This week for Flora and Fauna Friday there’s a hunter in the dark, a wader in the shadows, the Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax).
As the cloak of twilight settles on the Lowcountry, the diurnal din dwindles with the dissolving glow of day. A croak, like stone on rock, a sudden nasal squawk, half rally cry – half shock, pierces the veil with the fear of the dark. It echoes from above, resonating in the lower spine, rising and shaking loose the frigid frisson of hairs on end as you stand frozen in silence, now beyond the threshold of the night. Terror thaws under warming recollection. ‘Twas merely a Night Heron, plunging excitedly into the darkness of an inverted dawn, in anticipation of the hunt.
The Black-crowned Night Heron is one of two Night Heron species found in South Carolina. The other being the Yellow-crowned Night Heron (Nyctanassa violacea), a more seasonal and scarce species that visits our coast in summer. The Black-crowned Night Heron calls our coastline and Sea Islands home year-round. They’re a wide-ranging species found across the tropics and temperate regions of the globe. Looking at the species in local context, they’re a stockier and shorter build than most of our other Herons and Egrets, a middling size by comparison but with and uncharacteristically short neck. They’re a shape and profile unlike any of our other waders. That uniqueness is further distinguished by their plumage. The Black-crowned Night Heron’s back and cap are a bluish slate-black, their wings smoky-gray, and their belly and throat pearl-white. From below all is upheld on golden legs, out in front juts a dark dagger of a bill, and peering out from the dividing line between a sky of black and a sea of white hovers in the horizon an imposing crimson eye. Like a setting sun pushing the blinding day away from the cloak of darkness. Juvenile birds are more subtly colored with the browns of weathered, fallen leaves plowed and peppered with bone-white in a blend made for blending in, and the only color expressed being a smoldering orange eye.
Black-crowned Night Herons, despite being common birds, are often hard to find. That’s owed to their nocturnal nature. Most wading birds forage throughout the day and huddle together in treetops for safety throughout the night. But Night Herons work the graveyard shift and so do the reverse. At the shuttering of dusk, they rouse and scatter across the landscape of the Lowcountry, squawking with rejoice as they commute. They’ll settle onto a bank of a wetland, pond, or creek and fish the night away below the illumination of starlight. They’re not picky eaters either, and will eat most anything they can catch and swallow. As dawn looms over the horizon, Black-crowned Night Herons return to their rooks. This is where you’re most likely to spot them. Overhead in a hedge or thicket overhanging a pond or marsh in a secluded corner, they hunker down in numbers to sleep the day away.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re on the lookout for the compressor of the canopy, the twister of twigs, the possessor of pines, the enigmatic Witch’s-Broom.
Witch’s-Brooms are an arboreal anomaly. They’re a dense, gnarled cluster of leaves and twigs twisted together into a rounded mass within the crown of a tree or shrub. Somehow, somewhere, for some reason, a switch is flipped in the inner machinations of a single new limb and it begins to grow wrong. Its twigs become condensed, growing only a fraction of an inch in length while still packing new buds into every millimeter of space. Each of these buds still bears its leaves, creating an impossibly dense ball of foliage. Over the years the mass will continue to grow, inch by inch. On some parent tree species these twisted twigs shoot upward in a dense fan, resembling the bound sticks in the head of a handmade broom. When you factor in the seemingly arcane origin of these aberrant tree growths, then you end up with the folk name of “Witch’s Broom” bestowed upon these mysteriously mangled limbs. It’s a moniker that implies a fleck of the dark arts or some whiff of black magic has nestled itself into your local woodlot.
Witch’s-Brooms occur on the limbs of a wide array of woody plants but, here in the Lowcountry, are most commonly seen and most impressively sized in the crowns of pine trees. When produced by a pine, a Witch’s-Broom most often appears as a small, dense hedge growing right in the middle of a tree, a nearly solid mass of needles some two to six feet wide. These Witch’s-Brooms materialize in maybe one in fifty-thousand Loblolly Pines (Pinus taeda), seemingly at random on the landscape. But, with how many Loblolly Pines we have in the South, that shakes out to about one every hundred acres, a half-dozen or so per square mile, or at least that’s the rate my gut indicates from my own anecdotal experiences. Thus they’re by no means a rare sight when looking at the landscape as a whole, but it’s by no means a guarantee you’ll find one on any given tract of land.
