This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the balaclava’d bard of the bottomland, the Hooded Warbler (Setophaga citrina).
Amidst the droning drill of cicadas and bloodthirsty buzzing of mosquitos, a high and piercing warble hacks through the stagnant atmosphere of the floodplain forest. A Hooded Warbler sings his heart out as he darts and dashes from ash to elm, down grape to cane, taking but a moment at you to crane, a curious intruder in his floodplain domain. It’s always a wondrous sight in the Lowcountry spring when a male Hooded Warbler graces you with his presence. He’s a songbird who masks his face in a hood of black and drapes his back in olive, as if an extension of the green-washed shadows below the forest where he lurks. Yet, in stark contrast, down his belly and through opening in his hood beams the radiant glow of golden yellow, like a sunbeam crashing onto the forest floor. It’s an experience that arrests thought and directs attention squarely to it.
Hooded Warblers are found widely within the Southeast and all across South Carolina from spring to fall. They inhabit mature hardwood forests and river valleys. Here in the Lowcountry and Sea Islands, they are particularly fond of river floodplains and swamp margins where they forage within the dense and shaded tangle of understory plants. Hooded Warblers subsist on a diet of insects, spiders, and other arthropods, which they glean from leaves and snatch from the air. Males and females are similar in appearance, being olive-green above and sunflower-yellow below. However, males don a signature black hood across their cap and beard, making him an unmistakable sight. Both sexes also have a black bill, pink legs, and white on their outer three tail feathers. Hooded Warblers spend their winters in the tropics of Central America and the Caribbean before returning to South Carolina in spring to nest. In the Lowcountry, males start staking out their nesting territories in early April. They do so through the power of music. Birdsong, especially with Warblers, is employed as both a fence and a billboard. Each male sings to advertise where he, himself, is to the ladies and to his rivals. He also listens to where his rivals are. If it sounds like the neighbors are encroaching on his turf, he’ll head that way to give them an earful. Although more creative mnemonics exist, in my opinion the male’s song is most accurately described as “weeta-weeta-weet-Tee-o.” It’s a clear song which alternates up and down, before rising sharply in volume and pitch for its penultimate note, then trailing away at the end.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we’re on the lookout for our local Clover, Carolina Clover (Trifolium carolinianum).
Carolina Clover is native to the southeastern United States and found around the coastal plain of South Carolina. In the Palmetto State, one can find over a dozen species of Clover, but only two of those are native. Of those two native species, only Carolina Clover is found on Edisto Island. Unlike its showy exotic cousins, such as Crimson Clover (T. incarnatum) and Arrowleaf Clover (T. vesiculosum), Carolina Clover flies completely under the radar, out of sight and out of mind. It’s a hard plant to spot, even when you know what to look for. Rather than bearing proudly colorful flower spikes and lushly dense, verdant green leaves, Carolina Clover hides amongst its surroundings. Its leaves are trifoliate, with three leaflets, like all our other Clovers, but its leaves are small, muted in color, and sparsely found between its weedy neighbors. Its flowers are tiny and delicate with pink-washed and white petals held limply in a drooping ball of rosy-red flower stalks, down-facing and hidden from sight. Their flowers peak in mid-spring, from April into May, and are visited by myriad native pollinators.
Carolina Clover is one of many of our native legumes that are supremely adapted to sand barrens. It can tolerate acidic and nutrient poor soils, drought, and fire. It also has many wildlife benefits, being a desirable browse to deer and rabbits, a pollinator plant sought after by bumblebees, and a host plant for several of our smaller butterfly species. Clovers, even some of the exotic ones like White Clover (T. repens), also have great value in replacing turf-grass in alternative lawns. As they are legumes, Clovers can fix nitrogen from the air. When they shed old leaves or are mowed, the nitrogen in their leaves is drawn into the earth where it supports healthy soil and the growth of its neighboring plants. So, unlike turf-grasses, Clovers and other native legumes can build soil without fertilizer, all while supporting native wildlife and pollinators. So consider letting Carolina Clover, and our other native legumes, have a home around your home!
