This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s an omnipresent weed that’s tough to get ID’d, Cudweed (Gamochaeta spp.).
Cudweed, or Everlasting, is a genus of small, innocuous, wind-dispersed wildflowers in the Aster family and they can be found growing on practically every acre of South Carolina. Cudweeds grow in lawns, along roadsides, on top of dirt piles, between field rows, in dry ditches, between stumps in clear cuts, and pretty much anywhere there’s open air and open ground. The genus itself is easy to pick out on the landscape but the individual species are tough to tell apart. We have about six species of Cudweed that can be found around the Sea Islands, three native and three introduced. The most common are Purple Cudweed (G. purpurea) and Narrowleaf Cudweed (G. calviceps), both native to the Southeast, and American Everlasting (G. americana) and Pennsylvania Cudweed (G. pensylvanica), both introduced to South Carolina. Purple Cudweed has wide, hairy, silvery leaves and purple tipped flowers. Narrowleaf Cudweed has narrow, hairy, silvery leaves and likes to grow laterally as a clump. American Everlasting has hairless leaves, platinum-white stems and leaf undersides, and also grows as a clump. Pennsylvania Cudweed has densely fuzzy, silvery stems and long, broad leaves with a fine fuzz.
Top Left: Purple Cudweed (Gamochaeta purpurea) | Top Right: Narrowleaf Cudweed (Gamochaeta calviceps)
Bottom Left: American Everlasting (Gamochaeta americana) | Bottom Right: Pennsylvania Cudweed (Gamochaeta pensylvanica)
All our Cudweeds share a few common characteristics. They have simple, spoon-shaped leaves with a cupped margin and are often covered in fine, silvery hairs. These hairs act as a sunscreen and lip balm of sorts, helping keep the plants cool and retain moisture. They grow these leaves into a tight, circular, basal rosette on the surface of the soil. Cudweeds are notable for being predominantly fall germinators, cropping up at the end of the growing season and growing all winter. In spring they send up a short, stiff flower stalk strung at the top with sparse rungs of flowers. The flowers for most Cudweed species are small, urn-shaped, petal-less, and practically devoid of any compelling colors or patterns, generally just washed in grays, browns, and greens. Once pollinated these flowers mature to release a tuft of wind-blown seeds. Most species are annuals, but some biennials. Cudweeds are a wall flower of the wildflowers, existing everywhere in plain sight, but rarely at the forefront of anyone’s mind. However, they do play an ecological role as a pioneer species. They’re one of the first plants to take root on new terrain and freshly turned earth, helping to stabilize the soil and make way for more perennial plants. They are also one of the host plants for the American Lady butterfly (Vanessa virginiensis). Their spiny, khaki and black striped caterpillars feed on Cudweed leaves and flowers, curling their stalks to build a silken tree house, where they can retreat during the day.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we welcome the turbulent return of our wetland building rodent, the North American Beaver (Castor canadensis).
Beavers can be found in freshwater rivers, creeks, marshes, and ponds across all of temperate North America. Beavers are fascinating mammals with a whole host of unique traits. To start, they’re a nocturnal, aquatic mammal. As an aquatic mammal, they of course have webbed feet for speeding up swimming. They also possess a flat, leathery tail that, like the bottom of a Jon Boat, keeps them level and stable as they putter across the shallow waters of their pond. Also, just like a Jon Boat planing into the surf, that flat tail can deliver a bone rattling slap to shake awake the unaware. Beavers mainly slap their tails to signal danger for their family, before retreating to the safety of underwater submerged tunnels. Beavers are North America’s largest rodent and they share their trademark oversized, ever-growing incisors, taken to the extreme. The front teeth of Beavers, and many other rodents, are a rusty orange in color. This color comes from iron rich compounds in their enamel, which greatly enhances its durability. Their teeth continuously grow and wear down throughout a Beaver’s life, self-sharpening against each other. Beavers need these bolstered buck-teeth to feed and house themselves. Their diet consists of tough vegetation, including cattail and water-lily roots and, as what they’re most well-known for, wood! However, Beavers don’t eat just any old wood. They eat the living wood of trees and shrubs; snacking on tree leaves, twigs, and small branches whole or peeling tree trunks like corn on the cob, their teeth chopping it up like a wood chipper. But, unlike every other animal, rather than climbing to the treetop to find a meal, they prefer to bring the treetops down to them. Beavers will gnaw on pondside trees to feed on their inner bark. If they decide they want seconds, they girdle the tree as they waddle and whittle their way around the trunk, chiseling out chunks like they’re sharpening the world’s largest pencil until, with a cacophonous crash and splash, they’ve felled the entire tree precisely into their pond. From the safety of the water, they’ll stock their underwater larders as they work through their windfall of leftovers.
