This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re looking and listening for a pair of wonderfully weird water birds, our Loons (Gavia spp.).
Here on the Sea Islands, two species of Loons frequent our tidal waters, the Red-throated Loon (Gavia stellata) and the Common Loon (Gavia immer). Both species breed in the arctic, with the Common Loon also breeding across Canada and Alaska. They return to South Carolina each year to ride out the winter. Both of our Loons have a fairly duck-like silhouette but with a body sitting lower in the water, a long neck, round head, and a sharp and dagger-shaped bill. Loons prefer deep, open waters and aren’t afraid of swift currents or choppy seas. Loons need deep water because they hunt by diving, sinking beneath the waves to dart like a torpedo after fish, shrimp, and other sea life, or frogs and crawfish in freshwater lakes. They also need wide open water so they can take flight. Loons are built for swimming and consequently have legs pushed so far back on their body that, practically speaking, they can’t walk on land anymore. They pretty much have to slide and flop around like a seal. (This is why you rarely see them on land.) It also means taking flight is a struggle, as they have to take a running start, like a Cormorant or Anhinga would, but with less range of motion at their disposal. So they need a longer runway than most water birds to get airborne.
Red-throated Loons are often scarce in the Lowcountry. They prefer to whittle their winters away in the choppy, windswept waters of our beaches. They’re most often spotted along river inlets, beaches, or just offshore, bobbing on and diving under the surf in search of their next meal. They have a slender build and are about three-quarters the size of the Common Loon. Their bill is shorter, thinner, and sharper than their common cousin. This narrow bill and svelte physique give them a more streamlined appearance overall. Their winter plumage is a neutral-gray across the back speckled with white, like stars in the night. This gray extends up the nape of the neck, over the top of the head, and to end at the bill. Their throat and sides of their neck are pure snow-white, their bill a silver-gray, and eyes ruby-red. Here in South Carolina, Red-throated Loons rarely display their breeding plumage, which colors their bill black, head phosphate-gray, and their lower throat a rust-red. They also rarely ever vocalize outside of their breeding grounds in the Arctic Circle.
Common Loons are by far the more common of our two Loons. They’re also the most generalist in their habitat usage. Common Loons are abundant in lakes, inlets, sounds, tidal rivers, and major tidal creeks, particularly those close to the ocean and near confluences. They are heavy-bodied with a robust bill. Their winter plumage is quite drab, a dark-gray back running up the back of the neck to the bill, contrasted by a white throat and cheeks and with the only flash of color being their red eyes. On occasion, we’re lucky enough on Edisto to see one fully in its breeding plumage before it departs in spring. Their drab winter garb is replaced by a hood of iridescent black-green, a collar of white bars, and a black-green back studded thoroughly in small squares of pearl-white. Their calls and songs are equally beautiful and utterly captivating. An unmistakable holler that is equal parts harrowing and hallowed. The tune of the Loon echoes off the water, inundating the landscape and resonating deep in the soul of all who hear it; a call of the wild. A ringing wail, half mourning cry and new morning’s sigh, a requiem for our wilds of past and an exaltation for those that still last.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’ve got a pair of native clumping grasses, Saltmeadow Cordgrass (Sporobolus pumilus) and Sand Cordgrass (Sporobolus bakeri).
Both Saltmeadow Cordgrass and Sand Cordgrass are perennial native grasses found along the extreme coast of South Carolina, to include here on Edisto Island. Saltmeadow Cordgrass is a widely distributed plant, being found across the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. Sand Cordgrass is far more limited, mainly residing in Florida northward to Charleston, SC. The two species look very similar. Both spread through their roots but grow as clumps rather than individual stems. They form large, three to five foot high, dome-shaped clumps with their arching grass blades, which have emerald-green foliage fading to straw-yellow with age. Even the flowers of these two species are similar in appearance, a dozen branches of florets stacked tightly like books on a shelf, similar to other Cordgrasses (formerly members of Spartina). One of their few easily described physical differences is that these floral branches in Saltmeadow Cordgrass tend to be more perpendicular to the stem, whereas those of Sand Cordgrass are held upward to nearly parallel. But of course they vary and overlap! In my experience the two are best told apart by their differing preferred habitats and the gestalt of the whole plant.