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the homecoming for an odd and ephemeral butterfly, the Yucca Giant-Skipper (Megathymus yuccae).
The Yucca Giant-Skipper is found from California to North Carolina, with a scattered distribution here in South Carolina, and is a fairly rare butterfly across its range. They tend to inhabit dry, open, sandy habitats, and only those where Yuccas thrive. These include the Longleaf Pine savannas of the Sandhills, the maritime fringes of the Sea Islands, and the beach dunes of our barrier islands.
The Giant-Skippers are South Carolina’s largest members of the Skipper butterflies, family Hesperidae. Like most Skippers, they have compact triangular wings and a torpedo-shaped body. Unlike most Skippers, they’re giant! In appearance, our Yucca Giant-Skipper is a rich ebony-brown across the body and wings. Those wings are accented by spots of silver and golden-tan, with tan fringes above and silver frosting below that bleeds down onto the flanks of the body. In profile, they look like no other butterfly. I liken them to a thumb with wings.
The Yucca Giant-Skipper is big for a Skipper and dense for a butterfly. By weight, they’re likely our heaviest butterfly species, despite having half the wingspan of our larger Swallowtails. This barrel-chested bug needs that mass for two things: power and fuel. The Yucca Giant-Skipper is the drag racer of the butterfly world. They’re fast, very fast; all gas, no brakes. From firsthand experience, I can tell you they effortlessly cruise at about 30mph as their baseline speed. There are even anecdotal accounts of Giant-Skippers breaking 60mph! Their speed is thanks to their body size, which allows them to cram in the muscle mass to fly faster than many songbirds. To maintain that speed, they have to burn the body fat they carry around as fuel, but there’s no topping off their tank. Yucca Giant-Skippers, as adult butterflies, don’t drink nectar from flowers. They don’t eat anything at all. Once one emerges from its chrysalis, its only goal is to reproduce and start the next generation. Yucca Giant-Skippers only fly in one brood each year, which emerges in mid-April. Adults are often only active in the morning, resting all afternoon while hidden in the vegetation. Their scarcity, brief flight-time, and speed all make them a very hard butterfly to lay eyes on.
Female Yucca Giant-Skippers lay eggs on, predictably, the leaves of Yucca plants. Eggs are an eighth-of-an-inch wide and pale-green fading to khaki, with a small dark dot at the top. Once hatched, the young caterpillar crawls to the tip on top of a Yucca blade, where it weaves a parasol of silk between the leaf edges and hides within. There it feeds on the leaf tissue, turning the blade tip brown. Once it reaches about an inch in length, the walnut-brown worm wriggles its way to the bud of the Yucca, where it begins to bore a hole straight down into the stem and root of the plant. Here the caterpillar will feed on the starchy wood of the Yucca to pack on the pounds. The caterpillar maintains a hole back at the top of the stem. Around this exit it slowly builds a tubular “tent” out of waste and silk, inside of which it will eventually undergo metamorphosis and emerge a chubby cherubic speed-demon the following spring.
The Yucca Giant Skipper was historically relatively abundant around Charleston, but they practically vanished some decades ago. Then, out of the blue in 2022, they returned home! It’s assumed there was a recent bumper crop of Yucca Giant-Skippers somewhere inland, and those over-crowded butterflies headed straight to the beach for their first and only spring break. Since then, their populations have been strong on the Sea Islands, to include Edisto Beach. It’s almost like they never even left.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have an uncommon member of the maritime forest understory, Wild Olive, or Devilwood (Catrema americana).
