fear Chapter’s annual dune restoration event, volunteers place Christmas trees collected by the city along coastal areas in need of protection and rebuilding. Working closely with local government, community members, and wildlife advocacy groups, Surfrider ensures the trees are positioned to maximize sand capture while avoiding harm to wildlife. Once staked in place, the trees act as natural dune infrastructure, capturing sand and fostering the regrowth of critical dune plants and ecosystems.

In 2024, the Surfrider Foundation launched its Climate Action Program to focus on implementing nature-based solutions for climate impacts in coastal areas from Cape Fear to Hawaii, and everywhere in between. While the official program is new, volunteers across the country have long been leading efforts to address these challenges in their communities through the Surfrider Foundation. The Cape Fear Chapter exemplifies this approach, demonstrating how grassroots action can drive meaningful coastal change.

Across Surfrider’s network, volunteers are championing local initiatives to combat the impacts of climate change. From advocating for living shorelines and marsh restoration to promoting managed retreat, Surfrider’s activists are showing how nature-based solutions can address erosion and flooding sustainably.

The annual Christmas tree dune restoration event in Cape Fear serves as an entry point to educate the community on how nature-based solutions can mitigate climate-driven impacts. Through hands-on volunteer opportunities, Surfrider emphasizes the need for widespread adoption of sustainable practices along our coasts. These efforts empower community members to advocate for long-term, science-based policies, calling on decision-makers to prioritize the resilience of their communities.

As we welcome 2025, let’s make this the year we reimagine our relationship with North Carolina’s coast. By embracing nature-based solutions and working together to protect what we love, we can create a thriving, resilient coastline for generations to come.

To get involved with the Cape Fear Chapter’s dune restoration event next year — or to find volunteer opportunities with other Surfrider chapters along the coast — visit surfrider.org/volunteer.

Let’s make the health of our coasts a shared New Year’s resolution.

Surfrider Southeast Regional Manager Kayla Huff contributed to this piece.

Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or our publisher, the North Carolina Coastal Federation. See our guidelines for submitting guest columns.

There’s almost something deceptive about walking through the newest addition to Holly Shelter Game Land.

Trees rising from sandy ground largely blanketed by a thick cover of pine needles and wind-rippling wiregrass deafen any sense you’re just a short way from U.S. Highway 17.

Ben Jones summed up the experience during a recent hike through a small slice of the tract referred to as the Sleepy Creek property, a 1,616-acre parcel where baby longleaf pine trees sprout in savannas, carnivorous plants thrive and dense brush coats the surface of pocosin wetlands.

“It feels like we are miles from civilization,” he said.

That’s the idea behind rerouting a stretch of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail from the side of U.S. 17 in Pender County near Surf City and tucking it on land safely away from the four-lane blacktop.

Jones is the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail’s Coastal Crescent project manager and architect of the future section of trail, one that will link with nearly 20 miles of existing North Carolina trail snaking through the vast game land.

On a blustery cold day last week, Jones, Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail Associate Director Betsy Brown and North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission officials offered a tour of the portion of game land where the new trail is anticipated.

This is a particularly unique project, one where the plan is to steer hikers away from the gravel roadways that cut through the game land and onto natural surface defined by upland sand ridges, longleaf habitat and pocosin wetlands.

“We want to keep it wild,” Jones said.

The exception will be a boardwalk structure planned through a little more than a mile of pocosin. The walkway will be constructed of some type of fireproof material, perhaps precast concrete that can withstand fire from prescribed burns state wildlife officials will administer to manage the land.

The modern method for maintain longleaf pine forests is through controlled burns, which reduce hardwood growth and manage grasses and forbs in the understory. Fires are essential to longleaf habitats for a number of reasons, one being that longleaf pine seeds germinate on bare ground.

This habitat is essential to a variety of plants and animals, including federally threatened red-cockaded woodpeckers.

The Nature Conservancy acquired the Sleepy Creek property about two years ago, permanently conserving land that would have most likely been developed. The Nature Conservancy transferred ownership to the state Wildlife Resources Commission.

Growth along the U.S. 17 corridor between Wilmington and Jacksonville has exploded in the last couple of decades as demand for property along the coast has skyrocketed.

The roughly 64,000-acre game land sits almost half way between the two cities – 25 minutes from Wilmington and 30 minutes from Jacksonville.

While Holly Shelter is a draw for hunters of game ranging from whitetail deer to rabbit to turkey, it’s also a formidable hiking spot.

The new, natural trail will extend a little more than 3.5 miles through the game land addition, which will also be made available for public hunting.

Negotiations are underway to purchase an additional 45-acre tract surrounded by the game land. If plans go accordingly, that property will be the site of a primitive camp ground.

Brown said kiosks and signage explaining trail and hunting etiquette to help educate those groups on how to coexist will be installed at the trail head.

Hikers are urged to plan ahead, make sure they have sufficient supplies, including water, and check for hunting seasons before heading into the game land. Wildlife officials ask hikers to wear something blaze orange, whether it be a hat, vest or other attire, if traversing Holly Shelter during a hunting season.

The Mountains-to-Sea Trail stretches more than 1,100 miles from the Great Smoky Mountains to the Outer Banks.

The Coastal Crescent Trail gives its guests the opportunity to experience a portion of the Cape Fear Arch, an area tapped as having the greatest biological diversity on the East Coast north of Florida.

The Arch spans between Cape Lookout National Seashore, a barrier island system in Carteret County, and Cape Romain in South Carolina, and inland beyond Fayetteville to the Carolina Sandhills.

The Coastal Crescent Trail runs through Johnston, Sampson, Cumberland, Bladen, Pender and Onslow counties.

The segment (there are 18 total) of Mountains-to-Sea Trail included in Holly Shelter Game Land spans a little more than 90 miles. It includes 3.5 miles of trail, just over 9 miles of beach, about 5.5 miles of multi-use path, 19 miles of forest roads and a little more than 53 miles of paved road.

Jones said he did not have an exact timeframe on when the new rerouted trail will be open for hiking, though it is expected to be complete in fewer than five years.

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A rainbow reaches skyward from the Newport River as viewed from the marsh at Radio Island following Sunday showers. The island was formed by the placement of dredge spoils from an early channel-deepening project at the Morehead City port in the 1930s and takes its name from Carteret Broadcasting Co.’s WMBL, which began broadcasting in 1947 at 740 kHz. Photo: Mark Hibbs

Former Pine Knoll Shores resident Walt Zaenker authored a 2015 blog post about how Radio Island got its name.

Not much has changed in Sledge Forest in the more than 20 years since its distinctive features were captured on the pages of a document created to offer guidance for its future use.

That, said geologist Roger Shew, is the beauty of it.

The forest that rises from the banks of the Northeast Cape Fear River and sprawls thousands of acres across northern New Hanover County is still an important part of the river floodplain, one of the largest landscape corridors in the southeastern part of the state.

Towering up from the forest bed are cypress and loblolly pine trees, some of the oldest in southeastern North Carolina, that are hundreds of years old, a “rare old-growth occurrence,” according to a biological survey published in May 2003 by the Natural Heritage Program of North Carolina, which identified the forest as a significant natural area.

The forest’s attributes have in recent weeks been thrust front and center in a rumble that tipped off when a Charlotte-based developer submitted to the county’s planning department preliminary plans to build thousands of homes on about a quarter of the more than 4,000-acre, privately owned site.

Because the land being eyed for the proposed development of more than 4,000 single-family houses, a golf course, trails and a horse farm does not have to be rezoned, the project gets pushed straight through to the county’s technical review process, effectively omitting the opportunity for public comment.

That’s simply unacceptable to Castle Hayne resident and local activist Kayne Darrell.

“It’s a by-right property so they can go in and start clear-cutting any time they want,” Darrell told Coastal Review in a recent telephone interview. “We’re hoping they don’t yet. It’s unconscionable to me that we have no opportunity to get our questions answered or have any input on what’s happening because it’s going to impact so many of us in so many negative ways.”

Attempts to reach the developer, Copper Builders, LLC, were unsuccessful. An engineer listed on the development plan application did not return a call for comment.

The homes of Hilton Bluffs, the name of the proposed development, would be built on about 1,000 acres of uplands that adjoin about 3,000 acres of protected wetlands, those that have a continuous surface connection to the U.S. Supreme Court-defined “waters of the United States” – in this case, Prince George Creek, which connects to the Northeast Cape Fear River.

Sledge Forest is one of the largest tracts along a more than 35-mile stretch of the floodplain corridor running from Holly Shelter Creek, at the north, south to Smith Creek.

Shew, senior lecturer in the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Ocean Sciences and Environmental Sciences department and a conservationist, said in an email response to Coastal Review that the forest is dominated by hydric soils that are “periodically inundated during high-tide flooding events and storm events.”

Such floods are forecast to only increase with sea level rise, the latest projections of which are a minimum of one foot by 2050.

“High-tide flooding is common along the river and has the potential to inundate much of the site,” Shew said. “And, in the future … most of the area will be inundated fully or partially with river waters. Putting golf courses, horse barns and cabins or single-family homes in this area are ill-advised.”

The roads that will connect those neighborhood amenities will have to be built over wetlands, which will, in turn, block water movement, Shew said.

“And of course, whatever (fertilizer, herbicides, etc.) is put on these areas will runoff into the surrounding wetlands and river,” he wrote.

“The best and most logical use of this land is for it to be left as a natural area that supports wildlife, rich plant communities, corridor connectivity, reduces floodwaters, and maintains all of the ecosystem services of these wetland communities for the benefit of our community in a way too fast-growing area in northern (New Hanover County),” he said. “We need to have a comprehensive plan that maintains large natural areas and this and parts of Island Creek are sights that would be best and be opportune investments for the county for its future.”

Most of the old-growth trees are largely within the project building footprint, Darrell said. A 2003 natural area inventory dated cypress to be more than 350 years old and estimated to be as much as 500 years old, and dated loblollies to be more than 300 years old.

Area residents are also concerned about what is projected to be a significant increase in traffic on rural roads in the area – more than 30,000 additional vehicles per day.

Inactive hazardous site abuts tract

Opponents of the proposed development say they’re also troubled by the fact that the development is being proposed on land that is adjacent to a state-designated inactive hazardous site.

According to information provided by the North Carolina Division of Waste Management, contamination at the site off Castle Hayne Road resulted from drums of calcium fluoride and lubricants being stored in unlined trenches during the 1960s and 1970s.

That contamination spreads across two parcels, one of which is owned by General Electric.

Contamination in groundwater in the northwest corner of GE’s roughly 100-acre tract includes uranium, vinyl chloride and fluoride.

Those contaminants spill over onto a neighboring 1,500-plus-acre parcel owned by Nuclear Fuel Holding Co. Inc., a GE affiliate, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents.

There are also contaminants in groundwater around the main plant on GE’s property. Those contaminants include tetrachlorethylene (PCE), trichloroethylene (TCE), cis- 1,2-dichloroethene, 1,1-dichloroethane, vinyl chloride, benzene, and naphthalene contaminate, according to the state.

Contamination at the main plant area is contained on-site, but is also close to the northern central property line, said Katherine Lucas, public information officer for the Division of Waste Management, in an email responding to Coastal Review’s questions.

“A portion of the (northwest) Area Contamination has migrated to the adjacent property in the deep groundwater aquifer,” she said in the email.

The site was added to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Inactive Hazardous Sites Branch inventory in 1988.

The department’s Division of Water Resources conducted regulatory oversight of all remedial activities at the site until 2008, when site management was transferred to the branch as part of a reorganization between the waste management and water resources divisions.

The site was added to the branch’s Site Priority list in 2008.

“The area of the contamination has not been calculated,” Lucas said. “Ground water contamination is being remediated with a series of hydraulic control wells and pump and treatment of contaminated groundwater.”

More than 3,500 people have signed an online petition to save Sledge Forest.

Darrell, who helped organize Save Sledge Forest, said the ultimate goal is to get the land in conservation.

“That’s where it belongs,” she said. “We’re not giving up. It’s too special a place.”

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A belted kingfisher, or Megaceryle alcyon, surveys its autumnal surroundings from a perch, Nov. 14 at North River Preserve in Carteret County. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service describes the species as busy birds that burrow into the earth, patrol stream and river banks, and are “always ready to dive down and snag a meal.” Photo: Nick Green

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The 1859 Cape Lookout Lighthouse reaches 163 feet skyward beyond shorebirds hunkered down recently on a jetty across the bay at the Cape Lookout National Seashore visitor center at Shell Point on Harkers Island. Photo: Dylan Ray

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A fishing skiff anchored at the North River Bridge in Otway, in Carteret County, is nearly silhouetted at dawn recently. Photo: Doug Waters

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Striations of clouds blanket the sky at sunset over North River in Carteret County recently. Photo: Dylan Ray

There are some old fishing maxims that people throw around a lot, and a lot of them are misunderstood.

One in particular that really confuses people is, “Just follow the birds.”

I’ve been riding in the boat with novice anglers as they point out every bird they see as if that will lead them to the Promised Land. While it is true that birds tell us a lot of what is going on out there, it’s important to understand what each type of bird is, how it fishes, and what it means to us as anglers.

Let’s go through the most popular ones that we’ll see on our coast on any given day.

Pelicans

We’ll start with perhaps our most unusual bird, the pelican. As noted by American poet and journalist Dixon Lanier Merritt, “Oh, a wondrous bird is the pelican! His beak holds more than his belican.”

As we see them skimming the wavetops or gliding across a causeway, they are always looking into the water. They can see schools of fish a foot or two under the water and unerringly dive on top of them and scoop them up into their balloon-like bills. I have often seen them diving without a gamefish of any kind for miles in any direction. However, they can be helpful.

I was with a friend fishing a shoreline in the New River near Sneads Ferry and not having much luck. I noticed pelicans diving on mullet schools well out away from the shore. I could see mullet skipping every which way as the pelicans would fly over. We casually cruised over to the area and started making casts with our topwater plugs. We both hooked up on solid speckled trout almost right away and continued to do so the rest of the day.

Another time that pelicans can help us is during the fall migrations. When large concentrations of glass minnows are running the beach, you might see pelicans diving on them. Look for the cloud of bait in the water. If you’re really lucky, you may see them doing what I call “rafting,” where a dozen or more will be sitting on the surface just dipping their beaks into a bait ball of glass minnows or bay anchovies. Either of these situations is often accompanied by schools of feeding false albacore, bluefish or Spanish mackerel, and it’s worth throwing a small jig or minnow imitating fly.

So, the moral here is, if you’re not doing very well, and trying to figure out where your next cast should be, at least let the pelicans tell you where the bait fish are, and hopefully something bigger will be just behind.

Shorebirds

Next is wading birds: herons, egrets and other shorebirds. While not necessarily a bird you’ll be searching for, if you are fishing in a creek or marsh and wondering if there’s any life there, a heron wading the shoreline will at least alert you to the presence of small baitfish. This can be just the sign you need to make a few casts.

I have even pulled into a canal with docks and lifts and was just about to turn around when I saw a heron. I stopped and made “One More Cast.” Boom! A redfish ate my soft plastic jerkbait and I stayed there and caught fish until the tide ran out two hours later. It doesn’t happen a whole lot. But it’s worth paying attention.

Arctic terns are present here most of the summer. They are helpful to a point. They will definitely alert you to the presence of baitfish. But since they can dive under and pick them off with no help from below, they are not always good indicators of gamefish activity below.

Having said that there will be times in the summer when you will see terns diving and Spanish mackerel breaking the surface sporadically. Trolling is a good option in these situations because the fish will be spread out. I still prefer casting a small spoon or fly.

Other seabirds

Another bird that dives deep on small fish is the gannet. These will show up in our waters in late fall as larger schools of menhaden begin to arrive. They will dive from pretty high, cross their wingtips behind them, and enter the water like an Olympic diver. Often, they can go down to depths exceeding 70 feet.

Gannets are a good indicator of menhaden. Northeast striped bass fishermen love them because it will lead them to striped bass and big bluefish. Sometimes large red drum will be under our menhaden schools and possibly king mackerel. But it’s not a guarantee.

I’ve caught more sharks on jigs bumped under these schools than anything else.

Gulls are the No. 1 bird that anglers should concern themselves with.

In the summer we will see a lot of the laughing gulls, they have black heads and make that distinctive “laughing” call. Later on in the summer and into fall, we will see the little gray gulls called ring-beaked gulls.

If you are driving your boat across the water and look up to see a flock of gulls walking along the avenue, it’s worth checking out. They are voracious feeders and are always on the lookout for an easy meal. That means that they don’t often dive into the water like gannets or terns, but when a school of gamefish has baitfish on the move, they will notice and be right there when the minnows push out of the water to escape the jaws below. It is the gulls who will be there to pick up the ones the fish miss out on. It’s pretty frantic.

I always tell people to look for gulls “dancing” on the surface. This is when it’s really on. The action below is so frantic that the gulls don’t even want to pick up and fly up but want to stay as close to the surface as they can. This is a sure sign of false albacore, bluefish, or Spanish mackerel and will often lead to a day full of memories, which is what it’s all about really.

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Fall colors, the reds, yellows, browns and copperheads. An eastern copperhead crosses a path recently at the New Bern Civil War Battlefield in Craven County. Watch your step! Photo: Doug Waters

Spring tends to light up our imaginations after a long, few months of little color, but fall can just as much.

Besides the red-yellow-orange palette we associate with changing leaf colors as trees trade out their summer greens for autumn glory, fall boasts a host of other shades.