A Beaver’s relationship with wood and wetlands doesn’t end there. Beavers are the textbook example of an ecosystem engineer, a species whose day-to-day life and specialized behaviors change the world around them to usher in environmental changes that create a novel new habitat, which other species then rely upon. Like the sight of a shaggy suburban lawn does to some folks, the sound of running water incenses and overwhelms a Beaver with the maddening urge to cut vegetation. At the whisper of a trickle Beavers fell trees, clip limbs, haul logs, dig holes, waddle and daub. The course of a river be dammed, come Hell or high water. Beavers build dams and those dams staunch the flow of water to create Beaver ponds. Beaver ponds grow marshes, willows, gums, and alders as they expand their banks into the surrounding floodplains, all food for the Beavers. These ponds create a uniquely stable but complex wetland ecosystem that supports hundreds of other species, whether they have fins, fur, feathers, or flowers. Within the pond, Beavers will build their lodge, a cozy hollow hovel made of mounded mud and sticks, with underwater entrances, where they can rest and raise their young. Beavers live in family colonies of about a half-dozen, comprised of the parents and both this year’s and last year’s offspring.
The Beaver once ranged across almost the entire continental United States, bounded by the scorching sand of the Mexican desert to the south and the frozen permafrost of the of the Canadian tundra to the north. From the earliest days of the Colonial Era, Beavers were fiercely hunted and trapped for their valuable fur and musk glands, used in men’s clothing and women’s perfumes respectively. Their populations saw dramatic declines from unchecked and exploitative hunting pressure, extirpating them from many river systems entirely. However, hunting regulations and a change in hunter and trapper ethics, brought on by the conservation movement of the early 1900s, allowed the Beaver to rebound decisively. Now, in the early 2000s, they’ve begun to return to even Edisto Island, likely one of the first places in North America to have eradicated the Beaver from its bounds, some 300 years ago. In the modern world, Beavers have returned home, restoring stability and biodiversity to natural wetland ecosystems across the nation. However, these ecosystem engineers have found themselves at odds with human engineers. To a Beaver, a culvert or trunk is not a perfectly calibrated piece of hydrological infrastructure. It’s a dam hole. Nothing that cramming a truckload of logs and a few yards of mud into can’t fix. This leads to sudden flooding, as intended by the Beavers but not the civil engineers. Beavers also dig underwater tunnels into the banks of berms and dikes, which weaken them out of sight and risk a sudden breach if overlooked. Their lignivorous, wood-eating ways also don’t curry them any favor with foresters, orchard owners, and landscapers, as they can girdle a plot of prized, decades old trees in a mere night. Here on the Sea Islands, where freshwater is as scarce as elevation, Beavers are more of an annoyance than an imminent threat undermining our infrastructure. In the Lowcountry, they’re kept in check by Alligators for the most part but have nonetheless taken a shine to our swamps, rice fields, and farm ponds where, on occasion, they’ll plug a pipe or cork a culvert if they hear that siren’s song ringing of running water.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we’re immersing ourselves in a towering grass of our brackish marshes, Big Cordgrass (Sporobolus cynosuroides).
