This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s our most common slithering friend, the Southern Black Racer (Coluber constrictor priapus).
The Southern Black Racer is the subspecies of Black Racer found here in the Lowcountry. The Black Racer is a spindly snake with a long thin body, small head, large eyes, and semi-gloss black coloration, often with a white chin as its sole accent. Juveniles are phosphate-gray with ruddy-brown blocky blotches down their back. Adults can reach five feet in length but are usually three to four feet long. Black Racers can be found practically anywhere in the state, especially along woodland edges. They’re probably our most commonly seen species of snake on Edisto Island and usually one of the first to stir in spring. Unlike many other snakes, Black Racers are diurnal and hunt during the day. They hunt a wide range of prey including mice, skinks, birds, frogs, and insects using their exceptional speed for a snake. They will also raid low-lying bird nests but are not as adept at climbing as the Rat Snake. Black Racers hunt by sight and don’t constrict their prey, so they generally only eat small critters that don’t put up much of a fight. Another interesting trait of Black Racers is their preference for fleeing over camouflage. Most snakes stay stock still when approached or will coil up in defense. Black Racers, however, turn tail and scurry away as fast as possible. You’ll generally spot one coiled up on a log sunbathing or surveying the forest floor with its head held half a foot above the ground. If you get too close or move abruptly, they’re gone in a flash. Yet, when cornered, Racers are feisty and will not hesitate to strike and bite anything that gets too close. Despite this, they’re nonvenomous and totally harmless to people and all but the smallest of poultry.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have a two-toned forest flower found in the freshwater floodplains of the Edisto, Indian Pink (Spigelia marilandica).
Along the banks of the South Edisto and in river valleys across the South, Indian Pink blooms each spring, peaking in May. Indian Pink is a low growing, perennial wildflower partial to moist, nutrient rich soils. It tolerates deep shade and spreads into dense clumps. Its leaves are a deep green, almost triangular in shape, and held opposite each other. Atop the foliage the flowers are held upright in one-sided spikes. Each five-petalled flower is trumpet-shaped with a crimson-red exterior and golden-yellow center. These flowers are pollinated by hummingbirds and provide a welcome flare of color to the deep understory of floodplain forests. Indian Pink is by no means a common plant but it is a native and one that is well adapted to garden conditions. It thrives in the moist, rich soils and dappled sun of a shaded garden bed and its attractive appearance, to both man and Hummingbird, ensure it will be an appreciated addition to any backyard botanical project.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re taking in the sight of the big, bold, lumbering Eastern Lubber Grasshopper (Romalea guttata).
Each spring, wellsprings of bubbling black masses flow forth from our swamps to scour the forests and freshwater marshes of the Lowcountry. Swarms of Eastern Lubber nymphs emerge from the soil to begin their lives on the surface. Lubber nymphs are about a half-inch long, wingless, and matte-black with lemon-yellow highlights along the fringes of their bodies. Nymphs first start appearing in spring, usually in April, and they will slowly mature throughout the year until they become full-sized adults by September. Adults are downright huge, often three and sometimes four inches in length with a stout, hefty body. Their coloration varies from sunflower-yellow with accents of black and scarlet to nearly solid black with highlights of dingy yellow and red. Adults have tiny, nonfunctional wings and must clumsily saunter and lumber their way over the ground to get anywhere. You’d think this would make them a sitting duck for predators but that bright yellow and red coloration signals their toxicity. Lubbers naturally assimilate plant toxins into their flesh throughout their lives while feeding on a broad selection of forbs and shrubs. They will eat many ornamentals plants that are well known to be toxic and which are avoided by most herbivores. This makes them particularly unpalatable as each Lubber is poisonous in a slightly different way from each of its neighbors. It all depends on what plants it ate growing up. Additionally, they are able to release a foamy chemical cocktail from their sides in order to poison any predator that ignores their warning colors and takes a bite. Other than that, they are harmless to people. Despite their lack of flight, they can climb as well as any grasshopper and their large size means they have a big appetite. They can defoliate shrubs and crops but thankfully they’re scarce enough in South Carolina to never be much of a threat to our farms. However they can wreak a bit of havoc down in Florida.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday is a drought tolerant bush with an edible fruit, the Chickasaw Plum (Prunus angustifolia).
The Chickasaw Plum is large shrub to small tree found throughout South Carolina. It has a broad bushy growth and will often spread clonally into a small thicket. It’s tolerant of drought and will grow well on most deep soils either in full sun or partial shade. Chickasaw Plum has simple, narrow leaves with a finely toothed margin and is deciduous. In early spring, before its leaves appear, Chickasaw Plum will burst out into a profusion of small white flowers. They bloom from March until May all the while abuzz with bee and other pollinator activity. Through the spring it will set fruit and over summer these will mature into small, inch-wide golden-yellow or peach-colored fruits. These fruits are edible raw or can be sweetened and canned to make jellies and preserves. However, they’ll often be gobbled up by Orioles, Mockingbirds, and Raccoons before you ever get a chance to pick them. The foliage of the Chickasaw Plum is also food for the larvae of several butterfly species, including the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, Viceroy, and Red-spotted Purple.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s a widespread, weird looking waterbird, the Double-crested Cormorant (Nannopterum auritum).
