100 Secrets of the Carolina Coast by Randall Duckett

Author:Randall Duckett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

South

Carolina

Secrets

Overview Map: South Caraolina

Locatar Maps: Grand Strand Area

Locator Map: Charleston Area

Locator Map: Lowcountry Area

51

Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center

Off Limits

One of the toughest pieces of wilderness to get to in the world is the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center, which lies about midway between Charleston and Myrtle Beach near Georgetown, South Carolina. It’s not blocked by towering mountains or cut off by raging rivers—it’s just off limits, except to a handful of humans who are lucky enough to get a glimpse of this refuge for waterfowl and other wild animals.

“This is one of the most pristine areas left on the East Coast,” says Robert Joyner, who’s been the resident biologist at the site for more than twenty years. “We don’t encourage a lot of visitation.” To say the least. The center offers guided tours only on Tuesday afternoons year-round. Excursions are limited to fourteen people, the maximum that can fit into the large van in which visitors travel through parts of the twenty-thousand-acre preserve. “This is designed as a wildlife research area,” explains Joyner. “We’re very guarded about its use, because we’ve seen what’s happened to other areas that have been trampled by the public.”

The preserve was left to the state of South Carolina by Tom Yawkey, who’s most famous as the owner of the Boston Red Sox from 1933 until his death in 1976. (To our knowledge, though, there’s no ban on Yankee fans visiting the refuge.) The three islands that make up the wildlife center at the mouth of Winyah Bay—North Island, South Island, and Cat Island—were first used by European settlers as rice plantations, then in the early 1900s they were acquired by wealthy Northern industrialists like the Yawkey family as summer estates and hunting grounds. Yawkey inherited land from his uncle at age sixteen, added other parcels over the years, and for the rest of his life developed land management techniques designed to preserve the area’s plant and animal population.

The primary purpose of the area is to be a safe place for waterfowl to flourish. It is right smack in the middle of the Atlantic Flyway—the route migrating birds take to travel south in the cold weather and north in the warm. During the winter, more than one hundred thousand ducks and geese spend time in the protected ponds and marshes of the preserve. “We have more than 250 species of birds—every species in South Carolina, including eight active bald eagle nests,” reports Joyner. The area is also home to alligators, wild turkeys, red-cockaded woodpeckers, loggerhead sea turtles, fox squirrels, otters, hawks, and hundreds of other species. The landscape ranges from maritime forest totally untouched by human intervention to areas—many former rice fields— carefully converted to provide prime nesting and food habitats for a duck population that includes mallards, shovellers, pintails, gadwalls, widgeons, teals, canvasbacks, and coots.

On the Tuesday tours, which start with a short ferry trip, Joyner tells visitors about the habitats and history of the area—it was the site, for example, of Civil War forts. The tour

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