Volume 2 Issue 10

September 22 , 2006

Lettitor
By Heather Holbrook

     Who doesn’t like a bargain? Most people like to happen upon a treasure for a pittance whether it is in a retail bargain bin or a yard sale on a sunny day. Tag sale, garage sale, yard sale, rummage sale; they are all the same thing. Except we don’t happen to have many of them on the islands. An unusual phenomenon occurs, particularly on SI, where perfectly useable items are parked on the edge of the street free for the taking. You’ve seen it: a faded but otherwise perfectly good boogie board leaning up against household debris awaiting trash pick up, a baby stroller with all four wheels intact, a wooden chair. I’ve heard it called the Free For All. And it is exactly that.
      I like to think this gesture of island-wide generosity is rooted in the values of yesteryear when people shared what they had and didn’t let things go to waste. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, quite literally. Or else it’s just too much effort to haul it to the GoodWill next to the Pig.
      Now I presume that yard sales do exist on the islands, but not with any regularity to my knowledge. I’ve never actually been to one on Sullivan’s Island except for the big one at Battery Gadsden each October. And to be honest, I don’t really know if IOP residents subscribe to the Free For All method of acquisition, but I think suspect there are traditional yard sales there as well.
      Garage Salers, and EarlyBirds as they are sometimes known, are a curious bunch. On the hunt, they strategize circling all the sales listed in the newspaper, plan their route and then hit the trail in the wee hours each Saturday morning, coffee and dollars in hand. My father-in-law in NC is an expert at this and has brought home an assortment of interesting things from a kid-size battery powered NASCAR racecar in pretty good shape for $5 to a set of Franciscan dinnerware worth $800 bought for $30. I was talking with an islander yesterday who said her dad used to hit yard sales regularly and come home with ceiling fans. They had some 30 fans in various states of repair at any given time.
      And you can get some astounding steals at yard sales; I once accidentally sold my mother’s gold watch for a dollar amid a box of her costume jewelry when I was about 8. Made somebody’s day, though. He’s probably still telling that story to his friends.
      But back to the FFA method of goods distribution, I have a friend on the island drags home finds every week. She has spied big planters, teak lawn chairs, tricycles and file cabinets roadside, stopped, backed up and loaded these items into her brand-new SUV. I agree with her when she says,“I just can’t get over what people throw out!”