In the waning stillness of the morning, brightness breaks the ice of dawn into day. Khaki Cordgrass calmly crackles, bathed by the winter’s smoldering sun. That soft sizzling is soon silenced by the bowing, blowing breeze upon the brackish bottom. That tranquil tinging muted in a moment by reeds ringing across the rice field, wetland wind chimes in wintertime. Big Cordgrass is a big deal in the brackish tidelands of the Sea Islands. It’s a tall reedy grass growing well over head high with a narrow and circular stem, sparse emerald-green leaves, and an airy, bottlebrush-like inflorescence of upward facing spikes of seeds. In winter, this perennial colony forming plant dies back to its roots but its dried, khaki-tan stems remain preserved and upright for months. When baked in the first light of morning, these dried reeds quietly crackle and pop as the chill of night is warmed from their bones, producing a subtle rain-like tone when its stems shift and strain from thermal expansion, like joints popping after a long night’s rest. Like its salty sibling Smooth Cordgrass (S. alterniflorus), Big Cordgrass is an ecological mainstay in its narrow wetland niche. Big Cordgrass can be found growing in brackish tidal marshes or on the margins, bluffs, and berms surrounding saltwater marshes. Big Cordgrass can tolerate a fair degree of salt but not the pickling brine of straight seawater. It does best on the frontline of the brackish tidal zone, where salt intrusion is regular but not daily. There it can outcompete the more obligate halophytes like Black Needlerush and Smooth Cordgrass but is itself not overtaken by Cutgrass and Cattails. It also carves out a home on tidal creek margins and headwaters, where the flow of freshwater from the uplands are enough to wash the soil free from some of the salt saturation of the tides. Big Cordgrass is an important foundational species in brackish marsh habitats. It provides a bounty of both seed and structure to a variety of hard to see marshland birds, to include American and Least Bitterns, King and Eastern Black Rails, and Seaside and Saltmarsh Sparrows.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s a quintessential dabbling duck of the Lowcountry, the Blue-winged Teal (Spatula discors).
The male Blue-winged Teal is an unmistakable duck. In flight they present an entire skyline on a canvas of feathers. That flying homage to the horizon inset upon the horizon itself. A gleaming white crescent moon hangs upon his face, reflecting the sun’s rays down to the landscape of his wings. On those wings emerald field rows rise and sparkle with morning dew in a ridge beneath a wide and weary graying blue sky, obscured only slightly by a raft of opaque white clouds blowing in the distance to beyond our view. This impressive and evocative tri-colored speculum of the male Blue-winged Teal is mirrored from left to right on either wing and also encored by its cousin, the Northern Shoveler (S. clypeata). The Shoveler paints the same scene in darker tones, shadowed from the light of that moon since waned. In repose upon the water the male Blue-winged Teal is impossible to mistake, that blinding crescent glares out from a face of gunmetal-gray and is reflected back at the water’s surface, as a white block between the flank and the rump. Between these two pallid pearls is a leopard print plumage of small black spots on a coat of golden-brown. Conversely the female Blue-winged Teal is quite the utilitarian, with a camouflaged wardrobe of khaki and walnut. Her most defining feature at rest is a pale patch at the bill base and her khaki eyeliner. In flight her sky-blue shoulder is as present as ever but the green and white more reserved and reduced. In comparison to our other ducks, the Blue-winged teal is one of the smallest and with a dark gray bill that seems a bit oversized. Their call is a series of short whistling wheezes or hoarse barking quacks.
