This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we spy a native grass just beyond the surf and rising above the turf, Pinewoods Fingergrass (Eustachys petraea).
Pinewoods Fingergrass is native to the southern coast of the United States, from Texas through North Carolina. Here in South Carolina, it’s found in all our coastal counties and throughout our Sea Islands. It thrives on our young marine soils, coarsely sandy and rich in calcium from pulverized shells. I most often encounter it on Barrier Islands in healthy maritime forests, more inland on sandy ridges in the pineywoods, or along the shoulders of limestone roads in either.
Pinewoods Fingergrass is a perennial warm-season grass. It spreads weakly through running stolons into a loose clump but mainly disperses about the landscape through seeds. Its leaves are a soft blue-green and grow upward to about a foot in length. It begins to flower in mid-spring and continues through the end of summer. Its innocuous grass flowers chain together into one-sided comb-like spikes. Often their flower head is comprised of five spikes, lifted upward to two feet on a central stalk. This flower stalk arrangement resembles a hand reaching upwards to the sky and it provided the plant its “fingergrass” common name.
Pinewoods Fingergrass is a hardy native grass and can be a great addition to coastal yards. It does well in both full sun and partial shade. It’s well adapted to our coarse, sandy sea island soils with great drought tolerance and high resistance to saltwater intrusion and salt spray. As a grass, it’s mainly ignored by deer and likely a host plant for several species of our Grass Skipper butterflies. Unlike nonnative turf grasses, Pinewoods Fingergrass spreads sparsely and politely, allowing it to play nicely wildflowers in native plant gardens and alternative lawns, without taking them over.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we uncover a hidden gem, the sapphire pendant on the pineywoods, the Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea).
In the sweltering heat of the summer savanna, below a bluebird sky, a cascade of double notes catches the ear and draws the eye. A cerulean speck trumpets from a treetop, anointing a pine with a rare drop of blue spilled down from the sky. As you strain your eyes to resolve its form, the drop plummets further from the tree, curving on the wind before it collides with the Earth and sinks within the grassy sea of green that flows across the savanna. As quick as it fell it buoys back into sight. Set on a low bough of a flame charred shrub, a brilliance of blue shines like a sapphire amplified in the sun. A male Indigo Bunting presents in rare form.
The Indigo Bunting is found throughout the eastern United States from spring through fall, but under the summer sun is when they shine. They dwell on the boundary of forest and field, in open woodlands, clear cuts, and fringes of farms. Here in the Lowcountry, the Longleaf Pine savannas are their favorite haunts, a perfect middle ground between woodland and grassland. Indigo Buntings are most often heard before they are seen. Males fly to the tops of the tallest trees and serenade the savanna in bird song. Their song is a distinctive stuttered warble, with every phrase spoken twice before moving to the next. When they decide to drop down to the forest floor to forage, you may be blessed enough to watch one up close. Females are camouflaged, pale-khaki below, faded-chestnut upon the back, and ebony in their wings and tail. Contrastingly, male Indigo Buntings are dyed a deep indigo-blue across almost their entire body. The black between their eyes and their pewter-gray bill and down their flight feathers only serves to compliment the richness of their blue plumage. This blue changes in hue depending on how light hits the bird. This unstable hue is due to this being a structural color. Rather than a pigment dyeing the feathers blue, the microscopic shape of the feathers’ vanes force only blue light to reflect. Meaning the stronger and bluer the light, the bluer the Indigo Bunting glows.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the saffron signal of the summer solstice, Golden Canna (Canna flaccida).
Golden Canna is a common plant down in Florida but scarcely scattered on the landscape here in the Lowcountry. It’s a rare sight most anywhere in South Carolina but we’re blessed with a wild patch or two on Edisto Island. It grows in saturated mucky soils in freshwater marshes and is tolerant of submersion during the growing season. Golden Canna is a large perennial wildflower that spreads below the soil through rhizomes. Its leaves are large at over a foot long, tongue-shaped with a pointed tip, yellow green in color, and held upright around its fleshy stem. The foliage grows to just above waist high.