Without the summer haze of humidity, the sky seems bigger, somehow bluer, as it turns into a huge azure bowl. The air becomes crisper, laden with the scents of burning leaves — ever notice how distinctive smoke smells in the fall?

Along with the change in weather, our tastebuds change. All summer we yearn for salads and light meals. Fall makes us crave heavier fare. Chili, soup, beans and cornbread, roasts accompanied by tons of root vegetables alongside hot biscuits slathered in butter, apple pies and apple butter and hot apple cider.

Our modern lives often make us feel disconnected from nature, but even if we don’t think we notice, thousands of years of living on this planet ensure our bodies remember the changing seasons. The distinction is as engrained in humans as it is in plants and animals.

Plants other than trees give us hints of the coming cooler weather. From the light purple of wild ageratum (Conoclinium coelestium) to the silvery dew-spangled spiderwebs that seem to be everywhere this time of year to the bright gold of goldenrod (Solidago) and the luminescent yellows of swamp sunflower (Helianthus angustifolius) to the white of saltbush (Baccharis halimifolia), signs of fall are everywhere.

Interestingly enough, and even though they all look very different, ageratum, goldenrod, swamp sunflower, and saltbush are all in the daisy (Asteraceae) family. Tough native perennials, they can become invasive, to the point many people don’t like them. With few disease or insect problems, these hardy natives are a late season boon to pollinators.

Some leaves turn yellow, some, orange, some red, some brown, and some a glorious combination. Oaks tend to be bronzes and rusts while maples and dogwoods are redder. Keep in mind, one of the most brilliantly gorgeous shades of red belongs to … poison ivy, so if you’re picking specimens for fall bouquets or arrangements … “leaves of three, leave it be.”

But why do trees change color? It’s not simply to make us “ooh” and “ahh.” Some trees don’t change much at all, their leaves just drop. Evergreen trees, hence the name, like pine trees, stay green year-round. Some trees, such as live oaks (Quercus virginiana) and bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) hold onto this year’s leaves until newly emerging leaves in the spring push the old ones out of the way. Although, from what I’ve read, cypress trees are supposed to lose their leaves in the fall. A great many of the ones around here do not, making them look dead, rather than trees that are nothing but bare branches.

Trees lose leaves because it is a vital part of keeping them alive.

Leaves are green in the spring and summer because of chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is the chemical that enables leaves to absorb energy from sunlight, called photosynthesis. Using photosynthesis allows the leaves to convert energy into sugars in order to feed the tree.

When temperatures start to drop and days begin to get shorter, the chlorophyll in the leaves begins to break down. The lack of chlorophyll is what reveals the yellow and orange pigments, or carotenoids, that are present but masked during the summer.

Red pigments are caused by a different chemical change. Sugars that get trapped in the leaves produce pigments called anthocyanins.

What determines the level and brilliance of the colors? Weather conditions, with temperature and moisture being the main influences. Warm, sunny days, with crisp but not freezing nights usually causes the best displays. The amount of rainfall, and thus the moisture of the soil, also has a great bearing on whether or not we get an amazing array of fall colors or merely a blah handoff.

Another reason deciduous trees lose leaves is because their leaves are thin and tender, filled with watery sap that freezes easily. When the days become shorter and start cooling off, trees begin sealing the ends of their leaf stems off — kind of like putting your storm windows in place — and pulling their sap down to their roots.

Evergreens, such as pines and cypress, have a heavy wax coating on their needles and scales, and those contain an antifreeze-like fluid that keeps them from freezing.

So what happens to all the leaves and needles that fall? Other than the ones humans spend incalculable hours raking and disposing of?

They’re not wasted, for sure!

Left to themselves, leaves slowly decompose. The original leaf drop covers the ground around the base of the tree, providing essential mulch. This also creates the spongy layer of the forest that absorbs and holds rainfall and keeps the soil from washing away. As this mulch decomposes, it not only returns vital nutrients to the soil, it provides invaluable food and habitat for earthworms and snails and turtles and toads and toadstools and many, many organisms that make up the forest ecosystem.

While humans remain stumped as to some of the myriad interactions, we are understanding more about these puzzles all the time. Like the existence of mycelium — threads of incredibly tiny fungal organisms composing a “mycelium network” so plants can share nutrients.

The leaves that blow around, looking like herds of lemmings scurrying down the road, or a huge dance troupe staging an on-pointe flash performance, are being returned to, and in the process of, making new soil.

As they dry up and get whisked hither and yon, little pieces of them break off. Like individual grains of sand creating and nourishing a beach, eventually those little pieces will become a part of a new batch of soil, enabling plants to grow and holding the planet in place. Some day one of those plants will become a tree, and the cycle will begin all over again.

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Aurora borealis, the result of an intense solar geomagnetic storm reaching Earth, lights up the skies over Jockey’s Ridge State Park in Nags Head late Thursday evening. Photo: Catherine Kozak

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An especially young green tree frog catches the morning sun from an agapanthus leaf in a Beaufort garden. Photo: Dylan Ray

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A green tree frog peers out at the rain from the safety of a fence railing near Russell Creek in Beaufort. Frogs all along the North Carolina coast may be in for more of the same with the potential tropical cyclone stalled about 185 miles south-southwest of Cape Lookout early Monday expected to move northward during the day, dumping very heavy rainfall, according to the National Weather Service Newport-Morehead City office. Photo: Dylan Ray

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Blaze, a piping plover shown here on the beach in Waukegan, Illinois, has returned for the second consecutive year to winter at Masonboro Inlet in New Hanover County. The small, but determined piping plover was abandoned before she hatched and became among the first captive-reared chicks to be released in Illinois from the University of Michigan Biological Station in 2023. Within about two months of her release into the wild, Blaze migrated south to spend the winter at Masonboro Inlet, according to Audubon North Carolina. Audubon officials spotted Blaze Aug. 15 at the inlet, returning from Waukegan, where she successfully raised three chicks.

Piping plover are federally listed as threatened on the East Coast and listed as endangered in the Great Lakes region.

Sandy spits created by inlets provide havens for shorebirds to rest and roost and, for some, nesting habitat.

“No one else would be monitoring for Piping Plovers in these areas if we didn’t,” said Lindsay Addison, coastal biologist at Audubon North Carolina, in a statement. “We monitor the areas around Wilmington as part of ongoing shorebird surveys, along with our regular work to protect and manage shorebird habitat, including at the south end of Wrightsville Beach.”

Photo courtesy of the Lake County (Illinois) Audubon Society.

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An agile, busy and well-laden pollinator nearly blends into the yellow of a sunflower recently in a barely maintained part of a garden near Morehead City. Photo: Mark Hibbs

Chris Herndon of Cary is the new director of the North Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club.

The Raleigh-based nonprofit organization, which advocates for a clean, healthy environment and the well-being of all who live in it, made the announcement Wednesday.

Herndon, who has spent most of the past 12 years in executive leadership roles with the United Way, comes most recently from United Way of the Greater Triangle, where he was CEO. He also served as interim executive director of WakeUP Wake County.

Previously, he was chief marketing and engagement officer at United Way of Central Indiana in Indianapolis, and served on the United Way Worldwide Marketing Leadership Council.

The NC Sierra Club said Herndon, who moved to North Carolina in 2019, was a respected nonprofit leader in the Triangle.

“The work of the N.C. Chapter is more crucial than ever as climate change increasingly threatens our environment and communities. Our children and grandchildren’s futures depend on how effectively we meet this challenge,” Herndon said in a statement. “I’m eager to help protect marginalized communities from polluters in rural and urban areas, safeguard biodiversity and public lands, celebrate our connection to the natural world, and elect and hold accountable leaders at all levels of government who share these values.”

Herndon’s responsibilities include guiding staff and volunteers and working with Sierra Club national staff working in the state and region on environmental policies, priorities, and objectives set by the chapter’s elected volunteer leadership.

“The Executive Committee is glad to put our trust in Chris to steward this organization into its next era in collaboration with our volunteer leaders and staff,” Chapter Chair Katie Tomberlin said in the announcement. “The Sierra Club’s work is more essential than ever, and we’re happy to have a proven leader to bring new energy, ideas and commitment to our mission.”

Prior to beginning his nonprofit career, Herndon spent 16 years as a sports executive in Indianapolis.

Herndon currently chairs Cary’s Greenway Committee, is a member of the Cary Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Resources Advisory Board and a member of the Dix Park Community Committee. He also serves as a board member for WakeUP Wake County.

“I couldn’t be more excited to serve the North Carolina community I love in this way,” Herndon said. “I’m especially eager to amplify the power of the N.C. Sierra Club’s passionate members to defend everyone’s right to a healthy world.”

The national Sierra Club, now more than 125 years old, works to “defend everyone’s right to a healthy world,” according to its website.

This story has been updated.

Any time Barry Fulton spots a species of bird in his yard he has not seen before, he can’t help but ask himself the same question.

Did I do that?

“You see new species coming and you just ponder, was that because I have more water sources or more plants that have berries for a food source?” Fulton said. “Next thing you know, you’re downloading apps to identify birds.”

Fulton and his wife, Debi Gallo, are among dozens of St. James residents who have in the past several months become part of a unique, yet growing club of property owners who’ve worked to get their town certified as a Community Wildlife Habitat by the National Wildlife Foundation.

St. James officially earned the designation in late February, making it the only coastal town certified in the state. Wilmington is registered but not yet certified — that could happen next year.

To date, nearly 20 towns, cities, communities and neighborhoods in North Carolina have achieved the designation, one that denotes areas where residents have put in the time to create and enhance wildlife habitat on their land.

Proponents of the program say earning the designation is not particularly difficult or expensive.

“In someone’s typical yard they’ve already done some landscaping, so a lot of people are well on their way in what would be needed to certify their property,” said St. James resident Ernie McLaney.

McLaney, member at-large on the St. James Conservancy’s executive board, moved from Charlotte to the coast a couple of years ago to settle in a life of quasi-retirement with his wife, bringing with him a wealth of knowledge about the National Wildlife Federation’s Wildlife Habitat Certification program.

He was one of the originators in supporting Matthews earn its certification in 2012. Three years later, Charlotte picked up the designation, making it, at the time, the largest certified city east of the Mississippi.

McLaney said he was immediately struck by what the town of about 7,000 residents had to offer as a wildlife habitat community.

“When I saw the beauty and amount of tree canopy that St. James has designed into this development here I was just really blown away,” he said.

Roughly 42% of land within the town, which incorporated in the mid-1990s, has been set aside as natural preserve. Natural buffers cushion areas along N.C. Highways 211 and 906, main county thoroughfares that intersect at the town’s northwest corner.

“With all of that in mind and seeing that people were incorporating native plants, bird feeders and birdhouses in their landscape, I thought that this would be an easy project to take on,” McLaney said.

He reached out to the conservancy with the idea, eventually landing him on the nonprofit’s board. Soon he would discover that around 45 properties in St. James were already certified. The requirement to become certified was 150 individual wildlife habitats from everyone including homeowners and churches to fire stations and schools.

The conservancy, with help from organizations including The Garden Club at St. James, hosted a number of community environmental education and outreach programs to spread the word.

“It took us less than a year to get St. James certified,” McLaney said. “Record time. We were impressed.”

Today, around 165 properties in the town are certified.

Certification can be as simple as placing a bird bath or other water feature, birdhouses or nesting boxes and feeders, or planting berry-bearing shrubs in your yard.

“It’s something you can do at your own pace as your time and finances allow,” McLaney said.

That’s a message he hopes resonates throughout other communities in coastal North Carolina.

“It’s an easy lift for some and it’s a recognized process that if people see habitat destruction in their community from growing developments they can counter some of that loss by enhancing what they have in their yard,” McLaney said.

Fulton agreed.

“It’s important that we maintain habitat for our wildlife,” he said. “There’s so much of the habitat that is getting clear cut for development. Everybody can do their fair share to provide some more shelter. They’re getting chased from their natural environments in every way. It’s important to do what we can now.”

A study on last year’s extreme heat and the National Weather Service’s most recent seasonal outlook both point to 2024 being just as warm or even warmer than 2023’s record-breaking temperatures.

Researchers behind the study, “2023 summer warmth unparalleled over the past 2,000 years,” found that not only was 2023 reported as the hottest year on record, for most of the Northern Hemisphere, the year also included the warmest summer in 2,000 years.

Dr. Jan Esper and Dr. Max Torbenson, geography professors at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, and Dr. Ulf Büntgen, a professor from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, wrote the study published this month in the journal Nature.

Esper explained during a recent online press briefing that the study places the 2023 temperature extremes into a long-term context, in this case the last two millennia.

They combined existing meteorological records with data from the nine longest temperature sensitive tree-ring chronologies to examine June, July and August surface air temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere extra-tropics, Esper said. This region is between the latitude line that runs through New Orleans and Cairo, or 30 degrees north, and the North Pole, 90 degrees north.

The researchers also found that the temperature baseline from the 19th century used to contextualize global warming for the Paris Agreement is cooler by a few tenths of a degree than previously thought.

This period is really not well covered with instruments, Esper said of the years 1850-1900, but at least for the region in the Northern Hemisphere that was studied, the tree rings “can do really, really well.” He said the tree ring data can be used as a substitute and show the early instrumental temperature errors.

The study also found that in the last 60 years, greenhouse gas emissions have caused El Niño events to become stronger, leading to hotter summers, and 2023 is consistent with a greenhouse gases-induced warming trend that is amplified by an unfolding El Niño event.

The current El Niño is forecast to end early this summer, and past data shows that there is a lag between extreme El Niño conditions and large-scale temperature deviations, making it likely that 2024 will see temperature records broken again.

“When you look at the long sweep of history, you can see just how dramatic recent global warming is,” Büntgen said in a statement. “2023 was an exceptionally hot year, and this trend will continue unless we reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically.”

Officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information explained in its global monthly report that April 2024 is the 11th-consecutive month of record-high global temperatures. The month ranked as the warmest April on record, suggesting that Büntgen is right that the heat trend is continuing.

According to the global annual temperature rankings outlook, “there is a 61% chance that 2024 will rank as the warmest year on record and a 100% chance that it will rank in the top five of warmest years recorded.”

And, “based on current anomalies and historical global annual temperature readings, it appears that it is virtually certain that 2024 will be a top 10 year, consistent with a strong propensity since 1988 for recent years to be initially ranked as a top 10 year,” NOAA officials said.

State relief programs

To help communities take action to reduce the health effects caused by extreme heat exposure, Gov. Roy Cooper’s office announced Tuesday that May 26-June 1 is North Carolina Heat Awareness Week, and reminded residents of the state’s heat-preparedness tools.

“As our summers continue to get hotter, today’s proclamation raises awareness of the many tools and resources available to keep our communities safe from extreme heat,” Cooper said.

On the state level, several programs have been launched to help communities weather the heat, especially for outdoor workers, infants and children, older adults, pregnant people, athletes, low-income individuals and people with underlying health conditions who are at higher risk for heat-related illnesses.

The N.C. Office of Recovery and Resiliency, N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, N.C. State Climate Office and the Duke University Heat Policy Innovation Hub teamed up to create the Heat Action Plan Toolkit for health departments, local governments and other community partners to develop their own plans specific to their needs.

Chief Resilience Officer Dr. Amanda Martin told Coastal Review Wednesday that the state wants everyone to know the signs of heat illness when they are enjoying the summer sun at the coast.

“Extended extreme heat is dangerous to the human body. Perhaps just as dangerous as the actual heat is ignoring the protective factors that reduce and eliminate heat illness and death,” Martin said. “Last year was the hottest year in 2,000 years, so it’s more important than ever for outdoor workers and indoor workers without air conditioning to take breaks, access cooler air, and drink water. Senior citizens, young children and people with health conditions are especially vulnerable to heat waves.”

Also, the state Health and Human Services’ Climate and Health Program launched its Heat Health Alert System this month to notify subscribers when the heat index is expected to reach unhealthy levels in their county. The program operates a Heat-Related Illness Surveillance System from May through September and documents weekly emergency department visits for heat-related illness in the state.

“We want all North Carolinians to enjoy a safe and healthy summer,” said Dr. Susan Kansagra, Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Public Health, in a news release. “With more than 3,900 emergency department visits for heat-related illness in North Carolina last summer, preparing for extreme heat at the local level is critical to protecting the health of North Carolina residents and workers.” 

The Office of Recovery and Resiliency announced last week its newest product, the NC Resilience Exchange website, an interactive resource to help local and state leaders find relevant information in the wealth of climate data available online.

“The Exchange offers funding opportunities, a directory of experts, interactive mapping tools, model ordinances and more in a one-stop-shop that is relevant to North Carolina communities,” according to the website.

Federal efforts

At the federal level, the Biden-Harris administration on May 20 announced it had committed $4.55 million for the interagency National Integrated Heat Health Information System  “to enhance community science observations and data collection on extreme heat, and provide assistance to communities planning for and evaluating equitable heat resilience projects.”

NOAA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention founded the system in 2015 to lead developing community resilience to the effects of extreme heat.

The Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring based at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham will assist organizations conduct local climate and health studies. The Center for Heat Resilient Communities that will be based out of California and Arizona is to offer diverse expertise and knowledge-sharing hubs to identify and evaluate policies, protocols, and lessons for heat resilience.

“The impacts of extreme heat caused by climate change are an increasing threat to our health, ecosystems and economy,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a statement, adding that this investment will support new Centers of Excellence “to help protect historically excluded communities from the dangers of extreme heat, boost climate resilience and increase awareness on best practices to tackle the climate crisis.”

The Durham center will work with the Arizona Science Center, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and the Museum of Science in Boston to serve the entire country at a regional level.

