Ancient Roots

Even though we live in the Palmetto State, we probably hardly notice that we're surrounded by one of the earth's oldest life forms - palms. Palm trees, along with related climbing or shrub-like cousins, are all descended from a common ancestor that first appears in the fossil record 80 million years ago, well before the arrival of flowering plants and grasses. (Also in the palm family are lianas and saw palmettos.) Humans have been cultivating palms for thousands of years, relying on them for wood, food, and shade.

A cabbage palm

Our most common forms here on the island include the cabbage palm (Arecaceae livistona), the palmetto (A. sabal) and the royal palm (A. roystonea). Like all palm trees, these varieties lack the ability to grow rings the way deciduous trees do, resulting in the palm tree's straight trunks of uniform diameter. Nor do they sprout branches, but produce spikes from their crowns from which the fronds develop. With deep, single tap roots, palms can withstand gale-force winds, find water even in desert climates and live more than a century.

Anthropologists theorize that the rise of human civilization in Mesopotamia was due in large part to the palm tree, especially the date palm, which not only provided a high-energy, easily transported food source but also served as an indicator of potential water sources. Palms were being cultivated five thousand years ago, and their importance can be measured by their association in human culture with peace and fertility. The Bible mentions palm trees more than thirty times; the Quran, more than twenty times.

Dates ready for harvesting

Today, palms remain a key cash crop, providing among much else palm oil, rattan for furniture, thatching for traditional housing, açai berries, coconut milk, dates, a number of dyes, and even wine produced from the fermented leaves of a type of Chilean palm tree. Here in the Lowcountry, the wood of the cabbage palm was used to fortify Fort Moultrie during the Revolutionary War, since the tree's soft, spongy wood was able to deflect or absorb British cannon fire.

Ubiquitous they may be, but palms represent one of nature's longest-running success stories, rooted deep in Lowcountry soil.

Coyote Smarts

courtesy Post&Courier

Taking note of the increasing presence of coyotes in our martime environment, SIPOA recently promulgated a Coyote Management Plan to underscore our co-existence with this iconic wildlife species. Our local population of coyotes (Canis latrans) mate in late winter and produce litters of up to five pups. SIPOA's wildlife map records increasingly common sightings throughout the island.

Coyotes are now present throughout South Carolina; and although populations are concentrated in the Midlands and the Upstate, where they were first noted in 1978, the animals have been common in the Lowcountry for more than thirty years, following the push into new territory by one of their prey species, armadillos. Further afield from Seabrook, Isle of Palms has reported a population of sixty coyotes, who have been observed swimming to Dewee's Island from IOP, Mount Pleasant and Sullivan's Island to breed and den. They've been spotted on beaches dining on ghost crabs, scouring the tideline for washed-up fish, or creeping through marine underbrush for rabbits, mice and snakes. Their diet is filled out by deer fawn, insects and berries.

Considered a pest species by some, particularly as a threat to deer populations, data collected over the past thirty years indicates that the the number of white-tailed deer (South Carolina's state animal) remains plentiful, with coyotes serving as a curb on overpopulation by replacing the now endangered red wolf as an apex predator. Nonetheless, the state doesn't require a license to hunt or trap coyote on private land within 100 yards of one's residence and designates December 1st through March 1st for trapping state-wide.

Coyotes and humans have been linked in mythology for centuries, particularly in the legends of western and Great Plains Native Americans. Coyote is usually portrayed as a wily trickster, but one myth tells the story of Coyote singing with Earth Maker to create the world and its humans. Another attributes the bringing of fire to Coyote, who steals it from the sun. And one Navajo legend tells how Coyote, who lived in the Sky, one day felt the Sky reaching down to touch the Earth, where the First People were struggling to survive. Coyote leaped down from the Sky to teach the First People how to hunt and fish, and has been with mankind ever since.

First People

Today marks the start of Native American Heritage Month, a good time to remember the pre-colonial era people who once called the Lowcountry home and whose names are recalled in the rivers and tidal marshes that supported them. With no written language that has come down to us, our only knowledge of them comes from the descriptions written by the European settlers who first encountered them.

Planting corn and beans

The earliest records of these indigenous people are from the mid-to-late 16th century, when Spanish adventurers ranged up and down the coastline between present day Florida and North Carolina. It's in these descriptions that the names Bohicket, Stono, Edisto and Kiawah, or variations of them, first appear in documents. The Spanish encountered these tribes when they explored what is now Charleston Harbor (they dubbed it San Jorge) and the rivers that drained into it. They met a semi-nomadic culture, with the Lowcountry's First People spending winters in the upper coastal plains of central South Carolina and the warmer spring and summer months at the shore (which in their time extended some fifty miles further east than it does today). There were an estimated fifteen tribal groups described by Europeans, who initially relied on the natives for guidance in what crops to plant and game to hunt. In our immediate area, English explorers who came ashore near what is now Rockville were greeted and welcomed by the Cassique of a loose confederation of tribes that came to be known as the Kiawah.

A sculpture of the Cassique, Charles Towne Landing

Later, when the English had driven the Spanish south, a British visitor in 1682 recorded that the Native Americans he encountered were "of a deep chestnut color, their hair black and straight, tied various ways, stuck through with feathers for ornament or gallantry." He noted that they were superb hunters with bow and arrow or with reeds sharpened to a point. . Expanding plantations and the arrival of imported cattle began to alter the landscape that had supported indigenous cultures for thousands of years, and European diseases like smallpox to which the natives had no immunity further decimated tribal numbers. By the late 1700's, mention of these tribes had mostly vanished from the written record. Their settlements were easily dismantled for each season's move, leaving us little physical evidence of their presence. The evocative shell rings just off our contemporary coastline, and scattered shell middens along creeks, are all that remain.

The Charleston Museum has an excellent collection of artifacts from archeological explorations, including from the unearthed remnants of a Kiawah burial site uncovered during construction in the late 1960's at Charles Towne Landing. And a remnant Kiawah population survives in Tennessee, to where surviving tribal groups migrated in the late 18th century. They are known as the Guaymari Kiawah, or "Sacred People Of The Earth."