I find Sand Cordgrass to be a bigger plant overall, often growing chest to chin-high as a well-defined clump with more yellow foliage. Sand Cordgrass is more of an upland plant, growing on banks, dikes, and wetland edges on sandy, moist soils. It also doesn’t tolerate regular saltwater intrusion all that well, preferring to grow in the brackish and freshwater reaches of tidal systems. Here on Edisto Island, I mainly see it on the northwestern corner of the Island, where the freshwater influence of the South Edisto River and the plethora of old dike-works create pockets of suitable habitat. It is far more abundant west of Edisto Island, in the heart of the ACE Basin and around Beaufort. Sand Cordgrass is a wonderful native landscaping plant and does well in wide array of use cases in coastal towns and neighborhoods, but prefers subtropical climes.
Saltmeadow Cordgrass trends more toward a knee to waist-high clump and is more prone to forming loose clumps and monocultures. Saltmeadow Cordgrass is highly tolerant of irregular saltwater intrusion but can’t persist in the true saltmarsh. I most often encounter it on marsh islands, tidal ditch banks, tidal floodplains, and wetland swales where a shallow water table flows into the marsh. Think of it as growing within the king tide line. Places that see a high salty tide once a month or less, but not with daily consistency. Here on Edisto Island, these places, and consequently Saltmeadow Cordgrass, are generally few and far between, but fairly common on Little Edisto Island. Overall in the Lowcountry, Saltmeadow Cordgrass does well as a landscaping plant on the banks of brackish ponds, floating wetland islands, tidal wetlands, and sandy marsh edges.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the Lowcountry’s local marsh sparrow, the MacGillivray’s Seaside Sparrow (Ammospiza maritima macgillivraii).
Within the winter’s salt marsh the blackbirds linger and grackles gallivant, rails scurry and wrens bound, all beneath the watchful eye of hovering harriers and ospreys. But between them all resides a trio of songbirds, scarcely seen and rarely heard, who call this cordgrass kingdom home, the marsh sparrows: Seaside Sparrow (Ammospiza maritima), Saltmarsh Sparrow (A. caudacuta), and Nelson’s Sparrow (A. nelsoni). Within their ranks one can find a special lineage, the subspecies MacGillivray’s Seaside Sparrow (A. m. macgillivraii), who calls the marshes of the Sea Islands home year-round.
The MacGillivray’s Seaside Sparrow is a large sparrow with a heavy bill and tattered tail that’s dyed in dusky, dark plumage. Soot-stained gray shades its body, dark walnut-brown colors its wings, an occasional chestnut wash livens its breast and flanks, while a white patch under the chin and a lemon-yellow eyebrow add the only sharp contrast to its feathers. Their call is a high metallic “tink” and their song a three-part verse, first a cricket-like chirp, then a lower two note warble, and finished with a dry, trailing buzz. Their vocalizations are made softly and steadily, easily becoming buried in the cacophonous din of a windswept spring marsh, already saturated in blackbird song. MacGillivray’s Seaside Sparrows live their lives within the saline and brackish marshes of South Carolina. There they forage on seeds, insects, and other invertebrates. In spring they head up river to nest in higher, more tidally stable marshlands. In winter, they head towards the coast, to hunker down on marsh islands in the thermal stability by the sea.
Seaside Sparrows, of all subspecies, and the Saltmarsh and Nelson’s Sparrows are facing tremendous pressure. The Saltmarsh Sparrow is currently under review with the US Fish & Wildlife Service for listing under the endangered species act as threatened. The MacGillivray’s subspecies of the Seaside Sparrow was petitioned for listing in 2018, but ultimately not protected. The Dusky subspecies (A. m. nigrescens) of Florida already went extinct in 1987. Historic wetland draining and alteration, ongoing coastal development, more extreme tide cycles, and rising sea levels are squeezing marsh sparrows from all angles to dwindle their populations. Here in South Carolina, all three species overwinter in our salt marshes and rely heavily upon marsh islands and hammocks for refuge during king tides. As seas rise and the number of king tides increases, these marsh islands become ever more critical, and ever more scarce.
