There has been an ongoing debate in science as to whether or not animals have culture for well over a century. Now when I say culture here, I am not talking of sophisticated manners. Instead, I am speaking of unique behaviors taught or learned within specific groups. Intelligence in nature it would seem, is a subject that many are a bit uncomfortable with. If we have always defined what makes us human as our intelligence and our culture, than what does it mean if we recognize that other animals have not only extraordinary problem solving capabilities, but culture as well? Such a question is probably better left for another blog on the web of course. But this is very relevant when we are learning and teaching about Tursiops truncatas, or the bottlenose dolphin.

In the wild, there is a constantly evolving dance between predator and prey – each in evolutionary motion trying to stay one step ahead of the other. As a predator adapts in ways to advantage itself, those prey, if they are to survive, adapt in turn either physically or behaviorally in new ways to elude the would be predators.
Fish have evolved a unique line of sensory organs that we call lateral lines. That black stripe down the side of a largemouth bass is just that – a lateral line. All fish have it, even sharks. What the lateral line does, is pick up on the low electric impulses in the water that is produced through movement. By being able to read such minute electricity, fish are able to coordinate their movements with one another, or in response to the movements of predators in the area.
So think bait ball here. You have seen these on television before, that massive ball of innumerable fish magically splitting apart and coming back together again as predators attempt to dash through. With so many fish, so tightly packed together, it would seem like an easy meal. Yet rarely does such attacks prove successful. These fish operate like one giant living breathing organism responding instantly in coordinated movements. Watching this is truly one of the most beautiful sites to behold in ocean.
Predators, such as the bottlenose dolphin, have to adapt to such defensive mechanism in order to survive. And it is here, with the feeding adaptations that we find ourselves catapulted headlong into the sticky debate of culture.
Dolphins, like the rest of the world’s most intelligent creatures, live a highly structured social life. It is this social nexus that they must navigate that many biologists believe is the basis for evolving such a powerful brain to begin with. Since dolphins, like humans and chimpanzees, live and communicate with a structured society, these species (though not the only ones) are in the position to pass along information to one another. This may be through direct communication, or it could simply be through watching and learning.
Whichever the case may be, we know that certain populations of dolphins utilize very distinct and inventive ways to hunt – most often cooperatively – much like certain groups of chimpanzees. Take the dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia for example. In Shark Bay, and only in Shark Bay, bottlenose dolphins have taken to placing marine sponges on their faces when foraging for food along the bottom. There are a number of toxic creatures that dwell along the bottom of this bay, as well as razor sharp rocks. Its believed that either these sponges helped them stir up food, or otherwise protect them while foraging.
Jump to the other side of the globe and splash down into the waters of Florida Bay and you will find a completely different sort of cultural event taking place. Here, dolphins will employ the technique of mud rings to capture fish. One dolphin will swim around a school of fish, slamming his fluke (tail) down as hard as possible with each kick. This stirs up a thick cloud of mud and silt. As the dolphin circles the school of fish, he / she creates a ring of this thick cloud around them. As the fish begin to panic, the other dolphins line up around the outside of the ring to catch the fish as they attempt to jump over the cloud of mud.

A couple states north and we come to South Carolina, where dolphins have learned a unique method to capture food that researchers have termed “strand feeding.” Here in the salt marsh creeks, several dolphins will rush a school of fish so quickly that the wake generated by the back and dorsal fin of the dolphin actually picks up the fish and throws them onto dry land. The dolphins then race in, and slide up the bank out of the water, temporarily stranding themselves, to grab the fish left high and dry. Interestingly, these dolphins only ever strand on their right sides.
All three of these feeding behaviors are found in no other populations / locations on Earth. So what does this mean? Dolphins, like humans, are looking for new and better ways of solving problems in life. They experiment. They adapt. Through trial and error, they invent. Are dolphins teaching each other these successes? Many would argue no, that instead others watch the success and simply mimic it. Without this information being deliberately passed on however, how do you explain the coordinated efforts that make hunting techniques like strand feeding possible?
What is really intriguing though is that these distinct feeding behaviors have been documented in some of the most well studied populations of dolphins around. What of those groups that are not so well studied? What secrets about their culture do they harbor?

Dolphin Strand Feeding

mud ring feeding

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.

Dolphins have a pretty amazing way of handling the problem of finding food and finding their way around in the oftentimes murky lightless depths of the world’s oceans – sonar. A lot of folks like to refer to this as echo location, which is really more of a description. Either way though, this is some pretty cool technology that dolphins have been wielding and working out the kinks on for some twenty million years!

