Have you ever sat quietly in a marsh before sunrise? Have you watched as the Homeric rosy finger tips of dawn stretched out across the sky before you and a hidden world where land and water combine comes to life? This is a world unknown by most. It is an experience lived by only a few, these days – the story of Earth awakening.
An arctic mass of air pushed down over top of the Outer Banks a couple days ago and the mercury subsequently plunged into the twenties. The sun has not yet risen, stars continue to illuminate the world, and I find myself laboring my way through knee deep water this January morning. Behind me, attached to a thin strand of rope, I float the tools of my profession in a black plastic tub. Tripod, chair blind, binoculars, water proof bags containing an assortment of camera gear, and most importantly of all, coffee. When you plan to sit waist deep in water that you must break ice to move through, coffee is crucial.
Having scouted the area for several days now, I know that about 20 minutes before sunrise large numbers of pintails, green wing teals, and wigeons begin to fall from the sky into this pothole in the marsh. In the distance I hear the cooing of tundra swans, which I hope will visit my lens before the morning is through.
Though we refer to the general area as the Outer Banks, such a name is used to lump together a diversity of islands and ecosystems. To the south lies the salty worlds of Ocracoke and Hatteras where storms and the Army Corps of Engineers maintain a series of inlets for which the ocean injects its saline brew into the Pamlico and Albemarle sounds. Here though, I am on what we refer to as the Currituck Banks, a world more fresh than salt, and therefore a Mecca for migratory waterfowl.
Before the days when European colonies were being lost upon the shores of these Outer Banks, the Algonquian speaking culture of Native Americans ruled over these northern beaches. The Poteskeet in particular, used this stretch of wind swept barrier islands as hunting and fishing grounds, while living across the sound on the mainland. Each fall, as the bluefish began their journey south from New England, the skies over the Currituck banks would darken with impossible numbers of waterfowl. It is from the Poteskeet that we most likely obtained the name Currituck – an Anglicized rendition of the Algonquian word Coratoke, which roughly translates to Land of the Wild Goose.
The waterfowl of this stretch of sandy banks has become legendary now the world over. The tradition of waterfowl hunting runs deep within the culture here, and the story of these birds has become inextricable from the history of the Currituck Banks.
To understand this history and how it led to the creation of a booming tourist driven economy, we must go back to the beginning. When a history is as intricately braided with nature as the story of the Currituck Banks, the beginning more often than not starts with the Earth itself, and the geological forces at work that shape the world we now know. As it is geology that ultimately drives ecology, and it is the ecology of the Currituck sound that has created this sort of Eden of waterfowl, we must start then with the nature of barrier islands themselves.
A barrier island, by the most basic of definitions is nothing more than a giant sandbar. Plain and simple, the land beneath our feet is just a bunch of sand piled up off the coast of North Carolina. Now sand by its very nature is mobile. It blows in the wind. It gets washed around by water. You track it back into your cars and houses when you leave the beach. Thus a barrier island can never be static. It is dynamic and changing in every way imaginable. You know the old saying that change is the only constant? On the Outer Banks, this is a law of physics.
Even the name barrier island is quite telling. Such islands are the only thing that stand between the unbridled wrath of Poseidon and the North American continent. It is therefore these islands that shoulder the burden of absorbing the fury of the Atlantic Ocean during the fall, winter, and spring.
When a hurricane or nor’easter begins to move up the coast and the northeast winds of these low pressure systems come onshore, catastrophe sometimes follows. As the winds build the ocean into a tower of white water, the waves associated with these storms can over wash the island. The sand dunes that line the beaches of the Outer Banks were built in the 1930s for this very reason. They are simply a man-made seawall put in place to keep the ocean from washing across the islands. From time to time however, storms are large enough to breach these protective measures and may even sweep clean across the island and out into the sounds. Such waves inevitably move massive amounts of sand.
This is all perfectly natural, and actually beneficial to not only the long term survival of the islands themselves, but also to the biodiversity of the estuaries that lie behind these islands. As sand moves in with the overwash, traditionally this not only builds up the elevation of the interior of the island, but also helps to widen the islands along the back side. This movement of sand in turn actually helps to protect those areas from the next major storm. Such processes explain the creation of giant ridges of sand that make up much of the western side of Kitty Hawk and Nags Head. This pattern of ocean overwash also explains the strange undulating shoreline that makes up the back island shoreline, or what we call the soundside. The fingers of marsh that extend out into the sounds are the artifacts of the sand that was washed out behind the island.