This underscores the priceless value of the protection, restoration, and management of tidal wetlands in the Lowcountry of South Carolina for the survival of these three sparrows, as well as every other species that depends upon our estuaries. Protecting marshlands, marsh islands, and the marsh migration spaces abutting them ensures the highest quality marsh habitat will persist into the future. Restoring historically drained or bermed marshlands will improve the condition of marsh migration space and offers the opportunity to create future marsh islands. Smart management and maintenance of existing tidal impoundments, particularly rice impoundments, will provide bastions of stability and refuge during tumultuous times and tides. Although the futures of our marsh sparrows look bleak, we’ve pulled species back from the brink under bleaker circumstances. Here at the Edisto Island Open Land Trust, we’re doing our part, and we’re always looking forward to how we can forge the brightest future we can on Edisto Island, one plan, one person, or one parcel at a time.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s our most widespread Lichen in the Lowcountry, Bushy Beard Lichen (Usnea strigosa).
Beard Lichens can be found in humid forests all throughout the Southeast. This genus, Usnea, contains a multitude of similar looking species that range around the globe and with several found here on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, including Bushy Beard Lichen (U. strigosa), Coastal Beard Lichen (U. evansii), Horned Beard Lichen (U. subscabrosa), and Cryptic Beard Lichen (U. endochyrsea). Today I’ll be focusing primarily on Bushy Beard Lichen, our most common species. Beard Lichens are epiphytes, growing on the bark of trees, particularly small branches and buttresses. Like other epiphytes, they cling to bark purely for support. They absorb their nutrition from the air and rainwater that washes over them and produce food through photosynthesis.
I often find Bushy Beard Lichen growing in floodplains, bottomland forests, and maritime fringes. Its fungal façade is a pale platinum-white with a subtle greenish hue and takes on a fluffy, beard-like form. This lichen’s body is finely divided into roughly inch-long feathery tendrils to increase its surface area, for efficiently gathering both light and water. Bushy Beard Lichen often has many small circular discs, embedded in its body. These structures are called apothecia and are its primary spore-bearing structures. Its “mushrooms” if you will. Their abundance helps you to tell Bushy Beard Lichen apart from other members of the Usnea genus, as most of our other species reproduce with different spore-bearing structures and rarely have the dish-like apothecia in number.
Because of their epiphytic nature and reliance on rainwater and humidity for nutrition, Beard Lichens, and other similar epiphytic lichens, are very sensitive to poor air quality and pollution in rainwater. You won’t find them growing above a well trafficked road, due to car exhaust filtering through them, or in urban areas, with increased acid rain and smog. But on Edisto Island, they abound, high above, on the boughs of oaks in the peaceful woodlands along our backroads, and at arm’s reach, in the windswept margins of our maritime forests.
On an aside, I want to talk about Lichens in general for a bit and add a disclaimer to the above. I’ll be the first to tell you, I don’t much about Lichen taxonomy. To be frank, almost no one does. Lichens are a fascinating and strange life form, referred to as a compound organism. They are a fusion of a photosynthetic microbe, an alga or cyanobacteria, and a specialized fungus, with the fungus wearing the proverbial pants in this relationship. This arrangement is similar to how corals operate, but far more advanced and intertwined. The fungus has ostensibly turned its body into a greenhouse and is growing a special strain of photosynthetic microbe within its body. Complex symbiosis and natural co-evolution like this is quite amusing to ponder upon, but that’s a rabbit hole and monologue for a different day. In regards to Lichens, this makes studying and discerning different species of Lichen very complex. Since there are multiple organisms acting as one, what qualifies as the “species” becomes nebulous and breaks down most taxonomic definitions of what a species is. My above account of Bushy Beard Lichen (Usnea strigosa), I can tell you, for a fact, is really a description of a species complex containing at least one other extremely similar looking species, Cryptic Beard Lichen (U. endochyrsea), but likely also several more and probably something currently undescribed. Point being, biologists ain’t figured these things out yet! Advances in gene sequencing and phylogenetic techniques are coming along swiftly these days and more and more attention is being put to topics like this with each passing year. So maybe, in the next few decades, we’ll finally have a solid idea of the biodiversity of Lichens and hopefully some kind of handle on how to even define symbiotes like these taxonomically.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we have the bane of marsh birds, the wraith of the marsh, the Northern Harrier (Circus hudsonius).
