Yellow rumped warblers migrate south to the Outer Banks in fall by the thousands. The individuals of this species that live along the eastern seaboard like this used to be known as myrtle warblers for their preference of eating the berries of wax myrtles and northern bayberries – which would explain the location of the kill. These myrtle warblers are one of only a very small handful of birds whose digestive system if even capable of handling the thick waxy coating of the berries from these two species of plants and is certainly the only warbler you will ever find doing so. For this reason, the yellow rumped warbler is able to winter far to the north of other species of normally insect eating warblers.

Perigrine falcons, such as the one dinning on the warbler before us, follow the migrating flocks of songbirds and shorebirds south along these barrier islands. Reaching speeds of up to 200 miles per hour in dives, these falcons are not only the fastest animals on Earth, but such speeds make them perfectly suited for a life sustained through eating such smaller birds like warblers on the wing. Perigrines will literally snatch small birds right out of the air and eat them as they continue to fly showcasing their own version of fast food preference.

Another key role that barrier islands like the Outer Banks have in the biology of peregrine falcons is their smaller populations of great horned owls. Great horned owls are the number one predator of peregrine falcons, as they swoop in with complete silence and stealth to pluck the smaller falcon off of its perch while fast asleep at night. Few animals of prey size are a match for these silent killers of the night, and though great horned owls do live on the Outer Banks, their numbers of sufficiently low enough to put the falcons at ease.

Venturing into the backcountry of the 4×4 beaches always offers an endless array of possibilities for wildlife watching this time of year. Swans by the tens of thousands are migrating to the shallow and protected waters of our back island sounds, raptors rolling across the heavens in an almost endless procession – stopping in to dine upon the feast below. Humpback whales can be spotted in full breach just beyond the outer bars, as the coastal bottlenose dolphin hunts inside of the surf zone. This is Autumn on the Outer Banks, a time that every guide working the beach will agree, may just simply be the absolute best time of the year to be out here.

Instead, we mark the passing of seasons by more tangible means. The arrival of blue fish and stripers is one sign. Another is the spotting of humpback whales breaching beyond the outer bar. Ospreys leave, while peregrine falcons return. Scores of birds begin to make their way down along the islands. Some, like the tree swallow travel in flocks of thousands. Others, like bald eagles are simply following the ducks and other waterfowl. Swans begin to break up the silence of the night with their cooing as they fly in by moonlight from lands far to the north. Indeed, we play witness to some one hundred thousand of these tundra swans as that migrate south with the wild winds of the north to their wintering home of eastern North Carolina.

The great migrations that characterize the transitionary season that lies between summer and winter, are only one facet of this change. Persimmons, those sweet gooey fruits that when unripe will turn your mouth inside out from the bitterness of their tannins begin to fall from the trees. The sea grapes, Scuppernongs, Muscadines, and fox grapes ripen at the onset of fall, and are a distant memory by the end. Live oaks begin to flesh out with their mast of acorns, bringing with it the winter feast that will sustain wild horses and deer a like through the coming winter.

Autumn is a time when the loblolly pine, wax myrtle, white willow, northern bayberry begin to turn brown from the salt in the air. Salt, that grand orchestrator of life on these barrier islands, announces its arrival in large quantities from the burning of leaves, the film on our windshields, the rust of our cars, the taste on our lips, and the smell to the air. It is the winds of coastal low pressure systems that are once again allowed to form at these latitudes, freed at last from the all-powerful dictator of our summer patterns of weather we call the Bermuda High, that brings with it the salt of the ocean.

On our tables, arrays of seasonal foods begin to appear. Hard clams, in the form of littlenecks, cherrystones, and chowder appear without warning. Clam fritters, clam casinos, steamed clams dipped in salted butter, clam chowder, clam bisque, fried clam strips – the bounty of our estuaries begins to pay dividends in shellfish. Local oysters begin to make their way back into our dinners, as does all thing red fish and blue fish. Striper, fileted, wrapped in bacon, and baked with potatoes and onions become a regular occurrence. Speckled trout and winter flounder, its what’s for dinner.