Witch’s-Brooms are not a discrete taxon of life we can define. Instead they’re a loose collection of botanical phenomena that lead to a similar end point, a common downstream symptom of a complex biochemical interaction within a host plant induced by an external influence. You can think of them like something between a tumor, a gall, and a wart. In many trees, Witch’s-Brooms are caused by an infection. Be it a fungus, virus, protozoan, insect, or arthropod, the most common offender varies greatly between different lineages of plants. But the common thread with most Witch’s-Brooms is that something has invaded the tissue of the plant, triggered an immune response, instigated biochemical warfare, and initiated a cascade of hormonal responses within the host plant which, ultimately, leads to inducing dense, congested growth of limbs and leaves. However, in Pines, sometimes the root cause is a little deeper. It’s the genes of the plant itself that mutate or are epigenetically suppressed by an outside stimulus, inducing a form of localized dwarfism in its crown. Over the decades, some ambitious and pioneering horticulturalists have even collected cuttings from Witch’s-Brooms and propagated them, resulting in true-to-type dwarf Pine trees!
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have a briny bicolor barnacle biter, the Sheepshead (Archosargus probatocephalus).
Sheepshead are a marine species of fish found along the East Coast of the United States. They live in habitats along the coast from the brackish marshes of our estuaries, to the briny back rivers of barrier islands, and down into offshore reefs and forgotten shipwrecks. Sheepshead are an easy fish to identify. Their body is marked with alternating heavy, vertical bands of white and black. They have a high-sloped forehead and grow to about the size and shape of a turkey platter, being twice as long as they are tall. Sheepshead average between a foot to foot-and-a-half in length at maturity, but old fish can readily reach double that size. Legally harvestable fish generally tip the scales at between three to fifteen pounds. If you’ve ever hooked one, you also know they have quite a set of pearly whites! Sheepshead have very human-like incisors, but behind that toothy grin is a mouthful of multiple rows of flat, grinding molars. Those teeth are the key to its success in a unique ecological niche here in the Lowcountry tidewaters.
Sheepshead make their living eating on stationary shellfish, mainly barnacles, oysters, mussels, clams, crabs, and just about any other crustacean they can sink their buck teeth into. As such, they are commonly found hanging around docks, marinas, piers, wharfs, reefs, wrecks, jetties, and any other hard structures encrusted in barnacles and oysters. To get their victuals they simply pluck barnacles from pilings, much the same way you’d bite corn off the cob. It’s a simple but effective strategy, especially now that man has filled the Lowcountry waterways with all manner of rip rap and timber for shellfish to stick to.
Conversely though, this habit makes Sheepshead a convenient target for recreational fishing as they hang out year-round right under the dock. Anglers with a South Carolina saltwater fishing license can harvest adult Sheepshead with a total length of at least fourteen inches (as of my writing this in 2025). Sheepshead can take some skill to properly hook, and a little more skill to properly fillet, but, if properly prepared, they’re an undoubtedly tasty fish once they make it to the table.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re appreciating the elegance of Elegant Blazing-Star (Liatris elegans).
Elegant Blazing-Star is found in the coastal plain of the Southeast and much of the South Carolina Lowcountry. It grows in full sun on high and dry sandy soils, including the sand ridges of the Sea Islands and pine savannas of the mainland. Here in the Lowcountry we have nine species of Blazing-Stars, three of those being reasonably common around Edisto: Dense Blazing-Star (L. spicata), Wand Blazing-Star (L. virgata), and Elegant Blazing-Star. The Blazing-Stars can be a difficult genus to tell apart due to their similarities. Thankfully, the elegance of today’s subject blazes like a star and makes it an unmistakable wildflower.
For most of the year, Elegant Blazing-Star is out of sight and out of mind. It’s a perennial bulb plant that retreats to its egg-sized corm in winter and returns in spring to bask in sun as a simple tuft of grass-like leaves. But come September through October, Elegant Blazing-Star blooms to produce a long, brush-like plume reaching an average of two to three foot in height but just two to three inches around. The flowers of Elegant Blazing-Star differ from our other Blazing-Stars in two main ways. Their petals are a pastel pink, bordering on white in some plants, as opposed to the more often hot-pink and magenta blossoms of its cousins. They also bear colorful bracts, special leaves that appear like petals in twisted tongues that flank the fringes of each flower-head, giving them a distinctly shaggy look. These two features lend them a unique color and form from all other Blazing-Stars. This pink and brushy flower stalk of Elegant Blazing-Star is ringed in hundreds of individual flower-heads, one every half-inch or so. Each flower-head is itself a compound flower of about a half-dozen individual flowers. This means each flower stalk could yield a thousand flowers! Those flowers provide sustenance for our native bees and butterflies, who help sustain the entire ecosystem as well as the bounty of local crops and gardens.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’ve got a dirt common, detritivorous, diminutive butterfly, the Red-banded Hairstreak (Calycopis cecrops).