The chill of morning lingers in autumn’s wet dawn air. Fog rising, cold steam, from the waking engine of the salt marsh, a metaphor which reflects the serenity of your awoken mental haze, that pleasant AM daze, before the anxious machinations of mind, or marsh, can commence. But then, like a ghostly train of thought steaming on return from yesterday, an eerie specter tunnels into sight. Piercing sunken eyes and pallid plumage, cutting through the fog on silent wings mere feet above the marsh, a Northern Harrier coasts by on his breakfast commute, delivering a shudder of silence to the morning marsh.
The Northern Harrier is a mid-sized hawk, very similar in size to the Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) but bearing many unique physical features. Their tail is long and broad and so are their wings which, held upward in a slight dihedral, offer perfect aerodynamics for controlled gliding. Males are colored a dingy platinum-gray above and cloud-white below, with wingtips and trailing edges stained slate-black. Females are a walnut-brown above and dyed a rust-orange below, with a speckled checkerboard of black and white on their flight feathers. Both sexes have a long banded tail, affixed above to an unmistakable white rump. Like most raptors, their large eyes give them great vision for hunting. Yet, Harriers have honed another sense. Northern Harriers have excellent hearing and even possess a feathered facial disk, turning their face into a parabolic reflector and giving them a distinctly owl-like appearance. They also have elongated legs, making them stand taller than other raptors their size. Both these features give them a subtly uncanny appearance compared to other hawks.
A Harrier’s keen senses, long legs, and controlled gliding flight pattern come together to form the backbone of their hunting strategy. Northern Harriers cruise, silently and with infrequent wingbeats, on the short air thermals rising off the tops of sunbaked marshes and fields. From just a few feet up, they scan the grasses and reeds for movement while listening for motion and vocalizations, before reeling back and plunging straight down on unsuspecting prey, reaching their long legs through the grass to grasp. Northern Harriers primarily feed on songbirds within the salt marshes of the Sea Islands but will eat just about anything of suitable size, particularly rodents, small rails, lizards, frogs, and large insects. The Northern Harrier is found throughout North America but calls the marshes of Edisto Island home in fall and winter. Here they can readily be seen patrolling the vast mashes of the Dawhoo River along National Scenic Byway 174.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the field flown fuchsia floral flag of fall, Purpletop Tridens (Tridens flavus).
Purpletop Tridens is a perennial grass found widely throughout the eastern United States and all of South Carolina. It inhabits open, sunny, sandy areas especially along woodland edges, power lines, and road shoulders. It’s even got mild salt tolerance, letting it grow on barrier islands and in maritime forests. Its leaves grow in long, wide, emerald-green blades up to shin height as singular bunches, sometimes with fringes or flashes of burgundy foliage. Yet, its flowers and seeds are its real namesake. On slender long stalks, reaching from chest to head height, Purpletop Tridens bears a pendulous plume of muted fuchsia seeds, a diffuse arrangement that leans and ungulates in slightest of breeze. Often, many plants grow together within a clearing, creating a midday scene tinted in soft color, reminiscent of a rippling creek bathed in the long red light of sunset. Purpletop Tridens begins to bloom in late August and carries its purple seeds aloft often all the way through November, seeds aging to a pale brass in color with time.
Purpletop Tridens is a warm-season grass, growing and blooming in summer and fall. It’s also a bunch grass, with each plant growing as an individual clump of leaves, rather than producing runners like many of the exotic hay and turf-grasses do. Warm-season bunch grasses are a valuable component of southern grasslands due to the cover, food, and diversity of habitat they provide for wildlife. Growing as bunches, rather than mats, the spaces between these grasses create opportunities for other native plants to grow between the bunches and the umbrella-like shape of the bunch provides indispensable cover to wildlife from the elements and aerial predators, particularly ground dwelling birds like Quail, ground scratchers like sparrows, and a myriad of small mammals and reptiles. The seeds of Purpletop Tridens are high in fat, which grants it its other common name of “Greasegrass” and makes those seeds a nutritious winter food source for rodents and birds. Additionally, Purpletop Tridens is the host plant for a slew of native butterfly species including the Common Wood Nymph (Cercyonis pegala), Little Glassywing (Pompeius verna), and many more of the Grass Skippers of subfamily Hesperiinae. Purpletop Tridens also does well in a garden setting and is a great addition to any native plant friendly lawn.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, it’s a bean pole of an oversized odd ball bug, the Southern Two-striped Walkingstick (Anisomorpha buprestoides).