Officials with the museum said the center will observe, monitor and evaluate factors influencing heat risk at a local scale in 30 historically disadvantaged communities over the next three years. The center is a broad collaborative effort leveraging these place-based institutions and supported by the technical capacity and expertise at CAPA Strategies, Utah State University, the North Carolina State Climate Office, and AQUEHS Corp.

“The past few years have shown us that we can work towards fixing what we can measure,” said Max Cawley, principal investigator for new center and the Museum of Life and Science’s Director for Climate Research and Engagement. “And when it comes to heat imperilment, how you measure also matters. We’re eager to convene a strong collaborative partnership towards expanding where we can measure heat and who’s involved in measuring it.”

Last month, the National Weather Service and the CDC released an experimental online tool called HeatRisk.

HeatRisk provides a color-coded forecast of risk of heat-related impacts that could occur over a 24-hour period. HeatRisk takes into consideration how unusual the heat is for the time of the year, the duration of the heat including both daytime and nighttime temperatures, and if those temperatures pose an elevated risk of heat-related impacts based on data from the CDC, according to the website.

“Climate change is causing more frequent and intense heat waves that are longer in duration, resulting in nearly 1,220 deaths each year in the U.S. alone,” NOAA Administrator Dr. Rick Spinrad said in April when the tool was released. “Last year was the warmest year on record for the globe, and we just experienced the warmest winter on record. HeatRisk is arriving just in time to help everyone, including heat-sensitive populations, prepare and plan for the dangers of extreme heat.”

CDC Director Mandy Cohen explained during a news conference that the tool will help “protect health and improve lives and to prepare for what we anticipate will be a very hot summer. Heat is a threat to our health. Heat can make underlying health conditions worse and heat related illness like heat exhaustion and heat stroke can cause serious illness and even lead to death. Heat can be especially dangerous for certain people, including very young kids.”

With its rich, tea-colored waters and ancient bald cypress-peppered swamps, there’s something alluring, almost sacred about the Black River.

Stretching more than 60 miles, this river that meanders through portions of rural counties in southeastern North Carolina has much to offer. Paddlers enjoy exploring its majestic swamps. Wildlife in the area draw hunters and fishers to its banks. Conservationists marvel at its majestic bald cypress, the oldest trees in North America east of Nevada.

The one thing the river does not have is its own advocacy group. But that’s about to change.

The inaugural meeting of the Friends of the Black River will be hosted Tuesday at Moores Creek National Battlefield in Pender County.

Organizers of the newly-formed group hope to build an alliance of organizations and people, particularly those who reside on and near the river’s banks, interested in helping protect the river.

Julie Moore, a botanist and chair of the North Carolina Plant Conservation Program’s advisory board, said the idea is to think about many different ways to advocate for the river.

There is, of course, preservation through buying some of the land along the river.

More than 17,000 acres is protected within the borders of the Black River Preserve, which includes swamplands that are home to some of the oldest bald cypress trees affectionally called Three Sisters.

“The Nature Conservancy is doing a good job with buying the land at the swamp land and some uplands, but it’s what goes on in those adjacent uplands that can make a difference,” Moore said.

Whether it’s the young blueberry farms that are cropping up on the upstream landscape, or industry eyeing land to set up shop along the river banks, different things that could possibly affect the river require different ways to advocate for it, she said.

“We need people who are on the scene to watch those things, to go to county meetings and understand what’s happening. I think local people make the best advocates. People need to look after what’s in their backyard. You can’t expect a federal agency or state agency to do all the care that’s necessary for an area and that’s over 50 years of my observation. So, I think having local people on the scene, they can see if there’s dumping or illegal activities,” Moore said.

The idea behind Friends of the Black River was born a year ago under the backdrop of a bald cypress aptly named “Methuselah,” a tree estimated to be about 1,700 years old.

As Southern Conservation Partners, Inc. President Chuck Roe tells it, he and Moore were among a handful of people who had kayaked a portion of the river taking respite on a river sandbar under the tree.

The conversation that ensued that day was one of concern about the river’s long-term security.

“Our Black River has the most extensive surviving expanse of old growth swamp forest left in North America,” Roe said. “Some have described the Black River as a river that saved itself because it was so shallow and meandering that it was not conducive for channelizing and commercial industrial use, and so it had the good fortune to survive and its natural communities to survive.”

That’s where the idea of an advocacy group was born.

Southern Conservation Partners, an all-volunteer, nonprofit that helps local communities across the southern U.S. protect, restore, and enhance environmental resources, put up the funds to create https://www.blackriverfriends.org.

The URL for “Friends of the Black River” was already taken by another group advocating for a Black River in a different state.

The first meeting of the North Carolina edition of Friends of the Black River will be hosted at around 3 p.m. following the meeting of the Cape Fear Arch Conservation Collaboration, which starts at 10 a.m.

Speakers at the Cape Fear Arch meeting will include a representative of the Coharie Tribe, North Carolina Coastal Land Trust staff, The Nature Conservancy, and Dr. David Stahle, University of Arkansas distinguished professor of geology who discovered the Black River’s ancient trees.

Both meetings will be held in Patriots Hall, 40 Patriots Hall Drive, Currie.

Featured Image

An anole, freshly shed of its skin except the still-peeling tip of the nose, suns in a Beaufort agapanthus bed. For us creatures who don’t normally peel, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advise that protection from the sun’s rays is important year-round, not just during the warmer months. Photo: Dylan Ray

Guest commentary

To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues. Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or our publisher, the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

MANNS HARBOR – Here, on the front lines of the battle against climate change, the war looks lost.

Point Peter Road leads straight into the Croatan Sound where rising seas, higher tides, and monstrous storms batter the fragile coastline. The saltwater poisons and erodes the peaty soil before what’s left disappears under the relentless waves. A man-made canal carries the seawater inland where it kills cypresses and pines and turns the forest into shrubby marsh. Freshwater, blocked from running into the bay by the rising sound, pools under trees and kills them.

This corner of the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge stands no higher than one foot.

“This particular stretch of the coastline, due to the hydrology, experiences extremely high rates of erosion,” says Sarah Toner, the visitor services manager for the Coastal North Carolina National Wildlife Refuges Complex. “This is ground zero.”

All, however, may not be lost. A healthy infusion of climate-fighting cash — $27.5 million — from the Inflation Reduction Act will likely help Alligator River and a handful of other nearby refuges and state lands keep the ravages of climate change at bay. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and partners will deploy “nature-based solutions,” including oyster reefs, marsh sills, dredge spoils, and re-wetted peatlands, to protect the coast from a steadily warming world.

“The threat is that more of these communities out here will become really challenging places to live with more flooding, more soil erosion, and more frequent wildfires,” says Chris Baillie, the climate adaptation coordinator for the North Carolina Coastal Federation. “There is a need to be really judicious in how climate funding is spent because there simply isn’t enough money out there to address all the climate vulnerabilities faced by people and nature.”

‘We’re trying to hang on’

The Alligator River refuge — “mile after uninhabited mile on both Highways 64 and 264,” reads a 1990 Service brochure – is an otherworldly expanse of dredged peat fields, fresh and brackish marshes, pocket forests, and lakes. Established in 1984, the refuge is surrounded by water and serves as the second line of defense, behind the Outer Banks, against a marauding Mother Nature. The 152,000-acre refuge is one of nine, low-lying refuges in eastern North Carolina, all facing varying degrees of climate-induced threats.

Its purpose: protect the pocosin wetlands, which provide ample habitat for the wintering waterfowl that fill the skies, the black bears in numbers found nowhere else on the East Coast, and the elusive, and federally endangered, Red Wolves. Another goal: to save the eastern black rail, “the most secretive of the secretive marsh birds and one of the least understood bird species in North America,” according to the Atlantic Coast Joint Venture, a federal-state bird conservation partnership.

The birds, federally listed as threatened, once flitted across salt marshes from Connecticut to Florida, including those alongside Point Peter Road. But habitat destruction, due to drained marshes and rising seas, has decimated the population by 90 percent. Maybe 350 breeding pairs remain, according to the Joint Venture, “a catastrophic decline over the past 30 years.”

Seas, worldwide, rose on average 1.2 millimeters a year for most of the 20th century. Since 1993, though, the rate has more than doubled to 3.2 millimeters, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yet reports show the seas have been rising three to four times as much as the global rate between North Carolina and Massachusetts which leads to more frequent inundations and salt marsh loss.

“We’re losing a lot of land,” says Fred Wurster, a Service geomorphologist who’s leading the climate-fighting project. “Not only is the shoreline retreating rapidly, but the habitat we manage is transitioning very rapidly to salt marsh or open water. It creates a situation where we’re trying to hang on to what’s here long enough to give species a chance to move further inland.”

Much of Alligator River, like much of the coastal plain, was logged of cypress and Atlantic white cedar and drained for farmland which dried out the peaty soils. When the mega-farms proved unprofitable, the scarred and desiccated fields became refuges and wildlife management areas. Yet the salty water from surrounding estuaries creeps relentlessly inland poisoning the soil and further drying the spongy peat bogs. Without rain, the carbon-rich pocosins become tinderboxes for wildfires that can last months and cause significant damage to the ecosystem, and global health.

In 1955, a fire on the other side of the Alligator River burned 203,000 acres. Thirty years later, the Allen Road fire burned 95,000 acres. The 2008 Evans Road fire, though, sticks most in locals’ craws. It burned — above and below ground in the deep peat — for seven months before it was extinguished. Air quality as far north as Norfolk, Virginia, suffered. More than 40,000 acres, mostly in the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, burned. The Service estimated that the fire released six million tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Peatlands cover only three percent of the world’s land mass, yet they store twice as much carbon as all the planet’s forests. They are enormous carbon “sinks.” Duke University calculated in 2022 that rewetting and restoring 250,000 acres of abandoned peat bogs across the Southeast could prevent 4.3 million tons of carbon dioxide from escaping into the atmosphere each year.

“Southern pocosin peatlands punch far above their weight in terms of their capacity for carbon storage,” says Curtis Richardson, founding director of the Duke University Wetland Center. “Acre for acre, they can store significantly more carbon than forests or grasslands.”

Largest climate-fighting act

Arch Bracher stood at the end of a long pier casting mullet into Rose Bay where the freshwater Pamlico River turns brackish at the Pamlico Sound. It was an unseasonably warm, Carolina-blue morning and the red drum weren’t biting. And neither was Bracher when talk turned to climate change.

“They talk about sea level rise, blah, blah, blah,” says Bracher, a charter boat captain who runs the Pelican out of Oregon Inlet. “But the ocean’s not getting higher. It’s just eating away stuff. They’re talking about the water rising one inch over the next 100 years. I think that’s just propaganda.”

A forest of dead, ghostly pines stood in the adjoining Swanquarter National Wildlife Refuge. Rising seas have eaten away the banks on both sides of the Bell Island Pier. A study a decade ago showed that an average of three feet of peaty soil disappeared each year due to ever-higher water. In 2012, The Nature Conservancy and the Service built a limestone sill 30 feet offshore. The reef reduces the power of the waves that pound the shoreline. Erosion slows. Sand and silt accumulate between the shore and the sill creating new beach for plants to take hold and marsh to reform. Oysters and mussels attach to the marl further strengthening, and renourishing, the reef.

“We’re building good oyster habitat, and getting recruitment, which helps with water quality as well,” says Aaron McCall, a regional land steward for The Nature Conservancy. “We don’t want to reach a tipping point where the system gets destroyed and it doesn’t provide any service to the environment or the local community.”

The Conservancy surveyed 10 sites — six protected by the reef, four unprotected — near the pier to determine whether erosion continues apace. Erosion stopped or slowed at all protected sites; it continued at the unprotected sites.

Limestone sills and oyster reefs are major components of so-called living shorelines and hallmarks of nature-based solutions to climate change. And they are precisely the types of projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act that will be built across eastern North Carolina.

The IRA, at $369 billion, is the largest climate-fighting package in U.S. history. Its goal is to move the country fully towards renewable energy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change. Billions of dollars are dedicated to agricultural conservation, forest protection, and wildfire risk reduction.

“There is often an assumption that tackling the climate crisis requires only technological solutions,” the White House said in November 2022 describing the IRA’s nature-based offerings. “Too often, the power of nature is overlooked and undervalued as a core element of a more just, livable world today and for future generations.”

The Service received $250 million; nearly half will help restore federal wildlife refuges and state wildlife management areas “that have been affected by adverse weather events.” No other project received as much money — $27.5 million — as the Albemarle-Pamlico region. The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission will likely get $5 million of that amount for climate-fighting work at wildlife management areas across the coastal plain.

There’s really nothing new or radical about enlisting nature to solve nature’s problems. The Roosevelt administration, during the Dust Bowl, paid farmers to plant 220 million trees from Texas to North Dakota to reduce erosion, protect livestock, and create wildlife habitat. Oyster reefs have long been deployed off Florida. Sand is pumped on barrier islands across the Mississippi River Delta. The Service and partners also spent $38 million pumping sand, restoring marsh, and replumbing the hydrology at Delaware’s Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge which was decimated by Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

Nature-based engineering contrasts the coastal hardening tactics — sea walls, jetties, bulkheads, rip-rap — of centuries past. Sea walls, for example, only protect shorelines for so long against rising seas. More vicious storms and hurricanes easily top them. And the walls may protect one section of coast while causing erosion along another section.

“Nature-based solutions are definitely the way to go because you’re designing something that takes into account the natural hydrology and actual landscape in the first place,” Wurster says. “The things you’re building will be more stable in the long run. You’re not fighting against nature. Plus, these strategies tend to be more resilient and less expensive in the long run.”

Buying time

Climate change’s past, present, and alarming future unspools along Mashoes Road on the Alligator River refuge’s north end. A somewhat healthy marsh on the right gives way to shrub, pine, and oak on the left. In the distance, the skeletal remains of once-prominent trees hug East Lake. Eventually, inexorably, the salt water will reach the forest and destroy it too.

“We see, year after year, the forest retreating and turn into this ghost forest,” says the refuge’s Toner, a biologist by training. “We’re trying to keep what we have here for as long as we can.”

Help’s on the way. Much of the $27.5 million will be spent restoring fragile coastal ecosystems via shoreline protection and peatland restoration. IRA money could plug drainage ditches and add dikes, tidal gates, or wooden risers to keep saltwater at bay while restoring the natural flow of water over the land. Culverts may be dug to let water flow beneath roads. Restoration, or preservation, of trees, shrubs, and wetlands could provide habitat for Red Wolves, black rails, and other migratory birds. Communities near and far will likely benefit from a reduction in wildfires and a sequestration of carbon.

Oyster reefs, for example, could be built, or expanded, at Cedar Island and Pea Island refuges. A canal might be dredged, and a pump station added, at Lake Mattamuskeet. A logging road could be removed at Roanoke River refuge to let water flow naturally again. The marsh sill at the Bell Island Pier could be expanded.

Work is set to begin in 2024. Baillie, with the nonprofit Coastal Federation, says there’s no time to waste.

“It would be really disingenuous to say, ‘Hey, these funds are going to take care of all of our problems and let people live the way they currently do forever,’” he says. “There are tough decisions to be made. But these funds can have a big impact helping people and natural communities adapt while buying some time to figure out what’s the best way forward.”

See our guidelines for submitting guest columns. 

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Aquatic vegetation appears to form a pleased expression on the water’s surface as viewed from above the Patsy Pond Nature Trail in the Croatan National Forest near Newport. The trails that are accessed from N.C. Highway 24 include lengths from 0.75 to 1.9 miles and are open from dawn to dusk. The small ponds here are fed by groundwater and often surrounded by carnivorous plants such as bladderwort and sundew. Photo: Dylan Ray

The North Carolina Coastal Land Trust this week transferred its 172-acre Brice’s Creek Nature Preserve in New Bern to Craven County.

The forested property along more than 1.5 miles of Brice’s Creek and an unnamed tributary and off County Line and Old Airport roads is to become a new public nature park.

“I think this gift of land from Coastal Land Trust is quite a Christmas present to the citizens of Craven County,” said Director of Land Protection Janice Allen. “Coastal Land Trust did what it does best and that is to conserve special parcels of land. Now Craven County Parks and Recreation is going to do what it does best and create a wonderful new public park on this special land.”

The Coastal Land Trust made the purchase in three phases using more than $1.5 million from the North Carolina Land and Water Fund, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, White River Marine Group, and North Carolina Community Foundation’s Richard Chapman Cleve Fund held by the Craven County Community Foundation.

Brice’s Creek Nature Preserve is made up of mature mixed pine-hardwood forest in the uplands and a diversity of wetlands, including bottomland hardwoods, cypress-gum swamp, and nonriverine wet hardwood forest.

“There is considerable local interest in opening up this park, and we are already on it,” said Craven County Parks and Recreation Director Billy Wilkes.

“We received a $500,000 grant from the North Carolina Parks and Recreation Trust Fund to carry out our park plan and develop necessary infrastructure like a parking area, restroom, and trails. Construction can now begin in early 2024. Our plan is to have the park open to the public by spring of 2025. Stay tuned for news on park planning,” he added.

The Coastal Land Trust said each of the three portions of the riverfront property, which was once slated for development as part of the Carolina Colours golf and residential subdivision, was purchased at less than fair-market value.

“We greatly appreciate the willingness and generosity of Ken Kirkman of Overlook Holdings, LLC to sell these parcels of land to the Coastal Land Trust below market value especially given the location of the property in a rapidly developing section of New Bern,” stated Janice Allen.