The Double-crested Cormorant is a bird unlike any of our others. At about the size of a small, svelte goose but with a straight posture and a heavy bill, there’s nothing else that has the same silhouette. The Anhinga is their closest relative in SC but that odd-duck is even less like anything else in our State. Our Cormorant can be found along our coast year round but is most numerous in winter. Adult birds are jet black across the body during the breeding season but their necks and wings take on a more drab ebony hue in the off season. Juvenile birds have a grungy pale-gray belly blending into an equally gungy gray-brown neck. All ages have orange skin at the base of the beak and an aquamarine colored eye. The beak is fairly long and heavy with a sharp hook at the tip of the upper jaw. Their namesake “double-crest” is hard to see except in the breeding plumage of adults who flaunt a pair of thick eyebrows which flare up into cowlicks along the side of the head. Cormorants have stout black legs and webbed feet and can often be spotted standing either straight-backed and statuesque or with wings out-stretched like a sunning vulture atop a pylon, dock, or jetty. Yet, equally as often they can be spotted paddling in a creek, lake, or pond with their neck and a bit of their back exposed on the surface. Cormorants are divers and they propel themselves beneath the water with powerful paddling in pursuit of fish. They have feathers that are partially permeable to water, allowing them to dive more efficiently but still retain some buoyancy and insulation. This is why Cormorants are often seen perched with wings outstretched, as they are drying their feathers. Here on Edisto Island, Double-crested Cormorant can be spotted foraging or perched by themselves but are more often seen in groups ranging from a few to several dozen birds. Elsewhere on colony breeding grounds, they can even be found in the thousands!
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the mighty Pine that dominated the pre-colonial Southeast, the Longleaf Pine (Pinus palustris).
The Longleaf Pine is an ecoregion defining tree which once reigned in the coastal plain from Alabama through North Carolina. However, by the mid-twentieth century its kingdom had been hacked to pieces and its numbers whittled to just a small fraction of what it once was. Longleaf Pine is a long-lived pine with a broad crown, stout arrow-straight trunk, and relatively dense wood for a pine. This pine has long emerald-green needles which burst forth from thick spiny stems into globes of dangling threads. Between these its huge cones perch in the breeze, spilling winged seeds to the forest floor. Beneath the ground it extends a deep twining bed of roots, anchoring it to the sandy soils it inhabits. Longleaf Pine at a glance resembles both the ubiquitous Loblolly Pine (P. taeda) and especially the more southern Slash Pine (P. elliottii) but when more closely examined is easily recognized by its needles of unmatched length, thick stems, and massive cones, which dwarf those of Loblolly.
The Longleaf Pine was once found extensively throughout the Lowcountry and Sandhills of South Carolina. Outside of river valleys and swamps, it was likely the dominant tree throughout the Lowcountry. Great savannahs stretched for miles on end with a sea of grasses and shrubs sheltered beneath a cloud-like canopy of Longleaf Pines. This open canopy and grassy forest floor were maintained by periodic fires, set naturally by lightning strikes or intentionally by Native Americans. Longleaf Pine was built for fire. Its bark is thick and corky and its stems finger-thick even at their narrowest, insulating it from the heat of even a summer blaze. Young trees grow like a grass on the ground, pumping their energy into building an expansive root system and storing energy so they can quickly shoot up a spindly trunk above the reach of the average fire. Their adaptation to fire also came hand-in-hand with their tolerance for drought, as dry soils were often more at risk for fire. Their deep and expansive root system allowed them find water and nutrients on even the deepest, driest, most barren sand hills of the midlands and a refined tolerance for heat allowed them to reduce their water uptake dramatically in periods of prolong drought. These traits coupled with their longer lifespan allowed them to eventually dominate the Southeast and convert the land to savannahs. As the sun raged, fires blazed, and droughts persisted they were the only canopy tree that could survive in many places. Beneath their boughs a rich and diverse fire kindled landscape developed full of endemic species of wildflowers, grasses, birds, reptiles, and insects that could survive nowhere else.
