Southern Song

Photo: Dan Pancamo, via Wikipedia Commons

Easy trivia question: what's the State Bird of South Carolina? Easy answer: the Carolina Wren, one of the most ubiquitous birds in the Lowcountry, as it is for nearly the entire eastern United States, with a range from New England south to northern Mexico, and westward to the Mississippi River.

A cozy nest in an old pair of boots

The Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus) is easily identified by its cinammon-brown plumage, white eyebrow stripe and upwardly flicked tail, and can be seen year-round here busily darting and hopping among dense undergrowth and marsh vegetation in search of insects. They'll nest almost anywhere that offers protection from the elements, including eave-sheltered hanging plant baskets, mailboxes, even under the valve lids of propane tanks, as well as in trees and fallen logs. Males and females can pair for life and share in building nests, in which the female will lay up to seven brown-spotted eggs that will hatch in about two weeks. She may brood up to three times a year.

A male belts it out (image (c) birdwatchingdaily.com)

The "teakettle-teakettle" call of these diminutive birds, unexpectedly loud for such a small animal, can be heard year-round. Unlike other wrens, only the male Carolina Wren sings this distinctive call to attract females and warn other males away from its territory. One male Carolina Wren was recorded making the call more than 3,000 times in one twelve-hour period.

You can attract these energetic birds to your backyard during the winter with a suet-stocked feeder and provide nesting sites with brush piles or empty flowerpots. Then sit back and enjoy the music of these lively Lowcountry neighbors. (Listen to the song here)

Stepping Out

If you're partying this holiday week and get to dancing, don't forget the steps that made our Holy City famous. The Charleston took the country by storm in the early years of the last century, and like everything to do with such a history-rich city, it comes with a story.

The dance, with its rhythmic stomping, kicking and clapping, is thought to have been derived from traditional African-American dances, particularly one called the "Juba", brought to Charleston by enslaved Africans and passed down through the generations until it had become a kind of neighborhood challenge dance in the city's African-American communities. The tradition moved north during the Great Migration of African-Americans during and just after World War One.

James P. Johnson, composer of "The Charleston"

But it wasn't until 1923 that what we know as The Charleston came to larger audiences with the debut of a Broadway musical called Running' Wild , which included a song called The Charleston written by an African-American composer named James Johnson. Born and raised in New Jersey, Johnson claimed he'd been inspired to write music to fit the dancing he saw by Charleston-born longshoremen who frequented a Harlem nightclub where he was the pianist.

And there may be yet another link to Charleston. The city's Jenkins Institute For Children, an orphanage for mostly African-American children established in 1891, became famous for its Jenkins Orphanage Band, which incorporated dance into their performances. The band toured widely to raise money for the orphanage (which still exists, in North Charleston, as the Jenkins Institute), and James Johnson may very well have seen much the same energetic routine.

The Charleston may have begun as a dance craze, but it's still around today and has influenced other popular dance forms from swing dances to the Mashed Potato. So kick up those heels and stir up another part of Charleston's, and America's, cultural legacy.

Banded Together

Summer brings new faces and new neighbors to the island, if only for the season, but one recent arrival is here to stay - the armadillo. The "little armored one", once confined to Texas and Florida, has been moving north and east as climate change brings warmer weather year-long to the Southeast. First seen north of the Savannah River in the 1980's, armadillos are now present in all 46 South Carolina counties.

The "little armored one", with its nine-banded back

The nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus) is our Southeast variety (there's a three-banded species in parts of South America), distinctly odd-looking with its pig-like snout, nine moveable rings between its shoulder and hip, and 12 rings encasing its tapered tail. Distantly related to anteaters and three-toed sloths, it feeds on insects, scorpions and other invertebrates that it digs up with its powerful claws - and therein lies the trouble in its interactions with humans, who object to the holes and scrapes marring carefully tended lawns. Armadillos are champion burrowers, too, able to dig under building foundations, concrete slabs, driveways, even swimming pools. Livestock owners particularly object to them, for armadillo holes are the perfect size for cattle and horse hooves, with the possibility of broken legs.

Armadillos began appearing on Seabrook Island within the last ten years, and have been sighted all over the island, from near beaches and boardwalks to marshy areas further inland from the shore. (Check out SIPOA's wildlife sighting map to see where they've been spotted.) Preferring the protection of dense undergrowth and shrubbery, they're rarely observed during daylight hours, preferring to forage from early evening and throughout the night while spending the daylight hours in burrows, especially during the heat of the summer. Local predators include bobcats and foxes.

Try and find me......

Armadillos are famous for the ability to roll up into a tight, armored ball when threatened. Lesser known is that the female's litter produced once a year always consists of precisely four pups, all of whom are identical quadruplets. Scientists remain unsure of the reasons for this evolutionary cloning quirk.

Less salutary is the fact that armadillos can be carriers of parasites that cause human diseases like leprosy and Chagas disease, and so should never be touched with bare hands. But they pose no direct threat to humans; and however annoying turf disruptions may be, they help aerate the soil and control insect populations.