This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s a three-leaved weed of spring, Wood-Sorrel (Oxalis spp.).
Here in the Lowcountry we can expect to find six species of Wood-Sorrel. Three of those are native species: Slender Yellow Wood-Sorrel (Oxalis dillenii), Common Yellow Wood-Sorrel (Oxalis stricta), and Violet Wood-Sorrel (Oxalis violacea). The other three are exotic species: Creeping Wood-Sorrel (Oxalis corniculata), Large-flowered Pink Wood-Sorrel (Oxalis debilis), and Pink Wood-Sorrel (Oxalis articulata). All six of these Wood-Sorrel species share a few common features, making this genus easy spot out in the wild. Our Wood-Sorrels are low growing forbs, often not getting more than three to six inches tall. They have five-petalled, funnel shaped flowers and they bloom mainly in early spring. Most notably, Wood-Sorrels have symmetrical compound trifoliate leaves. Each of its three leaflets are heart-shaped with a seam down its middle. In response to light or heat stress, their leaves can both fold upward and lower downward into a unique shape, kind of like a paper fortuneteller. Their overall three-way leaf shape resembles that of Clover (Trifolium spp.), which is another common group of, low-growing, spring wildflowers. However, Clover leaflets usually aren’t heart-shaped and are rarely ever all symmetrical in size and shape.
The Irish term “Shamrock” generically refers to Clovers, but it also was historically applied to Wood-Sorrels on occasion. I won’t here attempt to decant a multi-century Irish history lesson down into two sentences, but just know Shamrock is an old term that symbolized Clovers and came to represent St. Patrick, and eventually Ireland at large. However, here in America, we have collectively decided to represent the term with an imaginary plant that is a curious amalgamation of both Wood-Sorrel and Clover. Our modern Shamrock has the leaf arrangement of a Clover but the leaflet shape of a Wood-Sorrel. It’s a strange fake plant which we plaster all about the place every St. Patrick’s Day and is a curiosity most people don’t recognize, nor care about after their seventh Guinness of the morning. Yet it drives pedantic botanists (like me) mad every March.
Slender Yellow Wood-Sorrel is by far our most common Wood-Sorrel in South Carolina and also a native species. It grows as an annual most often, but can survive as a perennial with some irregularity. It has a single stem and a bushy, upright growth form. Its leaves are small and emerald-green and its flowers a pure lemon-yellow. Its stems, upon close examination, have sparse, fine hairs that lay flat upward against the stem, an important feature to note. It is found commonly in lawns, garden beds, forest clearings, roadsides, and other disturbed areas.
Common Yellow Wood-Sorrel is native and, ironically, not all that common in the Lowcountry, instead being more abundant in the Northeast and Midwest. It looks nearly identical to Slender Yellow Wood-Sorrell: a single stem taking on a bushy, upright growth form, small emerald-green leaves, and small lemon-yellow flowers. However, its stems have a profusion of fine hairs that extend perpendicular from its stems. Its flower clusters also tend to have double the number of flowers and fruits. It’s also a weak perennial and found in disturbed, sunny areas as well as forest clearings.
Violet Wood-Sorrel is a native species and a perennial. It grows a small bulb underground and spreads through roots to form small colonies. Its leaves hug the ground, forming a carpet of foliage. The leaves of Violet Wood-Sorrel are often a jade-green but can flush from the center of each leaflet with a rich, dark-purple that either appears as a horizontal slash, a central splotch, or suffuses the entire leaf. The underside of its leaves are the same purple color. Its flowers are borne singly and are hot-pink with a yellow-green center. Its flowers are about the same size as its leaves. Violet Wood-Sorrel is most often found in rich, moist hardwood forests with some amount of slope. This makes it a very rare sight on the Sea Islands but relatively abundant towards the mountains of South Carolina.