Basically, dolphins send out a series of sounds – often heard by us as clicks and squeaks. Sound moves 4 times faster in water than it does in air, so navigating by sound makes for a pretty effecient way of doing things. Once the sound hits an object, the sound waves then bounce back. This is why people call it echo location. Humans can hear echos of course, but we sure can’t navigate by it. Dolphins on the other hand are able to Pick out an object the size of an orange from nearly 80 meters away. For those that don’t live in metric world – that is a whopping 262 feet! At shorter distance they are able to differentiate between a BB and a kernel of corn!

Dolphins therefore have a highly adapted way of perceiving sound. To give you an idea of this, humans can hear sounds as high as 20Khz. Dogs on the other hand can hear up to 45 Khz. This is why a dog whistle is completely silent to humans as the sound is to high of a frequency for use to pick up on, but dogs love it. Now a dolphin on the other hand can hear up to an amazing 120 khz with echo location! That’s 6 times what a human can hear. In order to accomplish this feat however, dolphins are not using ears like dogs and humans. Instead, dolphins, like all members of the family of toothed whales (known as odontocetes), have developed a highly specialized type of blubber known as acoustic fat. This fat is what makes up the big giant forehead on dolphins for which the clicks and pops are coming from. Along their lower jaw, they have another strip of this acoustic fat for which is designed to receive the echo coming back at the dolphin. Now just how dolphins are able to interpret what they hear with this biosonar, we have pretty much no clue. This is one of the great mysteries of marine biology which is one of the reasons that dolphins are so fascinating to us.

Just one of the many things that you will learn on one of Outer Banks Expedition’s Dolphin Watch Adventures

The image above gives you something of a diagram of how the dolphin is able to use echo location. Below is a really neat video on the subject as well that we highly recommend checking out.

In 1585, when Sir Richard Greenville first stepped foot upon the barrier islands of North Carolina, he walked into a world wholly different from the lavish resort communities that we now know as the Outer Banks. Aside from the glitz and trappings of a vacation destination, the barrier islands of the days of English exploration were far more numerous and restless than the seemingly subdued versions we sunburn on today. As mere ribbons of sand, the age old axiom of “change is the only constant” is not simply a cliché on these beaches but a law of physics.

With each passing storm, the emerald green waves of the Atlantic that rush upon our beaches turn back another page of history that the sands have hidden beneath their all encompassing embrace. The beaches of our islands are littered with the results: tree stumps protruding from the edge of the surf, clay, pebbles, rocks, coquina boulders, shelves of ink black peat moss, and chunks of coal. Even the shells have their story to tell if only one would listen.

Each of these enigmatic relics harkens back to a time long ago. Some, such as the tree trunks and peat moss reveal to us the recent past back to the days when European colonies were lost on our islands. Others however, can only be understood in the context of tens of thousands of years. Yet all of these artifacts coalesce into one story: that of islands migrating.

With wind and water as dance partner, sand is ever shifting. Anyone who has ever taken a stroll down the beach during a stout Northeast wind can attest to this. For those who bore witness to Hurricane Isabel’s storm surge on Hatteras Island or the Ashe Wednesday storm of 1962, they know all to well the precarious nature of sand and the harsh realities of life on a sandbar. Be it a hurricane, nor’easter, or just the general northeast pattern of winds that blows in off the ocean for much of the year, all of these processes are continuously working together to transfer sand from the beach to behind the islands. This is barrier island migration in the simplest of explanations.

For barrier islands to migrate, four things must occur: the ocean side of the island must move landward, the back of the island must grow wider, the island must continually be built up in elevation with sand, and the shoreline of the mainland must keep pace with the island’s migration.

Though the steady onslaught of winds that attack our shoreline throughout much of the fall, winter, and spring helps to drive this process, overwash brought on by hurricanes and large nor’easters is the real engineer of migration. As a storm surge pushes across the islands, sand is transferred with the waves and deposited either near the center of the island, or completely over and out into the sound behind the islands. The storm surge that crossed Hatteras during Isabel deposited so much sand in the Village that the over all elevation of the town was raised by about two meters. The vast stretches of great dunes that once covered much of the Outer Banks prior to recent decades were all a product of this constant building up. This process of overwash is what satisfies the first three tenets of barrier island migration.

