Other Islanders

We share our island with many types of wildlife, but none more prevalent than the white-tailed deer population roaming our marshes and maritime forests. With few predators, the white-tails (Odocoileus virginianus) thrive here, to the point where periodic culls have to be undertaken to avoid overpopulation and over-competition for food.

White-tails are the official state animal of South Carolina (along with ten other states) and are abundant throughout the southeast - and, indeed, in most of the United States east of the Rockies. As winter approaches, their coats turn gray/brown but darken to a deep reddish brown during the spring and summer, when females give birth to up to three fawns during May and June. The youngsters' spotted coats help conceal

Waiting for Mom

them in dense foliage while their mother searches for food and grazes some distance away. A fawn should never be disturbed if you happen upon one. Most likely its mother will return to it after feeding, and will actually avoid her fawn if she detects a human smell on or around it.

Along with their flicking white tails, the impressive antlers of the males are another trademark of the species. Bucks begin growing their antlers at about one year of age, at first as small nubbins, and regrow them every year starting in late spring. Some observers use rack size as an indicator of age, but nutrition is a more important factor in antler growth. Young bucks in a nutritionally supportive environment such as here on the island can grow an array as impressive as any older male. Antlers are used defensively during mating season to keep other males away from a female, and in play-fighting by young males to establish dominance within the herd. Antlers are also used to create scrape marks on tree trunks as a signal of the buck's presence to other bucks and to females ready for breeding.

Making scents

White tails communicate with each other vocally through a variety of grunts and snorts as well as by scent-marking using seven scent glands located on the head, legs, feet and genitalia. The waxy substance secreted from between the hooves is especially pungent, detectable even by human noses, particularly when a deer senses danger and stamps its feet as a warning to others.

Our island supplies plentiful grasses, legumes and acorns that form the white tail's diet. With the four-chambered stomach typical of a ruminant, deer can consume rough, woody plants and even foods toxic to humans, such as poison ivy and certain types of mushrooms, with no ill effects. And, of course, they may stop by to snack on your landscaping. Enjoy their presence as one of the pleasures of island life.

Powder Blue

Southern history may revolve around "King Cotton", but before there was cotton, there was indigo. The cultivation of varieties of Indigofera brought one of the earliest cash crops for European settlers in the Lowcountry, grown and produced by Africans sold into slavery from West Africa or shipped to South Carolina from Caribbean plantations. The plant's cultivation and use had been long known to African peoples who brought their knowledge with them into captivity. Highly prized by the fashion-conscious elite in Europe, the dye's rich color soon acquired the designation of "royal blue."

Indigofera caroliniana

Indigo has been entwined with human history for thousands of years, thought to have been first grown and processed by ancient peoples on the Indian subcontinent. (The Hindu god Krishna is always portrayed with deep blue skin.) The plant arrived in medieval Europe via the Silk Road and soon replaced woad, a plant of the cabbage family that also produced a blue dye that was more labor intensive to create and less colorfast. Indigo had arrived in the Carolinas by the mid-17th century; a hundred years later, it had become the Lowcountry's second most profitable cash crop, after rice, shipped to Britain as dried cakes for the country's textile industry.

Placing indigo "mud" into wooden forms for drying

Indigofera caroliniana was (and still is) the dominant species used here, although other varieties were found to grow equally well in the Lowcountry's semi-tropical climate. Charleston's Eliza Pinckney is usually credited with almost single-handedly creating the Lowcountry's indigo industry with seeds she obtained from friends in the Caribbean, although many other plantation owners were experimenting with the crop at the same time, planting it along with cotton and rice. The backbreaking work imposed on the enslaved required the construction of systems of vats, presses and other apparatus to crush and ferment the plant's leaves, stir the slurry to improve oxidation, and then drain off the liquid to leave behind a deep blue mud, which was allowed to dry in linen bags and placed into wooden forms to form the cakes. At least fifteen slaves were required to tend every fifty acres of indigo, and another twenty-five "hands" to transform the leaves into dye.

The remains of a Lowcountry indigo vat

By 1800, the arrival of mechanized farm equipment like the cotton gin soon made cultivating cotton far more profitable and less labor-intensive than indigo, even more so after chemical experiments led to an easily produced synthetic dye. Abandoned brick-lined vats soon crumbled into the Lowcountry soil; but today, there's a burgeoning cottage industry on Johns Island and elsewhere, using traditional techniques to color the Lowcountry blue.

(Images courtesy Charleston County Public Library and The Post And Courier)

Travelers

This time of year, our Lowcountry skies are graced with flashes of orange, black and yellow as butterflies take to the air on their seasonal migrations. Most well-known, of course, is the Monarch (Danaus plexippus), famous for the species' thousand-mile flight from the midwestern United States and Canada

A male Monarch butterfly

to overwinter in Florida or further south in Central Mexico. The annual southward and northward migrations are multi-generational; no individual butterfly makes the entire journey.The common name is thought to have been bestowed in honor of King George III of England, who also carried the title Prince of Orange, the color that most distinguishes the Monarch.

The Gulf Fritillary

But there's another butterfly also arriving in the southeast this time of year, and one easily mistaken for the Monarch. the Gulf Fritillary (Dione vanillae). Also brightly orange-colored, it's distinguished from its more famous cousin by its black wing spots and silver wingtip coloring. Its wings are longer and narrower than the Monarch's, too. Sometimes called the passion butterfly, the Gulf Fritillary overwinters here in the Lowcountry and further south, in Florida and Texas, before returning north, sometimes as far north as northern New York; and like the Monarch, these migrations spawn many generations from start to finish.

The Cloudless Sulphur

What about the small, flitting yellow butterflies that we're seeing frequently these late summer days? These have the delightful common name of Cloudless Sulphurs (Phoebis sennae), and while seen as far north as Canada, are most common to the southeast, Florida and Texas. The Latin nomenclature comes from the Latin for light, phoebe, and from the fact that adult females lay their eggs, and the larvae feed on, senna and pea plants.

Planting a butterfly garden is a great way to enjoy these colorful visitors. Learn more about what to plant, and where, here.