Golden Canna begins to bloom in mid-May and continues through mid-June. Its flowers are hung above the foliage, a frilly folded funnel of pastel-yellow unmistakable as anything else. These flowers attract bees and large butterflies, particularly Swallowtails, to pollinate them. Pollinated flowers mature into seedpods about the size and shape of a starfruit but fuzzy and pale-green. These seedpods dry over time and their skin disintegrates, revealing magazines of hard, round, and black seeds the size and shape of 00 buckshot.
Golden Canna makes for a good wildflower addition to most pond banks and rain gardens. They do best on rich, saturated soils and with plenty of sun. However, they’re frost intolerant. So the subtropical Sea Islands are where they’ll thrive most reliably. They attract pollinators when in bloom, have handsome foliage when not, and that foliage is the larval food for the Brazilian Skipper butterfly (Calpodes ethlius).
We have two non-native Cannas floating around Edisto Island as well, Indian Shot (Canna indica) and Garden Canna (Canna X generalis). Indian Shot has red flowers with narrow petals and broader leaves held more perpendicular to the stem. Garden Canna is a catchall taxa of hybrid plants and thus comes in a hundred different forms. However, it most often has darker, larger foliage. Both can readily be separated from Golden Canna by their seedpods, which are half the size, roughly spherical, and held upright.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have the aerial ace roosting in your rafter space, the Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica).
The Barn Swallow is a cosmopolitan bird species, being found across the temperate regions of the world. They join us here in the southeast for our spring but head down to the southern hemisphere as the days get shorter. They live their lives riding the wake of spring, in a loop of infinite summer they daydream of Icarus, circuiting half the globe to chase the sun.
The Barn Swallow is an unmistakable bird, by both color and shape. Their back is a deep and shimmering iridescent indigo. A barely detectable black mask surrounds their eyes, contrasted by a forehead and throat of rich rust-red that stains downward to their ruddy breast and belly. Their bill is small and their legs smaller, both ill-equipped for a life foraging along the ground. Barn Swallows have higher ambitions, skyward eyes. Their wings are long and pointed and their tail long and forked, the eponymous “swallowtail” shape. These long and pointed wings allow for high speed flight and that forked tail serves as a rudder for aerial agility. All this is needed, as Barn Swallows hunt on the wing.
Like all our swallows, Barn Swallows are “hawkers”, they catch flying insects for food. Swallows spend their days searching for listless insects flying upward on thermals. Screaming through the screaming Barn Swallows fly with unmatched precision as they hone in on prey. Then, mouth agape, they gulp down bugs, beetles, moths, dragonflies, and all manner of unlucky insects midair. They even drink on the wing, skimming the water’s surface to siphon a sip. They only land to rest and to nest.
Barn Swallows get their common name from their preferred nesting habitat, barns! Well, really any open air human structure with a roof will do. Much like their cousin the Purple Martin, Barn Swallows have discovered the marvel of human engineering and the convenience of free rent from squatting in someone else’s house. Barn Swallows prefer to nest under bridges and piers or in hay lofts and pole barns. Anywhere with a dry roof overhead, air flow underneath, and a path for quick entrances and exits will suffice. In nature, this would have been caves and cliffs. But here on Edisto, and in much of the Lowcountry, we don’t have any rocks nor elevation to speak of. So the floor joists under elevated houses have become an enticing nursery for any Barn Swallow couple out house hunting. The closer that structure is to fields, ponds, and creeks, then the more ready access Barn Swallows have to food and water and thus the more attractive the nest site. Barn Swallows build their nest like adobe, wet mud held together with dried grass, laid one beak-full at a time to form a cup stuck to the side of a wall or beam. Here they’ll lay their eggs and often raise a clutch of four or five chicks at a time. Like most squatters raising five kids, Barn Swallows tend to make a mess of the place and leave behind a great quantity of guano. But they do pay back a little for their inconvenience. Barn Swallows, just like Purple Martins, help with pest control, feasting on agricultural pests and blood sucking insects wherever they stake their claim.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have the cradle of Carolina’s Monarchs, Aquatic Milkweed (Asclepias perennis).