The Red-banded Hairstreak is found throughout the Southern United States and all of South Carolina. It’s one of our most widespread butterflies in the Carolinas and present in low but consistent numbers almost anywhere you go in the Lowcountry. They’re especially common along forest edges, pond banks, roadsides, powerline clearings, and other brushy areas. The Red-banded Hairstreak is a member of the Gossamer-winged Butterflies, family Lycaenidae, and more narrowly the Hairstreak subfamily, Theclinae. Our classic Hairstreaks all share a similar suite of characteristics that set them apart from other butterflies. Our Red-banded Hairstreak checks all of those boxes.
Red-banded Hairstreaks are small, about the size of a dime. They perch upright with their wings closed and have a triangular in profile. They are slate-gray and iridescent blue above and a warm-gray below with white, black, orange, and blue markings. Their namesake field mark is a heavy red-orange band down the middle of their wings. No other butterfly in the Carolinas boasts the same red band. This band has a sharp black and white margin. Paralleling it is an orange leading edge to their forewing. At the outside bottom of their hindwing is a special defensive pattern, a blue spot flanked on either side by black and orange semicircles and with a double set of “tails” protruding just above. This collection of features mimics their face, at least in the eyes of predatory insects, and draws attention to it. Many Hairstreaks employ this same defense and will slowly rub their hindwings together when perched to better emphasize it. The corner of their hindwings is actually weaker than the rest of their wings, allowing the wing to break off if attacked and the butterfly to fly away scarred but unfettered.
Red-banded Hairstreaks are quite unique as caterpillars too. They’re actually, in a way, detritivores. Rather than feeding on fresh foliage, they feed on the fallen leaves of several shrubs. Female butterflies lay their eggs in the leaf litter beneath these bushes and their young’uns happily munch away on freshly fallen leaves. It’s an ingenious strategy, as it means their larvae are safe from many patrolling insect predators and food is available essentially year-round. Red-banded Hairstreaks primarily host on Wax-Myrtles (Morella spp.) and Winged Sumac (Rhus copallinum). Both of these shrubs are extremely common in the Lowcountry. Thus so is the Red-banded Hairstreak and it can be spotted anytime from March through October. The adult butterflies are particularly fond of small white and yellow flowers for nectar nourishment, particularly Goldenrods, Bonesets, Pepperbush, and members of the Carrot family.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we’ve got a shrubby symmetrical sun-loving sand ridge wildflower, Forked Bluecurls (Trichostema dichotomum).
Forked Bluecurls are found throughout the Atlantic Coastline of the United States and across all of South Carolina. It’s an annual plant, growing about knee to waist high, into a small upright bush. They grow best on dry, sandy soils and are common under pine savannas, on our Sea Island sand ridges, and along sunny upland roadsides. The stems of Forked Blucurls are covered in dense, fine hairs and often blush a burgundy-red when growing in full sun. Its leaves are light-green, small, simple, diamond-shaped, and oppositely arranged. That opposite arrangement gives the whole plant some visual symmetry and its “forked” first name. But it owes its surname to it flowers.
From the start of September through mid-October, Forked Bluecurls are in full bloom. The bush becomes emblazoned in a brilliant glow of purple-blue flowers. (“Blurple” being the technical term for this color.) Each flower is about a half-inch in size and held upright. The flowers have four short blue petals reaching left and right and a fifth long petal flowing forward and down with a blue tip and a white middle speckled by blue spots. Overtop the petals hangs a great curled arch of four anthers and one stigma. This flower is a carefully crafted apparatus for enforcing efficient pollination. When a bee approaches for a landing, that white patch on the lower petal beams in reflected ultraviolet light, like a runway beacon guiding its way. Once the bee touches down and leans in for nectar, those blue curls scrape against its back, depositing and extracting pollen. It’s a very effective system and, consequently, Forked Bluecurls are a prolific self-seeder. Despite being an annual, they’re a plant that can be relied upon, year after year, to return to any yard or native plant garden. Albeit, not always where originally intended!
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have the reigning regent of our ropey reptiles, the Eastern Kingsnake (Lampropeltis getula).