Creeping Wood-Sorrel is an exotic species believed to originate from Southeast Asia. It has an appearance much like Common Yellow Wood-Sorrel, including its hairy stems. However, Creeping Wood-Sorrel creeps laterally along and under the ground rather than growing upright. Its yellow flowers sometimes show orange-red near the center and are very small relative to its leaf size. Its leaves can turn a reddish-purple when exposed to excessive sun and stress. This species is most often encountered in heavily disturbed areas and is particularly fond of growing in sidewalk cracks. It is a weak perennial that may or may not overwinter.
Large-flowered Pink Wood-Sorrel is an exotic species native to South America that has since spread across the globe. It is easily recognized by its large, inch-and-a-half or wider, smooth but slightly wrinkled leaves and large hot-pink flower with fine magenta stripes and a green-yellow center. It is a perennial with a sizable underground bulb. Large-flowered Pink Wood-Sorrel is sometimes sold as an ornamental and can be found commonly around house and in garden beds, as well as roadsides in the Lowcountry.
Pink Wood-Sorrel is an exotic species native to the subtropics of South America. It is a strong perennial with a woody, taproot-like rhizome that extends down several inches into the soil. Its leaves have fine hairs across their surface and these leaves can range widely in size from and an inch to two inches across. Its flowers are large and hot-pink with fine magenta lines and most often a burgundy center. Pink Wood-Sorrel is commonly sold as an ornamental and can sometimes be found around homes, gardens, and roadsides in the Lowcountry.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have our skyward soprano songster of summer, the Northern Parula (Setophaga americana).
The Northern Parula belongs to the Wood Warblers, family Parulidae, and is one of thirty-six species of warbler, give or take depending on how you count, that can be spotted here in South Carolina. Further, it is also one of only about a dozen species that consistently nest in the Lowcountry each year. The Northern Parula is very abundant and can be seen across not just the whole of South Carolina each summer but nearly all of the Southeast. They are most abundant in hardwood and maritime forests, especially the maritime forests of the Sea Islands and the floodplain and bottomland forests of our Lowcountry river systems. Here they nest in the abundant Spanish Moss strewn throughout the trees and forage for insects and spiders nestled within the interlocking crowns of the forest canopy. Because they spend so much time up in the treetops, Parulas are heard much more often than they are seen. Yet they still fairly regularly drop down to the midstory, especially in maritime forests, to forage for sustenance as well as to gawk and squawk, alongside alarmist wrens and tits, at any shady character that happens to stroll by below.
Warblers, overall, are a highly varied and diverse clade of small songbirds. Each species has its own unique song and plumage, and often a distinct plumage between males, females, and immature birds. This has brought the family much admiration, and ire, from bird watchers for their beauty and complexity.
The Northern Parula is, blessedly, one of the easier species to identify by both sight and sound. Males are white beneath with orange legs. Above they don a rich blue-gray cowl, back, tail, and shoulders but with a brassy greenish-gold mantle between their wings. Their wings show two bold white wing-bars. Their eye has a partial white eye-ring with a black smudge between it and their two-tone bill. Their most prominent feature is a golden-yellow throat and breast divided by a necklace of orange-bronze. Female and immature Parulas both look much the same in pattern but show a neutral gray above, possess a greenish-yellow wash to their crown, ditch the bronze necklace, and have a more washed-out-yellow breast and throat. The song of the Northern Parula is quite distinct as well, a rising, high pitched trill, sometimes wavering, that crescendos with a single emphatic note.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we have the wild, wiry workhorse of waterfowl wetlands, Widgeongrass (Ruppia maritima).