During the European colonization of the Southeast, these vast savannahs were logged for their timber and the more arable lands converted to farms and pastures. Some Longleaf Pine groves were continuously maintained for the production of pine resin, which was converted into naval stores. Quickly the Longleaf Pine forests became fragmented and great fires no longer carried for miles on end. However, many areas were still intentionally burned by European Americans to improve cattle forage and hunting. The pattern of fragmentation and conversion continued to worsen. In the 1930s, large scale fire suppression was widely implement across the country and the few intact Longleaf Pine ecosystems suffered greatly for it. For over fifty years, fire suppression wreaked havoc on these sensitive fire-dependent ecosystems. However, modern foresters and ecologists have re-embraced fire on the landscape and coordinated efforts by federal, state, and nonprofit entities are well on their way to returning Longleaf Pine back to a considerable portion of the southeastern landscape.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have our one and only flying mammals, the Micro-Bats of superfamily Vespertilionoidea.
I’ll be the first to tell you that, like most of us, I don’t know much of anything about our bats. Their nocturnal habits and frantic flying make for difficult observation and their supersonic calls go unheard by us ground dwellers. So today we’re going to stay very general and I’ll just be looking at our bats as a group. Bats are the only mammals capable of true flight. Their wings consist of a membranous skin stretched between their elongated fingers and down along their bodies. Bats are broadly divided into two groups, the Mega-Bats and the Micro-Bats. Mega-Bats, also called fruit bats, are found only in the old world and, as the name implies, can get quite large. Here in the United States, we only have Micro-Bats. Here in South Carolina, fourteen species of bat belonging to two families fill our night skies throughout the year. Some are quite rare and others quite common. Without having a bat in the hand or spying one out in the daylight, they’re near impossible to identify to species. Yet, much like birds, bats can be identified acoustically by their calls but, unlike birds, bat voices are ultrasonic and require specialized microphones to record and transform their calls into something audible to humans. Scientists have used this to great effect in studying bat populations across the world.
One common type of bat call is echolocation. Bats can emit high pitched clicks that, just like sonar, bounce off of obstacles and flying insects. They then listen for the echo of their call and discern its sonic signature to locate and hunt their prey all while avoiding collisions with buildings and trees. Additionally, contrary to the old saying bats have pretty good eyesight and can often be spotted catching insects in the dim twilight or beneath a full moon. During the day, bats return to a roost to sleep the day away. Depending on the species, our Bats would have naturally roosted in caves, hollow tree trunks, or out in the open on tree limbs. Nowadays, they can also be found under bridges, in tunnels or mines, abandoned barns, or even in attics. An easy way to create bat habitat is to build and install a bat box, which provides roosting habitat for certain species of bats.
Over winter, when food is scarce, bats will hibernate. Some solitary bats will simply hang out in the trees or even burrow into the leaf litter for insulation when freezing temperatures approach. The more social bat species retreat to more permanent roosting sites, called hibernacula, to hibernate in groups. Bats can enter a state called torpor where their metabolism is dramatically reduced and their body temperature plummets. This allows them to stay inactive for weeks or months at a time while barely using any energy. In the last decade, the social bats hibernating in the upstate have been hammered by a fungal disease called White-nose Syndrome that was recently introduced to the United States. This disease thrives in the cool moist atmosphere of Appalachian caves and, once it enters a hibernacula, can rapidly spread through the hibernating bats for years to come. So far in South Carolina, five of our fourteen species of Bat are known to be impacted by White-nose syndrome and some, like the Tricolored Bat, have seen incredible population declines. Thankfully, some of our Bat species appear to be resistant to the disease and those with more solitary lifestyles, or that don’t regularly hibernate, are not at great risk for contracting it in the first place. The USFWS, SCDNR, adjacent state wildlife agencies, and researchers are working frantically to understand the disease and prevent hibernacula from becoming infected where possible.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have a small evergreen tree with a bit of an identity crisis, the Carolina Laurel-Cherry (Prunus caroliniana).
Carolina Laurel-Cherry is found throughout the southeastern coastal plain. It usually grows between fifteen and thirty feet tall. It tolerates shade and is often found growing on forest edges, under larger trees, or in thickets. It has smooth-ish, dull-gray bark and a bushy growth habit. Its leaves are simple, elliptical evergreen with a deep green color often tinted with a purplish-red cast. In mid-March, Carolina Laurel-Cherry goes into full bloom, becoming festooned with plumes of pearl-white flowers. Pollinated flowers grow into a black, egg-shaped drupe which takes until the following winter to mature. Carolina Laurel-Cherry, or just Cherry-Laurel, was christened with its confusing common name due to its resemblance to the Bay Laurel. The Bay Laurel, from which we get Bay leaves for seasoning, is also a small shrubby tree with large, simple, evergreen leaves and a black egg-shaped fruit, but with clusters of butter-yellow flowers instead of spikes of white. So “Laurel-Cherry” is a pretty apt common name for a Cherry that looks like a Laurel but, when it gets corrupted into “Cherry-Laurel” then woe to the novice botanist who just wants to know whether it’s a Cherry or a Laurel. Thankfully, we don’t have many Laurels in the Lowcountry, so it’s not that difficult for the uninitiated to straighten out.