Aquatic Milkweed is found throughout the Lowcountry, ranging from South Carolina west throughout the southeastern coastal plain and north up the Mississippi River valley. It’s a perennial wildflower that grows in bottomland forests, floodplains, and the mazes of ditchwork and backwaters that permeate and diffuse them. Moist, rich soils that flood seasonally are a must have for its natural niche. Aquatic Milkweed grows to knee height in small clumps of singular stems. These stems are stacked with opposing pairs of narrow, blade-like leaves from base to leading bud. Come late May and through the end of July our Milkweed blooms.
Two to three dozen individual, pure-white flowers emerge together into a ball atop the tip of the plant. Each flower bears that unmistakable Milkweed shape: an hourglass of petals, five facing up in a tight packed bundle around, anthers and ovary, and five swooping down below into a showy skirt to catch the eye of passerby pollinators. New balls of flowers are merged beside the old, refreshing the display throughout the season and expanding across the stand of stems. Aquatic Milkweed flowers are a bright white beacon, a lighthouse standing amidst and shining across a choppy sea of green, cutting through the suffocating umbral umbrella of a bottomland forest. But what does the beacon beckon? It brings in butterflies! Most importantly the Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus).
Monarchs rely on native Milkweed plants to serve as nursery and nourishment for their caterpillars. Milkweed plants contain toxic compounds that ward off most herbivores. Monarchs have taken advantage of this, making themselves immune to the poison while also packing it into their own bodies as caterpillars, to serve as a lifelong shield against birds, lizards, and other predators. Monarchs are on the decline throughout much of the Unites States right now. They are even a candidate for federal listing as a threatened species. Their decline is due to impacts on all fronts at all stages of their life cycle. Monarchs are migratory, a trait that makes them resilient to large seasonal changes across a large landscape but simultaneously vulnerable to chronic, widespread habitat degradation or loss of critical refuge habitats. The most chronic threat they are facing comes from the widespread loss of Milkweed on the landscape over the last fifty years. Monarch caterpillars can only eat Milkweed. Without it, they will perish.
Here in South Carolina, Aquatic Milkweed is the most important host plant for our Monarchs. Its populations in our remote blackwater swamps are stable and consistent. Thus, Aquatic Milkweed provides a dependable network of host plants that our Monarchs rely on every spring. In fact, it’s so dependable many of our Monarchs in South Carolina no longer migrate! Well they still do, just not very far. From beaches to bottomlands, that’s as far as they go. Our Lowcountry Monarchs winter in the thermally insulated maritime forests of our beachfront barrier islands and our sheltered Sea Islands. Come spring they sail a couple dozen miles upriver, settling in the swamps and bottomlands of our blackwater rivers. There they lay their eggs upon Aquatic Milkweed and pass the mantle to the next generation. This new crop of Monarchs then disperses throughout our state throughout the year and makes use of the great diversity of Milkweed species found across our landscape. Then their children, or grandchildren, complete the circuit and return to their shelter by the sea to weather another winter.
If you’d like to learn more about the Lowcountry’s resident Monarch population, you can check out the research paper behind this discovery here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-37225-7.pdf
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have a bejeweled beetle in a thatch hat, the Palmetto Tortoise Beetle (Hemisphaerota cyanea).
The Palmetto Tortoise Beetle is found throughout the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, ranging south throughout all of Florida and west along the immediate Gulf Coast to Texas. They spend their life entirely on our native palms, including Cabbage Palmetto (Sabal palmetto), Dwarf Palmetto (S. minor), and Saw Palmetto (Serenoa repens). Upon the palms they slide up and down the fronds making their meals by scraping out the softer flesh from between the stringy fibers of the leaf. The Palmetto Tortoise Beetle is a captivating critter that deploys two fascinating defensive strategies throughout its life.
Adult beetles are a quarter-inch in length, dome-shaped, dimpled like a golf ball, and gleaming with a deep metallic blue-green that borders on black in the shade. Tiny orange antennae are their only contrasting color. The adult’s primary defense from predators is turtling up and tanking hits. Their shell is thick and its dimples provide extra structural reinforcement. Its glass-like texture and well-fit joints permit no handholds for prying predators. Even further, they have an iron grip. Their feet are modified into flat brushes. These furry feet are so finely divided that they electrically adhere at the sub-atomic level to a palmetto frond. It’s the same way lizards, like anoles and geckos, can scale plate glass, just shrunk down onto an ironclad arthropod. This makes Palmetto Tortoise Beetles functionally immune to being plucked from a palm frond by a passing bird or blown away by hurricane force winds. But as a young’un they have a far more juvenile form of defense.