Blue-winged Teal are dabbling ducks, which means they tip forward, tail to the sky and head submerged, to feed on aquatic vegetation and to snap up seeds, insects, and crustaceans beneath the water. They are winter migrants to South Carolina but some like to take an extended vacation, arriving early in fall and staying until spring. In the Lowcountry, they prefer freshwater and brackish marshes. They’re a regular sight gathered in small flocks upon the waters of rice fields, impoundments, shallow ponds, and betwixt the weedy margins of lakes. Amongst the Lowcountry’s dabbling ducks, to me none is more consistent and reliable than the Blue-winged Teal. It’s not as awe-inspiringly abundant as the Gadwall nor as sought after as the Mallard. It’s not as weird as the Wigeon, as petite as the Green-winged Teal, as unique as the Shoveler, nor as striking in flight as the Pintail. But the Blue-winged Teal seems to me the most omnipresent. Yet, never are they so common to be boring nor so abundant to be truly dependable. A welcome sight anywhere.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s Edisto’s forgotten evergreen, Slash Pine (Pinus elliottii).
Slash Pine is a pine just like any other. Tall and stock straight, needle laden, and cone bearing. In fact, its appearance and its life history fall somewhere between the two defining pines of the Southeast, Longleaf Pine (P. palustris) and Loblolly Pine (P. taeda). Slash Pine’s needles are long, but not too long. Its cones are big, but not that big. It likes sandy, well-drained soils but not those especially dry nor exceedingly wet. Yet, it nonetheless has its standout features. Although its needle length bridges the gap between Loblolly and Longleaf, it’s missing some of the traits that define either. Its needles bow, but don’t bend all the way over like a Longleaf. Its twigs are thin like a Loblolly but lack its torch-like profusion of needles. But, the easiest way to pick it out of a line up is by its cones. Slash Pine cones glisten with burnished brown, as handsome au naturale as any sanded and stained cherry wood or shellacked red oak could hope to get. Another simple test to tell it from the rest is the squeeze test. A Slash Pine’s cone can be safely squeezed in the bare hand as hard as you can muster. Try that with a Loblolly and you’ll be quickly cursing and bleeding. Conversely for a proper Lowcountry Longleaf Pine cone, unless you can palm a basketball, you won’t even be able to try! Beyond these subtle physical differences, the native range and habitat for Slash Pine also differs in similarly innocuous ways. Yet, you may be surprised to learn that Slash Pine is really our native Sea Island pine. Slash Pine is our most salt tolerant pine. It finds itself just as at home in the old field windrows as it does along our tidal creek backwaters, high hammock island thickets, and barrier island beachfronts. Although it enjoys well-drained sandy soils, it also tolerates tidal flooding and saturated water tables. Unlike Longleaf Pine, Slash Pine is not an ecosystem defining tree. It’s more akin to Loblolly Pine in the Lowcountry in that its nature is to blend into the mosaic of our natal forests. Slash Pine carves its place in the jungle of our Sea Island maritime forests and Loblolly Pine cuts its rut in the floodplain underlying our bottomland forests. Slash Pine is also well adapted to fire and benefits from frequent prescribed burning more than Loblolly Pine. Slash Pine has value as timber and, for a pine, has exceptionally strong wood, with characteristics very similar to Longleaf Pine. On Edisto Island, Slash Pine is scarcely mentioned and just as scarcely seen but, don’t let that deceive you, it’s the rightful heir to the pine lands of the Island. Our agricultural heritage runs deep on Edisto Island. The breadth and depth of our Island’s history with cultivation is so thorough as to have purged the once omnipresent Slash Pine from much of Edisto Island. When truck cropping began to give way to forestry in the late 1990s, it was the improved Loblolly Pines from off that filled the void. Leaving little room for Slash Pine to return. Nowadays, Slash Pine is relegated to the margins of a few of our creeks and the backwoods of the beaches. A once extensive evergreen deposed from its throne.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have our gregarious and gorgeous gangs of Common Grackle (Quiscalus quiscula).