Wild Olive is found throughout the coastal plain of the Southeast and all of the South Carolina Lowcountry. It is not a rare plant but scarcely seen in the modern landscape. It can grow on a wild range of soil conditions but seems to do best on the fertile, sandy soils of the Sea Islands and the coastal plain sand ridges. It is especially well adapted to the true maritime forests of our barrier islands. Devilwood is thoroughly an understory plant, thriving in the dappled light filtering through a forest canopy. It grows as a tall shrub, usually ten to twenty feet high, with multiple stems and twisted trunks. Devilwood purportedly gets its common name from its dense wood, slow-grown and twisted, as anyone who attempts to carve it, or even just split it for firewood, is in for a devil of a time! Wild Olive is evergreen and, like other understory evergreens, has dark, inky-green leaves that are simple, elliptical in shape, waxy, and leathery. As a member of the Olive family, Oleaceae, its leaves are oppositely arranged and, like most Olives, it blooms with clusters of small, fragrant, cream-white flowers. These spring flowers are highly attractive to many of our native pollinators. Pollinated flowers mature into dark-blue drupes. These fruits are eaten by birds and the Wild Olive seeds spread in the process.
Devilwood is an excellent addition to most any coastal garden or yard. Its aforementioned flowers and fruits are attractive to pollinators and birds, and its dense evergreen foliage provides protective cover for many songbirds year-round. It accepts a variety of southeastern soils, is practically disease free, drought tolerant, and can tolerate full sun or shade, making it an incredibly flexible option in landscaping. It even takes well to pruning and hedging.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the colorful, colonial, and cacophonous Red-headed Woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus).
With a bellowing and a banging this boisterous bird comes barreling up the bottomland to lit above a beaver dam. Black and white and red all over the dome, this bird is unmistakable by eye. A sold blood-red head, silver bill, a jet-black back and tail, along with snow-white belly and secondaries gives this bird an utterly one-of-a-kind plumage in the Eastern United States. And it’s also unignorable by ear, with startled vibrating screams and resonant barking rattles that ring throughout the canopy as one, then two, then four birds join in. Red-headed Woodpeckers are, sort of, a colony forming Woodpecker. They’re not a close nit family unit, and thus not a true colony, but more a tenuous alliance of neighbors to further self-interested goals, like an HOA, or maybe a street gang, or both. The Red-headed Woodpecker is found year-round throughout much of the South, to include all of South Carolina. They are omnivorous and their varied diet consists of wood boring insects, flying insects, seeds, nuts, fruits, and small vertebrates. They also build seed caches to help get them through the winter. Red-headed Woodpeckers inhabit forests dense with hardwood trees and have a strong preference for floodplains and the margins of large wetland systems. In the Lowcountry, Red-headed Woodpecker colonies can most often be found along river floodplains, bottomland margins, sea island lowlands, ghost forests, and beaver dams. These forest types foster environmental conditions that stress the trees and occasionally kill off a good number of them. These environmental stressors and periodic tree die offs create the perfect little suburban neighborhood for a merry band of miscreant Red-headed Woodpeckers to move into. The stressed trees of these environments are prone to disease, which subsequently invites insect pests, creating a pantry for our Woodpeckers to pursue. The already dead trees harbor insects as well but, more importantly, they collectively create a ghost forest. Here the Woodpeckers can excavate their nest cavities for years going forward. Surrounding these dead and dying trees are generally also some oaks, beeches, and other seed-bearing trees that are doing just fine on the rich wetland soils and produce a bounty of seeds for the Woodpeckers to feast upon each year. Not a bad neighborhood for a Woodpecker to move into! But Red-headed Woodpeckers don’t want neighbors. They have a darker side and they are known to raid other birds’ nests to eat the eggs and chicks, or to injure the parent birds in the process. This harassment continues until the encroaching birds leave or die. This exclusionary behavior and their particular habitat preferences give Red-headed Woodpeckers a sporadic distribution across their range. They concentrate into very specific regions of the landscape and are scarcely found anywhere else. This is unlike many of our other Woodpecker species, which are rather ubiquitous throughout the Lowcountry and coexist in separate niches.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have one of our first flowers of the floodplain forest, Butterweed (Packera glabella).