The Brice’s Creek property will be Craven County’s second nature park. Latham-Whitehurst Nature Park was established in 2008 when the Coastal Land Trust purchased 133 acres along Upper Broad Creek and then transferred it to the county.

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A ruddy turnstone secures a snack recently at the surf’s edge near Oceanana Pier in Atlantic Beach. These sandpipers have a varied diet that includes crabs, mollusks, worms, sea urchins and small fish, according to the National Audubon Society. They nest in the North American and Eurasian arctic and winter along the coastlines of six continents. Contributed photo: Nicholas Green

Fire is good for forests. See for yourself.

The Nature Conservancy invites you to explore the Green Swamp Nature Preserve from the comforts of your own home and see firsthand how thousands of acres are regenerating after burning in a wildfire last June.

The conservancy recently launched an interactive map that takes the user deep into the forest to reveal new life emerging in the weeks and months since a wildfire burned nearly 16,000 acres.

The story of the fire in the Green Swamp has the eye-catching title “Pulp Road Wildfire. 15,642 acres burned – 15,642 acres revitalized.”

Using ArcGIS StoryMaps, an online tool created by American geographic information system technology software company Esri, Emma Gwyn, a GIS stewardship intern for The Nature Conservancy — North Carolina in Wilmington, created the story of how the fire benefited the preserve.

Visitors of the site can click on different areas of a map of the preserve to learn about the variety of unique plants and wildlife that call the area home, watch drone videos, view before-and-after images, and a 91-day time-lapse of a pocosin wetland regenerating after the fire.

“It’s still there,” said Nathan Burmester, the conservancy’s coastal plain stewardship manager. “It’s flourishing. It’s better than it was before.”

That may come as a surprise to those who assumed much of the 17,424-acre preserve, known for its Venus flytraps, pitcher plants, and decorative orchids, lay in a charred, dead heap following the June wildfire.

But fire is just what the preserve’s two main ecosystems – longleaf pine savannah and pocosin wetland – need to thrive.

As explained in the virtual tour, longleaf pine savanna need low-intensity fires every two to five years. Pocosin, which are freshwater shrub wetlands of the southeastern coastal plains, require high-intensity fires every eight to 20 years.

“Even though a high-intensity fire in the pocosin may look catastrophic, the system recovers incredibly quickly,” according to the conservancy.

“It’s always one of our messages that we’re trying to get out is the importance of controlled burning,” Burmester said. “Part of my goal for making this was to have more education for the public.”

Whether sparked by a cigarette discarded from a car window or a lightning strike, forests are going to burn “someday, one way or another,” he said.

“When that happens, we don’t get to pick the day. We don’t get to pick the weather. So, we’re always trying to get out the importance of controlled burning,” Burmester said.

The Green Swamp fire began as a prescribed burn by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission on June 14 around Pulp Road in Brunswick County.

Related: Green Swamp now turning green again after burn, wildfire

The commission had a permit to burn 400 acres, but the blaze spread after the fire jumped its line and quickly spread into areas that had not been burned in years.

“The smoke was so intense that it sparked thunderstorms nearby!” according to the conservancy.

Winds pushed ash more than 30 miles away to Wilmington and air quality warnings were issued throughout the region before June 29 when the fire was fully contained.

The fire left a black and green patchwork-like landscape across the preserve. Green areas are those that were either too wet or had been burned in a series of controlled fires prescribed within the past year.

These areas served as “critical refuges” for wildlife during the June wildfire.

Burmester said that the preserve was last burned in its entirety 68 years ago.

That equated to 68 years of fuel for some areas of the preserve. There are no roads in the swamp to break the land into smaller chunks. The shrubby, wet pocosin can’t be sliced with fire lines.

“They’re extremely challenging to burn because they’re large pockets of non-divided fuels,” Burmester said.

He said that experts from various agencies, including Wildlife Resources and forest service officials, have begun talks on how they can turn the June wildfire into an opportunity to administer controlled burns in the future.

In the meantime, he encourages people to engage in the Green Swamp fire story.

“The tool’s out there so anything you want to do and show in a map feature is there, which is really cool,” Burmester said. “Enjoy and be creative.”

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A pelican stretches while perched upon a pylon in Core Sound near the Down East village of Atlantic. Photo: Dylan Ray

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An orb weaver appears to don its Halloween skull mask. Photo: Mark Courtney

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A blue heron hunts in the marsh grass near Conch’s Point on Calico Creek in Morehead City. Photo: Dylan Ray

Organizers of the annual Wings Over Water Festival set for Oct. 17-22 and Dec. 8-10 are celebrating the event’s 25th anniversary this year, with dawn-to-dusk bird counts, birding in otherwise restricted refuge areas, art, history, hikes and paddles.

The festival takes place at six national wildlife refuges that together cover parts of six northeast North Carolina counties and is the annual fundraiser for the Coastal Wildlife Refuge Society. The society, a nonprofit that supports regional national wildlife refuges, provides educational grants, volunteers and staff who are essential to national wildlife refuges and their visitor centers and support projects such as trail maintenance.

Author and artist Julie Zickefoose, keynote speaker for the 2019 festival, returns this year as keynote speaker. Her books include “Letters From Eden” and “The Bluebird Effect.” She is a contributing editor to Bird Watcher’s Digest.

Zickefoose leads natural history excursions to Latin America and Africa lives on an 80-acre wildlife sanctuary in Appalachian Ohio.

Her talk, “Baby Birds: An Artist Looks Into The Nest,” which is also the title of her 2016 book, examines why and how baby songbirds develop so quickly, with some launching into flight only 11 days after hatching. The keynote reception is set for 6-8 p.m. Oct. 21 at the National Wildlife Refuges Gateway Visitor Center, 100 Conservation Way, Manteo.

Online registration has opened for the festival launched in 1997 to better connect people with the wildlife and wild lands and a schedule of events is available for download.

Organizers advised that when registering for Wings Over Water Encore events, note that the trip dates are in December.

Featured Image

A Gulf fritillary rests on a flower inside the Butterfly House at Airlie Gardens in Wilmington. Guests can roam the 2,700-square-foot native North Carolina butterfly house that is part of the extensive Airlie Gardens. Admission is required to enter the gardens but is free to New Hanover County residents the first Sunday of every month. Photo: Mark Courtney

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An orb-weaver spider sits in it’s intricate patterned web in the Porters Neck area just outside Wilmington. Photo: Mark Courtney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the spring of 1890, journalist John Randolph Spears made plans to visit Cape Hatteras on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, one of the most isolated and dangerous stretches of coastline in America. For Spears, the Outer Banks loomed as a forbidding geography blackened by fog, lashing waves, and fitful winds, a place where pirates and grubby sea captains battled the elements and over 500 ships had been lost along the boils and shoals scuttling the legendary Cape’s angry waters.

Why go there at all? For the 40-year-old Spears, the answer was obvious: He craved adventure. As a reporter for The New York Sun and Scribner’s Magazine, Spears had covered the Spanish-American war in Cuba, boated down the Amazon River in Brazil, and wandered the bottom of the world in Patagonia. Now, he hoped to document the otherworldly sand waves of Hatteras — giant mountains of snow-white sand migrating across Hatteras Island from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pamlico Sound.

Spears found the idea of the sand waves hallucinatory and thought the readers would share his fascination. Some of the waves were said to be as tall as skyscrapers. Others were moody and fitful, rolling over yaupon and live oaks, burying maritime forests, turning ridges into mountains.

The mysterious waves were the work of the ever-present wind pulsing across the lower Banks. Indeed, the swirls, gusts, and hurricane-force gales — wet from the east, dry and brittle from the west, baking hot from the south, frigid and gray from the north — defined life there, sculpting the desolate and ethereal beaches, bending trees in half, battering flimsy cottages.

Spears assumed the sand waves were a broken thread in the grand design of how the physical world works. But he couldn’t say how or why, and apparently that bothered him. He needed to see for himself.

But first he had to get there, no small undertaking given the isolated geography. Cape Hatteras was far from the nearest mainland town of any consequence. There were no roads or bridges. The only way across was by open boat and the trip was dangerous and long.

Spears’s had grown up in Van Wert, Ohio, a small town originally known as the Black Swamp because of its boggy ground, mud, and malaria. He had worked his way up from a series of no-name local newspapers to The Sun, where he specialized in writing features about far-flung places. Spears had read a line or two about the sand waves of Hatteras and sensed a good story. So, off he went early on a Monday in May, traveling by rail to Norfolk, then securing a berth on the steamer Manteo, which chugged up the south branch of the Elizabeth River, through the recently dug Chesapeake and Albemarle Canal, down the North Landing River, and finally across the shallow, brackish Currituck Sound until he landed at a rickety dock in Manteo, the political seat of Dare County, and then one of the poorest counties in North Carolina.

The town was already shuttered for the evening but Spears managed to find a bed in a local boarding house. He wasn’t nearly as lucky, however, finding a ride to Hatteras, unable to book passage on a mail boat until the following Thursday. It was a 25-mile journey from Manteo to the village of Chicamacomico (now Rodanthe). The captain was a “broad-shouldered, deep-chested” man named J. Clifford Bowser, with “a new-moon mouth, keen eyes, and a most genial temper,” who gleefully laughed as chop and froth “whooped after them.” His boat, the Shad Pilot, was a mighty dugout canoe, 27-feet long, 7 feet wide, and 3 1/2 feet deep. It was cut from two giant cedar trees and halved together with nails and glue, and known locally as a cunner. The ride across took seven and one-half hours. Not that Spears complained. It was adventure he craved. And at 75 cents, the long boat ride was a bargain.

Spears waded ashore in Chicamacomico and found his way to a weather-beaten shack that served as the Post Office. He assumed he must be close to Cape Hatteras and asked where he might see the giant mountains of moving sand. A thin young man “with a thin, yellowish face, yellowish white hair, a yellowish white little mustache, and watery blue eyes” eyed Spears suspiciously. “Whar from?” he asked. “New York,” answered Spears. At which the man shook his head and repeated his question. It finally occurred to Spears that he meant his destination, and he replied, “Cape Hatteras.”

An hour or so later, Spears was back aboard the dugout dodging wind and waves as Capt. Bowser navigated the inner waters to Kinnakeet (now Avon). He spent the night there in an unpainted shack scattered amid sound side woods and a tumbledown windmill, and then hitched a ride on a passing mail boat that finally delivered him to Cape Hatteras. It was 10 o’clock at night on Friday and he had been traveling for nearly a week.

The next morning Spears began hiking north along the beach. The wind was warm and wet, the Atlantic a great sprawl of blue-white foam and waves. He had been hiking an hour or two when he observed a “mammoth wave of sand that towers aloft like a sea-wave, even curling in places like a huge breaker,” tumbling and rolling across the low dunes, as though some wild animal waiting to pounce.

Later, he would write that sand waves extended at least 30 miles, to Kinnakeet in the north, and as far south as Buxton, where the famed lighthouse stood sentinel over the rioting ocean. Spears was no scientist, let alone a geologist, but that didn’t stop him from speculating. Once upon a time, he informed his readers, the entire Outer Banks had been lushly carpeted with forest that anchored the sand in place. However, over decades fishermen and farmers had cut the forest to build houses and boats, and had freely grazed cattle, sheep and pigs up and down the Banks, denuding the landscape and allowing sand to blow freely across the island and form giant heaps.

The speed of the sand waves was increasing each year, Spears continued, and was now “on a mission of death. Foot by foot, yard by yard, rod by rod [as] the wave traveled inland.”

Now, the end was near, Spears warned. “There is as yet no family homeless, but a number of families find the surf from the deadly sand-wave beating at their doors.” Oddly, the humble Bankers appeared indifferent to their fate, Spears observed. Perhaps it was because death always seemed near on the Banks. So many had been lost to the crushing sea, fevers, and the frigid cold of winter. Doctors were hours away and there were no roads to get to them in any event. So far removed from ordinary life, who would save them?

The more Spears wrote, the more his mood darkened. Soon, he concluded, the entire island north of the Cape – the 60 miles or so of Hatteras Island — would be “uninhabitable,” its people “left to wander Ishmael-like.

“Steadily, stealthily, onward creeps the relentless wave,” the journalist concluded, “and calmly, idly waiting, these people accept their doom.”

It made for a riveting yarn. Yet much of what Spears told his readers was incomplete or wrong. True, sand waves had buried cottages but not scores as Spears asserted. Nor did the towering mountains of sand make Hatteras Island a vast wasteland. As anyone who has driven N.C. Highway 12 from Kitty Hawk to Cape Hatteras knows, the Outer Banks are now a destination for millions of vacationers and dotted with thousands of houses and businesses worth billions of dollars.

So, what happened? How did Spears get it so wrong? One explanation is that Spears assumed that the barrier islands had once been fixed in place – a lush paradise of forests and woods that anchored the sand in place. What scientists now understand is that the opposite is true. The Outer Banks are, by definition, unstable, a highly dynamic chain of low-lying islands that are always moving, re-sculpting themselves, grain by grain, eroding here, adding sand there, a forest now, a desert later, retreating and advancing in a cyclical dance as water approaches and falls away.

Millions of years earlier, in what scientists refer to as the Quaternary Period, the North Carolina coast was alternately buried under water as sea levels rose, or nearly dry as glaciers captured water in ice and sea levels dropped precipitously. The shoreline shifted along with the water levels. One million years ago the sea was over 400 feet higher than today and the North Carolina shoreline reached miles inland. Then, during the last glacial maximum, or little ice age, about 17,000 years ago, the shoreline receded so far seaward it extended to the continental shelf, about 50 miles east of where it stands today.

The only constant in this dynamic interplay is change, explains Stanley Riggs, one of North Carolina’s best-known coastal scientists. “The North Carolina coast is a work in progress. It is always evolving and subject to great energy transfers in storms. All it takes is one big storm to reshape an entire island. And despite what some people think, there is no way to hold the line.”

Even as John Randolph Spears worried about sand waves swallowing the Cape and its inhabitants, the sea was rising, steadily gobbling massive chunks of sand and ferrying it down the coast, through inlets that regularly opened and closed, or out to sea, where it formed treacherous deltas and shoals. As Mike Bryant, the former manager of the Pea Island Wildlife Refuge told me, “There isn’t a single grain of sand on the Outer Banks in the same place today as yesterday – let alone epochs, centuries, or even minutes ago.”

In this sense, sand waves were a normal, even predictable, feature of the Outer Banks, not an aberration as Spears assumed. For as long as the Banks have existed, sand has migrated from ocean to sound. It is part of how barrier islands adapt to rising seas and flood waters, and ever so slowly inch their way to the west, toward the mainland. Never stable, always in motion.

Locals put names to the hills and hammocks. There is Penny’s Hill, north of Corolla, and Run Hill and the Seven Sisters, near Nags Head. In the 1990s, scientists used handheld radars to date several of the sand waves. They discovered that some were over 1,000 years old, while others were hundreds of years old, still others barely a few years old.

Jockey’s Ridge, probably the best-known sand wave on the Outer Banks, was once a staggering 150 feet tall, maps reveal, but now is only about one-third of its former height. Is that because of tourists trampling the dunes? Wind pushing the ridge to the south? Perhaps. But natural forces are also in conflict with man-made ones. Oceanfront development in Nags Head “cuts off the supply of sand from reaching the middle of the island,” Stan Riggs explained. “So, the sand doesn’t get to the dune anymore. It is sand-starved.”

North Carolina is home to nearly 4,000 species of plants. A small percentage of them, but some of the most unusual, can be found in the Green Swamp Preserve, a 17,424-acre nature preserve managed by The Nature Conservancy.

The Green Swamp Preserve in Brunswick County, about a 40-minute drive southeast of Wilmington, remains closed after a recent wildfire, the result of flames escaping the area of a prescribed burn that was in process in June. The fire spread across most of the preserve, covering nearly 16,000 acres and prompting state air quality alerts.

But once it reopens later this summer, visitors can see 14 species of carnivorous plants, 16 species of native orchids, and other endangered wildflowers on the sun-dappled ground beneath a tall longleaf pine canopy.

The recent blaze was prevented from reaching any nearby private property, and due to the distinctive nature of the fire-adapted longleaf pine ecosystem — and conservancy’s management practices, which included a successful controlled burn in January — it’s more a problem for people who wish to explore the area than the plants that live there.

“There are already grasses popping up in the preserve,” Michelle Ly, conservation coordinator for the conservancy’s southeast coastal plain office, explained last week to Coastal Review. She noted that they expect to see some plant species recovering in areas where they previously had been crowded out by taller vegetation. “This wildfire and burnout will benefit the preserve greatly.”

The Nature Conservancy also hosts a “Fire in the Pines” festival in Wilmington, where visitors can learn how controlled burns help plants and animals in these coastal environments and watch a live demonstration burn. This year’s festival is set for Oct.14.

With the recent containment of the blaze called the Pulp Road fire, conservancy officials and scientists on Thursday led a media tour of a part of the preserve that was unaffected by the most recent fire but that was subjected to the controlled burn in January.

The area of the media tour was lush with color and new growth emerging from the char below.

Protecting star species

The star plant species of the Green Swamp Preserve include a huge range of carnivorous plants: Venus flytraps, sundew, bladderworts, butterworts, and four species of pitcher plants.

The conservancy works to ensure the Green Swamp remains a healthy, balanced ecosystem for these specialized plants. It has taken care of the land since 1977, when the Federal Paper Board Co. gifted it nearly 14,000 acres. The company donated an additional 2,577 acres in the late 1980s. Over time, the conservancy has purchased the rest.

