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.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we’re getting to know a delightfully festive fungus, the Christmas Lichen (Cryptothecia rubrocincta).
Christmas Lichen is found all along the coastline of the Deep South and across the Lowcountry. It’s a species that thrives in the humid and subtropical maritime forests of our Sea Islands. Christmas Lichen, like many lichens, is an epiphyte. It grows on the surface of a plant, using them as both scaffold and abode. Here on the Sea Islands, Christmas Lichen is most often encountered encrusting the bark of Live Oak, Water Oak, or Southern Magnolia limbs and trunks in deeply shaded forests, vying for real estate below the phoenix fronds of Resurrection Fern and between the swaying beards of Spanish Moss. Despite the oft crowded crowns of our maritime evergreens, it’s an easy species to spot. On smooth bark Christmas Lichen appears as a vibrant rose-red ring with a blush of red between on a palette of platinum-white, a clear and obvious bullseye for any eye to fall onto. On the blocky bark of Live Oaks, this pattern dissolves into a more uniform wash of white, like broad brushstrokes of paint, frosted with a dusting of rosy flakes.
Christmas Lichen is a fungus, but not just any fungus, it’s a lichen. Lichens are a special category of life. They are not one organism, but two unrelated walks of life, a fungus and an alga, living in deep symbiosis with each other. The alga photosynthesizes food and the fungus provides shelter and nutrition to the alga. We generally classify Lichens based on their fungal half, as it’s the organism we can actually see and measure, apart from variations in color and pattern. Lichens are almost always epiphytic and generally don’t produce “roots” (hyphae) into the surface they cling to. Lichens can grow practically anywhere and are extremely hardy to natural environmental extremes. Many grow on tree bark but others will grow on rocks and atop barren mineral soils. They absorb water from rain, dew, or fog and sponge nutrients from their surface, be that from detritus, dust, rain, or dissolved directly from raw rock. This epiphytic nature makes lichens extremely sensitive to air pollution. Many species, including Christmas Lichen, are almost impossible to find in urban areas and along major roads due to vehicle exhaust and smog. But in the secretive and shaded forests of Edisto Island, Christmas Lichen still provides a flush of hearty festive color to those who wander our woods in winter.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we’re training our eyes and ears to the wetland edges for the fleeting signs of the Winter Wren (Troglodytes hiemalis).
While walking and winding with our waterways in winter, one should watch the wooded walls of wetlands and wallows for the wary Winter Wren. ‘Tis a tiny bird of swamps and swales that settles into the South, as the sunlight shrinks and the shade trees slumber. Beige and brown from bill to bobtail, it blends beautifully into the background and black ground of our bottomlands, unseen and unheard until the unknown approaches. At the detection of trespass, any hapless passerby, alarm bells begin to ring within the wetlands. The Winter Wren will explode into action unleashing a rapid volley of rattling and chattering as it bounces and bobs from bush to buttress in a beeline towards the offense. For a lucky few, they’ll get to view the Winter Wren unobstructed, perched atop a sunlit stump in all its cryptic glory. Yet for the rest of us the best we’ll get is fleeting sideways glances between the boughs at the bottom of a brush pile.
The Winter Wren is one of five species of Wren that call the Lowcountry home and it only hangs out here in the coldest month of the year. It shares a genus, and a bit of its likeness, with the Northern House Wren (Troglodytes aedon). The Winter Wren is distinct among our Wrens for its overall darker and more uniform plumage, tiny size, and its stubby tail. It’s also quite particular in its habitat preferences during our South Carolina winters, sticking almost exclusively to the soggy, shaded soils of our bottomlands, floodplains, backwaters, bogs, bays, and the brushy margins of shallow ponds. The Winter Wren’s calls are short, sharp, and higher pitched than other Wrens and it’s not afraid to voice complaints if you start tromping into its domain. They are almost always heard well before they are seen, often from some ever shrinking distance away as it bounds from tree base to tree base towards any uninvited guest. Winter Wrens have a vexing habit for bird watchers, staying low to the ground and rarely perching in full view, preferring to stay under cover while sneaking peaks between gaps in debris on the forest floor, rarely staying in one spot for more than a few seconds.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s a subtropical, salt-loving, seaside, succulent shrub, Saltwort (Batis maritima).
Saltwort can be sighted along the Gulf Coast of the United States and ranges naturally up the East Coast to just below the Santee River here in South Carolina. It’s mainly found behind our barrier islands, growing in the sand flats of their back marshes. Saltwort is a halophyte, a salt-lover, and grows in much the same habitat as our common Perennial Glasswort (Salicornia perennis). These two salty succulents often grow together, but Saltwort clings to the oceanfront much more tightly. This is because Saltwort thrives in a subtropical climate and in very high salinity. The sand flats of South Carolina’s barrier island back marshes check both those boxes. Their proximity to the Atlantic Ocean ensures both a regular supply of full strength seawater and a tempering tropical micro-climate throughout the winter.
Saltwort is a unique looking plant found in a unique habitat here in the Lowcountry. So it’s an easy one to pick out in the wild. Its leaves are opposite, yellow-green, succulent, cylindrical in cross-section, and often curve upward. Overall they’re about one-half to three-quarters of an inch in length and shaped somewhere between a tiny banana and a tiny green bean. Young Saltwort stems are also green and succulent but, as they age, they become woody and turn a pale gray-brown. These stems can either run along the ground or arch upward to about a foot in height. Saltwort blooms at the end of April and bears inconspicuous pale-green flowers in swollen, cylindrical clusters.
Similar to our Glassworts, Saltwort leaves are edible but taste quite salty. Its seeds are also high in oil content. Given these uses and its high salt tolerance, it has some experimental promise as a specialty oil crop in regions of the world with excessive soil salinity and saltwater intrusion. Saltwort is also a host plant for the Great Southern White butterfly (Ascia monuste), a tropical butterfly whose range is slowly expanding northward into the South Carolina coast.