Common Grackles are a large species of Blackbird, family Icteridae, common throughout the Eastern United States that can be found year-round in South Carolina. However, they are somewhat migratory and most numerous around Edisto Island in winter. Grackles travel in flocks, usually composed of a dozen up to a hundred or more birds. They are generalists and a common site perched in forest canopies, marching across suburban lawns, or foraging in marshes, fields, and swamps. Common Grackles will eat just about anything but their diet mostly subsists of insects, seeds, fruits, and nuts.
Grackles have long tails, pastel-yellow eyes, and dark bills and feet. Male Grackles are a deep, iridescent purple-black that shimmers like fire-blued steel when basked in the sun’s rays, beams of blue, rose-gold, aquamarine, brass, and violet all shine brilliantly out of their feathers. Females are similarly colored but muted in their iridescence. Females also have a shorter tail than males without the flared “paddle” towards the tip. Our Lowcountry birds are usually of the purple form, who have darker colors overall and stronger purples and blues throughout their plumage. Common Grackles are one of those birds you practically always hear before you see. Flocks make an almost non-stop ruckus of squawks, screeches, and chatters as they fly, forage, and roost. These Grackles have a number of characteristic calls, from the typical Blackbird “chack” (or more aptly “grack” in this case), to resonant squeaky chattering, to the pained, squeaky shriek of the male’s song, which is just plain hard to put into words. When a male Common Grackle is fixing to sing, he’ll stop what he’s doing, fluff all the feathers on his body, and puff out his wings a bit right before letting loose a single cry. He’ll then go right back to what he was doing until, fifteen seconds or so later, like a bird possessed, he’ll do the whole song and dance again.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have the blocker of driveways, scourge of the fence-row, and widow-maker in waiting, the Water Oak (Quercus nigra).
Water Oak is a medium-large oak in the red oak group with a rounded growth form vaguely similar to a Live Oak, but taller and with more vertically oriented branches. Water Oak has fairly smooth, gray bark with pale horizontal bands when young and shallow vertical fissures, bottomed by a rusty seam, which develop with age. Water Oak has emerald green leaves with an unmistakable three-lobed spatula-shape, although leaves at branch tips can be variable in shape. Water Oak can live on a wide range of soils but is most at home on wet soils in floodplains, pond edges, and the margins of swamps. It likes a high water table and clay soils but can grow well on sandier upland soils when it doesn’t have to compete in the forest canopy. It has small, spherical acorns and is a fairly reliable producer for an oak. Water Oak is a contender for the most widespread and prolific oak species across all of South Carolina. Unlike most of our oaks it is a fast growing, short-lived species that is adapted for life in a young forest, recolonizing disturbed forest land.
Water Oak has a foul reputation in the Lowcountry. They are a short-lived, scraggly, disease prone species of oak. They drop a lot of limbs. They don’t have fall colors. They drop their leaves sporadically and piecemeal throughout winter. Most stems aren’t worth much as timber. But, worst of all, they have a propensity for sudden structural collapse. Water Oak is not particularly deep rooted, its wood is not very rot resistant, it’s prone to disease, and they can crop up just about anywhere. These all factor in to why it is so prone to uproot, drop limbs, shear a trunk, or suddenly just up and die, and also regularly annoy someone in the process. Ask anyone who owns or manages property around Edisto and they’ll have a Water Oak they can complain about! A small upside to the sickly nature of Water Oaks is that their insect infested wood and canopies provide excellent foraging habitat for woodpeckers and warblers, so they’re great trees to bird watch under. Around Edisto Island we have another, even more common, oak that is often confounded with Water Oak. This other oak is Darlington Oak (Q. hemisphaerica) and it grows in a very different habitat. Darlington Oak occupies our deep, sandy soils and maritime forests on the Sea Islands. It is more drought and salt tolerant than Water Oak, is generally hardier, grows taller and straighter, and has simple elliptical-shaped leaves. Darlington Oaks also have a propensity for falling apart and dropping dead. So, they get saddled with a lot Water Oak’s baggage, but it wasn’t always that way. Darlington Oaks are susceptible to a new strain of Basal Canker disease (Phytophthora cinnamomi) that has been quietly spreading through the Southeast over recent decades. This disease attacks and weakens stressed oaks, young and old, and either causes sudden death or weakens the tree enough to induce heart-rot. My point here is to highlight that not all “water oaks” are Water Oaks and the ones that aren’t don’t deserve all the flak the real Water Oaks get. They’re just having a rough go of it at the moment!
