The Cut

Captain Sams Inlet, 2016 ( Photo (c) Mary Ellen Fraser)

While replenishment operations are underway to help preserve our island's beaches, the near future may bring the more ambitious relocation of Captain Sams inlet at the northeastern tip of North Beach, usually a reliable spot for dolphin watching and for enjoying our lively populations of shorebirds. But it hasn't always been so welcoming, for this is a constantly shifting coastal geography shaped and re-shaped by wind and water at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean and the Kiawah River. At many points in its history, there was no beach at all here.

Seabrook Island in 1949, pre-development. The inlet is at the far right, considerably to the north of its present location.

Captain Sams Inlet, dividing Seabrook and Kiawah islands, is a highly visible example of how our beaches and dunes are continually on the move, in some years migrating more than 300 feet. The inlet has shifted position scores of times in the past 150 years, at one point migrating as far to the southwest as present-day Boardwalk #1, with no walkable, dry-sand beach to the northeast as erosion carried sand away to the south.

Seabrook's original Beach Club threatened by beach erosion after Hurricane David. (courtesy SIPOA/Coastal Science & Engineering)

During Seabrook's early days of development as a planned coastal community, seawalls and stone revetments were only partially successful in preserving the beachfront, and most of those structures were destroyed during Hurricane David in 1979 - severely enough that construction on the original Beach Club had to be halted and the only usable beach was reduced to about two-thousand feet south of Boardwalk #1.

Relocation work at the inlet in 2015. (courtesy SIPOA)

The damage was severe enough to spur SIPOA, and the the towns of Seabrook and Kiawah islands, to adopt a major relocation of Captain Sams Inlet in 1983 as a way to slow erosion which had been taking sand away from Seabrook's shoreline. It was the first of three such relocations, with two more following in 1996 and in 2015, involving cutting a new inlet entry to the northeast and blocking the old one to the southwest.

The result since the first relocation has been the preservation of as much as fifty acres of additional beach and marsh on Seabrook, providing crucial habitat for shorebirds like the endangered piping plover and building up protective dunes and water-absorbing marshland against storm surges. The inlet's position and ecology is monitored on an annual basis. The next time you visit Captain Sams Inlet, remember that you're, very literally, walking on shifting sands.

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)