Ours is a culture that stands along the edge of the sea, inextricable from the ebb and flow of the cycles of the ocean and nature. Ours is a culture that marks the revolutions of the Earth by what we see, feel, smell, and taste. When the osprey, that greatest of fishermen, known by hundreds of different names the world over, worshiped by native cultures throughout the Americas, at last leaves the nest from which I have watched the drama of his and her lives unfold over the previous two season, I know that Autumn has arrived.

Some species are what we call “endemic” to a place. That means they are found nowhere else in the world. Take the Outer Banks Kingsnake for instance. Whether you call it by that name or Lampropeltis getula sticticeps, snake enthusiasts and herpetologists alike will know what your referring to. Well, that is if they have even heard of this little King.

Other species though are not quite that simple. What about species that transcend multiple countries, languages, and continents? The osprey is a perfect example of this. A widely distributed bird found across the globe, suddenly we find ourselves faced with the challenge of keeping up with what each culture that sees this bird happens to call it. This is even more important when it comes to academic or scientific research. Just here in North America we find three common names for this bird. On the East, traditionally the osprey has been known as the fish hawk. In the Pacific Northwest on the other hand, these birds have gone by the name seahawk. Most people in the US have heard of the football team the Seattle Seahawks. However most folks living on the East coast have no idea that this is the very same bird as their beloved fish hawk or osprey.

The osprey is a migratory species which only confounds the problem. So sure, we can narrow down the name of this bird to three basic ones here in the US, but the osprey here on the Outer Banks will wind up in any number of South American countries where it is officially called Gavilan Pescador, unless of course it winds up in Brazil where Portuguese is the national language and thus takes on the name of Águia-pesqueira.

Even in England, where we draw a strong influence for our animal names from, people cannot decide what they want to call this bird. In England we find names such as the bald buzzard, fishing eagle, eagle fisher, fish hawk, mullet hawk, and even the old English Bleria Pyttel which is also used for the red kite. Now if we take into consideration the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish names we can add another 16 names to the list of what you might hear an osprey called in the UK.

By now I’m sure you can see how complicated things can get when it comes to names here. This was the dilemma that Carl von Linne, otherwise known as Linnaeus, attempted to overcome with the creation of the binomial nomenclature. With the basic classification of species in the order of Kingdom-Phylum-Class-Order-Family-Genus-Species, Linnaeus took the last two in this list, genus and species, to create the so-called scientific name of the species.

So instead of the endless list of possible names that we might call the osprey, Pandion haliaetus becomes the official name used throughout the world from Japan to North Carolina.

Now when we look at the “scientific name” of the osprey, its easy to assume that it has less utility than some of the other more creative names. However, if we dissect this name than we find that it does in fact serve its purpose. . .

With the osprey, we find a species of bird that is neither hawk nor eagle. This means that the osprey sits in a genus all by itself which gave its “namer” a little room for creativity here. In this case Marie-Jules-Cesar Lelorgne de Savigny, the ornithologist who had this honor, chose the name Pandion – from the mythical king of Athens – for the genus. Now this is not much help here by any means but when we get to the species things begin to make a lot more since. The haliaetus comes from the Greek “halos” meaning “sea” and “aetus” meaning “eagle”. So here we see that the species is the “sea eagle.”

As I just mentioned, the osprey is not an eagle at all, in fact this species separated from the rest of the Accipitridae raptors around 24-30 million years ago. Despite this fact, the latin name for this bird serves as a description of the species – which is the ultimate goal of the scientific naming jargon. A few other local examples of are Ursus americanus, Typhus latifolia, and Agkistrodon piscivorus. Ursas americanus, what we call the black bear translates simply to the American bear because its the only true American species of bear (Ursus). Typhus latifolia is the broad leafed cattail. Typhus means everywhere, because this stuff grows everywhere, lati is latin for broad, and folio for leaf. The Agkistrodon piscivorus is translated to the hooked tooth fish eater, a.k.a the cottonmouth or water moccosin.