Larval Palmetto Tortoise Beetles protect themselves from would-be assailants the same we protect ourselves from the sun, with a big straw hat. Only difference is our Beetle makes its hat from poop. How lovely! The first thing a baby Palmetto Tortoise Beetle does when it crawls out of its egg mass of a crib is start chowing down on a palmetto frond. The second thing it does is number two. The larvae will excrete long strands of what’s basically paper, compressed pulp pulled from the palmetto. Each strand is then glued to its back when complete and stacked atop the next. These strands twirl around into a basket that fully shields the larvae. This is called a “fecal thatch” and it helps shield the larvae from the elements and predators. Unlike the adult beetle, the larvae lack atomic Velcro feet. Instead they have sharp hooks that dig under the fibers of the palm frond, anchoring them like a roller coaster to its rail. When harassed, the larva hunkers down and waits for the predator to pass, hoping it loses its appetite as it vainly attempts to penetrate the fecal thatch. The larva carries this thatch with it throughout its life, even as an immobile pupa, until it matures, puts its childish past behind it, and dons a suit of armor instead.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re hosting a globe-trotting cosmopolitan herb, Common Yarrow (Achillea millefolium).
The genus Achillea, the Yarrows, has well over a hundred species globally within it. Three are found in North America but only one is native and widespread in the United States. Common Yarrow (A. millefolium), or just simply Yarrow, is found in all fifty states and essentially all of South Carolina. It’s not often an easy plant to find out in the wild but it is quite easy to pick out of a crowd when you do. Its feathery leaves, so finely divided to appear as a fluffy green haze, project half-a-foot up through grass and duff in search of light, forming a dense dome of leaves in good conditions. In the frost-free reaches of the Sea Islands, Yarrow even grows as an evergreen, spreading underground through its perennial web of roots into a cluttered groundcover. In early spring stalks rise skyward, plateauing at knee height into an umbel of small white flowers, crowded shoulder to shoulder. These flowers appear in late April through the end of May and are pollinated by all manner of small flies, beetles, and bees. Yarrow is very drought tolerant and hardy. In my opinion, it’s one of the easiest perennial plants to grow in any garden.
Common Yarrow has long been a staple in formal gardens, floral arrangements, herb beds, home remedies, and traditional ethnobotany. The leaves of Yarrow contain astringent compounds, the effects of which have been known since prehistory and have been relied upon by humans ever since. The astringency of Yarrow causes blood vessels to restrict and contract wherever it is applied to the body. This reduces swelling and slows bleeding, helping heal wounds, reduce pain, and break fevers for many minor ailments and injuries. The Greeks used it as a wound dressing in their armies and credited the legendary hero Achilles with discovering its medicinal properties. Fittingly, Yarrow received its genus name “Achillea” from this Greek myth. Yet, the utility of Yarrow was known long before Greece. Yarrow was ancient Ibuprofen, a wonderfully utilitarian plant prescription. This made it an invaluable asset in every culture that encountered the efficacy of Yarrow. Where those peoples subsequently traveled to, they brought Yarrow seeds in tow and sowed them freely around their villages and farms. When those people left or perished, the Yarrow persisted and often prospered.
As you might surmise, this has transformed Common Yarrow into a well-traveled wildflower with quite the tale to tell. From Iberia through Siberia, over the Bering Strait to Alaska and all the way to the Atlantic ranges Common Yarrow. This singular species calls nearly the entire Northern Hemisphere home! Down south it can be found growing freely across South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Australia. What brought it here is clear: the hands of man. But from whence it came and when it began to wander around the world, and where it is truly a wild flower, rather than a waif, is far from clear. To call the natural history of Yarrow complex would be a thorough understatement. For tens-of-thousands of years, practically as long as people and Yarrow have occupied the same space, humans have been intentionally collecting, prescribing, planting, and spreading Yarrow across the globe. All the while relict clumps of Common Yarrow have been advancing and adapting themselves to new locales on their own volition. This has created a species-complex like none other, a botanical boogeyman rendering night terrors unto today’s native plant enthusiasts.