All things considered, it is ultimately rising sea levels that force islands to migrate to begin with, otherwise the island would drown. As sea levels rise, high tides are higher and storm surges are farther reaching, therefore the faster the rate of rise, the faster the island turns over. As for the mainland shoreline keeping pace with this migration, it is simply a matter of rise over run, which on the North Carolina coastal plain is roughly a 1:2000 ft ratio, meaning for every one foot gained in sea level, the mainland shoreline will lose roughly 2,000 feet. In other words, if current predictions of a three foot rise in sea level over the next century are correct, than everything within a mile of our sounds today will be underwater in 90 years.

The oddities that sometimes are revealed upon our beaches are therefore a testament to this change. Obviously forests do not grow out of the ocean or the beaches. Therefore the stumps that can be found in areas such as Swan Beach, South Nags Head, and Pea Island were all once apart of a maritime forest growing along the sound side of the islands. As the island continued to migrate however, these forests were buried, and entombed beneath the sand.

Many people refer to these trees and stumps as part of a petrified forest. Hardened by time they may be, however there is nothing petrified about this wood. The preservation that is at work here is much less complex. To begin with, the stumps we find on our beaches are typically red cedar and live oak – two of the predominant tree species in our maritime forests today. Both of these trees produce wood that was highly prized for ship building due to its strong resistance to decay. Second, as the sand filled into the forest, the trees were buried in a low oxygen environment. Without oxygen, there is no aerobic bacterium that is needed to breakdown the dead plant matter. Lastly, this is a maritime environment we are talking about here, one where there is no shortage of salt to preserve things.

Based upon radiocarbon dating of stumps and peat moss, these organic windows into the past are probably in the neighborhood of 200-500 years old. This means that between 200-500 years ago, what is now the beachfront was actually the very backside of the islands, while the beach itself was up to a mile further out to sea. Over that period of time, the islands more or less rolled over top of themselves, and the wave energy is now exposing these once buried forests along the shore.

During the height of the last ice age some 20,000 years ago, as much of the Earth’s water was locked up in glaciers and continental ice sheets, the coastline of North Carolina was some forty miles east of where our islands now sit. As the Pleistocene era began to fade away and the Earth began it’s transition into the Holocene, sea levels rose, river valleys were flooded out creating the sounds, barrier islands were created and almost immediately they where launched into their steady march to where they now sit.

As these islands migrated to the west, the river beds that carried the glacial waters and sediment from the Appalachian Mountains and piedmont region were covered up. Sonar imaging of the sounds and ocean still reveals these beds to us today right up to the edge of the continental shelf. Remnants of these old rivers litter some of our beaches as do stumps on others. The pea gravel that makes up so much of the beaches in places like Kill Devil Hills, Nags Head, and Topsail Island, is actually the sediment of these river beds that lie below the islands.

Every morning visitors scamper along the edge of the sea where land meets water and two worlds collide, in search of sea shells. As most avid “shellers” can attest, the oyster shell is one of the more common of these calcium carbonate exoskeletons that can be found on our beaches. The problem however, is that oysters don’t live in the ocean. They are in fact an estuarine species, meaning they live in the sounds along the backside of the islands – a.k.a. estuaries. But if they don’t live in the ocean, how then did they come to make up the majority of the beach shells? As the islands migrated in a westerly fashion through the estuaries behind them, great oyster beds were buried in the process. Now so many years later they are being unearthed by wave action and tossed back up onto our beaches.

Like the peat moss and tree stumps, these oyster shells have been radiocarbon dated as well. Based upon such studies, researchers have determined that the majority of oyster shells found on the barrier islands are around seven to nine thousand years old. If you think that’s old, shells found on Hatteras Island and Shackleford Banks have been dated to forty thousand years, while the giant oyster shells found on North Topsail Beach and randomly on other islands are actually a species that went extinct around 23 million years ago! This is the part where you are supposed to say, “Whoa.”

Oysters are not alone in this regards. The fact of the matter is, that the vast majority of shells found on the beaches of our barrier islands are not marine species, but instead, like the oyster, are only found in estuaries. Therefore, also like the oysters, most of these shells are several thousands of years old as well. So next time you’re walking along the beach looking for shells, think of yourself not as “shelling,” but as fossil hunting.

The impact of barrier island migration is not limited to those strange peculiarities that dot our beaches however. The extensive network of marshes, the shallow nature of the sounds that allows for light to penetrate its depth and milfoil and widgeon grass to flourish, was all created by the same processes that drive migration. From over wash fans to the natural succession of inlets being opened and closed, the constant movement of sand allows for the back island shoaling that fosters our famous waterfowl habitat.