Widgeongrass is neither a grass, nor is it a widgeon. It’s a member of the monocots clade of plants and belongs to a small family, Ruppiaceae, containing just the one genus of Ruppia, with only eleven species contained within it. Widgeongrass is found in coastal waters all throughout the United States and much of the globe. It thrives in saline and brackish ponds, ditches, lakes, lagoons, and impoundments that hold water year-round. It a submergent aquatic plant, growing from the saturated soil of a wetland but staying entirely beneath the water’s surface. The plant grows in wiry, forking fans of zigzagging threads that hue a dark pine to emerald-green in color. The plant spreads through underground rhizomes and its many stems grow together to create a dense wall of stringy vegetation around the shores of brackish ponds or coalesce into heavy mats all throughout more shallow impoundments. These mats help stabilize shorelines, create underwater habitat, and the plant itself sequesters excess nutrients from the water column.
Widgeongrass is an incredibly important plant in these shallow and relatively stagnant brackish systems. It forms a network of interlinked stems that provide structure and refuge for aquatic algae, crustaceans, insects, and other invertebrates to cling to, eat, and live within. These organisms, alongside Widgeongrass, provide abundant food for fish, gastropods, shorebirds, and waterfowl who in turn are food for turtles, alligators, otters, mink, raptors, terns, and even people. In particular, Widgeongrass is a vital and dependable food source for many species of waterfowl in the vast network of tidal rice impoundments managed throughout the ACE Basin, and especially so in permanently flooded and highly saline impoundments and ponds. The entire plant is edible to ducks and its lingering vegetation and prolific seeds are a staple food source for many species of waterfowl across the Lowcountry each winter.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re admiring the seiner of the shoreline and trawler of the tidewaters, the American White Pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhychos).
The American White Pelican, whether sighted in formation floating high in the sky on Sea Island thermals, puttering about in a flotilla atop a flooded rice impoundment, or looming large and statuesque upon a low estuary sand bar, is an impressive bird to behold. They have the largest wingspan of any bird in the Eastern United States, measuring in at eight feet on the small side and up to ten feet in the largest birds. In flight, they resemble the American Wood Stork (Mycteria americana) with their solid white underside and wings trimmed with black primaries. However, the primary feathers closest to the body on the White Pelican are white instead of black, their short orange legs don’t extend beyond their tail, and they keep their neck tucked against their body rather than fully extended like a Wood Stork. On the ground or on the water they are a hard bird to misidentify. They have the same shape as our more locally common Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) only larger in size and lighter in color. White Pelicans are a heavyset, solid-white bird standing on short orange legs with webbed feet and bearing a long neck with an equally long yellow-orange bill. That bill, come spring, sprouts a unique sail-like horn about two-thirds of the way down its upper length that is used for display during the breeding season.
American White Pelicans are found around the Sea Islands primarily in winter and disappear in the warmer months to return to their breeding grounds in the West. They’re a relatively new addition to the Lowcountry’s retinue of avifauna, having spread northward from their wintering grounds in Florida over the last few decades to take advantage of the bountiful provisions of the ACE Basin’s well-kept duck fields. We’re at the northeastern extreme of their wintering grounds here in the South Carolina coastal plain and the species is far more abundant along the Gulf Coast. They’re also becoming more abundant in beach side lagoons, shallow estuaries, golf courses, unmanaged stormwater impoundments, and even the hydroelectric lakes further inland.
Despite having the same body plan and expanding throat pouch as our local Brown Pelican, the White Pelican acts like a different beast altogether. Rather than plunge diving like a dip-net to take a scoop from the middle of an unsuspecting school of fish, the White Pelican instead makes mealtime a group exercise. White Pelicans will paddle shoulder-to-shoulder together in shallow waters with their beaks extended forwards. As they putter along they corral fish together into an ever-growing school, like a seine net dragged between two fishermen. Once the team of Pelicans hit a limit they encircle they fish and scoop them up in a feeding frenzy. Then they turn around and make another pass. Sometimes you can find flocks of White Pelicans over a hundred birds strong on especially productive waterfowl impoundments. But most often, they’re seen soaring past overhead in flocks of about a dozen or twirling about on a small impoundment in groups of two to twenty.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we’re examining the verdant doubloon of the dunes, Largeleaf Pennywort (Hydrocotyle bonariensis).