Walkingsticks belong to the insect order of Phasmida, which contains only the Walkingsticks, of which we have about thirty species in the United States, only five in South Carolina, and likely just the one here on Edisto Island. The Southern Two-striped Walkingstick is found in the Deep South from Dallas, Texas to Wilmington, North Carolina. This insect doesn’t do well with harsh winters. So here in the Carolinas, it is found sporadically and most often on the Sea Islands and barriers island of our extreme coast, to include Edisto Island. They have a sister species, the Northern Two-striped Walkingstick (A. ferruginea), which is found in the Mississippi River valley east to the Appalachian foothills of South Carolina. The Southern Two-striped Walkingstick’s abundance peaks in late summer and early fall. They are mainly nocturnal and herbivorous, feeding on a wide variety of vegetation in the cover of darkness, preferring to eat the leaves of shrubs and small trees where they can camouflage on limbs and feed out of the reach of most predators.
The Southern Two-striped Walkingstick is an incredibly weird but easy to identify insect. They are a large, long, and finger shaped critter, with females growing in excess of three-inches and males half that. They have a dark, brown to black body with two wide pastel-yellow stripes down the back. We have nothing else on Edisto that looks like them! You also always find this insect in pairs, with the large, heavy female walking and the smaller, svelte male riding on her back. Walkingsticks are also wingless insects, which greatly limits their range and distribution on the landscape. Thus they can be common in some areas but scarce in similar habitats nearby. Which begs the question, how do males find a mate so quickly if they’re scarce on the landscape and can’t fly? In places like Florida where they have dense populations, it’s not an issue to smell out a date and hobble on over. But in the scattered, fragmented Sea Islands of the Carolinas, that’s not the case. It’s a mystery science hasn’t quite answered.
For a final fun fact and cautionary warning, Southern Two-striped Walkingsticks have a unique defensive mechanism. They shoot a liquid poison directly into your eyes. You read that right. They super-soaker toxic chemicals at would-be predators, and curious people. This chemical is sprayed from a pair of glands, just behind their head and at the base of their first pair of legs. It has a range of one to two feet and they’re sharpshooters to boot. This odiferous and noxious chemical functions similarly to pepper spray and serves to repel mammals, birds, reptiles, and arthropods. For humans, if it gets in our eyes or mouth it causes instantaneous, excruciating pain. This pain dissipates over a few hours and is followed by acute irritation and sometimes partial blindness for the next day or two. Although it’s quite rare for a Walkingstick to take a potshot at your pupils, as they prefer to just sit there and hide, maybe don’t pick this one up!
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s a little known midstory tree with flashy fall foliage, the Black Gum (Nyssa sylvatica).
Black Gum is a small tree found widely throughout the Eastern United States yet it is never a dominant forest tree, neither in height nor abundance. Throughout most of their range, Black Gums can be found growing on moist uplands soil but, here in the Lowcountry, they can be found just about anywhere that’s not a marsh or a bottomland. It also has a similar sister species, Swamp Black Gum (N. biflora) which is found in bottomlands and other saturated wetland soils. Black Gum grows to about forty feet in height with a straight trunk and narrow crown, often staying in the midstory and margins of forests. It has a few key characteristics that make it straightforward to identify year-round. In winter, its pale gray-white bark is lightly furrowed and flaky, making it easy to spot at a distance. Closer up, its thin, wiry stems and branches held sharply perpendicular to its trunk give a quick identification to this deciduous tree when leafless. Come spring its leaves emerge, alternately arranged, finger length, deep green, and simple with an obovate shape, making them widest two-thirds of the way to the leaf tip. Come the end of summer, Black Gum sets fruit, producing a bounty of small, egg-shaped, blue-black drupes about the size of blueberries. Yet, fall is when this tree truly stands out. Amidst the evergreen forests of the Sea Islands, Black Gum blazes like a torch in the night. Their crown of foliage begins its color change the end of October, burning into an incandescent beacon of deep scarlet-red. This makes Black Gum one of the very few native trees on the Sea Islands with a fall foliage display.