Now going back to the osprey, we know now why biologists prefer to use the scientific name for species, but what of the common name osprey itself? Where did this come from, considering some of the more descriptive common names such as the seahawk and fish hawk – which both make more sense especially considering how we name this species.

There are three possibilities to the origin of the name osprey. The first and by far the most commonly cited in popular literature and by naturalists is that osprey is derived from the latin ossifragus meaning bone breaker. Allegedly the Elder Pliny referred to this bird as ossifragus and eventually it was corrupted into osprey. Interestingly, the Fish Crow also uses this word in its name: Corvis ossifragus.

Other potential origins place this word, once again as a corruption of ospreit, the Old French for “bird of prey” which was derived from the latin avis praedae. Yet another possibility is that it derived from the Irish Ospróg.

Obviously the osprey is a bird whose name is steeped in mystery – partially due to the fact that it is such a widely distributed species and therefore countless cultures and languages have to be taken into account in terms of this name. . . This only lends itself further to the importance of the scientific name.

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.

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.

Dolphins are a  regular sight on our tours. With thousands of these amazing creatures calling the coast of the Outer Banks home during the summer months, chances are, you will have the opportunity to see and learn all about these little whales!

What we call a whelk, you probably call a conch shell. You know, the shell you are supposed to be able to hold up to your ear and hear the ocean? That’s it. Conchs and whelks are pretty much the same thing. Its just that along the coast of the Outer Banks, there is not a conch to be found. Go down south to Florida and the Keys on the other hand, and conchs abound. A good rule of thumb is that conchs tend to be tropical, and whelks temperate in climate.

Both whelks and  conchs are just big sea snails pretty much, and they are what biologists refer to as carnivorous gastropods. This is the point where you are probably thinking, “OK. Wait a minute here. These things are carnivorous? What in the world is a gastropod?”

The word gastropod is just a neat way of saying snails. It sounds better. Rolls off the tongue a little nicer. And when you say gastropod, people think your smart. Now a gastropod is a type of mollusc with an external shell – as opposed to slugs, also a mollusc, but with no shell – and they make up the second largest class of named species, second only to insects.

As for the notion of being a carnivorous gastropod then, well, its just like the name implies. Whelks eat other animals! When you are out on the beach looking for shells on the Outer Banks, you will probably find a tons of clam and scallop shells (think the Shell gas station symbol) that are popped wide open when they wash up. Nine times out of ten, this was done by a whelk.

Whelks will latch onto a clam shell with its foot. Then slowly but surely, the whelk will force its foot between the two shells of the clam. As the clam begins to weaken from fighting the whelk, the shell begins to slip open just enough for the whelk to insert its long probiscus and radula – which is a drill like organ to shredding up meat and shells.

Aside from popping open clams, some whelks even use this radula to drill into the shells of clams and scallops, much like our other famous little carnivorous snail called the moon snail.

Here along the Outer Banks, you are likely to find channeled, knobbed, and lighting whelks – with the lighting being the rarest.  The lightning whelk and the knobbed whelk look almost identical with the primary difference being the side on which the shell opens up. This is really easy to remember as lightning whelks open on the left. All you have to do is remember lightning and left both start with an L.

All three species of whelks have historically been used for food around these parts both by Native Americans and us Bankers. The Native Americans in the region would also use the lightning whelk in a number of different ceremonies, most notably for use in drinking Asi – also what became known as black drink or Carolina Tea. Black Drink was a ceremonial drink made from the yaupon holly (pronounced y-O-pawn) that is native to this region. As yaupon holly is the only species of plant in North America to contain caffeine, the drink was prepared and consumed much like coffee is today in the mornings, as well as during purgative ceremonies. This purgative ceremonies consisted of guys drinking copious amounts of this stuff until they vomited to purge their bodies of impurities and evil. This is how the yaupon holly got its scientific name -Ilex vomitoria.

Whelks are a pretty cool species, and their story is a testament to the weird crazy world that lives along the edge of the sea. Keep your out next time you are scavenging the beach – an age old profession around these parts known as “wracking” – because you never know when you might find one of these carnivorous gastropods to take home as a souvenir.

Posted by Jared Lloyd