Largeleaf Pennywort is one of four native species of Pennywort found here in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Its other three local siblings are: Manyflower Marsh-Pennywort [AKA Dollarweed] (Hydrocotyle umbellata), Whorled Marsh-Pennywort (Hydrocotyle verticillata), and Floating Marsh-Pennywort (Hydrocotyle ranunculoides). Each of these four Pennywort species are common and often evergreen perennials that each look quite similar and have the same growth form. This makes the Hydrocotyle genus, as a whole on the Sea Islands, instantly recognizable. They have what’s called a peltate leaf-shape, characterized by a flat leaf with its petiole attached to the underside at a roughly perpendicular angle. It’s the same leaf anatomy as a lily pad. Pennyworts, generically, have a leaf shaped like a round bar table: a flat, circular leaf supported centrally from below by a round, even-width petiole. Pennyworts have a prostrate growth-form, spreading laterally with running stems in much the same way a turfgrass does. These lateral stems are called stolons and each node of the stem produces both upright leaves and downright roots. In Pennywort species, these stolons most often grow underground and so the leaves appear to poke singly from the earth along wiggly lines. Each node also bears rounded clusters of small greenish-white flowers on free standing flower stalks.
These four species, all looking quite similar, can be hard to tell apart. Thankfully, these four Pennyworts each have their own habitat preference as well as a combination of traits that help distinguish them. Floating Marsh-Pennywort is the easiest to identify. It has smaller leaves with obvious fine scalloping, partial lobes, and often an off-center stem, it produces a small spherical cluster of flowers, and it grows most often as a floating mat on the surface of freshwater swamps and swales. Whorled Marsh-Pennywort is similar to its floating cousin, but its small leaves are more symmetrical and have coarser scalloping around the edge, its flower clusters can have multiple tiers, and its stolons grow underground in the mucky soils surrounding and beneath shallow, ephemeral freshwater wetlands. Manyflower Marsh-Pennywort is the most variable in shape and the most generalist in habitat. It tends to have a larger leaf, sometimes as wide as your finger is long, and produces spherical clusters of more white-colored flowers than the other species. Manyflower Marsh-Pennywort is most often found on moist, sandy soils throughout the coastal plain such as ditches, pond-banks, wet meadows, wetland margins, and most prominently in lawns, where it’s infamous and better known as “Dollarweed”.
Lastly we have today’s subject, Largeleaf Pennywort, which is very similar in leaf appearance to Manyflower Marsh-Pennywort. Largeleaf Pennywort has consistently large, circular leaves and bears yellow-white flowers in relatively large umbrella-shaped clusters. But what sets it apart is where it grows, the beach. More specifically in the harsh environment of our barrier islands’ beach dune systems, adding it to the ranks of a select few plants that can tough it out at land’s end. Largeleaf Pennywort has some salt tolerance, allowing it to brush off a surge or king tide every now and again, but it’s no halophyte. It is best adapted to life in the back dunes but will run on the front beach when it must. The large, leathery, waxy, evergreen leaves of Largeleaf Pennywort allow it to tolerate the drying effects of continuous wind and salt spray while also mitigating the heat and radiation stress of continuous direct sunlight. Its underground stolon weaves it an expansive root system, allowing the plant to anchor itself in the ever shifting sands while finding and storing scant sources of fresh water. The long chains of leaves it shoots up through the sand also serve as a tiny sand fence, slowing air and trapping sand to help better stabilize the dune system. This makes Largeleaf Pennywort an important part in the beach dune system and one of the frontline plants that collectively help hold the beach together.
Largeleaf Pennywort has some other unique things about it worth mentioning. Firstly as a beach adapted species, it’s not just found in the southeastern United States but has a very wide distribution globally, as it can disperse on oceanic currents. This species can also be found on beaches in South America, West and South Africa, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Australia. This has led botanists to suspect that Largeleaf Pennywort may not be “native” to the United States and instead has spread from South America across the Atlantic relatively recently as a consequences of transatlantic trade during European colonization. Or, conversely, it may be a natural advent that spread of its own accord. The jury is still out. But evidence seems to indicate the prior, as it was first described botanically in South America in 1789 and is noticeably absent from early botanical records for the Southeast.
