Making It Grow Minutes

Beidler Forest Audubon Center’s manager Matt Johnson said this is red-letter year for the larvae of the Eastern Tent Caterpillar. They were everywhere, the boardwalk was covered in frass, the polite word for insect poop, they were even falling on us from the trees! Although they covered with seta, hair-like bristles that sometimes cause serious skin irritation, these caterpillars are harmless to t...

On our visit to the Beidler Forest manager Matt Johnson spotted five snakes – three water moccasins and two banded water snakes. To distinguish between them, see if the eyeball is round and therefore a non-venomous water snake rather than the moccasins’ slit-eyed pupil. But that means using binoculars or getting too close for safety!

Much of the Beidler Forest is a swamp – a flooded forest where the water level fluctuates rather dramatically, some areas may occasionally be completely dry. The water doesn’t come from streams or springs but from rainfall draining from the four hundred and thirty thousand acres watershed above Four Holes Swamp, of which Beidler is a part. Think of a swamp as a massive porous surface – rainwater c...

Our crew spent a glorious day filming at the Beidler Forest Audubon Center recently, the original portion of which was purchased from the Beidler family in the 1960’s. Francis Beidler was a Chicago businessman who with partner Benjamin Ferguson established the Santee Cypress Lumber Company in eighteen eighty one, purchasing one hundred sixty five thousand acres in central South Carolina. This comp...

This offspring of the Bradford pear not only spreads like crazy, it also has treacherous thorns.

The saga of the rampant Bradford pear continues...

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

In many parts of the country, gardeners can’t buy fertilizers that contain phosphorus unless they have soil test results that show the need for that middle number on the fertilizer bag. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are the three nutrients the percentage of each is listed in that order on every fertilizer package. Nitrogen and potassium are both relatively water soluble and seldom are found...

Scalping your lawn has always sounded absolutely horrific to me, as well as the practice of burning. Actually, there are times when those practices can be beneficial but it all has to do with timing. Extension Agent Adam Gore explained that just as warm-season turf is about to come out of dormancy, scalping or burning can remove the insulating now dead grass residue and help reduce thatch build up...

Adam Gore, Extension Agent in Abbeville, who’s getting his PhD in turf, talked with us recently about not being in a hurry to get your warm-season turfgrass greened up. Although those big box stores have weed and feed conveniently and temptingly located near the checkout stand right now, March and April are one hundred percent not the right months to put out these products. As a matter of fact, th...

When I’ve been to fancy grocery stores in pandemic days, I’m more prone to impulse buying -- why five bags of almond flour and peculiar jars of condiments? The garden centers at big box stores are masters at product placement – with totally inappropriate displays of weed and feed by their check out points right now. Pre-emergent fertilizers for warm season turf needed to be applied in February – i...

The most important thing you can do to improve the quality of your turfgrass is to every year make entries to your calendar. At Clemson’s HGIC, you can find yearly maintenance calendars for both warm-season and cool-season turfgrasses we grow in South Carolina. Most important is a soil test –I know you get tired of hearing that, but different grasses want very different amounts of fertilizer. Cent...

Clemson Extension’s Home and Garden Information Center each week shares a listing of calls they’ve received, ranked by the topics with the greatest requests for help. Number one, leading the list, is always turf grass. A super-managed lawn, with no flowering, so-called weeds doesn’t feed pollinators, needs regular irrigation, and few lawn mowers and such have anti-pollution devices on them. That s...

We occasionally have had parties watching chimney swifts descend into a towering chimney right on the same part of the house where female mother bats emerge to feed -- they look like mercury oozing out between the clapboards. – both activities happening at the same time as dusks falls. When we can safely be together again, we’ll return to hosting these viewing parties where we serve margaritas. I’...

Clemson ecology experts T J Savareno and Ben Powell say that having some untidy parts of our yards makes a home friendly to all types of wildlife – from snakes that eat rats, to insects that pollinate our food crops, and for bats that eat harmful agricultural pests and annoying and potentially disease carrying mosquitoes. Bats International says if you can safely leave a dead tree, the space betwe...

DNR’s Heritage sites are an overlooked treasure these days when being outdoors is a safe way to get a break from our restricted lifestyles. Recently, we visited Calhoun County’s Congaree Bluffs Heritage Preserve –saw three other people. There was a bat box there that was on pole maybe fourteen feet or so up in the air as bats need space to drop after leaving their roost before they can take flight...

Our 190 year old house is not only home to us, but at certain times of the year to migrating chimney swifts and to bats, as a box soffit under the second story eaves serves as nurse colony. In spring, female bats enter through many of the cracks and cranies in this aging wooden house, spending their days nursing their babies, and leaving at dusk to hunt for insects – part if what makes them import...

My brother who lives to hunt, work in his woodshop and do outdoorsy things, got himself appointed to the “Homeowners Ground’s committee” where he had a beach apartment. Surrounded by ladies who came with girl friends for bridge weekends, his sole goal was to convince them to stop insisting that the maintenance crew remove palmetto leaves as soon as they started to turn brown, while half the leaf w...

White nose syndrome is an introduced fungal infection that’s exerting huge pressure on certain of our bat species. Some bats require a long and deep hibernation when their body functions slow down dramatically to conserve resources. When infected with this fungus, which concentrates on their faces, giving a white appearance to their nose, it irritates the bats, causing them to wake up and go outsi...

Flying around all night is pretty exhausting for bats and many of them roost for periods of time to conserve energy. Perch and wait is a strategy to sit, or rather hang upside down, until an insect flies by. Bats also use their incredible hearing to locate insects that are walking around on crop or tree leaves and then swoop down and pluck them off the actual plants. This ability means that caterp...

One way many bats find their supper is by flying around and emitting radar like sounds and listening to the signals that bounce off potential prey, a system called echolocation. The signals differ from species to species according to the bats’ body size, size of the intended prey and the sensitivity of that bat’s hearing. When a bat detects a potential meal is, it increases the frequency and zeros...

In the United States, we have forty-seven species of bats with 14 found in South Carolina. Most US bats and all of our bats are insectivorous with spiders thrown in, too. As such, they are hugely beneficial. Agriculture is the driving force in South Carolina’s economy, and the estimate is that insect suppression from bats is worth one hundred fifteen million dollars a year just in our small state....

Bats are among the most misunderstood animals we encounter – or don’t encounter as many people have never seen a bat. But with the of onslaught of the pandemic, bats which are truly beneficial, have gotten a bad rap. Although bats do harbor a large number of corona viruses which don’t seem to make them sick, most scientists believe the virus mutated and infected an intermediary animal, perhaps the...

The Audubon Society’s Francis Beidler Forest is the world’s largest untouched cypress-tupelo swamp, the perfect habitat for Prothonotary warblers, sometimes called swamp warblers. Specific birds have been tracked returning to the exact same hollowed out tre, year after year to build their nests. When a foot or two foot above water, these nests are less likely to be raided by racoons.

Jay Keck, who works for the South Carolina Wildlife Federation, called recently to thank me for re-upping my membership. As we chatted, he told me his group has partnered with Andrew Jackson High School whose students build bird boxes not only for screech owls but for Prothonotary warblers, as well.