Lowcountry flurries

One recent December afternoon found me precariously perched ankle-deep on a fallen tree in a pond on Daniel Island’s parkside. My editor’s recent request for seasonal articles about “wintry” animals was proving to be a challenge. This was my third and, I hoped, final visit to the pond for some pictures worthy of the spectacle Mother Nature was providing each night.

 

I am neither technologically equipped nor personally talented enough to be a professional photographer. What I lack in these areas I try to make up for by being in the right place at the right time. Unfortunately, I was trying to get a “perfect shot” of flying birds, screened by dense vegetation, over alligator-infested waters just before complete darkness settled in. The birds had arrived each time, but on this night they finally provided a special shot or two.

 

Great egrets, snowy egrets, herons, ibises, and other wading birds sometimes gather in great numbers to roost together at night. The sights and sounds encountered by inserting oneself into their world as day passes into evening are indescribably beautiful. The hundreds of birds, mostly white, soaring over the ponds, gliding down towards the water, and fluttering into the trees certainly bring to my mind a kind of Carolina snow flurry. We don’t get much of the real stuff here, so I find my “snowstorms” where I can.

 

For whatever reason, these populations of wading birds will sometimes quickly and completely change roost locations. I took some photos several months ago at the large pond just north of the intersection of Island Park Drive and Seven Farms Drive. When I went there late one afternoon a few weeks ago, there were only a handful of egrets to be found. But then I noticed a rather steady stream of flights overhead and followed them on my bike. Sure enough, the birds had relocated to the small pond adjacent to the Daniel Island Club entrance

road, perhaps half a mile away. And they were pouring in by the hundreds. While I could clearly see where the flocks of birds were going, it was the smell that confirmed they were regularly using this new roost.

 

With a couple of visits, I finally found my fallen tree where I could get the photographs I was looking for. That bird roost might be as close to snowfall as I will get in South Carolina this year, but that’s okay. It was every bit as beautiful as any Christmas card, and I won’t even have to shovel the sidewalk or blow off the driveway.