Following the end of the Civil War, union soldiers who had fought in eastern North Carolina began flooding back into the area for its natural wonders. Folks from all over the Northeast came much as they do now to our islands. At the time however it was not the euphoric warmth of the summer sun they were after. It was the cold. It was the frigid winds, the sleet, snow, freezing rain, and that which every big cold front brings with it: waterfowl. The framework of modern history and tourism on many of our islands was built upon duck hunting and the movement of sand that made this sport what it is today in Eastern Carolina.

For life to not only survive but to thrive on these ever changing precarious ribbons of sands is a testament to the adaptability of life itself. Howling winds of hurricane force, storm surges that momentarily connect sea with sound, the constant saturation of salt, and the ever present notion of a world migrating right overtop of you. This is “life on a sandbar” – though the bumper sticker neglects to include this bit in the fine print.

All of this is changing though. The marshlands that bring in hundreds of thousands of waterfowl each year are no longer being created. Those that remain must be heavily managed to keep the ecosystem in its most beneficial stage of succession. The islands, instead of moving with the rising sea, they are drowning. Overwash no longer makes its way across these magnificent sandbars. Sand dunes built in the 1930’s along our beaches stop all but the largest of storms. When new sand is deposited inland, it is mined and brought back out to the beaches to reform dunes thereby speeding the rate of beach erosion. Much of the sound side is bulk headed, and the ocean side presents a wall of homes. Inlets that are opened from storms such as Hurricane Isabel are promptly closed. The islands have been beaten into submission.

Yet, the ocean continues to rise. Unceasingly, unwavering, the dominion of Poseidon is spreading, his kingdom growing. We might be able to hold back the sand, but we cannot hold back the rising ocean. And for this reason, the barrier islands of North Carolina are once again experiencing a great moment of change. Those such as Core Banks and Masonboro will thrive, as humans have not imposed their architectural will upon their shores. Others, such as the Outer Banks, and the rest of the developed islands will be engulfed by the emerald waters of the Atlantic. Without migration, the islands cannot adapt to the rising sea. Without migration, they are drowning.

Yet as noted above, when it comes to these islands, change really is the only constant. The sands have been drowned before. The islands have broken apart and reformed into long ribbons numerous times. As the narrow stretches break in two and new inlets are created where once there was a highway, the natural fluctuations of tides will bring in the sand and shoals will once again form where humans would not allow. These shoals will continue to build until new islands are formed. The longshore current will continue to force the inlet to migrate in a southerly direction and the mosaic of shoals will join back together with the Banks, making them wider, stronger, and more resilient than before. One day, hundreds of years from now, the artifacts of our civilization will begin to be washed back ashore on these beaches and someone will ponder their origins and the nature of island migration.

The avian world is a kaleidoscope of colors. Every possible hue of color imaginable is found upon birds, and the study of this color and its evolutionary functionality is at the heart of one of the larger branches of ornithology. What makes birds colorful, why display such colors especially when they make you an obvious target for predators? These are the questions that researches such as Geoffry E. Hill of Auburn University have devoted their life’s work toward trying to understand.

One of the most puzzling aspects of bird coloration however is eye color. Like the plumage of the birds, eye color seems to come in nearly every possible color as well. Canary Yellow, Mandarin orange, scarlet red, coal black, you name it and you will find it as prominantly displayed in birds as the showy feathers they use to attract mates.

One thing we do know is how the eyes are colored, we are just not sure exactly why they are. Coloration in birds eyes is usually a result of both pigmentation and crystalline deposits of pigments. Dark browns and blacks are due to melanins – that same pigment that is now being studied for evolutionary advatages it gives carriers in thier fight against infections. Diving ducks and great blue herons exhibit yellow eyes which are produced by carotenoids. However, most yellow, red, and orange eyes are colored by pterin – a class of pigments that are completely unrelated to carotenoids. Then of course there is hemoglobin, that same stuff that makes our blood red, that is the source of the red eyes in the bronzed cowbirds.

Even though we can break down in labratories just what exactly causes the rainbow of eye coloration in birds, we are pretty much clueless as to why it occurs. One thing that we do know though, is that eye color tends to change with many species from juvenile to maturity and with the seasons. In these birds therefore, eye color is beleived to be attached to hormones and therefore serve the purpose of mate selection. Changes of eye color with age are found in a wide variety of avian families including the loons, grebes, ducks, hawks, pheasants, gulls, alcids, woodpeckers, mimic thrushes, vireos, and blackbirds. Species requiring more than a year to pass from juvenile to adult plumage (such as the Bald Eagle and Herring Gull) generally show a concurrent change in eye color. Some specific examples of age-related changes are Lesser Scaup and Northern Harrier (from brown to yellow), Sharp-shinned Hawk (bright yellow to red), Red-tailed Hawk (yellow to red-brown), American Crow (blue or blue-gray to brown), Dark-eyed junco (gray or gray-brown to red-brown), and Common Grackle (brown, turning paler with age).