If you take a look at the Outer Banks on Google Earth, these overwash fans, as geologists call them, become quite evident. So too, however, do the occasional large clusters of marsh islands. These islands, which often serve as the epicenter of waterfowl in the winter, are created from this same process, only in reverse.
Storms such as hurricanes and nor’easters are low pressure systems. Low pressure systems spin with a counter clockwise rotation to them. This means that as these storms approach, the winds are coming out of the northeast. The sounds like Currituck, Albemarle, and Pamlico that sit behind the islands behave like gigantic bathtubs in these storms. Those northeast winds drive a mind bending volume of water over towards the mainland, which quickly floods out those areas that border the sounds. Thus is why the edge of the mainland is made up primarily of flood plain swamps and dominated by species such as cypress and tupelo gum which are adapted to living in standing water for long periods of time.
As these storms begin to move on however, we find a subsequent shift in wind out of the southwest with the trailing edge, or tail, of the storm. Here is where the bathtub comes into effect. What happens when you slosh water in the tub to one side and then the other? You get water all over your bathroom floor. The same goes for these islands. As the southwest winds begin to drive water back towards the barrier islands, this surge can actually over wash across the islands and into the ocean. This is how inlets are formed.
Driving on Bonner Bridge across Oregon Inlet, that body of water that separates Nags Head from Hatteras Island, you can see the beginning of these islands starting to form. As water moves in and out of the sounds with the ebb and flow of the tides, sand continues to be pushed around. As this occurs, shoals begin to form. These are the sandbars of legend and lore when it comes to navigating these inlets. Just as inlets naturally open with storms, however, they naturally close as well. When an inlet closes up, those shoals remain intact out in the sound. Eventually, as time wears on, pioneer species such as salt marsh cord grass and black needle rush begin to take root on these shoals in the higher spots, and an extensive network of marsh islands are born. Looking at a map of the Currituck Banks, you can quickly discern exactly where some of these old inlets used to be by simply looking at the random explosion of small marsh islands in the sound.
In 1823 the Currituck Inlet, the last of the inlets that once dissected the Currituck Banks into a string of islands, shoaled up and closed. With its termination, the Currituck Sound suddenly became walled off from the salt water that was once the life blood of its ecosystem. As those rivers draining the Great Dismal Swamp continued to deliver their load of fresh tannin rich waters, juniper water as old timers called it, Currituck underwent what is still to this day considered to be one of the most profound ecological shifts to be witnessed in US history. The vast oyster beds that once provided a living for communities such as Knotts Island quickly vanished, along with the fisheries, beds of eel grass and other life sustaining features of the dying salt water ecosystem.
The region had always held extraordinary numbers of wintering waterfowl, even as a saltier estuary. Birds such as ducks, geese, and swan come evolutionarily equipped with what we call supraorbital salt glands specifically designed for expelling salt from the body when in a habitat like this. With the closing of the inlet however, Currituck was suddenly transformed into what would become most productive winter waterfowl habitat on the Eastern Seaboard, providing refuge for 10% of all the waterfowl along the East Coast of North America at the time.
The old eel grass of the past was replaced with wild celery, wigeon grass, and other sources of food that packed a tremendous punch of nutrition for travel weary birds. The Currituck Sound, with its average depth of only 4 feet, allowed for sunlight to penetrate through the water and right down to the sandy loam that makes up the bottom of this sound. The result is aquatic vegetation that does not so much as grow as it does explode throughout this body of water.
Waterfowl migration is really all about one of two things: food and procreation. What else could be so pressing and demanding as to force these birds to undertake such a costly and statistically deadly undertaking twice a year? Once the Currituck Sound made its shift over to a primarily freshwater environment, basic geography offered a virtually endless supply of food for these birds.
Peel through the yellowed pages of the journals left over from the nineteenth and early twentieth century by waterfowl guides and duck hunters along the Currituck Banks and you will quickly find that most people, even locals, remained in a state of awe at the sheer number of birds that this area attracted. When flocks of waterfowl took flight off the water, their numbers would completely blacken the sky. For this reason, locals referred to the phenomenon simply as “smoke,” as it reminded them of the giant columns of smoke that would cloud out the sun when the marshlands caught fire. From the perspective of the 21st century, we can only find ourselves somewhat jealous of the wildlife spectacles that our ancestors once witnessed.