The conservancy’s conservation activities center on the longleaf pines that tower above the understory layer. These trees once covered about 90 million acres of the Southeast, from Virginia to Florida and as far west as Texas. Logging and urban development have shrunk their numbers. Today, slightly more than 5 million acres remain, up from just 3.2 million acres in the early 2000s.

The conservancy has been protecting and restoring longleaf pine ecosystems across the tree’s original range. In Ly’s experience, walking through the Green Swamp is like stepping back in time to a less anthropogenically influenced landscape. Longleaf pine stands are naturally open and were historically maintained by low-intensity natural fires often sparked by lightning strikes.

In the early 1900s, forest management policies changed, ushering in an era of fire suppression. This altered longleaf pine ecosystems and put people and infrastructure in danger of larger, uncontrolled wildfires fueled by newly dense understories.

Now, prescribed fire is once again an important part of longleaf pine management. The conservancy performs controlled burns on regular intervals of three to five years to mimic natural fire regimes.

“Preserving longleaf pine is not just about the tree, it’s about the ecosystem,” Ly explained.

The controlled burns knock back any hardwood trees that have taken root and open the understory, so Venus flytraps, orchids, and other native flora can get the sunlight they need to flourish. These burns are also great for birds and other wildlife that thrive in longleaf ecosystems.

‘An iconic plant’

The conservancy’s website notes the preserve is closed to the public through Aug. 31 as it upgrades the trail, including building a new boardwalk. Don’t let that stop you from planning a trip to visit this fall, though – seeing Venus flytraps in the wild can be a special experience.

“This is such an iconic plant, and there’s just no other place in the world you can see this plant in the wild except here in the Carolinas,” explained botanist and author Scott Zona, who took his first trip to the Green Swamp earlier this year. Zona manages North Carolina State University’s North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox and has an appointment at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Herbarium.

Wild Venus flytraps are only found within about a 75-mile radius of Wilmington.

Venus flytraps catch their prey using special leaves with sensitive hairs called trigger hairs. Once the hairs sense that an insect has landed on the trap, it snaps shut in less than a second. Any further movement of the prey causes the trap to stay clamped tightly shut as it digests the unlucky passerby. If some nonprey item, like a stick, falls onto the trap, it will slowly open back up for the item to be blown away or fall off.

Venus flytraps also have special reproductive adaptations. While their leaves and stems are low to the ground, their white flowers grow on tall stalks stretching about 8 to 12 inches into the air to keep the insects that pollinate them from becoming lunch.   

Zona’s initial visit to the Green Swamp and seeing Venus flytraps in the wild for the first time did not disappoint: “To me, it’s right up there with the first time I went to the Muir Woods in California and saw redwood trees.”

That may be high praise coming from a man who has traveled around the world studying plant ecology and evolution and has a species of palm named after him.

Zona’s colleagues from the United Kingdom, who visited with him, also enjoyed the experience.

“Both of them are very well-respected, well-known botanists who travel the world, and they were just as excited to see these plants as I was,” he said. 

Myriad other fascinating plants also inhabit the Green Swamp. Its purple pitcher plants lack the umbrella-like leaf “hoods” that other pitcher plants have. The preserve also is home to bladderworts, extremely unassuming plants with tiny sacs used to catch prey. Bladderworts are the fastest carnivorous plants in the world, able to trap and eat their prey in less than a millisecond. And the noncarnivorous plants are worth a close look, as well.

“If you’ve never seen native orchids out in the wild, they’re so beautiful and so unique, they’re much different than the ones you see in the grocery store,” Ly said.

While the area’s nutrient-poor and often waterlogged soil might not sound like a great place to be a plant, according to Zona, those are great conditions for Venus flytraps and other carnivorous plants. During the winter they go dormant; in the spring, they revive, unfurling new green leaves. Their diet of insects is an adaptation that helps them make up for the lack of nutrients in the soil.

A 2020 study of the Venus flytrap genome found that the genes associated with flytrap “traps” — the leaves that snap shut on prey — came from copies of genes found in their ancestors’ roots.

The Green Swamp is not only a botanist’s dream, but also a fantastic day trip destination for any nature enthusiast. Zona has just one regret from his trip to the Green Swamp: “We did not have the foresight to pack a lunch with us,” he said. “If we had packed lunch, we could have stayed there even longer.”

I find great peace in the ever-changing place called the salt marsh.

The tides come and go. Marsh grass is sometimes fluorescent green, other times it’s devoid of color. At times the water appears crystal clear and at others it’s murky. The marsh, or tidal creek appears different as the light changes, fog rolls in or out. Sunrises or sunsets, moonrises or sets, I find solitude in the salt marsh.

There are hundreds of acres of marsh that I paddle on a stand-up paddleboard, an SUP for short. There is little to no sound from my craft that tops out at around 3 mph and is propelled by my single-blade paddle.

The vantage point of just over 6 feet above the water is where I observe some creatures that are just visitors and others that call the salt marsh their home. Some are there to breed, others to feed. I’m just passing through their habitat as an observer, sometimes with a camera to document and preserve the memories of my paddle.

The marsh is a place where I can observe Kooks to my right, Pogues to my left and I’m right in the middle just doing my own thing.

My children grew up there, I refuse to get old there. My children Alyson and Travis grew up on Pages Creek in northern New Hanover County just outside of the Wilmington city limits. They both were greatly influenced by the marsh and they both developed a respect and appreciation for the water.

My son was so moved by this natural environment that he became a marine biologist and is now teaching and doing research for the next generation so they can help preserve our precious resources.

My daughter lives near a beach on the West Coast. She loves to swim in the ocean when it rarely reaches a comfortable temperature, explores tide pools, runs along the coast and will take in a sunset whenever possible.

On my marsh excursions I have seen otters, sea turtle, dolphin, stingray, shark, terrapin, various jellyfish, bald eagle, osprey, deer, owl, tree frogs, heron, egret, migratory birds, spiders, snakes, a multitude of different fish, spitting oysters and a watercraft or two — or more – on which humans are normally speeding by on their way to somewhere else.

I first started paddling the marsh just over 25 years ago. My mode of transportation in the early years was a sea kayak. I’m also a surfer, so when stand-up paddleboards made their way to Wilmington, I was game for trying it.

The first SUPs were basically just large surfboards. I started out with one of this style board and throughout the years moved up to a displacement hull, which is much more efficient then the early basic SUPs. I can paddle much farther and more efficiently, effectively adding much more mileage to my trips.

My longest rigorous paddle was a 12-mile venture just to challenge myself on a really long paddle. My go-to routes are in the 6- to 8-mile range, which is a relaxing outing for me now.

I enjoy bringing first-time paddlers out into the water. I always paddle at their pace (as long as it’s not faster than I can paddle) so they can relax and not worry about overexerting themselves.

One first-timer was Edwin Toone, who is from Spain and in great shape. He did 6 miles his first time out. We were both treated to seeing a sea horse that day, about an inch in length, swimming in Banks Channel at Wrightsville Beach.

A unique experience was when I discovered a colony of bonnethead sharks behind Masonboro Island. It was a fun summer as I could paddle to my secret spot and normally see the smallest member of the hammerhead shark family within a few minutes.

The sharks spend winters several thousand miles south of here and migrate back every year for breeding and rearing their young.

Another time I was able to paddle with a 2-foot sea turtle pretty deep into the marsh and ran across an otter that wanted nothing to do with me, but it was a treat to see.

Marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols writes in his book, “Blue Mind,” that we humans benefit from spending time in, on under and near water. He writes that “the water experience can make you happier, healthier, more connected, and better at what you do.”

I know that when I spend time surfing or paddling I come back to dry land with a much calmer feeling. It’s somewhat similar to the runners high I used to get by putting in a solid run, that is before my knees decided they did not appreciate the pounding from the sport.

The book states that “Blue Mind, a mildly meditative state characterized by calm, peacefulness, unity, and a sense of general happiness and satisfaction with life in the moment.”

It also mentions that, “We know instinctively that being by water makes us healthier, happier, reduces stress, and brings us peace.” I completely agree.

The most exotic sea creature I have seen so far was a spotted eagle sting ray. It looks as though it could have just swam in from tropical waters. At about 4 1/2 feet of wingspan, it was a good-sized ray.

While I have found great solitude in the marsh, my new favorite paddle is with my girlfriend, Cara Bloom. We create our own Sunday brunch by packing some fruit and sandwiches along with a few towels to spread out on the sand. We’ll paddle to our own private beach and let the birds sing us a serenade and provide an airshow. It’s a much better way to brunch than any I’ve ever experienced.

This winter was the first time I went oystering on my board. I could paddle in to waters too shallow for most boats so early season bore plentiful large salty oysters. I would load up a 5-gallon bucket with approximately a half-bushel of the tasty bivalve mollusks to later eat raw or steamed the same day I harvested them, so the flavor was magnificent.

While I have never heard crawdads sing out in my salt marsh, the paddle never gets old.

Last in a series on pollinators.

KITTY HAWK — Denise Deacon inspects her bees. This year she only has one hive, although in years past she has had more — as many as eight.

She gently pries the lid off and points to the dark brown resin that lines the top of the inside of the hive.

“That’s the propolis,” she says, explaining that it’s resin the bees collect from trees and other plants that they use to weatherproof the hive.

She slides a frame out and looks at it critically. It’s still early in the season for honey production — they’ll get around to that later in the summer. Right now, the bees are concentrating on foraging for food, building the hive and reproduction.

The bees in this frame have been working on the honeycomb for some time and the comb fills almost the entire frame.

She pulls out another frame and in this frame the honeycomb is clearly a work in progress, the comb filling perhaps a third of the frame. Each cell appears to be identical, although they are not. The largest are reserved for the drone bees, smaller ones for workers and the queen bee gets her own shape and size.

The comb, the wax the bees produce to seal the honey in the combs, and the honey are unique to the honeybee. Other bees die off in the winter and emerge as the weather warms. Honeybees stay active in their hive all winter and the honey is their food source.

They produce more honey than they need for the winter, although beekeepers vary in how much honey they’ll harvest. Some, like Deacon, leave enough honey for the hive to get through the winter. Others take all the honey and feed the bees sugar water as a substitute.

“Some people do take off honey and then feed them sugar water, to make it through the winter. They will survive but they won’t be as healthy is my understanding,” she said.

This is Deacon’s 10^th year raising her own bees, although the idea had been in the back of her mind since childhood and the onetime attempt by her father.

“In my teens, my father started beekeeping,” she recalled. After a weekend away, “We came back and the house had been broken into and they had kicked over the beehive. He didn’t continue from that point forward. (But) that was just something in the back of my mind that might be a cool thing to do.”

She is a member of the Outer Banks Beekeeper’s Guild, one of the founding members, although she downplays that role.

“In my mind. I may have made phone calls to people to say, ‘Hey, let’s get together and talk about getting a group together,’” she said.

The guild is part of the North Carolina State Beekeepers Association, an amateur beekeeping organization that may be the largest in the country.

“We do have the largest state (bee) association, with nearly 5,000 paid members,” said Dr. David Tarpy, apiculture professor and extension specialist at North Carolina State University. “Compared to even large states like California and Texas (we have) more beekeepers. In Texas and California, those are large-scale commercial guys so they have more colonies but fewer beekeepers.”

There are some large commercial beekeeping operations in the state, but Tarpy, when comparing North Carolinas commercial beekeepers to other states, said they are, “vanishingly small.”

The number could be fewer than a dozen.

Not all the commercial operations take place in the state; they are, in fact, somewhat migratory.

“There are large-scale beekeepers that reside here full time and go out to California every winter for the almonds and up to Maine for the blueberries and things like that,” he said.

There are 4,000 or so species of bees that live in the United States, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and the honeybee is not even native to the continent. The first shipment of honeybees arrived in the Virginia Colony in early 1622. By the end of the 17th century, they were part of everyday life, although beeswax was the more valuable commodity at that time.

As an introduced species, there is controversy surrounding honeybees. Deacon pointed out that even her lone hive could have an effect on the local ecology.

“The problem with honeybees, you’re bringing 40,000 insects into this realm of 3 to 5 miles and all these other native bees that are all out there competing for the same plants,” she said.

Tarpy sees the issue of competition with native species as overblown and, perhaps, one that misses more significant questions.

“Whatever competition has happened, it’s been going on for 400-plus years. Ecology responds a lot faster than that,” he said. “There probably has been competition and certainly when beekeepers move their hives into a very fragile area like a desert, they can swamp whatever species are there. So it certainly is an issue and one we need to be cautious about. But is it driving the extinctions of these other bees? I think there are bigger fish to fry for that: pesticides, those kind of things.”

The pollinator population in general is under stress. And, although careless pesticide use does threaten honeybees, the most significant natural peril is the varroa mite.

It is not the mite itself, though, that is the threat, rather it is the disease the mites carry.

“I would say that public enemy No. 1, 2, and 3 are all called the varroa mite,” Tarpy said. “They’re like little vampires, sucking the bees until they’re so anemic that other stressors start to compound. But the biggest thing that we’re actively researching is that it’s not really the varroa mites that kill bees. It’s the viral pathogens that they’re vectoring. They’re like little dirty hypodermic syringe needles.”

There is no easy way to protect bees from varroa mites. The N.C. State Apiculture Program is concentrating on two areas of research: strengthening hives so they can better withstand stress and early detection of infection.

“We offer this service that if you send in your bees, we can … look at all of these different pathogens and see if we can identify if you have an overwhelming pathogen load within the colony,” Tarpy said.

Tarpy’s research is finding ways to identify the strongest queen for a colony. The apiculture lab has developed empirical measurements that can be applied to queen bee health, and Tarpy’s research has shown healthy queens correlate to a healthier hive.

“If you have a bad queen, your ceiling is low. If you have a good queen, your ceiling is high. The queen is this singular thing that beekeepers have control over,” he said.

The work is currently conducted in a dilapidated building on the N.C. State campus.

“Research is being conducted in one of the worst facilities in the University of North Carolina system,” according to the North Carolina State Beekeepers Association’s website. “There is inadequate room for instruction, storage and research … The teaching classroom is in the former kitchen and dining area where long leak stains adorn the sheetrock ceiling. During rain showers, buckets are strategically placed in order to catch rain water that drips through the sheetrock.”

The association lobbied state legislators for funds to replace the building and the North Carolina General Assembly responded in 2019 with $4 million for a new apiculture center.

“We’re on the downhill slope of the design phase, which is the fun part for me because we get to decide what kind of rooms we want, what we’re going to put in it and how we’re going to use it. We’re building this facility exactly the way that it would really work well for apiculture, science and extension. It’s having all the elements that we could ever want,” Tarpy said.

Construction is estimated to be completed in August 2024.

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Boats dot the Carteret County waters of, from left, Gallants Channel, Taylors Creek and Bulkhead Channel Thursday, with, in the foreground, Pivers Island, home to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Beaufort Laboratory and the Duke University Marine Lab; Front Street in Beaufort at top left; the Rachel Carson Reserve, center-left; Shackleford Banks, top-center and part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore; and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Photo: Dylan Ray

Part of a series on pollinators.

When people shop for ornamental trees, shrubs and flowers for their gardens and yards, visual appeal is usually top of mind. Chain stores and nurseries offer lots of striking choices, but often plant species native to the North Carolina coast are hard to find.

Biologists say that’s a problem.

It can take some effort to find a retailer selling native species, and professional landscapers often fail to include them in their designs, but these plants play a critical role in providing for bees, butterflies and other pollinators here.

Amy Mead of the North Carolina State Extension for New Hanover, Pender and Onslow counties explained to Coastal Review last week that native species are the foundations of coastal ecosystems. For insects like bees and other pollinators, native plants provide nectar, but that’s just one facet of their importance, Mead said.

“Especially for butterflies and moths, so many of our native plants are host plants for their caterpillars, and so they’re looking for these plants to lay their eggs on,” she said. “These native plants are providing the food source for those caterpillars to complete their life cycle. They are absolutely critical, and then that moves up the food chain to these birds looking for these caterpillars to be able to complete their life cycles, as well.”

It’s not an unusual sight in North Carolina: Vines of kudzu or wisteria sprawling across the landscape, reaching up, wrapping around, covering and choking the life from trees and other vegetation and creating a mess that’s not only unsightly, it’s also bad for the environment.

Though common, these vines aren’t native to this area, they were introduced as ornamental plants and subsequently became invasive. They’re just a couple of high-profile examples of plants that cause ill effects because they don’t belong here.

So, how can coastal property owners and landscapers avoid harmful landscaping plants? What plants native to North Carolina would be better alternatives?

A collaborative called the Coastal Landscapes Initiative has compiled a new guide of what it describes as “attractive eco-friendly plants” to substitute for commonly used “bad actors” that the initiative has identified as landscaping plants to avoid.

The Coastal Landscapes Initiative, a public-private partnership created more than five years ago to promote beautiful, functional, cost-efficient and environmentally friendly coastal landscape designs, recently released its free guide, “Plant This Instead!” The publication is available in print at county Cooperative Extension offices and online at the North Carolina Sea Grant website in PDF form.

“The Coastal Landscapes Initiative was started to find ways to promote and support landscaping practices at various scales, practices that meet our human needs and our desires, but also protect and enhance our coastal resources, resources like water quality fisheries and wildlife habitat,” said Gloria Putnam during a webinar in March that shared the title of the new publication.

Putnam, North Carolina Sea Grant’s coastal resources and communities specialist who leads the Coastal Landscape Initiative, said that the North Carolina coast has diverse ecosystems, and each has its own distinct set of plants that are naturally found here – they are native to the area.