Another fascinating aspect of color is that it would appear some species have even gone so far as to enhance the pupils of the eyes for signaling as well. Both the Black Oyster Catcher and the American Oyster Catcher exhibit a double pupil. This double pupil has been heavily studied in the Black Oyster Catcher – that species that associates with rocky shorelines as opposed to sandy coasts like the pie bald American. These studies have found that the presence of a double pupil can be used with an 80% success rate of determining the sex of the bird. Double pupils mean female. Experiments on American Oyster Catchers like this have either not been conducted, of the findings have yet to be published.

Eye color, like plumage color, is therefore most likely all about signally for a mate.

Animals have developed an ingenious way of handling problems like competition or attack. We simply move away from the offense. Such a simple act of course, walking or flying away in order to free ourselves from intolerable pressures. We really do take this for granted. Yet what of plants? Some such as Russian tumbleweed exercise the freedom of mobility, but most others are bound to one spot. Inevitably other plants move in around them. Competition becomes intense for those necessities of life such as water, sunlight, and nutrients. Animals come and graze upon the leaves. Insects infest. Plants are therefore bombarded by a litany of attacks from both kingdoms of life. Through it all, most stoically they sit and endure it would seem.

This is an illusion of course. Plants are not adopting Christian teachings of turning the other cheeks. Plants are fighting back. They are constantly at war. Chemical warfare is being waged all you as you read this. In the Darwinian battle for survival, pacifism is extinction.

These chemical weapons come in many forms, but all are known as alkaloids. Alkaloids are not all bad though. Some are good of course in that they are produced to entice other species to associate with the plant, be it for protection or propagation. Alkaloids however, are what make species such as water hemlock one of the deadliest plants known to man – for which Socrates employed in his suicide. Alkaloids are also the medicinal properties of plants. Some plants in the constant battle of deterrence, have developed psychotropic properties that make animals hallucinate or go numb. Other alkaloids attack the nervous system of animals that feed upon them, causing death.

One such neurological alkaloid that evolved to cause death in insects that infest plants has also helped the wielder of such chemicals to conquer the world. As humans are much larger than insects, this alkaloid has a slightly weaker and oddly desirable effect on us. This desire has prompted domestication and the spreading of those plants far beyond boundaries for which they would have survived on their own. By eliciting the favor of humans, these plants have exploited us in their fight against other plants, and their fight to reproduce and prosper. Domestication is a two way street of course. This neurotoxin is caffeine.

Few species of plants have mastered the production of this weapon but nearly all that have, have of course won our favor. Coffee most likely originated in Ethiopia. Tea from the Chinese highlands. Yaupon holly, from the Southeast of the United States. Scientifically known as Ilex vomitoria, Yaupon holly is the sole proprietor of caffeine in North America, and the American Indians, like us today, were quite fond of its effects.

If you ever read any accounts of European dealings with Southeastern Indians, you will most likely find references to either Black Drink, cassina, or asi – all of which was the ceremonial drink that was prepared from the roasted leaves of the yaupon holly.  Today, Black Drink is mainly remembered for its use in purgative ceremonies – hence the name “vomitoria.” Yaupon holly however, was also used as a social drink by men. When sitting around deliberating upon important matters, men would drink cassina much like we drink coffee in similar situations today. Black Drink along the coast of the Carolinas was drank primarily from lightning whelk shells – what many people like to call conch shells today.

The caffeinated effects of yaupon was not lost on European colonists as English, French, and Spanish colonists all adopted the use of yaupon tea. After the famed Boston Tea Party, the colonies up and down that Atlantic seaboard began importing roasted yaupon holly leaves from the Carolinas – hence one of it’s English names, Carolina Tea. When introduced to Europe the tea became an immediate hit and was called South Sea Tea. During the Civil War, Carolina Tea became in high demand on both sides the battle fronts for its stimulant properties.