But Black Gum isn’t just pretty to look at. It’s also wonderful for wildlife! The spring flowers of Black Gum, although tiny, green, and inconspicuous are adored by both native bees and honeybees. The honey those bees produce from Black Gum flowers is highly prized for its flavor. The fruits of Black Gum are also a sought after snack for migratory birds, like Catbirds and Robins, and local residents, like Blue Jays and Mockingbirds. When those fruits hit the ground they provide food for raccoons, turkeys, quail, foxes, rodents, and other mammals. These tart little fruits are edible for people too, and quite tasty! A final fun fact, fresh Black Gum foliage is one of the White-tailed Deer’s most desired browses. This makes Black Gum valuable to land managers for habitat improvement practices like hinge cutting, which brings a trees canopy down to deer level while creating cover for critters to hide in, and a relatively new practice of “mineral stumping”. When most hardwood trees topple over, break off, burn up, or are felled during logging, they will rapidly put out new growth from their roots, making a beeline for the sky. When a tree does so, it mobilizes nutrients, proteins, and sugars that it’s been storing up in its roots. The tree concentrates all that nutrition from a huge root system into just a very small volume of foliage, making those leaves a temporary superfood for herbivores like deer and livestock. This phenomenon has been dubbed a “mineral stump”, turning a native tree into an all-natural mineral lick and feeder in one. This process also happens naturally on the landscape during prescribed fires and wildfires, to which Black Gum has naturally adapted with a response to go for broke and get up out of the range of deer as fast as it can. Meaning for Black Gum, this mineral stump effect is very strong, and the deer come running for the delicacy!
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the maniac of the marsh, the hysterical hen of the moor, the Common Gallinule (Gallinula galeata).
The Common Gallinule, also known as the Common Moorhen, is a curious bird found year-round in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. They inhabit shallow, still, densely vegetated freshwater and brackish wetlands. They’re especially common in rice fields, tidal impoundments, and weedy ponds where they forage along the margins between marsh reeds and open water for seeds, arthropods, and aquatic vegetation. Gallinules are just as apt to tread open water as they are to walk along shorelines, clamor over hummocks, or weave between reeds. The Common Gallinule is duck-like in character but, don’t let that fool you. It’s actually a member of the Rail family, Rallidae. Like other Rails it has a stocky body, a neck that’s longer than it looks, and sturdy, long legs. Common Gallinules have a pretty generalist lifestyle for a Rail. That makes them one of our more numerous Rail species in the Lowcountry and definitely the easiest Rail to lay eyes on!
The Common Gallinule’s plumage is a matte blue-black across much of its body, which blends into a rich walnut-brown on the wings. This dark, muted plumage is contrasted by a white streak down the flank and white undertail feathers divided by a black central streak. Atop their head is a scarlet-red bill bleeding up into a uniform red shield on their forehead and tapering down to the bone-yellow tip of their short, sharp, and stout bill. Holding up their bulky body are long, robust, and chartreuse-green legs which extend, uncannily, into slender toes as long as their shins! Common Gallinules use these elongated toes both as snowshoes for walking over soft mud and floating vegetation as well as paddles for poling across shallow water. Common Gallinules have two similar looking and closely related species here in South Carolina, the scarce Purple Gallinule (Porphyrio martinicus) and the prolific American Coot (Fulica americana). Purple Gallinules are quite similar in appearance to Common Gallinules but prefer freshwater ponds with dense mats of floating vegetation. They have yellow legs, iridescent plumage that blends from indigo-blue to green, and a sky-blue shield on their forehead. American Coots prefer more open waters and lakes where they flock in rafts. Coots are also solid black on the body, with a heavier neck and head, a white bill with a black tip, and lobed toes. Common Gallinules, alongside their Purple and their Cootish cousins, are gamebirds in the state of South Carolina with hunting seasons in fall and winter.