The Eastern Kingsnake ranges through the Mid-Atlantic States, from New Jersey through Florida, and in all of South Carolina. They’re found in a wide array of habitats but are most abundant in lands surrounding swamps and other waterbodies, where food is abundant. Unlike most of our southeastern snakes, Kingsnakes are primarily diurnal, rousing at daybreak and hunting throughout much of the day.
Kingsnakes are marked with a bold, bicolored pattern of jet-black divided by thin crosswise bands of ivory-white. These white bands interconnect with each other along their flanks to weave a net-like, reticulated pattern extending down over their belly. Their head is crowned with a smattering of white dots and dashes. Each snake has a unique head pattern, which can identify them like a name. They’re a striking, unmistakable, and handsome snake to behold. Kingsnakes are big and heavy to boot. They most often grow to three to four feet long but can exceed six feet in the wild. They’re strong constrictors and thus have a heavy, stout frame that hints at their muscled physique and big appetite.
Kingsnakes hunt a wide array of animals for food. Their diet is composed of mainly frogs, lizards, rodents, eggs, and snakes. Kingsnakes are renowned for their tolerance to viper venom, being essentially immune to the bites of Copperheads, Cottonmouths, and even Rattlesnakes. Kingsnakes lack any form of venom. Kingsnakes are harmless to humans, but not to their prey. Instead of toxic teeth they use their well-toned torso to constrict, strangle, and crush their prey before swallowing it whole. That includes venomous snakes nearly their same length! Vipers, despite being heavy and impressively large, are all bite and no might; they’re a glass cannon. Venom is their one and only defense and, if it fails, a viper is out of options. This is weakness of vipers is an ecological niche the Eastern Kingsnake has adapted to capitalize on, and the matchup couldn’t be worse for the viper. Like a black belt in jiu jitsu thrown into a bar fight, it takes a Kingsnake mere seconds to fold its opponent into an inescapable and incomprehensibly painful pretzel-like shape. Kingsnakes adhere to the age old adage of ‘might makes right’ and have been coronated the “King Snake” by early naturalists due to their uncontested position in the serpent pecking order.
But their reign is waning and their kingdom in tatters. Eastern Kingsnake populations have declined dramatically range-wide over the last few decades. The reasons behind this decline, despite coordinated research by multiple states, are worryingly unknown. The declines are even occuring in some of the most extensive and sheltered swaths of habitat on the landscape, implying the causes are subtle, diffuse, and inescapably chronic. Ubiquitous factors in the southeastern landscape like habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation, climatic instability, invasive species, pollution, and exotic diseases are assumed to all be playing a part in some way to the withering of Eastern Kingsnake populations. Kingsnakes, being a snake eater, are also particularly poised to be overexposed and sensitive to environmental conditions that impact snake populations. Kingsnakes are more intensively exposed to snake diseases and bio-accumulating pollutants, given they subsist on a diet of snakes. Their prey may be suffering with these ailments and pass those on to the hunter. You are what you eat after all. In parallel, if other snake populations decline, that means less food for the Kingsnakes and their populations must contract accordingly to remain stable. It’s a double whammy. However, this is all speculative conjecture on my part. The takeaway is that Eastern Kingsnakes are in a rough spot and they need our attention and care to ensure their continued prosperity and governance over the snakes of South Carolina.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the buoyant beacon of bottomland and pond, the American White Waterlily (Nymphaea odorata).
The American White Waterlily is found scattered about the Eastern United States and most of the South Carolina coastal plain. It’s a denizen of slow flowing freshwater pools, ponds, lakes, oxbows, beaver dams, and bottomlands where the water is clear, shallow yet deep, and not overly nutrient rich. It does best in the warm waters of the South where ponds aren’t too deep and never freeze solid. Waterlily is a submerged aquatic plant. It establishes in the mucky substrate of a pond bottom and propagates throughout it as scaly rhizome. This rhizome anchors roots down below to extract nutrients from the murky depths and sends stems up above to reach the sunlit surface. These ropey stems extend through several feet of water until they breach the surface with a single leaf.
Waterlily leaves unfurl into the classic “lily pads” we all know and love: dish-shaped with a shallow rim, a wedge missing from the back, and floating tight atop the surface of the water. These leaves have a hydrophobic coating that repels water, keeping them dry and atop the water, rather than trapped below. The leaves and stems are largely hollow and full of air, allowing them to float to the surface no matter how deep it gets. These hollow stems also act like snorkels that flow oxygen enriched air down to the spongey roots. The bottom of a pond is often devoid of all oxygen and so oxygen must be pump down to sustain their roots. The flower of American White Waterlily is an unmistakable sight shining in the swamp, a large and brilliant pearl-white whirl of petals cupped around a golden heart of anthers, floating atop or hovering just above the water amidst a glistening flotilla of green lily pads; a porcelain hand from the Lady of the Lake offering a gilded treasure from the murky mire.
