A Brown Study

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We may hardly notice them because they're so always present, including on the town of Seabrook Island's official seal, but brown pelicans, with their seven-foot wingspans and silent gliding formations, are a key indicator species of the health of our surrounding waters. Feeding on sardines, anchovies, herring, mullets, minnows and small crustaceans, a thriving colony means a sustainable marine ecology.

Brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis carolinensis) are one of three species of pelicans found in the Americas (the Peruvian and American White are the other two), and are common from southern New England as far south as the mouth of the Amazon River. Listed as endangered until 2009 due to low birth rates caused by exposure to DDT and other toxic pesticides, populations of "brownies" have stabilized, as a visit to the Deveaux Bank, a major breeding ground at the mouth of the North Edisto River, will confirm.

Breeding takes place during March and April, when you'll see a yellow patch on the birds' white heads while in breeding plumage. Males and females alternately tend to a clutch of three or four eggs, keeping them warm under their webbed feet until they hatch in about thirty days. Pelicans are among the longer-lived marine species with a lifespan of up to thirty years.

Soaring as high as seventy feet above the water while searching for fish, brown pelicans are one of only two of the world's eight species to feed by diving, plunging headfirst into the water to scoop up their prey before surfacing and straining the water from their signature pouch to swallow their catch.

Brownies are non-migratory, so we're able to enjoy these magnificent birds all year round as they soar gracefully overhead or skim offshore waters.

The Lady Finger

We'll start this post with a Dad joke: where does the Lowcountry's favorite vegetable come from? Okra-homa! (Pause for the groan...) And that's not the worst of the jokes about the slender green vegetable, sometimes called the Lady Finger, that's been a staple of Southern cooking for generations. Steamed, boiled, grilled, pickled, sautéed or fried, okra is the key ingredient in gumbos and salads, or as a side dish. It's high in vitamins C, K, A and B6, and contributes no fat to your diet while offering 2 grams of protein and only about 30 calories per cup.

Okra on the vine

But okra's most famous attribute, the one that gives pause to newcomers to the vegetable, is the slimy goo the pods exude when cooked. (The amount of goo can be reduced by cooking with an acidic vegetable, like tomato.) But even the mucilage has its benefits, used as part of wastewater treatment (it reduces cloudiness) and under study as a biodegradable packaging material and as a biofuel. The pod's seeds can be roasted and ground for use as a coffee substitute (a popular use during the Civil War, when coffee beans were hard to come by), or pressed for their oil, which is high in unsaturated fats.

And okra carries a bit of mystery, too, because no one seems to know for certain where it was first cultivated. Egypt is the current favored origin, first described there in the 13th-century, and from where it spread around the Mediterranean and east toward India and southeast Asia. The first use of the word in English appeared in 1679 in colonial Virginia, derived from the vocabulary of enslaved worker fromWest Africa. But the plant (it's related to cotton and cocoa plants) was under cultivation in Asia long before and remains a staple of Asian cooking.

While the okra at our local farm stands is grown here, most of the commercial okra crop these days comes from Florida and, yes, from "Okra-homa". To enjoy this quintessential Southern food, check out these recipes from Southern Living.

Catfishin'

DuBose Heyward

Downtown's Spoleto Festival begins next week, an annual celebration of the performing arts that continues Charleston's place in the national arts. An early landmark of the city's arts prominence rose nearly a century ago with ""Porgy and Bess" and its ties to one of Charleston's leading artistic couples of the early 20th century, Dorothy and DuBose Heyward. The couple were A-list names in their day, well before writing the libretto for George Gershwin's adaptation of the Heywards' novel and play "Porgy."

DuBose Heyward came from an old Charleston family that traced its ancestry in the city to well before the American Revolution. Unusual for an aristocrat at the pinnacle of Charleston's elite white society of the time, Heyward pursued a lifelong interest in African-American Gullah culture, and incorporated Gullah dialect and traditions into his 1925 novel of life in Charleston's black slums, "Porgy". It was drawn from a newspaper article about Samuel Smalls, a paraplegic black man who made his way around Cabbage Row (part of present-day Church Street) in a cart drawn by a goat.

"Catfish Row", c. 1930 (courtesy College of Charleston)

Dorothy - a playwright and novelist whom Heyward had met during a writing workshop in New Hampshire and married in 1923 - adapted the novel into a play of the same name, which opened on Broadway in 1927 featuring at the Heywards' insistence an all-black cast, highly unusual at a time when most black stage characters were still being played by white actors in blackface.

George and Ira Gershwin with DuBose Heyward (center)

The play formed the libretto for the Gershwin jazz and blues-inflected opera cast with classically-trained black singers, which met with much controversy when it premiered in Boston in 1935 but has since become one of the most widely-produced American works in the operatic canon.