Inside Carolina Bays

By Tom Poland

 

Editor’s Note: This feature is an excerpt from a book in progress Robert Clark and Tom Poland are working on. 

It’s hard to escape civilization’s essentials, flotsam, and trappings. If I don’t see powerlines, contrails streak the sky. If I don’t see contrails, litter mars highways and fields. Plastic bottles bob along waterways. Windborne grocery bags snag limbs. Eyesores abound. Abandoned sofas, discarded tires, piles of trash. We blight our habitat and natural places. Even worse, we change rare places’ fundamental nature. We’ve drained, farmed, timbered, and in general destroyed a lot of Carolina bays. Those that remain pristine, however, are well worth the time to see. Photographer Robert Clark and I explore and document many of them. We tell people about bays at book events. That’s when the questions begin.

“Why do you call them Carolina bays?”

“What’s it like in a Carolina bay?”

We get those questions a lot. We explain that they’re highly unusual and wild places. That they have an otherworldly appearance.

“What do you do there and what do you wear? Are they safe?”

We get those questions, too.

To go into a bay is to go into the wilderness. It’s a place where, you, man, enter nature’s domain. It’s not like sitting in your backyard with its manicured lawn, fountains, and flowerbeds watching birds, butterflies, and squirrels. They are in your domain where signs of man’s tampering abound, pruned hedges and carefully laid out brick and stone, comfy lounges, fountains, and pools.

 

 

You won’t see signs of man in a Carolina bay. Oh, you may see charred trunks and burnt grasses where foresters’ prescribed burns duplicate lightning’s fire benefits. (Prescribed burns, known also as controlled burns, manage weeds and invasive plants, lower wildfire risk, restore nutrients, and foster desirable plant growth.) You won’t see roads or pavement or litter. You won’t see power lines or pipelines. You will see what in many ways are natural gardens. And birds. This book overflows with references to birdsong, and here’s what’s crucial about that. In our world, we can’t live without air conditioners, ambulance sirens, whining airplanes, horn-blasting trains, road rager horn honking, and revving engines. We know what it’s like to hear a giant garbage truck impersonate a dung beetle with its raised arms, groaning engine, and beep-beep backing, the finale of which is the dumpster being slammed repeatedly to empty refuse to be carted off to some landfill.

Birds must compete with all that noise, and it drowns out their sweet calls. In a Carolina bay, you won’t hear lawn mowers, weed eaters, nail guns, and the trappings of civilization. You will hear birdsong whose only competitors are thunder, rainfall, frogs, and wind in the grasses and trees. It’s as beautiful a harmony as you can imagine. At night, you’ll hear frogs and owls. You’ll hear things you can’t identify. You won’t find a place to sit, certainly not a log, a favored sanctuary for snakes. You are an intruder.

 

 

What do we do in bays? We visit them on a seasonal basis to get year-round coverage of how they look and document what’s taking place. Spring and summer, the seasons of growth, are busy times. We take a lot of photographs and make extensive notes. We record the emergence of wildflowers. We note the changes varying water levels produce. During spring, we note water levels by the presence of pollen rings upon trees. We look for bird nests in bays.

We examine what wildlife species are doing throughout the seasons. In the summer we take a close look at the deep pink veins running through meadow beauties. In habitat-specific bays, we get on our knees and hands and search for Venus flytraps. Examining the oddly beautiful blooms of pitcher plants evokes the mysterious ways of nature. The carnivorous pitcher plant is death made beautiful. We like seeing white top sedge in bloom, Rhynchospora colorata. From afar you can’t see the delicate mint-green tendrils that are part of the white blossoms. You have to get up close. In spring and summer thanks to early morning dew or afternoon rain we get a kick out of the spiders that build webs across the rims of pitcher plants. You could say the spiders have erected a blockade, Checkpoint Charlie, where they intercept insects.

Toward fall we anticipate the zonation in sedges and grasses, fenceless borders where colors delineate grass kingdoms. Envision a layer of deep blue sky just over a line of green trees and six bands of pink, gold, light green, yellow, dark green, and red grass. Now sprinkle in yellow and blue wildflowers. It’s something to behold. At the edge of the sedges, colonies of pitcher plants shoot up like alien cities. Fall brings colors to them that rival a florist’s most imaginative creations. And all these wonderful plants are in close proximity. You can walk from one area of habitat to another in mere feet. Ecotones, areas of transition between biomes, abound in bays. A typical bay gives you the opportunity to explore diverse habitats.

In autumn, sand rims look as if snow has fallen around and beneath the red leaves of scrub oaks that stand in sharp contrast to the white sands. Even beneath a gray sky, the red leaves of oaks, snow-white sands, and evergreen trees on the horizon paint a pretty picture.

In the interior wetlands, look for concentrated pools of water in the leaves where tannic acid looks much like red Kool-Aid.

Going into a bay is not like going into a park. The seasons have a lot to do with what to wear. If it’s spring or summer, wear long pants, jeans work, high-top boots, snake chaps as a precaution, and a long-sleeve white linen shirt, which handles the heat well. Wear a wide-brimmed hat or at least a cap. Use sunscreen. Wear good quality sunshades. Take insect repellent. Mosquitoes abound, as do ticks, and at times deer flies attack in swarms. U.S. Forestry Service’s Bruce Lyles, retired, said huge clouds of mosquitoes were so thick and ravenous at one bay that he and his colleagues had to run to escape them.

Make a record of what you see and orient yourself. Take a compass and a good camera, not a smart phone camera. Always take a lot of water. Don’t go alone. Again, don’t go alone and let people know when and where you intend go. File a flight plan.

Choose your time to go with forethought. Fall is a great time to visit a Carolina bay. Often it is quite pleasant as the temperatures are cooler and the humidity is lower. Color changes sweep through the bays giving them a beautiful countenance. Pitcher plants turn brilliant colors and the grasses do too.

Read up on the Carolina bay you wish to visit. Some are so remote as to take themselves out of consideration. Some are off limits as the bays at Savannah River Site are, and though the public can’t visit them, they are some of the more pristine bays around. SRS consists of secured 310 square miles, as it was the site of nuclear weapons development. Man hasn’t been able to tamper with its bays. As the long-time director of the University of Georgia’s Ecology Lab at SRS, Whit Gibbons, pointed out, “The best protection for the environment is no people.”

Visit A Carolina bay but remember it is nature’s domain, not yours.

 

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

 

Tom Poland is the author of twelve books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press released his book, Georgialina, A Southland As We Knew It, in November 2015 and his and Robert Clark’s Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II in 2014. The History Press of Charleston published Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia in 2014. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, “Georgialina.”