All species of waterfowl came to take refuge along these waters with redheads and canvasbacks the most highly sought after by local gunners as they were considered the best table ducks the tribe of waterfowl had to offer. Over the course of history however, it was not so much the ducks as the geese that would come to symbolize the bounty of the Currituck Sound due to their impossible numbers. Both the greater snow goose and the Canada goose called this land their winter home with numbers once in the millions. Even today, there are an estimated two million geese that call Eastern North Carolina home.
The very same geological forces at work to create one of North America’s greatest waterfowl havens quite conversely also guaranteed the poverty of those North Carolina counties that bordered the sounds. Those very same shallow waters that harbored 10% of the eastern population of ducks, geese, and swans kept this region of North Carolina from developing deep water ports. Such lack of deep water held the economy of the region back, suppressing the local communities into little more than backwaters save for the town of Nags Head due to its rising popularity with well-to-do mainland planters escaping the scourge of malaria in the summer and fall.
By 1857 the Currituck Shooting Club – now known simply as the Currituck Club – had already purchased over 3,000 acres of prime waterfowl habitat, and operated as a most exclusive invite only hunting club. Beyond the Currituck Club however, the region’s bounty remained a well-guarded secret. For this reason, knowledge of the regions explosive populations of waterfowl remained obscure outside of Eastern North Carolina. Like most great secrets however, such obscurity would be short lived and the natural bounty of the Currituck was soon to be exposed to the world abroad.
In the early morning hours of April 12, 1861 shots rang out over Fort Sumter in South Carolina. With this musket fire the Civil War began. As the Union army began to pour into the South, the Outer Banks quickly fell under Northern command and thousands of these soldiers would eventually come to be stationed along these barrier islands. It is here where the North got its first real taste of the cornucopia of wildlife that the Currituck Banks had to offer.
With the closing of the war, Union soldiers would return north with the fantastic tales that seemed to border the impossible. They spoke of ducks in such numbers that the skies would be black for days at a time. Tales of fish so plentiful, they would practically jump right into your boat. The Currituck Banks, it seemed to so many of these men, was indeed a sportsman’s paradise – a name that still to this day stands as the official motto for the county that rims the sound on both sides.
As such tales began to circulate throughout the more well-to-do circles of the Northeast, and as industrialists began to penetrate the area as re-construction began, the legends of the Currituck Banks seized the imagination of countless would-be adventure hunters. In short order, over 100 exclusive duck hunting clubs, owned by wealthy northerners, were established within a 50 mile radius of Currituck Sound.
Before the closing of the Currituck Inlet in the early 1800s, the inhabitants of the northern beaches had always made their living from the land and sea. Harvesting oysters, blue crabs, clams, and shrimp from the pre-closure sound had long supported these communities, along with netting mullet and hunting whales and dolphins for fat and oil. With the transition from salt to lightly brackish, the fisheries of the Currituck all but disappeared for a time. Likewise, as demand for the oil from whale blubber was dwindling, Currituck Banks residents began to resort back to a life of subsistence where goods and trade were far from reach. With the sudden rise of the region in popularity by sportsmen of the upper class however, a litany of new job prospects fell into the laps of those communities.
Carpenters were needed to build hunting clubs and associated buildings, local guides were needed to navigate the region’s notoriously shallow and dangerous waters to find birds, guards were hired to keep treasured hunting grounds free from would be poachers, general stores needed building, and decoys carved. Those families not directly affiliated with the hunt clubs would instead set up their own private guiding companies while employing wife and children in converting their homes into bed & breakfasts during the duck season. In essence, ducks became the economy almost overnight.
Despite the money that the members of such hunt clubs had to pay for membership, hunting birds on the Currituck was still an adventure and the accommodations in the clubs quite spase. Just getting to the area could take weeks as you battled storms while sailing. Once on the Banks, it was not guaranteed you would even survive duck hunting. As the old saying goes on the Outer Banks: “the weather to kill geese, is the weather to kill men,” which the countless men who succumbed to hypothermia while gunning for waterfowl in a strong north wind found out.
Different species of waterfowl required different methods of hunting. Puddle ducks, such as pintails and mallards could be hunted in the relative protection of the marsh. Diving ducks on the other hand, such as canvasbacks and redheads, were not only birds of open deeper water, they were also the most prized.