Largeleaf Pennywort is edible and can be eaten as a green, a pot herb, or made into a juice. However, some folks report a nauseating affect. So snack with caution. (And in general, never forage plants from a lawn you don’t manage yourself. You never know what someone may have sprayed on it nor how recently they did so.) There is also long ethnobotanical history between humans and Hydrocotyle species globally, and many purported health benefits from their consumption. Thus, there has been some scientific interest in the plant for pharmacological use and agricultural cultivation. Modern scientific studies indicate that the species appears to be safe to eat (excepting the potential for nausea), it is relatively nutrient dense, and contains a suite of phytochemicals that may prove to be beneficial to human health when taken as a dietary supplement. However, few, if any, efficacy trials have been published to date and so the plant’s potential health benefits are still purely speculative. But recent early research places Largeleaf Pennywort in a category as a candidate “superfood” and an ecologically sustainable crop for future human use.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, it’s our pearly-eyed perching bird, the White-eyed Vireo (Vireo griseus).
The White-eyed Vireo is a small songbird found throughout the southeast. Although many of them migrate to Central America for winter, a small sect of the species hangs out year-round in the coastal plain of the Deep South, including the South Carolina Lowcountry. White-eyed Vireos are specialized for life in heavy brush and thickets. You’ll find them commonly on forest edges, pond banks, hedgerows, pocosin rims, and in old clearcuts. They’re a common bird, and they’re commonly found anywhere there are dense shrubs. White-eyed Vireos, as well as most other Vireos, are insectivorous leaf gleaners. They get their daily bread by moving from branch to branch combing leaves and twigs for arthropods to eat. They’ll also scarf down small fruits, especially in winter when insects are scarce.
Vireos, in general, are small perching birds in the same size bracket as the warblers, and the White-eyed Vireo is no exception to that generality. They’re an easy bird to identify, if you can land your eyes on one through the brush. Dark tail feathers and wings with a wash of olive-green along the margin and two heavy white bars on the shoulder of each wing, a pale belly with a belt of yellow wash across the breast and down the flanks, a white throat, an olive-green mantle to the back, an aluminum-gray hood over the head, a blue-black faintly hooked bill, a lemon-yellow mask, and a namesake striking ice-white eye, all these traits come together to style a bird that’s an unmistakable sight across much of the Eastern United States. The White-eyed Vireo’s vocalizations are also quite unique, with calls a nasally resonant scolding “cluck” or “mew”. Their song is a phrase that is both hard to describe and hard to mistake, at least once you have an ear for it. The song is usually four to six notes that blend together like a sentence. It starts sharp and loud and then bounces up and down in volume, then either trails off in a mumble or ends in a decisive note as loud as the first. It kind of has an iambic pentameter character to it. There are many mnemonics out there to better remember the White-eyed Vireo’s calling card, but most birds haven’t read the field guides and are prone to going off script. So it’s best to learn it by ear and make your own memory of it, at least in my opinion.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re picking out the pH particular pitch-packed pyrrhic pyrophyte of the pocosin, the Pond Pine (Pinus serotina).