Over the centuries however yaupon began to fall from favor of both Europeans and European Americans and was replaced by coffee and Chinese tea as the caffeinated drink of choice. Today few have heard of yaupon tea, though many recognize the drink Yerba Matte – a Peruvian tea made from another member of the holly family known as Illix paraguariensis. Historians of tea drinking typically relate to fall from grace to the scientific naming of vomitoria which does not bode well for trade. Like any caffeinated drink, consuming copious amounts will most likely cause you to vomit. Try drinking 25 shots of espresso and see what happens. This is exactly what Native Americans did in purgative ceremonies. By the twentieth century though, the only people left in the United States that were known to consume yaupon holly tea were the inhabitants of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. As late as the 1970s this drink could still be found on the menus are restaurants on Ocracoke island. Here in the 21 century however, most Outer Bankers have never even heard of drinking the stuff, despite the incredible abundance of the shrub all over the islands.

But what drives this explosion of color? Spring and summer offer a monotony of green, but then with Autumn, our world takes on the appearance befitting of a Dr. Sues book. In order to understand what we are seeing in the fall we must first understand what color is in the first place. When we look at an object, the color that we see is determined by the physical properties of that object and specifically which color wavelengths of light that objects absorbs and reflects / scatters. For instance, an object that absorbs all wavelengths of light takes on the appearance of being black. Conversely, an object that scatters all wavelengths in turn looks white. Ultimately the color we see on an object is in fact the color of the wavelength of light that the object does not absorb and therefore reflects or scatters off of its surface. This means that when we look at the leaves of a red maple in the fall, the brilliant scarlet red that we see is the one color that the leaf itself does not absorb and therefore reflects back for us to observe.

During the growing seasons of spring and summer, leaves are full of chlorophyll which is where photosynthesis takes place. As the days grow shorter and the nights become cooler, the deciduous trees that characterize the eastern hardwood forests undergo a dramatic transformation as they prepare for the coming winter. Much like a squirrel stockpiling food for the winter, or bears consuming as much as 30,000 calories a day to prepare for hibernation, trees begin the process of storing energy as well.

At first the tree simply begins to develop a specialized layer of cork cells at the base of the leaf. As this is formed water and mineral uptake into the leaf is decreased and finally stopped all together. As the water and mineral uptake slows, the production of chlorophyll begins to cease as well while yellow xanthophylls, orange  B-carotene, and red anthocyanin become unmasked by the dwindling chlorophyll. As the structural protein that produces the chlorophyll begins to degrade, the resulting amino acids are taken back up into the tree and stored in the trunk and roots.

All of this begs the question though as to whether or not the color change itself could in fact actually be beneficial for the trees in ways other than just the re-absorption of amino acids? As it tuns out, there has been quite a bit of research done on anthocyanin – the compound that turns leaves red. Researchers have found that not only does anthocyanin help with the absorption of nutrients – especially nitrogen – but when the leaves fall to the ground, this substance also stunts the growth of nearby saplings thus helping to reduce competition in an act known as allelopathy. More research needs to be done on the potential benefits of xanthophylls and carotene but if red leaves tend to aid trees, than we may very well one day find that other colors offer their own specific benefits.

Salt on a barrier island is the grand orchestrator of all life. If you cannot adapt to it, you cannot live here. This goes for plants, animals, and even people. Salt encases everything. Its the reason your car begins to rust as soon as you bring it to the Banks, its the reason we are constantly refilling our windshield wiper fluid out here. Sometimes I think I should own stock in the wiper fluid industry considering the hundreds of dollars I spend on the stuff.

For animals though, the problem of salt is not a simple matter. The problem with salt is that we need salt to survive but like anything else, too much of a good thing can often kill you. Therefore one of the greatest adaptations that any animal must make in a salty environment is the ability to overcome the issue of salinity. And with some 75% of the Earth covered in salt water, this is a major hurtle for many species. Birds, reptiles, and mammals all have different and fascinating ways of handling this problem – and each one is an extraordinary testament to the adaptability of life on Earth.

Mammals need fresh water to survive, its a basic fact of life. Yet whales, dolphins, seals, etc. . . do not have the luxury of freshwater in their world. You will be hard pressed to find a blue whale cruising the open ocean in search of the stuff. It just simply does not exist. So how do they do it? With specialized kidneys. In marine mammals, the kidney, first and foremost is typically much larger than a terrestrial mammal of the same size. Second, marine mammals posses what are known as reniculate kidneys. A reniculate kidney is a kidney that is made up of hundreds to thousands of tiny little kidneys known as reniculi that are fully functioning miniature kidneys that work both independently of each other as well as together in order to process out salt and other toxins. The rule of thumb with the number of reniculi in marine mammals is that the saltier the water (or more accurately the saltier the diet), the more lobes are needed.