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, it’s a trio of our cold weather sea-ducks, the Scoters of genus Melanitta.
Scoters are large sea-ducks that can be spotted buoyed off our coastline in winter. We have three species found all up the Eastern Seaboard, the Black Scoter (M. americana), Surf Scoter (M. perspicillata), and White-winged Scoter (M. deglandi). All three of our Scoters are large, dark-colored ducks. Their genus, Melanitta, literally translates to “black duck”. Fittingly, males of all three species are jet-black and females all a dark ebony-brown. As sea-ducks they, predictably, live out at sea. In South Carolina, they’re found almost exclusively floating on saltwater. Scoters are most prevalent and easy to see in the surf along our beaches, especially near river inlets, jetties, and groins. Their diet here in the Lowcountry is almost entirely shellfish, specifically mussels, clams, and other bivalves. Scoters dive underwater to pluck small clams out of the sand, wrench mussels off of rocks, and break off small oysters off of pylons. Scoters swallow shellfish whole and grind them to dust in their powerful gizzard.
Black Scoters are by far our most common Scoter species in the Lowcountry. Males are jet-black from tail to nose, except for a prominent tangerine-orange knob on top of their bill. Female Black Scoters are a dark grayish-brown throughout, except for pale cheeks that extend from below the eye and the base of their bill down to the nape of their neck. Black Scoters also have an obvious forehead, which the other two species tend to lack.
Surf Scoters are the next most common Scoter around Edisto Island. Males are ink-black across the body accented by a white nape, white forehead, white eyes, and a multicolored schnoz that is something to behold! Their bill runs straight back to the top of their head and is patterned with red, orange, and white surrounding a large black spot towards the base of the bill. Female Surf Scoters are a dark ebony-brown in color with a large, triangular bill and two pale spots on the face, one spot at the base of the bill and one back behind the eye.
White-winged Scoters are our hardest scoter to find but the easiest to identify on the wing. Males are mainly black but have walnut-brown flanks and a snow-white speculum in the middle of their wing. They also sport white eyes, white eye-bags, and their own impressive schnoz, this one with a pink tip and a prominent black knob on top but while still retaining the semblance of a forehead. Female White-winged Scoters are very similar in appearance to female Surf Scoters. However, they have that prominent white wing patch and their feathers of their face extend down the bill to their nares, AKA nostrils. This means the pale spot at the base of their bill also extends further forward on the face towards the nares, whereas on the Surf Scoter it ends sharply at the bill.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the banner of the beach, Sea-Oats (Uniola paniculata).
Sea-Oats are a perennial species of grass native to the Atlantic Seaboard from the Chesapeake Bay south. It grows in clonal colonies with clumping bunches of blades arching up below knee-height. Those blades take on a bluish hue across its calico collage of young yellow-green and aged khaki-tan leaves. In winter it withers to a monotone khaki cast of foliage. But, its most defining feature is its flowers and fruits. The flower stalks of Sea-Oats reach high above the dunes, up to some seven feet in height. A singular stem crowned in a panicle of pendulous flattened flowers fluttering to and fro. A shape that inspires comparison to fertile fields of cultivated Oats (Avena sativa). These are wind-pollinated grass flowers, so showy is not their goal, but pleasing aesthetics emerged nonetheless. As the winds whip and blow along the shore, it pollinates these flowers before finally flinging their seeds sideways along the sands.