A species-complex is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a species that is complicated and defies traditional scientific classification. Yarrow is the definition of a species complex, but cranked up to eleven. There are native, “true” wild-type Yarrow plants on the landscape within its original home range. Trouble is we don’t know where that is or which exact strain is the wild-type, but it is somewhere in Europe, probably. From there we have the species’ many ancient introductions across the northern hemisphere where they have naturally adapted to the unique ecosystems in their new homes. In parallel we have the millennia of heirloom cultivars bred and grown by cultures across the world. Then came the traditional European cultivars, which were spread globally during the renaissance and with colonization to most of the Southern hemisphere for gardens and cattle forage. Then lastly the modern cultivars of Common Yarrow developed in the last hundred or so years with precise artificial selection for horticultural use, again grown globally. All of these different chronological steps for every subspecies, strain, cultivar, and variety now exist simultaneously on the landscape, planted next to each other in fields, farms, and garden beds. Of course, they all hybridize with each other with varying degrees of regularity. Let’s not even mention the further complications of the polyploid plants. This all has created a vast gradient of gray area into which we must wade to answer the question, “Is Common Yarrow native to North America?” The curious case of Yarrow shatters the false dichotomy of the question. It is both exotic and native at the same time in the same place. Each individual plant occupies a space on a spectrum somewhere between either extreme.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have the king of the cane, the piper over the palms, the Swainson’s Warbler (Limnothlypis swainsonii).
Past the break of winter, beside the brake of cane, a spell of birdsong suddenly sunders the silence in the stagnant steamy air. A brown blob at the bend of a branch beelines below the bamboo. Switchbacks through Switch Cane it snakes swiftly into a sightline, sneaking peeks to guess your intent before dissolving into the shadow of the thicket; a Swainson’s Warbler patrolling his kingdom of cane.
Among our Warblers in family Parulidae, the Swainson’s Warbler stands out for its stout frame, sharp and sturdy bill, and muted plumage. Unlike the radiant golden Prothonotary and Hooded Warblers or the contrasting bi-chromatic Black-and-white and Yellow-throated Warblers, all of which are neighbors in the spring bottomland forest, Swainson’s Warblers instead don a cryptic cloak of camouflaged colors. Their back is bronzed-brown and belly olive-stained-ivory. A dark stripe runs through the eye, a pale eyebrow borders above and is capped with a crown of chestnut. Not a fleck of extra color to stand out against the standing timber’s shadows. What the Swainson’s Warbler lacks in prismatic presence it makes up for with its pipes.
The song of the Swainson’s Warbler is a short verse of sharp whistles: three flat notes slowly rising, a fourth cut short jumps high and falls low, “Tea, Tea, Tea, Te-wi-two”. Although easy to hear it’s a hard song to commit to memory, falling lyrically somewhere between the tunes of the oft adjacent Louisiana Waterthrush and Hooded Warbler. Despite being readily heard when present, Swainson’s Warblers are hard birds to find and even harder birds to lay eyes on.
Swainson’s Warblers are found across South Carolina in summer. Yet, they are secretive birds, singing low below heavy canopies and just barely above dense thickets of bushes, bamboo, and palmettos amidst the depths of blackwater swamps, heath thickets, and bottomland floodplains. Even within these vast and nearly inaccessible ecosystems, breeding pairs of Swainson’s Warblers are often few and far between. Swainson’s Warblers are a species of conservation concern across much of the Southeast. Conversion of floodplain forests to agricultural fields and intensive hardwood timbering and pine planting of floodplains have supplanted or upset the delicate balance of these ecosystems. This destabilizes the palmetto thickets and canebrakes in the coastal plain that Swainson’s Warblers rely on to nest. Without consistency in these wetland systems their populations have fluctuated and shrunk for over a century, making them a species in need of special attention. Thankfully the forever protected floodplains of the lower South Edisto River remain a stronghold for the species, where Swainson’s Warblers still peacefully reign over the cane.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we look longingly towards the bountiful boughs of Red Mulberry (Morus rubra).
