Keeping It Clean

You've probably seen them roosting on rooftops at Freshfields, those hulking black silhouettes of the turkey vulture . Few would consider these impressive birds beautiful, but they serve a crucial function in Lowcountry ecology as nature's sanitation engineers, diligently consuming carrion and other odiferous items that would otherwise lay rotting and flyblown. This is the chief difference between vultures and buzzards, the latter being active hunters rather than opportunistic scavengers.

A gray vulture on the wing

South Carolina has two species of vulture - the gray vulture (Cathartes aura), distinguished by the gray underside feathering of its wings, and the black vulture (Coryagus atratus), which is nearly all black except for gray "fingers" on its wingtips. These two are examples of convergent evolution, for they belong to different taxonomic orders but evolved separately along similar lines. They both have wingspans of up to five feet, and on the wing both exhibit the characteristic "wobbling" flight as they ride thermals far above the ground in search of food.

Vultures have one of the keenest senses of smell in the animal kingdom, and gray vultures can detect the odor of carrion from many feet in the air. (Black vultures tend to swoop closer to the ground to pick up the scent, or spot their next meal by sight.) With their hairless, bright red heads and hooked beaks, vultures can consume even a large carcass in a matter of hours. Despite their feisty appearance, vultures are highly social, forming close bonds marked by sharing food and nesting sites, at which the female lays three or four eggs on the ground. Both parents see to the chicks after hatching.

But strangers to the group (including humans who come too near) should beware, for one of the vulture's chief defense mechanisms is to vomit on intruders - given their diet, a formidable challenge. Vultures have an extremely high acid level in their stomach, allowing them to consume even diseased carrion with no ill effects. One other fun vulture fact: on hot summer days, vultures will defecate on their feet to cool off.

The word vulture most likely comes from the Latin vellere, which means to pluck or tear, but far more pleasant is the gray vulture's Latin name Cathartes aura, which can be translated as "purifying breeze", a more poetic rendering of this native bird's ability to keep our yards and roadsides clean.

The Struggle On Johns Island

February is Black History Month and a time to mark the important role Johns Island played during the Civil Rights era. Important figures such as Septima Clark and Esau Jenkins lived and centered their activities on the island, with their legacy carried forward by others today.

Septima Clark

Septima Poinsette Clark (1891 - 1987), born and raised in Charleston during the Reconstruction era, is still honored as the "Grandmother" of the Civil Rights movement and came to Johns Island in 1916 when, as an African-American, she was barred from teaching in white schools in the city. She not only taught children at the old Promised Land school on what is now Betsy Kerrison Parkway, but taught still-illiterate adults to read and write, sometimes using the Sears Roebuck catalog as a teaching tool. By the late 1920's, she had joined the Charleston chapter of the NAACP, which led to her dismissal by the all-white Charleston County school board. Undaunted, Clark undertook a variety of NAACP initiatives throughout the Southeast to improve literacy rates for Blacks. By the late 1940's, Clark had become a major figure in the establishment of Citizenship Schools teaching reading, writing and basic business skills to Black children and adults.

Esau Jenkins

One such school was here on Johns Island, founded with the help of Johns Island native Esau Jenkins (1910 - 1972) as The Progressive Club on River Road. Jenkins and fellow Johns Island native Joe Williams had raised money for the legal defense of a Black neighbor who, in 1948, had been shot while defending himself against an attack by a white farmer's dog. When a judge dismissed the case that had been filed against the farmer, Jenkins and Williams raised enough money for a successful appeal of the ruling, and the eventual conviction of the farmer for aggravated assault.

Shopping at The Progressive Club

Soon, Jenkins and Williams organized the Progressive Club to help build a permanent legal defense fund, as well as to serve as a food cooperative and social center for Johns Island Blacks. In 1954, Jenkins attended a workshop at the socially progressive Highlander Folk Center in Tennessee, where he met Clark and others involved with the Citizenship School movement, and was inspired to adapt The Progressive Club as one such school teaching the literacy skills necessary to vote.

The Progressive Club site

The Club's site is now a National Historic Landmark, although all that remains of the original building are its crumbling cinderblock walls, the only survivors of the uninsured structure after Hurricane Hugo in 1989. But the Progressive Club as an organization is still active on Johns Island, carrying on the work of Clark and Jenkins for social justice.

Shifting Ground

The devastating earthquake that struck Charleston in 1886 remains, at 7.4 on the Richter scale, the strongest earthquake to ever occur on the East Coast, but it wasn't the last by any means. Smaller tremors have since been felt once or twice a decade, most recently in 2014, when a magnitude 4.1 rattled the Lowcountry. In fact, South Carolina is the most seismically active state east of the Rocky Mountains. Summerville, for example, was shaken by two quakes, in 1912 and 1914, felt not only in Charleston but as far south as Savannah and Macon, Georgia. Charleston itself experienced a series of minor tremors in 1959, 1960 (two of them that year) and 1967.

courtesy USGS

Geologists have long identified fault lines criss-crossing the midland and upstate regions of South Carolina. They're the buried but readily located remnants of ancient plate tectonics some 500-million years ago, when colliding prehistoric landmasses raised the Appalachians. The gathering pressures along such known faults that may result in earthquakes can usually be detected well in advance, but Charleston lies hundreds of miles from the nearest fault-prone plate boundary, under the Caribbean.

Here on the coast, geologists can only estimate where fault lines may lie within underlying bedrock, since the bedrock is buried under up to 3 miles of layers of sand, silt, clay and sedimentary rock, making it difficult for even modern technology to perceive early warnings of a pending tremor.

King Street post-quake

The 1886 quake began as a barely felt tremor before the main earthquake rocked the city. Aftershocks were felt for another 24 hours. Sixty people were killed amid estimated damages of $160 million in modern dollars. In rebuilding, the city mandated "quake bolts" for new construction and for retrofitting on the few structures that remained standing.

The good news is that most geologists think such major quakes occur only every five hundred years or so, allowing some breathing room before the Lowcountry once again is all shook up.