Butterweed is annual wildflower in the sunflower family, Asteraceae. It is found throughout the coastal plain and piedmont of South Carolina. Butterweed is a wetland plant, typically growing in sunny, disturbed, poorly drained, fertile soils in the lower floodplains of freshwater rivers, to include areas such as fields, swales, clear-cuts, power lines, bridges, or roadsides. It can be incredibly abundant under the right site conditions. It grows from about knee to waist high, generally in disorganized clumps with a weedy appearance. Its stem is thick, ribbed, and hollow with a blush of purple-red darkening towards the base and along the ridges of the stem. Its leaves are pinnately compound with uneven, round, and toothed leaflets that expand in size as you move towards the tip of the leaf. The real defining characteristic of Butterweed, and its namesake, are its buttery yellow flowers. Butterweed bears a prolific profusion of brilliant flowers at the top of the flower stalk. The flowers have lemon-yellow petals and a rich yolk-yellow center. Each flower is about a three-quarters of an inch wide and the flower clusters are mostly flat but with a slight dome. Butterweed blooms throughout March and April, peaking at the start of April. These flowers are frequented by many species of pollinators, of all shapes and sizes.
Butterweed, and the other Ragworts in genus Packera, are avoided by White-tailed Deer and other native herbivores. This avoidance is due to their toxicity and allows Butterweed to grow more or less undisturbed. Butterweed foliage contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which cause acute liver damage and impair the nervous system in mammals that eat their foliage, even at fairly low concentrations. This can be dangerous to horses and cattle that are pastured in floodplain fields or fed hay harvested from these areas. So although Butterweed is an easy to grow and fairly pest-free pollinator plant, it is best kept out of home gardens, as it can readily volunteer and could become a hazard to foraging pets.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re on the lookout for a cryptic climbing amphibian of the forest canopy, the Cope’s Gray Treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis).
The Cope’s Gray Treefrog is found throughout the southeastern United States, to include all of South Carolina and our Sea Islands. It has a sister species to the north, the Gray Treefrog (H. versicolor), that is nearly identical in appearance but not found in South Carolina. The Cope’s Gray Treefrog is unique in many regards to our other Treefrogs. It is colored to camouflage itself with tree bark and any lichens growing on that tree. Its skin is bumpy, covered in fine warts across its body, giving it the texture of a lichen, and is colored ash-gray, faded-bronze, or pastel-green with uneven darker stripes and blotches to blend them into the bark background. This makes them nearly impossible to spot when motionless on an appropriately colored limb or tree trunk. The only flashy color on them is a wash of orange along the joints of their legs, which is peppered in tangerine spots on the back of their thighs. All this color is hidden from sight unless they’re in motion. The skin of the Gray Treefrogs also secretes a toxin that irritates mucus membranes, like are found in the mouth, eyes, and nose. This is a defensive toxin to discourage predators and can irritate you as well, if you forget to wash your hands after picking one up, but is otherwise harmless to humans.
The Cope’s Gray Treefrog is one of our most arboreal Treefrogs, spending much of their time in the canopies of hardwood trees. They are primarily nocturnal, hiding under bark or in holes during the day and hunting insects and arthropods at night. They prefer mature deciduous forests and, although quite common, are hard to lay eyes on due to their cryptic colors, nocturnal nature, and elevated lifestyle. However, they aren’t a hard frog to hear! Cope’s Gray Treefrogs have a loud, resonant trill that last about a second. It is a common sound in the spring forest, reverberating through the treetops. Like all our Treefrogs, males have an expandable throat pouch that they inflate to amplify their call. Cope’s Gray Treefrogs rely on fishless, ephemeral wetlands to safely rear their offspring. From spring through mid-summer, they’ll descend to the forest floor after heavy rains to mix and mingle at the margins of these ephemeral wetlands. There their tadpoles will quickly hatch, grow, and metamorphose into miniature froglets, all before the wetland dries up again.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have the perimeter of the pocosin and border of the bay, Shining Fetterbush (Lyonia lucida).