Red Mulberry is a small midstory tree found in forest understories throughout all of South Carolina and the Eastern United States. Here on the Sea Islands, I most often find it reaching about thirty feet in height, squarely within the midstory below a hardwood canopy, and growing on well-drained but moist and fertile upland soils. Its growth form is an umbrella, with long arching boughs towering and spreading upward into a dome-shaped canopy. Each sinuous limb holding aloft emerald-green leaves often as large as an outstretched hand. These leaves have a rough, scaborous texture on the hand, like sandpaper. Their shape is also highly variable. Red Mulberry leaves are trimorphic in nature, having three distinct shapes. They can either be a nearly circular swollen heart-shape with a small pointed tip, or instead a three-lobed form falling somewhere between the shape of a fleur-de-lis and a trident or, lastly, somewhere in between with the shape of an oven mitt. These trimorphic leaves are incredibly distinct and make Red Mulberry easy to identify in the wild. When its leaves are lacking in winter, that arching trunk and the rather smooth, finely fissured dull-gray bark gives this tree’s identity away to the perceptive naturalist. Yet, the most defining feature of Red Mulberry is its fruit.
In April, Red Mulberry begins to bloom with its small and pendulous pale-green catkins dangling from every leaf node down its limbs. These wind pollinated flowers are easy to miss and short lived. Once pollinated the flowers mature into a clustered fruit, similar in shape to an elongated raspberry or blackberry. Within the span of a few weeks these fruits rapidly ripen, turning from pastel-green to pink, then ruby-red, and eventually purple-black when fully ripe. These fruits are short lived on the limb and a favorite food of every animal in the forest. Red Mulberry fruits are plucked as fast as they can mature by every patrolling songbird. The few that mature and make it to the ground are soundly sucked down by any passing quail, turkey, turtle, deer, fox, squirrel, opossum, or raccoon that chances upon them. Red Mulberries are a tremendous spring food source for practically every forest creature. These fruits are edible for humans as well and apparently quite good. However, I can’t personally provide commentary myself. Despite having a Red Mulberry tree in my own yard, I’ve never once eaten a fruit off of it. The critters never leave me any to try!
We have a second species of Mulberry here in the Lowcountry as well, the White Mulberry (Morus alba) which is an exotic species introduced from Europe. It’s easily told apart by from Red Mulberry by its leaves, which are a bit smaller, smooth to the touch, and in their lobed forms take on a more fig-like appearance. Its bark is usually paler and its fruit more variable in color once mature, averaging more towards a pale-red. White Mulberry is most often found in urban areas and the margins of major highways and railroads, where it has escaped from yards and gardens thanks to birds spreading its seeds. White Mulberry can become invasive in areas of high disturbance with little natural habitat. Yet I rarely see it causing issue in wild areas of the Lowcountry. It more so fills a void left in the wake of industry and sprawl.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’ve stumbled upon the mock moccasin, the Banded Watersnake (Nerodia fasciata).
Watersnakes, as the name implies, are a genus of aquatic snakes that spend their days in the swamps, rivers, ponds, and bays of the Carolinas hunting fish, frogs, salamanders, and aquatic invertebrates. During the day they can most easily be found sunning or lounging on stumps, fallen logs, shrubs, culverts, rocks, and banks in or along wetlands. Often they are more active at night, hunting croaking frogs and sluggish fish under the cover of darkness. Once supper is caught, Watersnakes swallow their prey whole and alive without venom or constriction.
Although the Banded Watersnake is my focus for today, I’d like cover our other Watersnakes in brief detail. Here in South Carolina we have five species of Watersnake: the Banded Watersnake (Nerodia fasciata), Plain-bellied Watersnake (N. erythrogaster), Green Watersnake (N. floridana), Brown Watersnake (N. taxispilota), and Northern Watersnake (N. sipedon).