Common Gallinules have many curious behaviors. Firstly, their calls are like nothing else. Gallinule calls are like the cackling laughter of a mad man, a maniac floundering in the marsh. Often it begins as a horse-like whinny or a dry chuckle that slows into a choking, chortle of harrowing, unhinged laughter. Other times only single, simple utterances are barked, squeaked, groaned, or cooed with a lonely echo off the water. Like many Rails, Common Gallinules have a triangular tail with white undertail feathers, which they oft flick. This behavior serves as a signal of danger; both to the other birds in line of sight and to the would-be predator, letting everyone know that this bird is aware it’s being watched. Conversely, when startled, Gallinules take explosive action. Rather than flying up and away like a duck or diving out of sight like a grebe, Gallinules bust out into a sprint! They flail their wings rapidly to lift their tubby frame off the water as they make a mad dash towards the nearest clump of cover, slapping their long toes to run across the surface of the water.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the furtive forb, the secret sneeze-maker, Common Ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia).
Common Ragweed is a prolific annual herb found across the Eastern United States and all of South Carolina. It’s an abundant component of prairies, savannas, meadows, fields, power-line clearings, roadsides, and practically all open and disturbed upland soils. In appearance, Ragweed is a leggy herbaceous plant, growing waist to chest-high as a norm with wide-held and sparsely foliated branches. It gets its common name of “Ragweed” from its oppositely arranged, ragged, finely divided leaves, which have something between a fern-like shape and the form of a wind-tattered flag. Ragweed is an incredibly inconspicuous plant, blending in seamlessly into the seas of green found in any vegetated clearing. It takes a trained eye to even know it’s there, but it almost always is!
The things Ragweed is best known for, infamous for even, are its flowers, more specifically its pollen. Common Ragweed is a wind pollinated plant. Rather than bribing bees to carry its pollen from one plant to the next, it uses the tried and true strategy of saturating the air waves in pollen granules. Common Ragweed flowers are a tiny green blob with a cream-yellow tip born on long slender spikes held aloft at the tips of its stems. These flowers sway in the subtlest breeze, shedding pollen while collecting it from off. Many clades of plants, like oaks, pines, hickories, and grasses, use wind pollination quite successfully. Yet a key difference with Ragweed is that its pollen is one of the most allergy-inducing of the botanical world and is the chief instigator of “Hay Fever” in the United States. One of the great shames of this infamy is it obfuscates the many wonderful wildlife benefits of Ragweed and the blame for seasonal allergies often gets unduly assigned to a different workhorse wildflower, Goldenrods.
As a quick aside, many Goldenrods, genus Solidago, grow in nearly identical habitats to Common Ragweed and their bloom period syncs up closely with Ragweed. Both are members of the Sunflower Family, Asteraceae, but Ragweed is the odd duck here being wind pollinated. Most of the Asterids are insect pollinated, this includes Goldenrods. Insect pollinated plants have showy, colorful flowers to advertise to insects and, as a consequence of their symbiosis with insects, don’t shed allergenic pollen. Their pollen is heavy, clumpy, and sticky so it can adhere only to the pollinating insects that visit their flowers. So a good rule of thumb is that, if a plant has big or colorful flowers, it doesn’t cause seasonal allergies. Ragweed, on the other hand, sheds pollen freely into the wind like smoke off a fire.
Ragweed, despite the respiratory aggravation, has many benefits in our Lowcountry ecosystems. Common Ragweed foliage is one of the most nutritious and protein rich forages around for Deer, Rabbits and other herbivorous wildlife. Ragweed is especially good at growing quickly on disturbed and nutrient poor soils, providing much needed food and overhead shelter to turkey, quail, sparrows, deer, mice, and other wildlife all while cycling nutrients up from the soil to make them available in damaged environments. The seeds of Common Ragweed, although small, are an incredibly sought after winter food source for sparrows, quail, and other prairie bird species. It’s even known that Native Americans once cultivated a different Ragweed species, Giant Ragweed (A. trifida) which is found in the SC upstate, as an oil and protein rich food grain before fully transitioning to corn as a stable grain crop.