Carolina Laurel-Cherry is a great native alternative for a tall hedge or small ornamental shade tree. Its flowers provide bountiful nectar in spring, its leaves give good shade throughout summer, their evergreen nature means they don’t shed in fall, and in winter their fruits provide food to wintering songbirds, turkeys, and small mammals. Carolina Laurel-Cherry is indeed a Cherry, so it also has toxic foliage and is thoroughly deer resistant. Yet, it is also the host plant for several species of butterfly, including the Tiger Swallowtail. Carolina Laurel-Cherry has merits for both wildlife and landscapers throughout the year and can make a great addition to most Lowcountry landscape plans.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re beating around the bush in pursuit of two boisterous but bashful birds, the Marsh Wren (Cistothorus palustris) and the Sedge Wren (Cistothorus stellaris).
Bouncing between the blades of broomsedge and creeping cautiously below the cordgrass is where today’s two songbirds spend most of their time. Both of these Wrens are small, warm brown in color, active, and vocal when disturbed. They are scarcely seen but easily heard. With great agility they acrobatically ricochet through the vegetation of the marsh and seldom need to fly through the open air. Here they hunt for insects and arachnids, build their nests, and raise their young all while hidden from the world above.
The Sedge Wren is only found here in the Lowcountry during winter. They’re most often found in wet fallow fields, impoundment banks, and other thickly vegetated wetland fringes. Their belly blends from bone-white to straw-brown on the flanks. Their back, wings, and head are speckled in blacks, browns, and whites to create a cryptic, well camouflaged cloak. They have a straw-colored eyebrow above the eye and a bill that’s a fair bit shorter than the Marsh Wren. Sedge Wrens are rarely heard singing in South Carolina but their calls can easily be heard if you trespass into their territory. Sedge Wrens often spit a quick scolding two note call at intruders as they worm their way through the underbrush towards their target. Sometimes getting within just a few feet, fussing all the while, popping out of the grass for just a split second to perform reconnaissance, and then burrowing away never to be seen again.
The Marsh Wren is a year-round resident of our Lowcountry marshes, be they saltmarsh, brackish, or fresh, but is most common in the saltmarsh. They have a pale white belly, straw-yellow flanks, and a rusty back and shoulders which trail into a checkerboard of black and brown on the wings and tail. Their strong white eyebrow can often identify them at just a glance. A Marsh Wren is a hard thing to see but they’re not difficult to hear. Over the top of the saltmarsh, when the sea breeze slacks, many male Marsh Wrens can often be heard singing their metallic bubbling song of chattering notes. When a person wanders into their range, they may also close the distance to issue a series of angry “chek” scolds while craning their neck through cordgrass or cattail before timidly turning tail and retreating into the sea of green, still calling as they go.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s one of our smallest, earliest, and most commonplace wildflowers, the Violets of genus Viola.
The Violets are a well-known genus of wildflowers. Ornamental varieties of several species have been used in gardens for centuries. We have many native species common to the Lowcountry that can be found blooming each spring across almost every habitat. Our native Violets as a whole are low-growing plants with relatively large, simple leaves. They have a small, bilaterally symmetrical flower held above the plant on a narrow stalk and petals colored either white, violet, magenta, or some combination of those three. Our Violets all bloom during March but some may start in February and others go through April. A whole Violet plant may only be four inches around and two inches high. They’re perennials commonly found in woodland clearings, forest edges, and lawns where there is partial or full shade, blooming early in spring and spending the rest of the year resting in the shade.
Here in the Lowcountry we have eight common species. I’m just going to cover the four most common and recognizable in brief detail. The Common Violet (V. sororia) is in fact our most common violet. It has round to triangular leaves with a scalloped margin and a half-inch violet colored flower with faint white and purple striation or sometimes white with purple veins emerging from the center. It’s common in both forests and lawns. The Field Pansy (V. bicolor) is a small violet found in fields, pastures, and lawns with narrow, clustered leaves and a small pale-violet flower petals around a golden center bordered by white. The Prostrate Blue Violet (V. walteri) is found in shady forest floors and north-facing forest edges in sandy habitats. It tolerates deep shade well, has round blue-green leaves with prominent veins, and will even spread laterally through its stems on moist soils. Its flower is pale-purple in color with prominent royal-purple veins and a white center. Primrose-leaved Violet (V. primulifolia) is found in moist forests, along wetland edges, and in other damp locales. It has a scalloped, spade-shaped leaf and a small snow-white flower with a lime-green center and maroon veins creeping out onto the lower petals. Additionally, Sand Violet (V. affinis), Lance-leaved Violet (V. lanceolata), Wood Violet (V. palmata), and Southern Coastal Violet (V. septemloba) are also widespread in the Lowcountry but either not as commonly found or as easily identified.