The Northern Watersnake is restricted to the upstate here in South Carolina, where they live in a wide array of aquatic habitats, particularly streams, rivers, lakes, and ponds. They grow to about three feet in length and have a body patterned with a checkerboard of alternating brick-red squares over a base of coppery bronze. Their diet consists of a diverse array of amphibians and small fish.
The Brown Watersnake is found throughout the coastal plain of South Carolina and is specialized to a life living in major rivers, as well as the reservoirs, streams, swamps, and oxbows along their courses. They often reach four feet in length and their body is checkerboard patterned, with dark walnut-brown blocks atop a base of neutral-brown. They are strong swimmers and piscivorous, specializing on a diet of fish, with a strong preference for catfish.
The Green Watersnake has the narrowest range in the state out of our five Watersnakes, being found only in two disjunct areas: the backwaters of the central Savannah River and the swamps of the lower coastal plain from the Waccamaw to the Edisto River. They are specialized to a life patrolling still or slow moving freshwater marshes. They average three to four feet in length and have a body colored a dark olive-green with narrow zig-zags of black crossing their back. Their diet consists mainly of fish and frogs.
The Plain-bellied Watersnake is found across nearly all of South Carolina and lives in a wide array of habitats and wetland systems. They are highly mobile on the landscape and can be found more readily than other Watersnakes in ephemeral wetlands, floodplains, isolated ponds, pocosins, ditch systems, or out in the uplands trekking between wet areas. They readily grow to three feet in length and are distinctly colored, with a dark ruddy-brown back and a belly as orange as Carolina clay. Their diet is skewed more towards frogs than fish, on account of them often hunting in fish-free ephemeral and isolated wetlands.
The Banded Watersnake, our focus for today, resides throughout the coastal plain of South Carolina. They can be found in practically every freshwater wetland system in the Lowcountry, from major rivers and lakes, to expansive blackwater swamps, to ephemeral pools and suburban drainage ditches. They are our most abundant Watersnake here on the Sea Islands. Being as widespread as they are, the Banded Watersnake’s diet is equally diverse but, like our other Watersnakes, consists primarily of frogs and fish. They generally grow about two-and-a-half feet long and can be quite varied in coloration and patterning. Often, they have a reddish-brown body ringed in bands of ebony black. With age and size, these bands often blur together turning the snake nearly black across the back.
All our Watersnakes are non-venomous and no threat to man nor pet. However, they often have a short temper and a bad attitude that has not helped them escape undue persecution. Watersnakes mimic the venomous Cottonmouth (Agkistrodon piscivorus) when threatened. They flatten their heads into a broad triangle to resemble a Viper and coil their bodies into a threatening posture. Their keeled scales, a trait they share with our Vipers, help them complete their menacing look. Yet, if you look closely, they lack the vertical “cat’s eye” pupils of a Viper. If approached or touched Watersnakes generally bite without hesitation. This is all just a bluff to convince you to let them be. The Banded Watersnake is a particularly good mimic as it is the same size, body shape, and a similar color and pattern to the Cottonmouth, with which it overlaps in range and habitat. Sadly its success as a mimic leads to a lot of Banded Watersnakes being mistaken for Cottonmouths, and then pointlessly killed by people every year.
As I’ve said before, and will say again, snakes aren’t out cruising around looking for people to bite. Just think about it for a second. Even our largest snakes here in South Carolina can’t eat anything bigger than a squirrel. Why would they risk life and limb (well maybe not limb) harassing humans and dogs? The vast majority of our snakes are nonvenomous and so the vast majority of snakes killed each year are harmless. Even with the Vipers, most snake envenomations are caused by people trying to pick-up, move, or kill a venomous snake. A snake’s primary defense is camouflage; they freeze and pray you don’t see them. If you spot them, the jig is up and they will attempt to flee into cover. But if escape isn’t possible and or they are cornered or grabbed, biting is the only chance they have to save their scaly hide. A snake doesn’t know your intentions, and every day in nature is filled with life or death dilemmas for wildlife. All the snake knows in this situation is that it may only have seconds left to live. Can you really condemn a creature for just wanting to stay alive? Spare it the spade! If you find a snake in the wild, leave it be. Appreciate it, photograph it, but let coiled snakes lie.