“The type of soil, the amount of water and the temperature are really the primary determinants of the type of plant that can live in an area, and the type of plants that are there determines the kind of animals that can exist. In other words, native plants are naturally adapted to the local soil and climate conditions. These plants co-evolved with other species in the area. Some of these plants have highly specialized relationships with animals, and they work as a system,” she said.

Putnam, during the webinar, cited the cedar waxwing and the eastern red cedar as an example.

“Eastern red cedar is actually Juniperus virginiana, so it’s not a cedar at all. It’s juniper, which is why it’s important to know the scientific name,” she said. “Red cedar is very common on barrier islands, and they’re adapted to the conditions there. They’re adapted to the soil and salt aerosols and drought, and the waxwing depends on the cedar for food. And the cedar depends on the waxwing for seed dispersal.”

Invasives can be costly

A big problem with nonnative species is that they can outcompete the native plants, and often with devastating results, environmentally and economically.

According to the publication, estimates of invasive plants’ economic effects can vary. But costs to control just one ornamental species, Lythrum salicaria, commonly known as the European purple loosestrife, and the loss of forage associated with the invasive plant are estimated at $45 million each year in the 48 states where it is found.

The publication cites a 2018 University of Delaware study of residential yards in the Washington, D.C., area, which found that Carolina chickadees there could sustain their numbers only where available plants were at least 70% native species. That’s because Carolina chickadees mainly eat caterpillars that often rely exclusively on a limited number of native plant species for their food.

“A single clutch of chickadees, hatched from 3 to 10 eggs, consumes up to 9,000 caterpillars in the 16 days it takes to develop into fledglings,” according to the publication.

Native plants in coastal landscapes support numerous other birds, as well as other animals and insects, including bees and butterflies.

The guide includes alternatives for commonly used nonnative species, with options for various landscape uses, such as trees and grasses as accent plants, shrubs for foundations and borders, privacy screens and hedges and ornamental deciduous vines to add “vertical interest and flowers.”

For example, the guide suggests Amelanchier canadensi, or serviceberry, and Cercis canadensis, or redbud, trees instead of commonly used Pyrus calleryana, or callery pears, that include Bradford and other cultivars.

Bradford pears, which bloom beautifully in March along much of the North Carolina coast and are frequently featured in landscape designs here, were bred to be sterile, but because they are grafted onto other pear rootstock, which can send out suckers that flower, they can cross with other pear trees nearby.

“Bradford pears can’t crossbreed with one another but they can crossbreed with other cultivars and other pear species,” Mead said during the webinar.

Mead said the Bradford pear had become a “poster child” of good intentions. Structurally weak and “malodorous,” she said that, while it is a beautiful, spring-blooming tree, “I have heard the blooms described as (smelling like) rotting fish or urine, not something that I want to have in my yard.”

Alternatives to the Bradford pear include Cornus florida, or flowering dogwood, Magnolia virginiana, or sweetbay magnolia, and Acer rubrum, or red maple.

For shrubs, plant Ilex vomitoria, or yaupon holly, instead of Nandina domestica, or nandina.

Instead of ornamental grasses like Cortaderia selloana, or pampas grass, the guide suggests planting taller cultivars of native Panicum virgatum, or switchgrass — or Muhlenbergia capillaris, or pink muhly grass, where plant height is not a priority.

Supply and demand

So why aren’t native plants more widely available in stores here?

“It’s sort of a chicken and egg — there’s got to be a demand for the native plants in order for box stores to start carrying these, but then it goes all the way back to the supply chain. The nurseries need to have the demand from the box stores to be able to start growing these plants,” Mead told Coastal Review.

She said it’s not always easy growing native plants on a commercial scale. There’s the matter of the native seed supply, and then figuring out how to grow them.

“And then there’s the psychology, too, of what plants people will buy in the box stores. It has to look pretty and be blooming, and so there’s so much more that goes into it rather than just saying, ‘Hey, you should grow more native plants,’” Mead said.

The effort to increase awareness of the importance of native plants is so that it will drive more demand. “So people will start going into these large home improvement stores and asking for native plants and then they will start asking the growers to grow these plants as well. We’re hoping to drive that supply and demand and we’re starting with education,” she said.

Knowledge could steer folks away from what Mead calls “the starter pack of crepe myrtles and loropetalums,” plants easily found in stores and widely used – sometimes to the exclusion of all other choices – in residential landscaping.

Mead said there are so many more plants to choose from that will thrive on the coast and provide benefits to the environment. These plants can be added to established gardens, including those planted with nonnative species.

“I’m not a native purist,” Mead said. “We don’t live in a natural forest, but I would say add plants. I’m a big fan of expanding your garden beds, adding in plants. If you’re ready, if you have failing or older plants, it’s a good opportunity to plant something new.”

She advises trying to plant 70% native species, and then ornamental plants can be included as “ornaments in your yard.” Sometimes a few nonnative plants can simply bring joy.

“I have a beautiful gardenia bush that reminds me of my childhood. And so that’s something that gives me pleasure, and I can have it in my yard. It’s important that something is beautiful and gives me pleasure,” Mead said, adding that Japanese maples are similar. “Something that I really enjoy having in my garden, as well. Those are going to be beautiful, they’re not going to be invasive or cause any harm.”

Find a nursery

To find native plants, contact your county office of the N.C. State Extension, which also offers the following links to help you locate a nursery near you that sells native plants:

• North Carolina Botanical Garden
• North Carolina Forest Service
• North Carolina Native Plant Society

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An osprey takes flight, leaving chicks in a nest on a leaning piling above the waters of Midden Creek near Tusk in Down East Carteret County. Photo: Dylan Ray

Part of a series on pollinators.

Spring is the time of year when things start growing and blooming. It’s also when pollinators like bees come out and get to work.

An awareness campaign called “No Mow May” is urging people not to mow their lawns this month, or even this whole season, as a way to help make sure that these pollinators have enough to eat. Many of the small flowers that pop up in the spring can provide a critical food source for bees. Mowing these blooms robs the bees of this potential sustenance.

Bees are critical to the health of our ecosystems, but they are also in trouble.

Wild bee populations have experienced substantial declines due to factors including urbanization, pesticides and undiversified agriculture. Increased urbanization has led to the fragmentation of pollinator habitat — a widening in the space between areas where bees can find food or live. Without bees, our food system would never be the same.

“(When) we think of habitat loss, we think of forests being logged and things being plowed and built on,” said Matthew Shepherd, director of outreach and education for the Xerces Society of Invertebrate Conservation. “But then, every acre of featureless grass is just as much loss of habitat as anything else.”

History of the Green Lawn

The American attachment to the perfectly trimmed green lawn aesthetic has a history rooted in settler colonialism. Americans modeled their landscaping after wealthy European elites, who used a pure grass lawn as a way to signal their wealth.

This thing that originated as a status symbol is now a hallmark of the American backyard. Despite that it is an extremely common sight now, most green turf grasses are not native to the United States. Therefore, they can require a lot of upkeep — excessive water, pesticides — to keep them going.

Covering 40 million acres across the country, grass is now the biggest irrigated “crop” in the U.S. — surpassing even corn. And yet, it gives little to nothing back to native ecosystems.

No Mow May

Green grass lawns, in effect, extend the fragmentation of pollinator habitat. That’s why Plantlife in the United Kingdom started the awareness campaign, No Mow May. This movement has also taken hold in the U.S. The idea is that not mowing your lawn for even a month can allow for the growth of things like clover that bees can use for food.

Of course, not mowing your lawn can present issues, such as enforcement of local ordinances, or even just the local status quo. There are homeowner associations bylaws and legal prohibitions on any deferred lawn maintenance that could be characterized as overgrowth.

Related: Celebrate pollinators Saturday during World Bee Day

Facing ordinances like this, some U.S. residents have challenged the idea of what a yard should look like. In Maryland, one couple pushed back on an HOA requirement and it resulted in legislation that prohibits unreasonable restrictions on low-impact landscaping such as a pollinator-friendly yard.

Beyond May

Ultimately, said Shepherd, No Mow May should ideally serve as a springboard for a more comprehensive conversation about making spaces pollinator friendly all year round. Shepherd said there are three things you can focus on: creating nesting areas, flowers for food, and quitting pesticides.

If all you’re doing is not mowing your lawn for a few weeks, said Shepherd, you’re not achieving any long-term benefit. Because if you don’t have any blooming flowers in your lawn, you’re just growing long, green grass. And if you do, teaching bees that there’s a food source in your yard and then taking it away can be harmful. So ultimately, true support for pollinators has to go beyond the campaign.

“The real benefit from (No Mow May) is that people are talking about lawns — they’re talking about the bad things of lawns, how the lawns could be, what the changes can be,” Shepherd said. “And we’re seeing a much broader conversation about pollinator conservation in our neighborhoods, and what we really should be doing to support the bees.”

Advocates say focusing on native, flowering plants is also a good idea, as is spreading awareness to other people in your community and beyond. Critically important is eliminating things from your yard, like grass, that might require regular pesticide applications.

“Anything we can do to bring habitat back into our neighborhoods, our towns, our farmland and so on, is going to be beneficial,” Shepherd said.

After May wraps up, June is National Pollinators Month. Follow along for more in this series about pollinators.

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A lone Ibis hunts near a ridge of oysters near low tide on a recent morning in Marshallberg. Photo: Dylan Ray

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A humpback whale navigates the tide May 4 in Beaufort Inlet, as photographed from Fort Macon State Park. Humpback whales’ flukes can be up to 18 feet wide, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says their markings are unique enough to identify individuals. Photo: Doug Waters

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A pied-billed grebe chick watches intently as mother prepares a crawfish for breakfast at North River Wetlands Preserve in Otway.

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A sailboat is anchored in the cut near Sugarloaf Island along the Morehead City waterfront in Carteret County, with two cargo ships shown berthed at the North Carolina Port of Morehead City in the background. Photo: Dylan Ray

“The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.”

― Rachel Carson

Mine is a short journey, but you wouldn’t know it.

Hushed ripples as my paddle slips through the water are the only noise I make, but everyone else is making a racket. A cacophony of mingling bird calls, fish splashing as they wake up and bounce out of the water every which way. Sunrise is feeding time. I watch a big blue heron standing gracefully in the marsh and swiftly scarfing down a fish for breakfast.

The marsh looks like heaven when the rising sun begins to hit it and the colors of the sunrise reflect off the water. The marsh is my portable paradise, I take it with me wherever I go. When I need to get away from reality for a moment, which is happening more and more often now, I close my eyes and imagine my happy place. The sun on my face, the friends I make of the sea creatures, and the salty and sulphury scent I love because it smells like home. But more importantly, I imagine the journey to get there. It is a tranquility like no other.

If everything is going right, I am out of bed 10 or 15 minutes before the sunrise, and the ebbing tide is setting me up for success. I swing open the garage doors from the corner house on Gordon Street and snag my paddle, maybe my life jacket if I’m feeling like a rule follower.

Clad in a sun shirt and Chacos sandals with my bag of snacks that will soon be replaced with shells, I set out on my way — just a short, two-block jaunt down to the Beaufort waterfront where I find my yellow kayak in slot 10. The neighbors all draw sticks at the beginning of the season in hopes that they will receive a coveted kayak slip by the public dock on Front Street. This year, I was one of the lucky ones.

As the sun begins to peek out behind the clouds that cover the horizon, I heft the kayak off its rack and over to the water. Taylor’s Creek is its own paradise. I can’t wait to get out there.

In the span of just five minutes on the water I can wonder at bottlenose dolphins, a multitude of marine invertebrates (my favorites for their alien-like qualities!), and one of the best sunrises I’ve ever seen. And rarely are any other humans around. The minute my kayak hits the water, I am headed less than a quarter mile, directly across the creek. I want to be by the marsh, where the creatures live. Paddling parallel to the shore of the island, Town Marsh, I stick close to the shallows. There is a steep dip from the bank into the middle of the channel where a strong current may be ripping. I stay right on the edge, where I can peer over the side of my vessel to see what sea creatures are awake.

I pass over a sting ray, or maybe a skate. They camouflage so well, the only way they make themselves seen is from their outline, and the quick flap of the wings as they dart away once my paddle makes my presence known. There — right where the water laps onto the sand — what is it? I see two eye stalks and realize it is a blue crab buried in the sand. Sneaky. After paddling a few feet farther, I spot another. This must be a predatory technique. I wish I could stick around to see if any small fish will get caught in their sly claws, but the current is pushing me forward.

A loud scraping sound interrupts me from my trance. My head jerks away from staring at the water to look in front of me. I have mowed right into an oyster bed. Sweet! Now, just a little bit stuck, the perfect opportunity presents itself to check out what, or who, has made a home on this little reef.

These oyster structures are new in the past couple years. Taylor’s Creek is narrow, and at all times of the day, except sunrise, hundreds of boats go by. Their wakes can cause erosion of the marsh and the island.

Dr. Rachel Gittman, a researcher with East Carolina University, Brandon Puckett, former research coordinator with the North Carolina Coastal Reserve, and one of my professors from the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences, Dr. Niels Lindquist, came together to test living shoreline material intended to mitigate boat-wake impacts on the shoreline by restoring these oyster reefs.

My small kayak won’t produce a problematic wake, so I get up close and benefit from exploring what is living on the structures! First, seaweed is all I see, but then I see one of my favorite marine inverts. A purple spiny sea urchin! I gently peel one off the substrate, having to manually pry its suctioned tube feet off, so I can get a good look at its underside.

These urchins are not so spiky that they will stab me, as long as I hold them carefully and with taut hands. Cupping its spines, I check out my favorite part of this creature’s anatomy, the Aristotle’s lantern. Five opalescent, sharp, teeth-like protrusions face me. They gape out of a small black hole. Gooey, tiny tube feet wiggle around surrounding the moving teeth. Only a couple centimeters wide, the mouth captures my attention. Obviously, this is something special if it has garnered such a whimsical name. The urchin’s intricate shape and formidable appearance could convince me this creature terrifies its prey.

I frighten myself imaging an urchin 100 times its normal size. Luckily, these globular, spiny echinoderms stick with tiny prey, munching on seaweed, scraping algae, or catching plankton drifting by. Opportunistic omnivores … nothing to be afraid of — unless you range on the side of microscopic body sizes.

I paddle on and see a small shark fin rise in front of me. It must be chasing that school of fish I just glided over. The sun is higher in the sky now and it is almost low tide. Depending on the tides, I could make it to my destination by water only. However, I find more joy from beaching my kayak and tramping across the island. I pull up to the sign that introduces visitors, “Welcome to the Rachel Carson Reserve,” and make sure to pull my kayak up farther on land since I will come back to it at a higher tide. I can’t let my ride float away without me! Grabbing my bag, I look back at Beaufort and turn toward the trail that will lead me into a landscape that calms my whole being.

The gratitude I experience for having the opportunity to be here, early on a Sunday morning in the middle of the fall semester, is beyond measure. You can’t have happiness without first knowing how to be grateful. This space I am in allows me to take clear deep breaths. No one is around telling me what to do, there is no one to care for, no work to be done. It is too early for friends or family to even be awake to interrupt my reverie with the vibration of an incoming text. And this is still just the journey! Pure bliss. The destination awaits.

Scampering across a sandy patch, I find my way to what I’ve deemed my secret trail. It is a bit hidden behind some bushes, but once inside it is like Wonderland. There is a small trail lined by dense trees that open to a cleared, trampled circle. Here, I imagine, are where the wild horses of the reserve hang out to cool off or hide from tourists.

There is a mulberry tree here where I have harvested berries, just enough to sustain me, since I am sure they offer sustenance for the horses as well. I maneuver my way through the rest of the short, overgrown trail and come out on a hill. I can see the marsh, and my destination from here, but if I turn just 180 degrees, I see where I came.

There is Front Street, bustling a bit more as churchgoers and dog walkers start their mornings. I can still hear the honks of a car and the music from a passing boat. It is strange to feel like I am on an uninhabited island yet still hear the happenings of life in town. This is peaceful, I am alone, but not lonely. Just how I like it.

Trekking toward the western side of Town Marsh, I am stepping through dune marsh-elder, American beachgrass, pennywort, and mock strawberries. My favorite flower, which I will always associate with home, is the bright orange Indian blanket, resembling a sunflower. These wild plants mark my way to the path I head toward.

Hot and sweaty, I stop for a drink of water at another favorable lookout spot. I have the perfect vista of downtown Beaufort. Sunday morning is in full swing. I see tourists sitting on the porch at Dock House waiting on breakfast, while others are walking along the boardwalk. I continue on, smiling to myself, appreciative for the beautiful day and knowing I’m now sharing this time with others too.

Only 20 minutes after beaching my kayak, and maybe 30 after launching into the water, I have arrived. I stand at the rickety wooden sign that is painted green indicating Bird Shoal is ahead of me. I sigh and smile again. I’ve made it.

Excusing myself to the mud snails I bother as I walk through a bit of marsh at low tide, I continue over the dunes to the water. Here I have an undisturbed view of Beaufort Inlet, Fort Macon, and the sound side of Shackleford Banks. Blue sky and bluer water. This. This is my happy place.

In her book, “The Edge of the Sea,” Carson recounts her time at Bird Shoal when “in calm weather, one is able to wade out from the sand-dune rim over immense areas of the shoal, in water so shallow and so glassy clear that every detail of the bottom lies revealed.” (pg. 99-100) She captures the view so vividly. I’ve explored North Carolina’s coast, far and wide, and at low tide on a sunny day, Bird Shoal has by far, the clearest, bluest water I’ve seen in this coastal state. I crave wading through those waters.