Pond Pine is found across the coastal plain of the South Atlantic, from the panhandle of Florida north to the bottom end of New Jersey, and here in South Carolina it resides below the fall line. Pond Pine is one of our more diffuse pines, growing mainly in scatter clusters around the landscape where habitat conditions are most suitable. Pond Pine strikes a keen resemblance to many of our other pine species, sharing ruddy brown and mottled flaky bark, hand-length deep-green needles, and a tall straight posture. It’s often a dead ringer for Loblolly Pine (Pinus taeda) and takes a sharp eye to pick it out of the canopy. But thankfully, Pond Pine has a few traits that help differentiate between these two native pines. The most distinguishing characteristic of Pond Pine is its cones. Unlike our other Lowcountry pines species, Pond Pine’s cones are nearly spherical and about two-and-a-half inches across, a width somewhere between a golf ball and a tennis ball. These cones usually stay tightly closed for a season and cling to the tree for multiple years, making them a dead giveaway you’re looking at a Pond Pine. The crown of Pond Pine is usually quite messy to boot, with numerous short stods from old dead branches erupting out of the trunk and trailing below the live limbs, and often a bent, warped, or twisted character to its upper trunk and major limbs. Further, Pond Pine is one of the few pine species that can regenerate from its trunk. So, you’ll occasionally spot individuals with needles or twigs growing directly out of bark fissures on the lower half of the trunk. Lastly, Pond Pine needles, when shed, are noticeably a paler shade of orange, an almost sickly looking jaundiced-yellow, compared to shed Loblolly Pine or Slash Pine (Pinus elliottii) needles, at least in my own experience around Edisto Island. This difference in duff color is a rather subtle distinction but in mid-winter, when pines shed their oldest needles, it can appear like a circle of chartreuse highlighter around the base of a lone Pond Pine poking through a canopy of Loblolly Pines.
Pond Pine is a habitat specialist and encountered most frequently in and around pocosins, Carolina Bays, peat bogs, and acidic streams or swales on sandy soils that are low in pH and most nutrients. Pond Pine is able to tolerate the acidic, nutrient impoverished, and saturated soils of these habitats better than any other pine, or really any other tree, and has come to dominate these habitats. It’s thus quite abundant up in the Sandhills and down here in the lower coastal plain where these conditions are more prevalent, but they’re not particularly common on the Sea Islands where our relatively young soils are often still enriched with the remains of oysters and marshes, and thus bolstered in their pH and nutrition. Their preferred habitats are often prone to catastrophic wildfire in times of drought, when their organic heavy or peat soils dry out and the accumulation of resinous plant material in the understory becomes a literal litter tinderbox. All of Pond Pine’s standout identifying features are direct consequences of their adaptations to life in these lands of extremes. Its ability to regenerate needles and limbs from its trunk lets it rise like a phoenix from the ashes of devastating crown fires, fires that would eradicate a stand of any other pine species. Its messy crown, with twisted boughs and the remains of dead limbs, is a side effect of its easy-come easy-go mindset. It doesn’t make sense investing great time and energy cleanly callousing off old limbs and neatly ordering and expanding your crown over decades when a drought and chance lightning strike could change your fate tomorrow. In that same vein the sour, sodden soil it subsists on is meager. So, Pond Pine invests its resources more strategically into its needles, leaving their husks shed as duff with a different hue. Lastly, those spherical cones are locked shut with resin and compact in shape to best maintain that sticky seal. When a fire rips through the understory and its hot winds rise and lap at the limbs of Pond Pine, this resinous wrapper over its cones softens and melts, allowing them to pop open and sow their seeds downward into the freshly fire fertilized soil below, now neatly cleared of competing vegetation. This ensures the would-be Pond Pine seedling gets a fighting chance to establish in a normally overcrowded and underfed understory. Because of these specialized adaptations, Pond Pine is one of our many, many native plants in the southeast that is dependent on receiving regular fire on the landscape, preferably low-intensity human prescribed fires, to complete its life cycle and reliably recruit its next generation.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have the tiller in the turf, the Eastern Mole (Scalopus aquaticus).