Marine mammals also obtain a significant amount of their water through the metabolization of their food. According to A. Rus Hoelzel  in Marine Mammal Biology: An Evolutionary Approach, mammals can derive just over 1 gram of water for every gram of fat that they consume and nearly half a gram of water for every gram of protein. So in terms of eating fish, the fattier the fish for a marine mammal, the more water it can generate through the eating that fish. This all goes one step further in the sense that not all food sources in the ocean have the same rate of salinity or saltiness. Fish are going to have about the same salinity as the blood of marine mammals and therefore will provide more fresh water. Crustaceans on the other hand provide the same amount of salt as drinking seawater directly. This is where the number of reniculi plays into the equation.

So if mammals have evolved multi-lobed or reniculate kidneys for processing out all that salt in the diets, how do reptiles deal with the problem? Reptiles have been around just a tad longer than mammals have and therefore they have developed unique glands specifically designed for dealing with and excreting salt from the body. Saltwater crocodiles have them on their tongue, marine iguanas have adapted nasal glands, sea snake contain salivary glands that do the trick, and sea turtles simply cry super salty tears.

The tear glands of sea turtles occupy a considerable amount of room in the turtles head. These glands are constantly producing a thick, sticky, clear mucus that is actually twice as salty as seawater itself. This mucus not only functions to lubricate the sea turtles eyes, but also removes the excess salt from the body. As turtles are continuously removing salt via tears, numerous legends have arisen around the world explaining that the mother turtles were crying for their unborn children.

Being that birds are closely related to to reptiles they have a very similar solution for removing salt from their diet through whats known as supraorbital salt glands. These are glands that line the eye sockets of the birds and excrete salt. Birds have proven to be quite good at removing salt from their body by excreting as much as 90% within three hours of ingestion. All of this makes perfect since when we are talking about species of pelagic birds such as shearwaters, petrels, the albatross, etc . . .  But what of other species of birds such as oh, say, mallards. As it turns out, when or if a mallard – even from the the Midwest – happens to find itself in a salty environment, its supraorbital salt gland will actually grow in size as a response to the amount of salt now suddenly in its environment. The only group of birds that do not have this salt gland are the passerines (songbirds). Even those passerines that live in salt marshes do not have these glands. These birds, like mammals, rely upon renal (kidney) excretion of salt.

So there you have it, animals are adaptable. Considering life began in the ocean, which is roughly 3% salt, its only natural that animals will find ingenious ways to handle the problem of salt in their environment. Fish simply process it in their gills. But then again, fish are not species that have “returned” to salt water like other animals. Mammals, birds, and reptiles, those species that most likely evolved on Terra firma on the other hand are the ones who had to reinvent the wheel.

Migration is about two things: filling bellies and having babies. Imagine that, migratory species are driven by the same two basic things that motivate guys. What else would be pressing enough to convince anyone to risk life and limb each year to undertake an epic journey that statistically speaking you may not  survive? With October now right around the corner, the fall migrations are fully upon us. Birds, fish, whales, sea turtles, monarch butterflies, and everything else that needs more than the landscape has to offer come this time of year is on the move.

Migration in species is one of the most baffling and least understood behaviors in science. Even though migration this time of year is just simply moving from one food source to another, why do animals make the monumental treks that they do when food is available elsewhere? Why and how do they take the same route each year. There are birds that leave Alaska, fly over to the Atlantic coast, then south, and back west again into Mexico. Why not just fly south? How do these species manage to navigate?

The only thing that is truly agreed upon when it comes to the topic of migration is that it starts at different times for different species based upon how far they have to go. When most people think of migrations, they think of late fall or winter. But for some species this starts as early as August. The answer to why this is, is pretty simple. If all you have to do is go from New York to North Carolina, than sure, you can get started in October. But if you have to go from Baffin Island in Northern Canada to Argentina, than you better get your butt moving! There it is, what we collectively agree on in terms of migration in a nutshell. Every thing else is up for debate.

One of the more intriguing theories out there in terms of how species are able to navigate is by use of the Earth’s magnetic field. Researchers have long been puzzled how species such as the leatherback sea turtle could set a direct course across the entire Atlantic Ocean to specific points on the other side of the drink. Satellite tracking devices have shown these sea turtles leaving the buffet lines of Nova Scotia where they are feeding on Lions Mane jellyfish and heading directly south to St. Croix to lay their eggs. How is this possible?