Never being one who can lie on the beach when there is so much to see and do, I set my stuff down, grab my shell bag, and set off along the shoreline. I’ve trained my eyes for a specific treasure when I am here. They are so abundant, and I trust I will find many since I am here at low tide. And just like that, seconds into my walk I see one. It is big, maybe five inches wide, but half of it is hidden in the sand. I bend down to dig underneath it a bit and pull up a fully intact, white sand dollar. First one of the morning!

The tricky part of shelling, or scouring the beach for the perfect shells, is that some of the shells have an owner, a tenant, or may just be alive itself. Honestly, it is frustrating sometimes. The shell that will forever elude me is North Carolina’s state shell, the scotch bonnet. Only once have I found a perfect scotch bonnet, and lo and behold, it housed a hermit crab.

As a marine science student, and an empathetic person with morals, I let the crab and with it that shell, go back to the water. There is often a large, heated debate among shellers about collecting sand dollars. Once, walking back along Gordon Street from a morning trip to Bird Shoal, I passed a neighbor sitting on her porch. She asked if I had any good finds and I held up my bag of sand dollars. In an accusatory tone she questioned, “You didn’t take any live ones now, did ya?” I said, “No, ma’am,” and held up a bleach-white suspect as proof. She didn’t look convinced.

Growing up as a so-called beach girl, spending much of my time on North Carolina’s coast, specifically around Topsail Beach and Beaufort, I sometimes take for granted my knowledge of marine life. I’ve always wanted to be a marine biologist; I just didn’t know that job really existed until a friend told me it was a real thing when I was 9 years old!

Learning about life on the estuaries so young, I sometimes forget that those unfamiliar in marine territories do not share my knowledge base. Appalled describes how I felt when, as a preteen, I was with a visitor who didn’t recognize a live sand dollar versus a dead one. It was an eye-opening experience to understand the importance of marine education.

Sand dollars and sea urchins are in the same phylum, the echinoderms. A similar feature in this phylum is their five-part symmetry, and tube feet, which I mentioned with the sea urchin. Tube feet help urchins move, but they are not extremely noticeable or visible compared to their long, obvious spines. In comparison, sand dollars have tiny spines and tube feet that cover their exoskeleton. When they are alive, they will be a dark color, like green or purple, and feel bristly to the touch. They use the spines and tube feet to move, eat and breathe.

If you find an intact sand dollar that is white and smooth to the touch, you have found a dead, dried-out sand dollar. What you see is its hard exoskeleton, or test, and there should be a flowery star-shaped pattern. Some people believe these creatures look like a flattened version of their cousin, the sea urchin. You can take a white sand dollar home with you, but be careful, because they are delicate and can easily crumble in your hand.

As I continue my walk east along Bird Shoal, I stay wading in the shallows looking for these small white disks that have gotten buried along the bank. “Ah!” I scream to no one as I scuttle out of the water to dry land. A small shark darted past me as I was reaching down for a shell. My affinity for sharks does not replace my respect for what nature could do to an uninvited guest to their home. I do not need to be swimming with sharks this early and while I am alone. I wait for the shark to swim away then continue my hunt. The sand dollars are abundant during low tide this morning! I add my treasures to the bag.

Occasionally I will look or walk up to the windblown dunes and see wild horses gathered in the marsh. During the beginning of the pandemic, another paradise-seeker had revamped one of the “Protect the Wild Horses” signs. It now states boldly “SHOAL OF SOCIAL DISTANCE.” I like that message, but the sign is fading now, as is our concept of social distancing. Maybe I will update it. Despite social distancing not being as prevalent now, Bird Shoal still offers and provides.

Pandemic or not, sometimes I need my own space.

On any one of my trips to Bird Shoal, I typically come back with around 20 to 30 sand dollars, five miles walked, two podcasts listened to, maybe a sunburn, and definitely dehydrated. However, another thirst is quenched. I am refreshed, feel accomplished and have been to my happy place. I can start the day stronger, ready to face whatever comes my way.

I am grateful to have discovered a peaceful place in the middle of a chaotic world, right out my back door. So close, and yet, at times, seems so far. Surrounded by the beauty of wind and water, seashells, sea creatures and sunshine. This place reaffirms my calling to environmental science and marine biology. The N.C. Coastal Reserve and National Estuarine Research Reserve work to preserve places just like this and keep them open to the public. These reserves are magical and can transport me even if I just close my eyes and imagine being there. I recommend visiting at sunrise. Listen for the splash heard as a pelican lands after gliding above. It almost sounds like a whale breaching.

This may sound cliché but a simple hike through Town Marsh and a walk along Bird Shoal puts me one with nature. Rachel Carson said it best, and I hold these words that get me through hard times: “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” How wondrous to know I find joy by exploring the same places, walking the same paths the inspiring and influential Rachel Carson did in the 1930s. In this volatile world, which seems to have more downs than ups these days, there is a place, my happy place, where it’s just me, my footprints, and my place on this planet.

To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues. See our guidelines for submitting guest columns. Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

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A green anole, or Anolis carolinensis, the United States’ only native anole, hunts near a row of agapanthus Monday in a Beaufort garden. Photo: Dylan Ray

The New Hanover County Center of the North Carolina Cooperative Extension is featuring experts on native trees, snakes, resilience, sustainability, butterflies and more for its monthly extension speaker series.

The talks are scheduled for 10-11 a.m., the first Friday of each month at the New Hanover County Arboretum, 6206 Oleander Drive, Wilmington.

The first talk of the year is March 3 with “Building a Personal Connection with Nature.” Join Heather Kelejian, therapeutic horticulture agent, for a brief introduction to therapeutic horticulture. Learn about using nature to improve overall wellness and personal growth with specific activities. Visit Eventbrite to register.

On April 7, attendees can learn about “Native Trees for a Resilient Community with Amy Mead, area natural resources agent. She will teach about native trees that are well adapted to the coastal climate and soil conditions, and how these trees are critical to creating a resilient community. Visit Eventbrite to register.

May 5, the topic will be “Snakes of North Carolina Love ’em? Hate ’em?” Join Rebecca Skiba from the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission to learn about snakes that share our coastal habitats. Education can be the key to reducing fears and helping to protect these essential animals in our ecosystems. Registration details will be announced.

“Home and Garden Sustainability” is scheduled for June 9. Join Casey Sandemeyer, Horticulture Program Assistant, to explore practices in your home and garden to protect our resources for future generations. Registration details will be announced.

“Butterfly Gardening” lands on July 7. Butterflies and caterpillars, which is the larval stage in the butterfly life cycle, provide food for birds and other organisms, pollinate flowers and are easy to attract to a garden or backyard landscape. Butterflies are found throughout North Carolina and will flourish within a well-designed landscape of native plants in both rural and urban areas. Join Matt Collogan, consumer horticulture agent, to learn how to create habitat for butterflies in your own backyard. Registration details will be announced.

“Therapeutic Horticulture on the Go” is set for Aug. 4. Join Heather Kelejian, therapeutic horticulture agent, to learn activities to increase mental health and build a lifelong connection with nature. Registration details will be announced.

“Stormwater 101: What is it and what can we do about it?” is scheduled for Sept. 1. Amber Ellis, extension associate with N.C. State’s Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering will provide an in-depth look at stormwater and the systems used to manage stormwater in urban communities and share practices to help mitigate the impacts of stormwater on local waterways. Registration details will be announced.

“Spotlight on Local Foods” is Oct. 6 with Morgan King, family and consumer science agent, who will share information on local food systems and explore the bounty of foods grown in the area area. Registration details will be announced.

Rounding out the program will be “Trees for Coastal Fall Color,” Nov. 3. Join Lloyd Singleton, county extension director, to discover learn what trees are best to plant in the fall in the Cape Fear region. Registration details are yet to be announced.

The county’s cooperative extension, part of the NC State Extension, offers residents easy access to the resources and expertise of North Carolina State University and North Carolina A&T State University through educational programs, publications and events. Extension agents are charged with delivering unbiased, research-based information to the public.

The Arboretum is 7 acres of gardens and plantings dedicated to demonstrating the best plant species for southeastern North Carolina landscapes, proper horticultural techniques, aesthetic design, environmental stewardship and research.

The Museum of the Albemarle will host a poster exhibition that explores the process of pollination by interpreting the unique relationship between pollinators and flowers.

Presented by Smithsonian Gardens and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, “Pollination Investigation” will be on display starting March 20 and will showcase how pollinators are vital for a strong ecosystem as most plants need their help to fertilize flowers and reproduce.

The exhibit will be on display until March 2024 in the museum in Elizabeth City. There is no charge to visit the museum.

The exhibition features seven “pollinator profiles” for bees, beetles, butterflies, hummingbirds, flies, moths, and wind, along with special references to bats and water. Using a field-journal theme, each profile describes the pollinators’ favorite flowers based on floral characteristics encouraging exploration into flower shape, color, scent, and more.

The set of 14 posters is in both English and Spanish and designed to educate and inspire people to explore the natural world looking at flowers and insects.

Distributed at no cost to schools, libraries, museums, and community organizations, “Pollination Investigation” was created by Smithsonian Gardens in collaboration with the National Museum of Natural History and made available by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. It is funded in part by the Smithsonian Women’s Committee.

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A great blue heron takes flight from an oyster bed at low tide near Russell Creek in Carteret County. These large birds, often called cranes, walk and beat their wings slowly and can be found near all kinds of waters all over North America, according to the Audubon Field Guide. Photo: Dylan Ray

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

Leland will have a ribbon-cutting and community event to celebrate the grand opening of its new StoryWalk 1-3 p.m. Saturday at the Westgate Nature Park, 1260 West Gate Drive.

StoryWalk includes 18 panels along the Westgate Nature Park trail, each featuring a page from a children’s book. The first story is “The Traveling Coin” by local author Kevin Kirk.

Visitors can walk the 0.3-mile trail to read the full story. This project is designed create movement, reading, and creativity.

The stories featured on the StoryWalk will be changed each quarter.

The ribbon cutting will be followed by crafts, face painting, and a meet and greet with Kirk.

The event is free and open to the public. Though parking at Westgate Nature Park is limited, a free shuttle will be running from the Leland Cultural Arts Center at 1212 Magnolia Village Way.

The StoryWalk is presented by the North Brunswick Kiwanis Club and cosponsored by the Town of Leland and First Bank.

The StoryWalk Project was created by Anne Ferguson of Montpelier, Vermont, and developed in collaboration with the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. StoryWalk is a registered service mark owned by Ferguson.

For Lisa Rose, author of the new book, “Urban Foraging,” her fascination with the often-overlooked plants that can be a part of a healthy diet began with family and has become a profession and a passion.

An anthropologist with an interest in ethnobotany and herbal medicine, Rose has written three books. Her first two, “Grand Rapids Food” and “Midwest Medicinal Plants,” were focused on her home state of Michigan. Her latest, though, “Urban Foraging,” released in October, takes a nationwide look.

“I’ve traveled a great deal between both coasts … so in considering this book, I really had to double click into generally what am I going to be able to find across most of my regions,” she said. “So in parts of North Carolina coastal regions, you might have 35 of those plants, whereas 15 might not be immediately at your fingertips. The criteria, first and foremost (was) geographic distribution.”

The foundation for her interest in botany, plants and how they can be a part of everyday life, began in Flint, Michigan, where she grew up. Her father was an engineer and mother an avid gardener, and both parents contributed to her fascination with plants.

“He was always asking questions, “she said, describing her father. “He was very engaged in the natural world. In fact, he taught me at a young age that the natural world is the best engineer, that the natural world has solutions to the problems of imbalance. There’s a natural rhythm, not always nice and frequently chaotic in the restoration of balance.”

It was her mother, though, who applied knowledge of the natural world to daily life.

“My mother was a gardener for a good chunk of my childhood, not because it was a hobby, but because it was a practical, economical way to feed her family,” Rose said. “We had a feral concord grape hedgerow when I was growing up and my mother would put up about 50 to 75 quart jars’ worth of juice. I mean that that really was a foundation of my childhood.”

Not every plant in the book grows in eastern North Carolina. Aspen, according to North Carolina Parks webpage “Vascular Plants of North Carolina,” only grows in the mountains of the state and even then, only rarely. Hyssop, described by the “Vascular Plants” page as “one of the tallest and most robust native herbs in the state,” has not been recorded in the Piedmont or coastal plain.

With 50 plants listed in her book, though, there are plenty to choose from. Some are well known as edible wild plants, particularly blackberries and grapes, although Rose features wild concord grapes of her native Michigan.

Some of her selections are surprising, although when reading about these plants, it becomes apparent why they were chosen.

The prickly pear is a case in point. Rose suggests numerous possible uses for the plant, ultimately settling on recommending a prickly pear simple syrup. When harvesting prickly pear, Rose makes clear the hazards involved, pointing out that the species has two types of sharp barbs awaiting the careless.

“Both the prickly pear pads and fruits are covered in large and tiny spines. While the large spies are somewhat avoidable, the glochids are pesky buggers that can get into the skin and feel like a fiberglass rash,” she writes. “The glochids will embed themselves into fabric, so do your gathering with leather gloves.”

She described for Coastal Review the lesson she learned the first time she harvested prickly pear.

I didn’t realize — It’s not the big thorns that are the worst problem. It’s the glochids. They’re horrible. I had harvested my first batch of prickly pear using a cloth bag and cloth gloves. That was the worst idea ever,” she said.

Her recommended recipe for prickly pear simple syrup is as a “delicious simple syrup for margaritas.”

A number of Rose’s recipes are for mixed drinks, which she noted is part of a long tradition.

“In past generations a lot of plants were preserved into a bitter as digestive aids and served as aperitifs. Monks were brewing them in the Middle Ages, 13th century France, Germany. So it’s really a long tradition, of maybe not for medicinal any longer but definitely today for a cocktail hour,” she said.

Many of the plants Rose writes about are often thought of as common weeds. Field garlic is a great example. Also known, according to the North Carolina State Cooperative Extension webpage as crow garlic, onion grass, stag’s garlic, wild garlic, and wild onion, the plant is common, especially along the edge of gardens. The plant has a distinct odor that is a cross between an onion and garlic and has the appearance of a spindly scallion.

Her recipe calls for a wild garlic flatbread, but she also notes the tops make an excellent garnish in place of scallion in a salad. She also writes that the bulb is exceedingly fibrous and quite difficult to use in a recipe.

Rose also takes readers into the forest. She noted that the needles, bark and resin of pine trees in general are edible. The needles in particular are emphasized for their culinary versatility.

“Chop the needles and use them as an herb to flavor salads, butters and vinegars for dressings,” she suggests in her book. She also notes that homebrewers can use pine needles to create ”a Belgian or wheat-styled ale without making the brew overly pine flavored.”

For Rose, “Urban Foraging” is a way to help readers understand the common plants in our lives that can be a part of our everyday diet — trees, flowers and many that are considered weeds. The book also reminds us of a largely forgotten history, a time when foraging for wild plants was a regular part of life. “In general, common knowledge we’ve forgotten about (wild plants),” she said.  “We’re about two generations now from that having been a really common practice.”

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The silken egg sac of a spider is strategically suspended against a yucca spine along Carteret County’s Bogue Banks. Photo: Dylan Ray

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A wedge of egrets hunts shrimp in the salt marsh along the Newport River in Mill Creek in Carteret County. Photo: Dylan Ray

HARKERS ISLAND — The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center is hosting a wildlife and nature photography workshop Friday.

Led by photographers Gordon Allen and Dan Williams, the workshop includes both classroom and field experiences with instruction on learning how to dial in your camera for sharper images and what it takes to capture wildlife and nature in a different light through your camera. The workshop is designed for all skill levels with helpful hints for even the most experienced photographers as well as beginners.

Attendees are to gather at 8:30 a.m. Friday at the Core Sound museum with coffee and pastries and time to view different types of photography on exhibition. Class begins at 9 a.m. and will conclude around 4:30 p.m. Lunch will be provided at noon before a trip to Cape Lookout National Seashore (weather permitting) for field time in the afternoon.

Fees cover instruction, supplies, food and ferry – $125 for museum members; $150 for nonmembers with full payment needed at registration.

Register online or at either museum location, the museum at 1785 Island Road, Harkers Island, or 806 Arendell St. Morehead City. 

Reprinted from the Ocracoke Observer.

Negative ions caused by crashing water can elevate our feeling of well-being, and so, apparently, can walking in the woods.

A growing number of studies show that when people are exposed to negative ions — electrically charged particles that occur when air is under the influence of energy sources such as crashing waves or waterfalls — they feel better, owing to negative ions raising the brain’s serotonin (happy hormone) levels.

Apparently, forest trees can also impart beneficial substances.

According to an April 2021 New York Times article, in the 1980s, researchers in Nagano, Japan, found that the practice of spending time in forests lessens stress, boosts immunity and lowers blood pressure.

Subsequent studies showed that soaking up the forest environment reduces cortisol (the body’s primary stress hormone) and activates the parasympathetic (self-healing) nervous system.

According to some reports, breathing in phytoncides, the aromatic oils released by trees, can increase the number of the body’s natural killer cells (a type of white blood cell crucial to the immune system that can limit the spread of microbial infections and tumors).

So “forest bathing” has become a thing, especially in Japan, where it is called Shinrin–yoku and where nature therapy has ancient roots.

For a recent article on forest bathing, visit www.japanesegarden.org based in Portland, Oregon.

You don’t need to get naked, put on your swimsuit or get wet during a nature “bath” because you’re bathing in the energy and clean air while walking in the woods.

On Ocracoke, one can experience this along the mile-long Hammock Hills trail across from the National Park Service campground.