Charles Towne Landing Gets a Facelift

     Charles Towne Landing has needed a good overhaul for several years now. Ever since Hurricane Hugo blew over the original museum and damaged the Animal Forest, the park has been suffering from low attendance and lack of recreational funding.
      Luckily, Charles Towne Landing was selected to undergo some major renovations last year and the result is a stunningly different park. Instead of dropping off in front of a snack stand and tired gift shop with poorly-labeled management offices, the driveway winds though the coastal forest of tall, thin pine trees, oak and sugar maple until you arrive at the newly improved visitor center.
     And what a visitor’s center! Designed by Liollio Architecture in conjunction with Meredith Drakeford Architects, the visitor’s center is a beautiful structure in perfect sync with the landscape. Broad glass walls, exposed beams and vaulting ceilings all contribute to the sense of the outdoors, indoors. The building sprawls across a small pond, open field and edges into the forest, blending in while striking a bold resemblance to a mountain cabin on a grand scale.
     When you walk in, your eyes are immediately drawn to the two story sectioned glass wall overlooking the pond and the wooden walkways branching into the park grounds. Through overhanging limbs of ancient oak, the reconstructions of the first settlements are visible; split timber in tall “x” patterns cut across the original settlement footprints, allowing visitors to tour the area and see it exactly as it was three hundred years ago.
     Once your eye comes back to the front desk, you’re being whisked through after paying a small entrance fee of $5 for adults, $3 for children ages 6 – 15 or free for five and under, and into an interactive museum that takes the visitor from the first idea of travel across the broad and intimidating Atlantic, to the current facilities and ongoing archeological digs. Children are invited to touch everything and in fact, most of the displays are interactive. The museum opens with a “Virtual Dig”, where a motion-sensitive screen is projected on a low, broad table. The screen displays a field with rocks and plants and the children use their hands as “tools”, scraping away at the display to reveal artifacts from the original settlement. Throughout the rest of the museum, displays feature buttons, flip cards, touch-and-guess boxes, sliding doors and life size replicas of some of South Carolina’s earliest residents.
     After the museum, visitors are free to take the “historic trail”, a meandering blacktop path that leads in one direction to the Animal Forest and in the other toward the recreation of the original settlements and the restoration of the “Adventure”, a life-size reproduction of a typical trading ship of the 17th century. The settlements not only map out the original land plots of the settlers, but also have a small garden home and crop garden, where samples of the original cash crops of Charleston are grown. Archaeological sites dot the paths and visitors are invited to watch or sign up at the main office to volunteer on digs. A short ways past the settlement are the original earth embankments built by the settlers to serve as a rough fort to protect themselves and to guard their only port into the ocean. The “Adventure”, currently under construction, is dry docked there and visitors can see the process of crafting a boat according to 17 th century construction methods. Standing on the first landing site of the settlers and looking across the marsh, the city of Charleston is perfectly visible and seems almost like a vision of the future, as though we were the first settlers seeing what our small group of immigrants might one day become.
     In the opposite direction, the Animal Forest is Charleston’s only zoo. The animals are all rescued from the area and are either be rehabilitated for the wild or are too injured to be set free, but are perfectly happy with being fed daily meals and having wide, wild spaces to play in. The “pens” are virtually unchanged landscape, the fences being built around what was already there, so that the animals feel like they are still living in the coastal forests. The animals are almost always visible, as well. The black bear enjoys sunning himself on a very visible path of comfy grass and the puma hangs contentedly from the numerous live oak branches in his pen. The birds are all nearby, enclosed in an almost invisible net that visitors walk through, so close they could almost pet a pelican.
     If you’ve absolutely fallen in love with the animals of the forest, Charles Towne Landing also offers an “adopt an animal” program, where individuals can “adopt” a black bear for $250.00 or a turtle for $5. The animals stay in their cages, of course, but every animal in the forest is available for adoption, with prices ranging between bear and turtle, and all the proceeds go to keeping them comfortable, fed, happy and toward larger play areas and expansion of staff.
     To get to Charles Towne Landing, take Highway 17 South through downtown and across the Ashley River Bridge into West Ashley. Right after you cross the bridge, merge right onto Highway 61. Take Highway 61 about a mile and a half until it splits between Highway 61 on the left and Highway 171 on the right. Merge right onto Highway 171 and follow about a third of a mile down until you see Charles Towne Landing on your right. The address is 1500 Old Towne Road , Charleston , SC and their phone number is 843.852.4200. Hours are between 8:30 am and 5 pm (closed Christmas Eve and Christmas Day) with visitors allowed to bike the grounds any time before 8:30 in the morning.

Fall Bird Migration on Sullivan’s Island
By Will Post

      If you go outside after sundown and listen carefully for sounds above, you may hear the chips, clucks and squeaks of migratory birds passing overhead in the darkness. Their calls are often mistaken for those of insects. A possible reason for the evolution of nocturnal migration is that it enables birds to avoid predators such as hawks. Nocturnal migrants are able to navigate by using a variety of clues, primarily celestial patterns, but also the orientation of magnetic fields, and even sounds such as ocean waves.
      This time of year, tens of millions of birds leave their summer nesting grounds, flying vast distances over land and water to reach wintering grounds in the tropics. The largest numbers of birds move southward with the passage of cold fronts, and. if you examine the daily weather map, you will be able to determine when they are coming.
      Most of the migrants that move through the coastal area are inexperienced navigators, birds that hatched the previous summer. Migrating along the ocean is a dangerous enterprise, as you can be blown offshore when winds change direction when you are in flight. Most adult birds migrate far inland to avoid the coast: only about 10% of the fall migrants captured at a banding stations on Sullivan’s Island were adults.
      The migrant flocks are composed mainly of species that feed on insects and other invertebrates, abundant food that is a critical source of energy for nesting, but food that is scarce in winter. Insects as well as fruits are abundant in the Caribbean Basin, where most of the migrants spend the winter. The most common migrant species are insect-eating members of the warbler, vireo and thrush families. The most abundant on Sullivan’s island are American redstarts, prairie warblers, northern waterthrushes, palm warblers, common yellowthroats, red-eyed vireos, white-eyed vireos, Swainson’s thrushes and veeries.
      After a cold front passes Sullivan’s Island, the best way to see these birds is to walk along one of the paths that bi-sects the conservation area (accreted land) in front of Ft. Moultrie. The path at Station 16 often provides good birding. Most migrants can be spotted as they feed along the edges of wooded areas, especially where there are pools of water. If you have a lot of vegetation in your yard, you may be just as likely to see them at your house.

Sullivan’s Islander Will Post is Curator of Birds at Charleston Museum. He was a regular contributor to The Naturalist, a community publication complete with sketches by Jim Darlington, circa 1991.