Shining Fetterbush is a spreading shrub found on acidic, moist soils throughout the Lowcountry of SC. It grows from waist to head high with arching, intersecting limbs and spreads to form dense thickets. Its common name, Fetterbush, comes from its impressive ability to restrain, or fetter, anyone trying to walk through the stuff. Often it forms a near impenetrable wall around the margin of a wetland. Fetterbush is commonly found around the rims of pocosins, also known as “Carolina Bays”, and it often borders bogs, fens, and other ephemeral wetlands with highly acidic soils. It can thrive in acidic soils because it is a member of the Heath family, Ericaceae, whose members, to include Blueberries and Azaleas, are especially well adapted to extracting nutrients from even the most acidic of soils. Like many Heaths, Fetterbush has simple, evergreen leaves and, more particularly, those of Fetterbush are about two to three inches long, half as wide, round, and leathery with a shiny surface. It also bears a very Blueberry-like flower, with a half-dozen or so white to pink, pendulous, urn-shaped flowers dangling from every leaf node. Fetterbush blooms very early in spring and is relied upon by several species of our native bees for pollen. Unlike Blueberries, Fetterbush’s flowers mature into hard, dry seed-capsules rather than soft fruits.
Shining Fetterbush is a good example of an indicator species, its presence always indicates two things: highly acidic soils and moisture. An indicator species is a plant or animal whose presence signifies an environmental condition, be it a general indication of ecosystem health or a highly specific site characteristic. Indicator species offer scientists, ecologists, property managers, farmers, and foresters an efficient way to predict site conditions, plan out land uses, and narrow down options in their day to day work and to quickly ascertain what they’re looking at when on a new property.
Above: Greater Yellowlegs on left and Lesser Yellowlegs on right.
Top Row: Pair of Greater Yellowlegs on saltwater mudflat.
Bottom Row: Lesser Yellowlegs in managed rice impoundment.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s a pair of shorebirds prone to perplexing even proficient birders, the Greater and the Lesser Yellowlegs (Tringa melanoleuca and T. flavipes).
Both our Yellowlegs are found across the SC Lowcountry and the Sea Islands in winter. The two species are very similar in appearance but vary in size, habitat, and calls. Yet, that doesn’t mean they’re always easy to identify! Both are lanky shorebirds with a thin white eye-ring, muted brown mantle and wings speckled with small ivory and ebony spots, a white belly, a dark, narrow, medium-length bill, and their namesake long, bright yellow legs. The key visual differences to tell them apart are their bills and the birds’ overall sizes. The Greater Yellowlegs has a slightly longer and heavier bill that is ever so slightly bent upward. The Lesser’s is a touch shorter and straight as an arrow. When stood side-by-side, size is the best way to tell the two species apart. Greater Yellowlegs are head and shoulders taller than a Lesser Yellowlegs, with the top of a Lesser’s head only reaching the shoulders of a Greater. When together, this size difference is pretty obvious but, when on their lonesome, it can be hard to gauge. For further comparison, a Lesser Yellowlegs is close in height to a Dowitcher. A Greater Yellowlegs is about a head shorter than a Willet. The two can also be told apart by their calls. A Greater Yellowlegs gives a sharp, loud, three-note “TuTu-tu” call and the Lesser Yellowlegs a similar sounding, but shorter, two-note “Tootu” call.
Both species occur in similar flat, muddy, open wetland habitats but each have their slight preferences. Greater Yellowlegs are the more abundant of the two in our high salinity salt marshes, mudflats, and beach systems. They are usually seen by themselves or in small flocks of less than a half-dozen birds. They are also common, but a bit less abundant, in brackish and freshwater systems, like rice impoundments, flooded fields, lakeshores, and pond edges. Lesser Yellowlegs are far scarcer in high salinity wetlands and not as common in most freshwater systems. However, they are prolific in brackish marsh systems, especially brackish tidal mudflats, rice fields, and other impoundments. Here they can often be seen in flocks numbering dozens of birds or more and far outnumbering the Greater Yellowlegs. Both species use their long legs to wade into shallow water and their narrow bills to pick out small insects, crustaceans, and mollusks from the surface of the mud and water.