The Eastern Mole is a small mammal, about the size of a small rat. It belongs to a rather small order called Eulipotyphla, the “True Insectivores”, which contains Shrews, Hedgehogs, and Moles. The Eastern Mole is found across the eastern United States and throughout all of South Carolina. They inhabit a wide range of habitats from fields to forests to lawns but generally prefer sandy soils. They subsist on a diet of underground invertebrates, especially beetle grubs, earthworms, crickets, termites, and cranefly maggots. Eastern Moles are nocturnal and also fossorial, spending their lives almost entirely underground. They are covered in a dense coat of short dark brown-gray fur from head to stubby tail, excepting their hairless pink pointy nose and broad feet.
Eastern Moles have a suite of adaptations for life underground. They lack any visible eyes or ears. Eyes are near useless liabilities in the pitch black below ground. So the eyes of the Eastern Mole have shrunk and their eyelids fused shut over them. Their ears are still present and have limited function but, similar to a bird’s, Mole ears lack external features and are hidden under their fur in order to keep their body streamlined and sand out their ear canals. What our Moles lack in sight and sound, they compensate for with touch and smell. They have a highly refined sense of touch that allows them to feel both the footsteps of approaching predators and the echoes of burrowing insects. They also have an acute sense of smell for parsing out the paths of potential prey crisscrossing through the soil. For locomotion, the Eastern Moles possesses a pair of large paddle-shaped front paws that they use to swim through the earth. Their bodies are also torpedo shaped, allowing them to readily tunnel through their tilth. Lastly, their short fur is dense, oily, water repellant, and can lie flat in any direction, which allows it to act like a lubricant to slide through the soil.
Seeing an Eastern Mole alive and above ground in the wild is an exceeding rare sight. Most often we only detect their presence through the arches and mole hills of dirt they push to the surface as they tunnel through the soil or when lovingly pitched on the doorstep by a family pet. Eastern Moles can inhabit a home range of an acre or more and will regularly return to the same areas and tunnels each night on nightly rounds in search of food. They often show up under bird feeders, not in search of seed, but following the detritivorous insects who chow down on the waste seed hulls beneath. Moles can become a pest to those who like to keep a neat lawn, as they leave raised burrows in their wake when tunneling through topsoil. However, I assert that such lawn enthusiasts are just making mountains out of mole hills. Eastern Moles are actually beneficial to soil and lawns in the long run, as they aerate compacted topsoil, improve water infiltration, and help keep turfgrass pests, like cranefly (Tipula spp.) and may beetle (Phyllophaga spp.) larva, under control. Moles also serve as an important link in the food chain, being a food source for bobcats, foxes, coyotes, and other small predators, and play a role in proper nutrient cycling, as they help sequester nutrients deeper into the soil, further improving soil health and water quality. Moles are a fascinating facet of our local ecology and a good neighbor to have if you like to keep a bit of nature close to home.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s a bronzed bush of the barrier islands, Tough Bully (Sideroxylon tenax).
Tough Bully is found on the immediate coast of South Carolina and Georgia and down into peninsular Florida. It’s a denizen of the dunes and maritime forests of our Barrier Islands and Sea Islands throughout the Lowcountry and it thrives in subtropical climate and dry sandy soils of our coast. Tough Bully is a mid-sized shrub that grows as either a squat bush in the blustery windswept dunes of our barrier island beaches or as a multi-stemmed arching shrub in the more shaded sea island maritime fringe forests. Its trunks are often gnarled and twisted with a roughly fissured, dark-gray bark while its stems are conversely a smooth, pale-gray. These twigs are lightly zig-zagged and bear short thorns at each node. The leaves of Tough Bully are its most distinguishing feature. Their alternate evergreen leaves are simple, leathery, and shaped like an elongated teardrop. Turn them over and you’ll be greeted by a carpet of reflective, near metallic-colored hairs that range in shade from platinum to brass to a deep bronze. These velvety hairs, called indumentum, perform a suite valuable services to plants that live in dry, sandy, open environments, including both insulating their leaves from wind and reflecting sunlight bouncing up from the sand below, away from the delicate leaf underside.