A refreshment if you will.

“That’s exactly how I feel,” said islander Barbara Adams, who visits the trail just about daily with her dog. “I’ve always loved walking in the forest. Hammock Hills is just so fresh.”

This trail was heavily damaged during Hurricane Dorian in September 2019 and the wooden enhancements — some bridges and the look-out platform at the Pamlico Sound — have not yet been repaired.

And they might not be replaced since the trail has been thrice flooded and damaged in hurricanes Matthew in 2016, Florence in 2018, and most recently Dorian.

Cape Hatteras National Seashore Superintendent Dave Hallac said that his staff is taking a longer, open-minded look at the trail.

“It is, in fact, a hiking trail, and hiking trails get wet and flooded sometimes,” he said. “For some folks, that’ll be part of the experience and for others, it just might not be able to be used all the time.”

So, they’re looking for a less complex and less costly, long-term way to manage it, he said.

Nevertheless, the trail is open and available for breathing in the pine-scented atmosphere.

In the warm months, arm yourself with bug spray.

In the fall and winter, listen for the high pitched “yank-yank” call of the red-breasted nuthatch, a northern visitor that loves longleaf pine trees.

A ranger-guided, 60-minute nature walk on the half-mile trail will be held at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 20. Attendees are encouraged to bring bug spray.

This story is provided courtesy of the Ocracoke Observer, a newspaper covering Ocracoke island. Coastal Review is partnering with the Ocracoke Observer to provide readers with more environmental and lifestyle stories of interest along our coast. 

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A swallowtail butterfly peeks around the blossom of a Mexican sunflower Tuesday in a garden near Russell Creek in Carteret County. Photo: Dylan Ray

Pender County is celebrating the 45th birthday of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail this September with three family-friendly hikes.

The 1,175-mile Mountains-to-Sea Trail runs from Clingman’s Dome to Jockey’s Ridge. The trail was proposed in September 1977 by Howard Lee, then secretary of the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Community Development.

“The trail travels the length of Pender County, through two trail towns, Burgaw and Surf City, as well as Moores Creek National Battlefield,” said Tammy Proctor, Pender County tourism director.

To celebrate the birthday of this trail, Burgaw Parks and Recreation, Surf City Parks and Recreation, Moores Creek National Battlefield and Pender County Tourism are hosting 1- to 2-mile hikes.

“All hikes are free to participate,” Proctor added. “We just ask that all hikers register with the tourism office so we can plan appropriately.” To register, call 910-259-1278.

Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail Outreach Manager Betsy Brown said the communities along the MST are what make it so special.

“In celebration of the 45th birthday of the trail, we’re thrilled that MST towns and special places are hosting events to welcome folks who may not yet know about the trail. And of course we welcome back those who already spend time walking the MST miles in Pender County. Bring a friend,” Brown added.

Brown said the Friends group has several plans in the works to celebrate the 45^th anniversary of the trail. To learn more and for updates, visit the trail’s website.

The MST Birthday Hikes kick off in Pender County with the Surf City Bridge Hike.

Hikers will meet in Soundside Park at 9 a.m. Sept. 8 to cross the Surf City Bridge. The hike will be led by a volunteer with the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. The hike will feature a photo opportunity of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway and the ocean at the peak of the bridge. Herrings Outdoor Sports has donated an Ice Mule Cooler, valued at $80, to be raffled off.

Burgaw is to host a birthday hike along the Osgood Canal Greenway Sept. 9. Meet at Hankins Park for a 9 a.m. step-off. Cupcakes to be provided by Pender County Tourism staff.

Moores Creek National Battlefield will host a 1.5 mile walk-and-talk that will be dog-friendly starting at 9 a.m. Sept. 10. This will include a walk of the History Trail, Tar Heel Trail, Woodpecker Trail and Black River Road, all in the park. This is not a guided tour but rather an informal walk with a park ranger. Hikers should meet at the park’s visitor center. The walk is expected to take an hour. Visitors can walk the loop as many times as they would like.

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The waters of upper Ward Creek near Otway in Down East Carteret County are shown in this Thursday aerial. The creek flows into the North River where its meets water from the ocean to create conditions considered favorable for tasty oysters. Photo: Dylan Ray

A dragonfly zipped over the water.

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

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

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

“Because they eat mosquitoes,” Burgart said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An endangered red-cockaded woodpecker flies in to his nesting cavity with a spider in in his beak for the awaiting chicks inside. Red-cockaded woodpeckers are an endemic species of the longleaf pine forest and were placed on the endangered species list due to the destruction of nesting habitat. Longleaf pine forests once covered an area the size of the Amazon across the southeastern United States. But today, less than 10% of this forest remains. Photo: Jared Lloyd

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A trio of great crested flycatchers gather momentarily Saturday in a tree at Sandy Run Park in Kitty Hawk. According to the Audubon Guide to North American Birds, flycatchers are more often heard — especially the males’ loud calls — than seen, as they prefer wooded areas. Photo: Kip Tabb

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Clouds settle over Town Marsh in Beaufort during a recent summer evening. Photo : Dylan Ray

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An assassin bug sets a trap for its prey near a blooming thyme plant in Beaufort. Photo: Dylan Ray

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A cypress tree stands tall just off the shoreline of the Neuse River near James City. Photo: Dylan Ray

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Fox kits roughhouse in a clearing on the edge of the Croatan National Forest. Photo: Dylan Ray

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A lone paddleboarder moves over the slick waters of Onslow Bay near the Bogue Inlet Pier in Emerald Isle. Photo: Dylan Ray

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Canada goslings are among the newest residents of Pea island National Wildlife Refuge. Most of the Canada geese on the refuge during the winter months are migratory and have already migrated out. But over the years, a few pairs have stayed on refuge all year. Canada geese are known for flying in V-formation and for their loud honking. Most Canada goose pairs stay together for life. The goslings may stay with the parents for their entire first year.

The Coastal Wildlife Refuge Society is the official nonprofit support group for National Wildlife Refuges in Eastern North Carolina and shared this information on behalf of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service.

Got a photo you’d like to share with Coastal Review readers? Please read our submission guidelines.

More people are out enjoying the coastal North Carolina outdoors this time of year, but state wildlife officials advise that the warm weather also means you can expect to see more snakes.

Wildlife diversity biologists at the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission ask that if you see a snake, don’t be alarmed or try to kill it. Just give it plenty of room, and if it happens to be a pine snake or rattlesnake, let officials know about it.

“Snakes are an important part of the ecosystem and help control the rodent, slug and insect populations,” Jeff Hall, reptile conservation biologist with the Wildlife Commission, said in a statement. “There are many ways we can coexist with snakes, which is important because of 38 of North Carolina’s native snake species, ten are listed endangered, threatened or of special concern.”

The commission said the northern pine snake is a native threatened snake species. Agency biologists want to know more about their distribution and are asking the public to report sightings. The nonvenomous snake ranges between 4 and 5 feet long, but can get as large as 7.5 feet. It has a white or tan background color with dark brown or black markings that begin as solid coloring or messy blotches near the head before gradually becoming distinct saddle-like blotches toward the tail. It’s mostly found in the sandhills and the southern coastal plain, although there are confirmed reports of pine snakes in Cherokee and Swain counties, the commission said. They prefer open areas within pine-oak forests with well-drained, sandy soil.

“We are partnering with several organization and agencies to conduct surveys in the areas where pine snakes have either been seen or areas with potentially good habitat,” stated Gabrielle Graeter, conservation biologist with the Wildlife Commission. “It’s difficult to conserve a species when we don’t even know all the places it occurs. Assistance from citizens in recording and documenting the pine snake will be a huge help. Websites like HerpsofNC.org are great for helping people to identify snake species.”

How to report

People who see a pine snake in the wild are asked to send an email to pinesnake@ncwildlife.org with a photo, which is required, date and time the snake was observed and location, GPS coordinates preferred. Keep in mind that some species have similar patterns, especially juvenile rat snakes and racers. The public can also download the HerpMapper mobile app and document their observations electronically. The agency partners with the app to track amphibian and reptile species.

Of the six venomous snake species native to North Carolina, three are rattlesnakes: the timber, the pigmy and the eastern diamondback. Each one is in decline and protected by the North Carolina Endangered Species Act. Persecution by humans and habitat destruction are the main culprits. If anyone spots a rattler, they are urged to send an email to rattlesnake@ncwildlife.org with a photo, required, date and time the snake was observed and location, GPS coordinates preferred, or they can log their sighting on the HerpMapper mobile app.

If you see a snake in your yard and would prefer it to reside elsewhere, you can safely encourage it to leave by gently spraying it with a garden hose. You can also make your yard less hospitable for snakes by cleaning up clutter such as stick and rock piles, keeping your lawn mowed, closing gaps and holes in your siding and foundation, and sealing openings under doors, windows and around waterpipes.

Most snakes will leave people alone if they aren’t bothered and are provided an escape route. Watching for snakes and giving them a wide berth are effective habits for co-existing with snakes safely.

Questions about human-wildlife interactions can be directed to the agency’s NC Wildlife Helpline 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, at 866-318-2401 or by email, HWI@ncwildlife.org.

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Judy L., of Morehead City, who says she’s also known as “the Bread Lady,” feeds the gulls at Fort Macon State Park on the east end of Bogue Banks.

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The weakfish is a beautiful marine species, but is it really a “weak fish?”

According to fishers up and down the East Coast, that is the furthest thing from the truth.

Weakfish are known as strong fighters and give the most advanced fishers a challenge in hooking and landing them. The most challenging part of catching them is not to rip the hook out of their soft mouths.

They resemble and are often confused with the spotted sea trout. In North Carolina, this species is also known as either a gray trout, or just plain trout because of the similarity to the spotted sea trout, which is a completely different fish.

“Weakfish are most common along the Atlantic Coast from North Carolina to New York. The fish migrate seasonally, moving generally south and more offshore in the fall and winter months, and inshore and north in the spring and summertime,” said Tracey Bauer, North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries weakfish biologist.

Weakfish have a dark olive-green coloration on top and are silvery on the bottom half of their bodies. Their backs and sides may have purple, lavender, green, blue, golden or copper colors mixed in. The sides are reflective with dark blotches that look like wavy lines running down the side of the fish, but not into the fins, which are yellow. They have two large canine-like teeth in the upper jaw.

“The spotted pattern is how you tell the weakfish apart from the spotted sea trout because the spots do not appear on the tail or second dorsal fins,” said Bauer.

The weakfish can grow to be 36 inches in length, but most specimens range between 12 and 16 inches long.

This species is an omnivore that has adapted to whatever food is available throughout its range. They will eat other smaller fish, crabs, shrimp, butterfish, small clams and herring.

Weakfish are considered adults when they are a year old. In northern reaches, females mature at 10 inches in length and males just slightly smaller at 9.9 inches long. Weakfish in North Carolina waters tend to reproduce when females reach 6.9 inches in length and males reach 6.5 inches.

“Weakfish spawn in the estuarine and nearshore reaches of the coast after they migrate inshore during the spring. Weakfish in North Carolina spawn over a longer period of time and begin spawning earlier than areas to the north,” Bauer said.

Spawning season runs from March to September, with peak activity from April to June. By comparison, in New York Bight, which includes the Delaware Bay through New York, the season runs from May to mid-July.

Weakfish are described as batch spawners, meaning they spawn multiple times over a single spawning season. Weakfish have been estimated to spawn anywhere between once every two days to once every 22 days, for a total of anywhere between four and 66 spawns per season. These multiple spawns mean weakfish have been estimated to release up to 11.8 million eggs per year, though the number can be as low as only 740,000.

Younger weakfish spawn less frequently than older weakfish.

Weakfish larvae range from 1/16 to 1/14 inch in length when they hatch. This species larvae have been collected in nearshore waters to offshore in coastal studies.

Weakfish prefer to use estuaries as their nursery grounds. Sampling of North Carolina sounds showed that juvenile weakfish were at their highest numbers in areas the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries has designated as a secondary nursery habitat regions, such as shallow bays or navigation channels characterized by moderate depths, moderately high salinities with sand or sand-grass bottoms, rather than the main nursery areas made up of shallow tributaries with low salinity and mud or mud-grass habitat. In the Chesapeake and Delaware bays, juvenile weakfish usually move from high- to low-salinity areas during summer and return to high-salinity waters in the fall and leave the estuaries typically by December.

Young weakfish can be found along the Atlantic Coast from Long Island to North Carolina at depths of 29.5 to 85 feet, usually during the late summer and fall. Researchers discovered that weakfish younger than a year old were caught in ocean trawl surveys along the coast of North Carolina at depths of 29.5-59 feet during the fall and winter, and from North Carolina to Florida at depths of 29.5-36 feet during the winter and early spring, Bauer said.

Adult weakfish seasonally migrate between offshore and inshore waters. The warming of coastal waters in spring usually triggers an inshore and northerly migration route of adult fish from their wintering grounds to estuaries, sounds, and bays. Larger fish tend to be the first to move and congregate in the northern part of their range.

Catch records from the pound net and haul seine fisheries in Pamlico Sound, Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay tell researchers that larger fish are then followed by a second group of smaller fish during summer. Just after they arrive, weakfish return to the larger bays and maybe to the ocean to spawn. In northern areas, large numbers of adults spend the summer in ocean waters instead of in estuaries.

As water temperatures drop during the fall, weakfish form into schools and move offshore and typically south along the coast. It appears that the continental shelf from Chesapeake Bay to Cape Lookout is the primary wintering ground for weakfish.

“The growth rate of weakfish is very fast during their first year,” said Bauer.

In Delaware Bay, juveniles may grow from 0.83 to 1.18 inches per month from June to September and can grow to lengths between 3.94 to 6.9 inches in length throughout the range by the end of their first year.

“The size of the young fish will be determined by where they have been collected and the food and available to eat,” she said.

Movements of weakfish show geographic variations in growth, with their size increasing the farther north they are collected along the Atlantic Coast.

Northern weakfish collected between Cape Cod and Ocean City, Maryland, were largest, while those caught Virginia Beach and Cape Fear were smaller. The size of fish caught between Chesapeake Bay to Virginia Beach were intermediate and were similar to Delaware Bay. Growth of weakfish of southern half of their range may also be limited by food availability or by their DNA makeup, she concluded.

 “Weakfish have been one of the most important components of a mixed-stock commercial fishery on the Atlantic coast since the 1800s. with several periods of high and low landings. Commercial landings peaked in 1980 at about 36 million pounds coast wide and a little over 20 million pounds in North Carolina. Commercial landings remained relatively high through the 1980s and generally declined since then,” said Chris Batsavage, special assistant for councils and the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries representative on the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

In 2020, coastwide and North Carolina commercial weakfish landings were 232,684 pounds and 87,784 pounds, respectively. Batsavage noted that commercial weakfish landings since 2010 had been limited by the commercial trip and bycatch limits of no greater than 100 pounds that are required by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Weakfish Fishery Management Plan.

“Weakfish have historically been landed in haul seines, pound nets, trawls and gill nets, with gill nets the predominant gear since the 1990s. North Carolina, Virginia and New York account for the majority of the commercial landings. Discarding of weakfish by commercial fishermen is known to occur, and the discard mortality is assumed to be 100%,” Batsavage added.

Recreational weakfish harvest has shown a similar trend as commercial landings with a peak in the early to mid-1980s and a marked decline since the early 2000s. In 2020, the coastwide recreational harvest was 481,418 pounds with 105,729 pounds landed in North Carolina. Since 2010, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Weakfish Fishery Management Plan required a one-fish bag limit and a minimum size limit of at least 12 inches total length, which has contributed to the low harvest over the last decade or so.

North Carolina, South Carolina and New York account for the majority of the recreational harvest. Virginia hasn’t been among the top states for recreational harvest in recent years.

It is assumed that 10% of weakfish released alive by recreational anglers die. Although the total number of weakfish released follows a similar trend as recreational harvest, the proportion of weakfish released has increased since 2010, Batsavage said. 

A 2019 stock assessment update shows weakfish still showed signs of being depleted as they have been since 2003. The fish stock is considered depleted when it is below the spawning stock biomass, or SSB, threshold of 30% or 13.6 million pounds. In 2017, the SSB was only 4.24 million pounds. While the assessment shows some good signs in the weakfish population recently, with a slight increase in SSB and total abundance, the stock is still well below the self-sustainable threshold.

“The assessment also shows natural mortality, or the rate at which fish die because of natural causes such as starvation, disease, predation, has been going up since the early 2000s. The assessment therefore uses total mortality, which includes fishing mortality and natural mortality, as benchmarks to prevent an increase in fishing pressure during times of high natural mortality and low fishing mortality. Although total mortality has decreased since 2010, it is still too high for the stock to recover,” Batsavage said.

North Carolina gives awards for the catch and keep of a weakfish that is 5 pounds and larger. They also give out awards for the live release of a weakfish measuring 24 inches or longer. A total of 10 weight citations and three release citations were issued for weakfish in 2020, the most recent totals available.

Anglers catch weakfish with natural or artificial baits by a variety of techniques including bottom fishing and jigging. They commonly use sting silvers and spec rigs. The weakfish have soft mouths. Anglers should keep the line tight, yet not pull too hard because the hook could rip through the lip and permanently injure the fish.

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Wild mares enter the salty water between Town Marsh and Carrot Island in the Rachel Carson Reserve along Taylor’s Creek in Beaufort. Photo: Dylan Ray

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Herons, shown in the foreground, look for prey along the shore of the Newport River near Crab Point in Morehead City. Photo: Dylan Ray

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