Howls From The Marsh

Among the more striking members of our island's wildlife population is a relative newcomer, the coyote. SIPOA's wildlife map shows increasing coyote sightings along the western and southern marshes of the island starting in 2020, and some residents are familiar, on a cool winter's night, with the eerie howls of these top predators.

Once confined to western and Plains states, coyotes are now present throughout the United States, first reported in the 1970's in upstate South Carolina, where they had been imported to be hunted by hounds in rural Pickens and Oconee counties during competitive, and illegal, night hunts. (The state's DNR is quick to insist that the animals were never imported by the state to control deer populations.) Coyotes are now established throughout the state and, in the Lowcountry, are frequently seen on beaches and in marshes where they prey on crabs, rabbits, deer fawns, birds and, as our island's turtle patrol reports more frequently during nesting season, on turtle eggs.

Sometimes mistaken for foxes, these intelligent canids typically stand about two feet tall, with a narrow muzzle, pointed ears, and grayish to reddish-gray fur. They form breeding pairs early each year, mating during the winter and producing three or four pups which both parents tend and feed until the cubs are weaned in the spring. The cubs are reared in dens fashioned out of reeds and brush (which is why the animals are so frequently seen around marshes), or will take over another animal's abandoned nest hole. Once the cubs reach adulthood, the group disperses to hunt in packs. Coyotes are capable of mating with domestic dogs, but that's a rare occurrence and the offspring generally don't survive into adulthood.

Although they generally avoid human contact, coyotes can attack domestic pets left unguarded outdoors. Hunting coyotes is allowed throughout the state year-round with a valid license, but most of the victims are "incidental kill" associated with deer hunting or nuisance animals removed by contract hunting. As with all our island's wildlife, it's best to admire these resourceful animals from a distance.

A Lowcountry Fall

The autumn equinox arrives this year on September 23rd (at 2:50am, to be exact), when the sun crosses the ' equator on its way south. Of course, that's our earth-centric view of what is really the seasonal northward tilt of the earth, shifting the northern hemisphere away from an immobile sun until the winter solstice in December, when the process reverses and carries us toward another spring and summer.

While those in other parts of the country may enjoy a more colorfully spectacular autumn, our shift is more subtle. Salt marshes change from summer green to gold as the spartina grass dies back, and the cordgrass loses its flowering parts and drops its seeds for the benefit of migrating birds, who depend on it for a food source. At the beach, migrating shore birds like pipits and plovers forage in the pluff mud to refuel before resuming their journey south. Cooling waters bring the start of oyster season, as the warm-water fueled reproductive season comes to an end and harvesting can begin (with the blessing of the state's DNR). Those cooling waters also bring a welcome end to the traditional hurricane season, as storms are deprived of the warm ocean that gives them energy. (Although climate change and a more continuously warm Atlantic can now bring storms as early as the spring and as late as the winter.)

It's a season of change, however gentle that change may be in the Lowcountry, and traditionally a time to pause, rest, re-evaluate. It was a time of great ritual significance for ancient peoples who built monuments like Stonehenge or the mounds of the American Midwest to mark and observe the changing of the seasons. For the Gullah Geechee, with the Lowcountry's more gentle seasonal shift, it's a time for harvest feasts and traditional crafts like basket-weaving during the cooler winter months to come. For others, it was a time of myth-making to explain the fiery change in the trees, at least for more northern First Peoples. The Wyandots, one of the Great Lakes tribes, said the change was because of the blood of the Great Bear, wounded in a celestial fight with the Great Deer, which falls to earth each year and covers the trees in brilliant red, orange and yellow.

The Carolina Bay Mystery

Who doesn't like a mystery? Geologists and natural history enthusiasts have been trying to solve one for decades - the origin of an ancient collection of elliptical features called Carolina Bays, scattered over the Lowcountry coastal plain. The nearest to us is one in Francis Marion Forest, one of an estimated 4,000 such features throughout the state, according to the South Carolina DNR, ranging in size from just a few hundred feet across to the size of a small lake. No one knows where they came from.

Carolina bays are always oriented northwest/southeast

They all share some intriguing similarities. They're all oriented along a northwest/southeast axis, and most have sand banks built up on their northeast and southeast edges. Erosion on the northwest and southeast edges have caused a general migration to the northwest. When supplied with water from underground aquifers, Carolina Bays support a plentiful array of wildlife and rare plant species along with loblollies, cypresses and sweet bay trees; drier bays have allowed geologists to date their formation through bedrock samples to as early as 20,000 years ago.

John Lawson's account of his explorations of the Carolinas

They remain mysterious even though they were first described in the late 17th century by a European explorer, John Lawson, during a months-long trek with Native American guides that took him from Charleston as far north as present-day Washington DC. Traveling up the Santee River, Lawson noted what his guides called "pocosins", swampy areas that, he wrote, were always studded with huge bay trees. The association eventually gave the features the common name we use today.

Theories abound about the origins of Carolina Bays. The most popular current theory is that they were created by the southwesterly winds of the late Pleistocene era that swept and buffeted left-over water from receding seas into the shapes we see today. Until recently, though, the bays were thought to have been created by a meteor impact somewhere near the Great Lakes, spewing debris south and east and creating depressions that retained water from the retreating ocean. Or they may be glacial in origin, gouged out of the earth as glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. But no one really knows, and the mystery remains.