Sea-Oats live their lives on the narrowest of margins, just that thin strip of sand that constitutes our beach dune ecosystem. Beach dunes are one of the harshest environments for a plant that can be found in South Carolina. Beach sand retains next to no water and is nearly devoid of certain necessary nutrients. Simultaneously, the near unceasing sea breeze and singeing salt spray will wring every drop of moisture from most any plant. Yet, Sea-Oats are among the select few that can not only tolerate, but thrive in this hostile environment. Beyond even that, it’s what builds and bolsters these dunes to begin with. Sea-Oats are what we call an ecosystem engineer. Barrier island ecosystems, and in particular the beach dune systems, are contenders for having the most dynamic conditions of any natural environment. From year to year islands vanish and appear, beaches stretch and shrink, the water line ebbs and flows, inlets open and close, and dunes roll and fold atop themselves like a mirror of the surf in slow motion. Sea-Oats bring a semblance of stability to the chaos of the coast. Their expansive, fibrous roots grow out and down while their leaves grow upward and interlocking to raise a natural series of sand fences that intercept windblown sand and trap it beneath their net-like root system. This serves to build the dunes up over time and then anchors their shifting sands in place. This allows the dunes to resist erosion from the persistent slashing of wind and lapping of tides as well as the sudden smothering of a storm surge. This stability allows Sea-Oats to persist from year to year and lets them pour the semblance of a foundation for an ecosystem to build up around them.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s an odd pair of not-quite-ducks, the Pied-billed Grebe (Podilymbus podiceps) and the Horned Grebe (Podiceps auritus).
A light fog folds and wraps around a pond, a wispy woolen blanket on a chilly winter morning. With the stab of first light the fog recoils and rolls aside to let the waters greet the day, revealing a small and curious shape paddling away. A Grebe taking its leave. Here on Edisto Island we welcome two species of Grebe each winter, the Pied-billed Grebe and the Horned Grebe. Both are small water-birds that stand out from all the rest. Grebes sit lower in the water than most, with short pointed bills, a head that seems a little small, and a neck that looks just a little too long. Grebes also have paddle-like feet, with each toe being flattened, which propel them across the water as they cruise or when getting a running start to take flight. They inhabit open water habitats and hunt by diving underwater to pursue prey. Their diet is primarily crustaceans, small fish, aquatic insects, and mollusks. Our two Grebes occupy different ecological niches and are starkly different in appearance.
Pied-billed Grebes in winter are a uniform walnut-brown only accented by a more umbral shaded mantle and a white rear-end. Their beady eye is set in a thin, pale ring and their short but robust bone-colored bill is split in twain by a dark bar. Our Pied-billed Grebe is a year-round resident, although far more numerous on Edisto in winter. When wearing their summer best, they don’t look all too different, but their bill bleaches to a pearl white and is starkly split by an oil-black band. This bicolored bill gives them the “pied” in their common name, which simply means black and white. A Pied-billed Grebe’s shape is more compact than other Grebes and their drab plumage can make them hard to discern from other floating fowl at a glance, but their low buoyancy and small head will shortly let you resolve them. Pied-billed Grebes are partial to calm and shallow ponds, lakeshores, and brackish impoundments. They can be found all across the state in these quiet water bodies. They also have a curious habit of sometimes sinking, rather than diving, especially when they’d rather not be seen.
The Horned Grebe in winter is a bicolor blend of snow-white below and shale gray above. Their neck is longer and their bill more knife-like than the Pied-billed Grebe. Yet this drab appearance is shattered by a blatant and brilliant ruby-red eye. In their summer breeding plumage, which we almost never see in the Lowcountry, these drab tones are eschewed for rich cinnamon, deep ebony, golden khaki, and ink-stained black. Horned Grebes are most easily spotted on Edisto bobbing in the surf along our beaches or riding the tides in our river inlets. They brave far more harrowing habitats and salty shores than the pond loving Pied-billed. Horned Grebes have also taken a liking to manmade lake reservoirs in the upstate, where both our Grebes can now sometimes be seen cohabitating.