Tough Bully, and its relatives in genus Sideroxylon, also have some ethnobotanical merits. When broken, the leaves and twigs of Tough Bully exude a milky sap. Some Native American tribes would cut the bark of the tree to allow this sap to ooze out and dry. They could then collect this dried gum to use as a chewing gum. Tough Bully blooms in early summer with a spherical cluster of small white flowers along its twigs. These flowers are well-loved by native pollinators and, once pollinated, give rise to oblong, purple-black drupes about the size of a blueberry. These fruits are edible for humans and sweet in flavor.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s a bird on the brink, the Piping Plover (Charadrius melodus).
On the edge of the world lives a bird without a place. An animal that thrives where old becomes new, where the past and future ever intermingle into the twisting, roiling present. It’s a liminal space, a subduction of place. Upon this shifting land of sea and sand persists a piper at the gates of dawn: the Piping Plover.
The Piping Plover is a small shorebird found all along the East Coast of the United States. Piping Plovers spend their summers on the beaches north of the Carolinas as well as the shorelines of lakes in the northern Great Plains and the Great Lakes. Come winter, they fly south to the beaches of both the Gulf Coast and the East Coast, up into both Carolinas. Here on the South Carolina Sea Islands, Piping Plovers are a scarce bird to sight but not hard to recognize. Like our other Plovers, they prefer to hold a perpendicular posture and pace in pulses between pecking, picking, and pulling polychaetes and other sundry invertebrates from the sand. Piping Plovers look much like our resident Semipalmated Plover (C. semipalmatus). They have a white belly, orange legs, black eyes, petite bill, and a compact body of similar size. However, their back is a far paler beach-sand-tan and the normally black band across their breast a similar shade in winter. This provides them excellent camouflage on our windswept winter beaches. Yet they’re hard to see not just because they blend into the sand, but because they are few and far flung across the beaches of our coast.
Piping Plovers occupy a very narrow niche here in the Lowcountry. They bide their time on only the youngest of our beaches. Most often their haunts are the northern points of barrier islands, where shoals drift south beneath the waves of an inlet to collide with the beachfront to birth new land. It’s a continuous cycle of sand rolling and flowing, building and eroding, a process powered by longshore drift that creates the most dynamic and chaotic environment in South Carolina. This ever-churning conveyor belt of sand creates a unique environment that fosters great biodiversity beneath the ground in the intertidal zone and has hence become the perfect hunting ground for the Piping Plover. As this environment is very rare within our Lowcountry landscape and, with not all our beaches being equal, Piping Plovers exhibit very strong site fidelity for both their wintering and nesting grounds. If they find a suitable winter home, they cling to it for dear life and will return to the same beaches year after year for their entire lifespan, if they can. This level of site fidelity makes them extremely vulnerable to coastal development, rising sea levels, and any major changes in sedimentation on our coast.
Thus, it may not be a surprise for me to tell you that Piping Plovers are listed as a federally threatened species range wide. Piping Plovers will return to the same beaches every year, even if conditions become unfavorable. This means they won’t relocate and chronic, low-grade disturbances can quickly mount into life threatening danger for the species. Here in South Carolina, they’re feeling pressure from all sides. The construction of the Charleston harbor jetties in the late 1800s fundamentally altered the volume and flow of sediment on our coastline south of Charleston. This has caused many barrier islands, like Morris Island and Edisto Island, to contract and heavily erode. In combination with this, rising sea levels over the last century have forced barrier islands to contract even further. At the same time, rapid coastal development throughout the latter half of the 1900s damaged the quality of much of their wintering habitat. The last few decades, the level of human disturbance on our winter beaches has increased dramatically here in South Carolina, providing little respite for the weary shorebirds clinging to our winter coastline. These factors all compound to squeeze many of our other shorebirds into a life on an ever more narrow slice of land. For a species like the Piping Plover that naturally resides on the very brink of the earth, its perch on this precipice is particularly precarious. Today, they are scarcely seen along our coast and often only found on the most remote of barrier islands.