Hunting birds such as the canvasback was a test of iron will and constitution. The most effective approach was in a unique type of blind known locally as a battery. Now a battery is really nothing more than a coffin that you lie down in submerged just under the surface of the water, minus the creature comforts that a coffin would have actually afforded, as the novelist Rex Beach once described. The top of the battery was painted a steely gray to match the color of the sky when waterfowling is at its best. Weights were used to submerge the box just under the surface of the water, in which case any waves whipping up from the wind would come spilling in on top of the hunter. Many a waterfowl hunter found himself on the verge of drowning in these things due to a slight shift in wind.
When birds would set their pinions and begin the descent to the decoys, gunners would sit upright as fast as they could and fire off at the birds as they buzzed by. This of course was no easy task. Ducks are small birds, and the canvasback in particular has been clocked at 72 mph. The percentage rate of kills was low in these batteries, but all said and done, this was the most productive means of hunting divers.
Known locally as gun clubs, shooting clubs, and hunt clubs, these organizations were really elite social clubs that entertained the wealthiest men that America had to offer at the time. J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie make the list at the Currituck Club, while President Eisenhower and the prize fighter Jack Dempsey are on the roster of men who hunted at the Whalehead Club. It was the movers and shakers of the United States that came to hunt our birds, and it was the money that they poured into these communities here that helped to build the foundation of the Outer Banks we know today.
Like all things, it seems, there is a duality of both good and bad with the legacy of duck and goose hunting on the Currituck Sound. As demand for recreation hunting grew throughout the region, so did the demand for the meat from these ducks on the commercial market. Such demand would leave its mark on the waterfowl population of the entire Atlantic Flyway, which is a sort of super highway for eastern migratory birds.
The peculiar thing about business is that when it gets involved in natural resources, it always seems to find a way to harvest such resources on a truly industrial scale. Thus market gunners in the region quickly took to using guns that were virtually small cannons known as a punt gun. These punt guns are still to this day the largest shotguns ever to be manufactured. Actually manufactured is not quite applicable here, considering that most punt guns were actually home =made and customized specifically for the market hunters’ needs.
The monstrous guns were often as long at 10 feet and were far too heavy and delivered much too strong of a kick for any man to actually handle. Therefore they were mounted on small flat bottomed boats that were poled through the shallows, known as punt boats – hence the name punt gun. Some of these guns were designed to be loaded with as much as two pounds of shot and could take out as many as 100 ducks in one single blast. The recoil from such a blast would send the boat and gunner sailing backwards across the water if not sufficiently grounded before firing. In order to improve the efficiency of such industrial scale market hunting, punt gunners would often work in teams of up to 10 gunners.
It is for this reason that individual hunters were reported to bring in five, six, or as many as seven hundred ducks from a day’s hunt. The legendary flocks of waterfowl that were said to rise like smoke from the water were decimated in short order. The effects of such market hunting in the region rippled throughout the range of eastern waterfowl. Inevitably, populations began to crash.
In the year 1900, President William McKinley signed into law the Lacy Act, which prohibited the trade or sale of wildlife. With the signing of this act, the legal practice of market hunting any form of animal was brought to an end. Of course, with the amount of money to be made in the gunning for birds, and the lack of game wardens to enforce such acts, it would take some time for the laws of supply and demand to truly end such practices for good.
Despite the industry of market hunting turning belly-up, recreational hunting was in full swing and the hunt clubs of the Currituck Sound were becoming some of the leading organizations of conservation of their time. Due to the dwindling populations of ducks from market hunting, clubs along the Currituck began to impose “bag limits” on their members. The hunt clubs also set hunting seasons for their members, stating when exactly their lands could be hunted, banning spring hunting all together, and establishing “rest” days. Most clubs also went as far as to ban hunting on certain sections of their holdings, thereby creating private waterfowl and wildlife refuges. It was here along the waters of the Currituck Sound that waterfowl conservation first began.
Such a movement was primarily a localized phenomenon whereby local clubs governed themselves so as to conserve the natural resources that their elite societies were built upon. All of this was to change, however, once a prominent Brooklyn publisher named Joseph Palmer Knapp stepped onto the scene in the 1917.
Traveling to and hunting along the Currituck had become something of a right of passage for many of America’s elite. Joseph Knapp’s foray to the Currituck was no different from Carnegie or Morgan’s in this case. The thing that set Knapp apart was that he just couldn’t get enough of the Currituck Banks. Wanting to own his own piece of the bounty, Joseph Knapp purchased the 7,000 acre Mackay Island from author Thomas Dixon Jr. who had written the bestseller, The Clansman, which was adapted into the first motion picture – Birth of a Nation.