Studies done on baby loggerheads have shown that when placed into an Olympic sized swimming pool for instance, these turtles always move towards the direction of the Gulf Stream. The magnetic field of the room was tweaked to represent numerous different locals along the Eastern seaboard from Cape Hatteras to Canada to Florida and with each mimic the baby turtles predictably headed across the swimming pool in the direction that the Gulf Stream would be in relationship to that location. These turtles, it was found, actually contain magnetite crystals in the brains and bodies. The presence of this mineral could very well act as magnetoreceptors, which would help sea turtles align themselves with the earths magnetic field just like a compass needle aligning itself to the North Pole.

Animals are able to perceive the geomagnetic field in three distinct ways. Mechanical reception like a compass and how sea turtles orient themselves in the first. The second is electric induction whereby movement within a magnetic field leads to an induced electric field – a common tool of many fish. The last is simply chemical changes due to the variation in the magnetic field.

Birds appear to have a bit more complex means of magnetic orientation that sea turtles.  With birds, we find the magnetite at works once again but we also add chemical changes into the mix as well.

Some forty years ago it was hypothesized that migratory birds may actually have magnetic receptors in their eyes that are able to respond to the geomagnetic field. Argued by few, laughed at by many, decades passed with nothing concrete enough to prove the presence of such things. All of this changed recently when Peter Hore and his colleagues at Oxford discovered that chyptochromes – a class of light sensitive proteins found in both plants and migratory birds are in fact sensitive to weak magnetism.

Cryptochromes are stimulated by light of specific wavelengths to produce two free radicals. Peter Hore found that he could control the concentrations of each free radical by applying a magnetic field. The color wavelength that stimulated the cryptochromes was blue light – same as the light that is typically present at dusk. It just so happens that ornithologists believe that birds orient themselves at dusk – when the blue light is most prevalent.

Numerous books have been written on the matter of migration and how species manage to navigate their way across the globe on a seasonal basis. Some species follow their parents, others have the map deeply ingrained into their genetic code so that they come their own GPS system already programmed to exactly where they need to go each year without ever having actually been there. The study of migration and orientation is a fascinating one and considering what little we do know, yet how extraordinary that which we do understand is, only time will tell just how deep the rabbit hole really goes on this topic.

Driving along the beach today, watching as scores of double crested cormorants move south I find it pretty easy to quickly get lost in the mysteries of this annual event.

Hurricanes are a fact of life in the Southeast. Category 5 storms are the most powerful and destructive weather events on Earth with the ability to completely erase human existence from the coast. As I write this, Hurricane Earl is some 300 miles south of the Outer Banks and is churning our way. With maximum sustained winds of 145 mph at the moment, this storm is a category 4 storm. If we see a 10 mph increase in winds, Earl will become a 5. The roads are clogged with visitors frantically trying to leave under the mandatory evacuations for all of the Outer Banks. The skies have become overcast, the winds are beginning to pick up, and the inevitable barrage of news vans and storm chasers have once again descended upon our islands.

These storms have always been one of the driving forces behind the geology, ecology, and even the history of these barrier islands, the sounds behind them, and the mainland beyond those. Flood plain swamps have evolved along the mainland side of the sounds to handle the extraordinary amounts of water that suddenly race inland with the powerful northeast winds of the leading edge of these storms. The geological study of these barrier islands is called coastal geomorphology due to the never ending change that occurs when these islands migrate westward with every major storm that washes over. As these storms move up the coast, the trailing edge of the low pressure system switches back around to the southwest and all of that water that has been building along the mainland suddenly comes barreling back towards the barrier islands. This backwash effect is what causes inlets to form on these islands when the sound overwashes to the ocean, stripping the islands of sand.

The orign of the word hurricane has its roots in the language of Native Americans that the Spanish encountered in these storm beaten parts of the world. On the Yucatan Peninsula the Mayan God of wind was named Hurakan. Out into the Caribbean, the Carib speaking people of the West Indies and northern coast of South America named their God of Evil Huracn. The Carib peoples were relative new comers to the Caribbean Islands however, mostly likely immigrating to the region from the Orinoco River. It was upon coming into contact with the Taino / Arawak people that the Carib most likely adopted Huracn. The Spanish dealt with the Taino extensively as the strong hold for the Spanish Crown in the islands was based upon their lands. For the Taino the word Juracan was the name of their God of Storms, and considering the destructive nature of the storms in question, its no wonder why the Carib would have perceived the god that created such havoc as the God of Evil.

As the God of Wind and Storms now stands at our doorsteps and we brace ourselves for his visit, we know that this will be a long night of uncertainty.