This elongated growth form of the American White Waterlily allows the plant to get the best of both worlds. It can reap the full intensity of the sun’s rays and mine the nutrient rich mud at the bottom of the pond, all while having a steady flow of oxygen to its roots and an infinite supply of water. This stringy shape allows it to grow where few other plants can manage. As such, its root system can get quite extensive and Waterlily can quickly fill up a pond. Waterlily does best in ponds with low dissolved nutrient levels and consistent but light winter freezes, where its unique growth form is most advantageous and it doesn’t face excessive competition from duckweeds.
Waterlily provides food and habitat for a whole host of wildlife. Dragonflies enjoy perching upon the floating leaves. Frogs nestle between and upon the lily pads while fish lurk in their shade below. Beavers and Muskrats feed on the leaves and rhizomes of the plant. Ducks feed on its floating seeds and, by extension, help spread American White Waterlily seeds between ponds and swamps to start new populations.
The land trust accreditation program recognizes land conservation organizations that meet national quality standards for protecting important natural places and working lands forever. The Edisto Island Open Land Trust (EIOLT) is pleased to announce it is applying for our third renewal of accreditation in 2025. A public comment period is now open.
The Land Trust Accreditation Commission, an independent program of the Land Trust Alliance, conducts an extensive review of each applicant’s policies and programs. EIOLT is proud to have achieved our first accreditation in 2009, and we have continued to renew this level of organizational review and oversight ever since.
The Commission invites public input and accepts signed, written comments on pending applications. Comments must relate to how EIOLT complies with national quality standards. These standards address the ethical and technical operation of a land trust.
For the full list of standards see:
http://www.landtrustaccreditation.org/help-and-resources/indicator-practices
To learn more about the accreditation program and to submit a comment, visit:
www.landtrustaccreditation.org
Email your comment to: info@landtrustaccreditation.org
Comments may also be mailed to:
Land Trust Accreditation Commission
Attn: Public Comments
36 Phila Street
Suite 2
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
Comments on EIOLT’s application will be most useful by October 1st, 2025.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, it’s your local celebrity impersonator and the body-double of a beloved butterfly, the Viceroy (Limenitis archippus).
The Viceroy is a large butterfly found throughout the Eastern United States. The Viceroy’s wings are a burnt-orange crisscrossed with black veins, bordered with a heavy strip of black pinpricked by white, and with white spots at the wrist on the forewing. It’s a color pattern that is practically identical to that of the Monarch (Danaus plexippus). The only major visual differences between the two species are an extra black vein dividing the hindwing of the Viceroy, and the Monarch being a good third larger on average. Behaviorally, the two have a few telltale deviations. Monarchs rock and float more on the wing, whereas Viceroys often flutter in a straight line. Viceroys tend to stand atop vegetation while Monarchs dangle from it. But, at a glance when perched on a flower or gliding on the wing, the two look essentially indistinguishable. That’s by design. This is called Müllerian Mimicry. Both the Monarch and the Viceroy are toxic and foul-tasting to their predators. Thus they both benefit from bearing the same coat of arms and flashing the same warning signal to the world.
Unlike the Monarch, the Viceroy doesn’t migrate. They stay local to preferred habitats, generally wetlands, freshwater marshes, and river banks where Willows are plentiful. This makes their common name of “Viceroy”, a local ruler appointed by a wider ruling monarch, quite the apt name.
Viceroys, just like Monarchs, garner their toxicity as caterpillars by dining on their host plant. Here in the Lowcountry, Viceroys predominantly host on Willow trees (Salix spp.), eating their leaves and concentrating salycilic acid in their bodies. This is the same phytochemical that was studied and refined to create the medicine Aspirin. Viceroy caterpillars have a second defense mechanism as well and another form of mimicry. Their caterpillars have a lumpy greenish-brown body with a white saddle and two rugged black antennae. Their chrysalis has the same pattern as well, minus the antennae. Not only is this a fairly cryptic pattern that makes for good camouflage, but it also strongly resemble bird droppings. It might not be the most stylish appearance, but it certainly makes them an unappetizing target for avian predators.