With the purchase of Mackay Island, Joesph Knapp began to establish his own private Eden on the banks of the Currituck Sound. Immediately Knapp began to develop some 2,500 acres of the island with canals, roads, caretaker houses, boat houses, duck ponds, and the like. He had Thomas Dixon’s home dismantled and in its place, built a grand three story, thirty seven bedroom Georgian plantation styled home overlooking the legendary waters of the Sound. Knapp was a man of money, and he was prepared to invest a fortune into the community.
Keeping the estate open year round employed 60 people, making Mackay Island one of the largest employers in the region. For this reason, Joseph Knapp almost single handedly floated the adjoining community of Knotts Island through the Great Depression. It is said that J.P. Knapp put more money into the county of Currituck than taxes, and most of this money was funneled directly into the school system. Still to this day one of the schools in Currituck County bares his name, as well as the medical library at the University of North Carolina to honor the extraordinary contribution that Knapp made to the schools of Currituck and UNC.
Though locally Joseph Palmer Knapp is best known for his philanthropy throughout Currituck County and other parts of eastern North Carolina, on the national scale, it is his dedication and commitment to long term conservation that he goes down in the history books for. Regardless of the conservation measures that Currituck hunting clubs adopted, true conservation, Knapp understood, would have to take place at the international level. Waterfowl, being migratory birds, could not be managed on a local level to ensure the continuation of the species. As these birds range from Canada down to Florida and points south, Knapp knew that without an organized effort by the very same movers and shakers who took so much pride in their membership in the Currituck hunting clubs, without a large scale movement working for the protection of key breeding and wintering grounds as well as the enforcement of conservation minded hunting laws, the waterfowl of the Atlantic Flyway had little to no chance of making it through the twentieth century.
In 1930, Joseph Knapp formed More Game Birds in America. This was to be the first wildlife organization of its type. The Audubon Society had formed specifically to protect wading birds that were being hunted to extinction by the plume hunters for the women’s fashion industry. More Game Birds in America, however, did not seek to only conserve waterfowl populations. What made Knapp’s organization so different is that their goal was to specifically grow the population of waterfowl through habitat preservation and breeding programs. This was a landmark for wildlife conservation in the United States. Today, we know of the More Game Birds in America by the name it adopted in 1937 – Ducks Unlimited.
As the decades rolled on, the natural beauty of the Currituck Banks and the Outer Banks in general became more widely known. Though at first it was only the wealthiest members of society that came to the banks of the Currituck from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, it would soon come to pass that much of the northeast was also finding their way down to the idyllic barrier islands of North Carolina. The stories and notoriety of hunting exploits and tales of picturesque little seaside villages pulled at the heartstrings and imaginations of so many looking for temporary escape from crowded and frantic life of the city. The old duck hunters of the social elite had popularized the Banks in the minds of their communities back home, and these seeds were beginning to grow.
With this popularity, however, also came a rise in real estate prices as more and more people wanted their own little piece of tranquility and the natural beauty of the region. The pressure was on to capitalize on the economic boom, and thus many of the old hunt clubs that retained thousands of acres in prime resort real estate, began selling off much of their lands to developers. In this since, according to the Currituck County tourism board, the old duck clubs were really a victim of their own success and the decay of their power and prestige slowly began.
Today, the vast majority of the old clubs are gone. Most in fact are no longer even standing. A few have been converted over to coffee shops, private residences, and most notably a museum as is the case with the Whalehead Club. The Monkey Island club handed over all of its lands to the US Fish and Wildlife to help create the Currituck Beach National Wildlife Refuge. The Swan Island Shooting Club, which is now the largest and most active club on the Currituck followed suit and also donated considerable amount of land to the creation of the refuge, though they still own much of their original holdings. The famed Currituck Club is still in operation today and therefore has the distinction of being the longest continual running hunt club in America though the main club house burnt to the ground in 2003, and along with it untold priceless artifacts of our history here on the Currituck Banks. Despite the fire, however, the spirit of the club still lives on, and each fall and winter club members make their annual pilgrimage to the marshy banks of the Sound to follow the tradition of so many gunners before them.
#1 by Melanie on March 31, 2011 - 2:15 pm
What a beautifully written article. I have lived in Currituck since I was a little girl and had some knowledge of this history. Excellent!~Melanie