Edisto Island Open Land Trust

06/12/2026

This week for Flora and Fauna Friday is the Earth’s veil ennewed on each morning dew, the Southern Dawnflower (Stylisma humistrata).

Here in South Carolina we have four species of Dawnflower and, in the Lowcountry, two are abundant: Southern Dawnflower (S. humistrata) and Coastalplain Dawnflower (S. patens). These two local species are very similar in appearance and preferred habitats. However, Southern Dawnflower is what you’ll find on and around Edisto Island and thus our subject du jour. Coastalplain Dawnflower is more abundant in the Sandhills and up the coast from Charleston, and is distinctly more hairy on its sepals beneath the flower and has thinner leaves on average, if you care to hunt for it afield.

Southern Dawnflower is a low-growing vine found on dry, sandy soils throughout the Southeast. It is best adapted for sand barrens, dry roadsides, and Longleaf Pine Savannas where the sun is strong and hot and where frequent fire or other disturbance keeps soils open and light competition low. Southern Dawnflower’s specific epithet of “humistrata” deftly translates to “layered upon the earth”. This plant creeps as a groundcover across the open soil, intervening and overlapping the grasses and forbs sparsely eking out a living around it. Its vines are thin, wiry, and straight and may extend for several feet in multiple directions. Its leaves are alternate, oval-shaped, lightly crinkled with indented veins, and colored a gentle pastel green. Dawnflowers are easily overlooked, almost a hidden member of our local flora.

Yet come June through July, Southern Dawnflower bursts into view like the crack of dawn. White funnels of flowers fling open each sunrise in sheets across the scene. Each bloom blinding in its purity, reflecting and refracting the sharp morning rays hand in hand with the thick wash of dew drops settled upon and smothering the Sea Islands. Dawnflowers are members of the Morning-Glory family, Convolvulaceae, and share many of their common traits. Like other Morning-Glories, Dawnflower’s flowers have fused petals forming a unified cone. These flowers are pure, solid white and about three-quarters of an inch in breadth and depth. These flowers are magnetic for pollinators and a wonderful source of pollen and nectar for native bees, wasps, and butterflies during the dawning dog days of summer. Southern Dawnflower makes an excellent alternative groundcover for sunny lawns on barren sandy soils. When and where it’s too tough for turf to tolerate, Dawnflower perseveres and greets the day at the end of May bright eyed and bushy tailed.

-Tom A.

06/10/2026

06/05/2026

This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we stand before the monochrome majesty of the meadow hawk, the Eastern Kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus).

The Eastern Kingbird can be found throughout the Eastern United States from spring through summer and into fall. In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, they reappear in April and depart on their winter migration come October. Eastern Kingbirds are simply colored, yet distinctly marked. Slate-black back and snow-white belly, a black cowl across the head and a white beard beneath, and a black tail with a white trailing edge. Their plumage is just two colors but is worn well, like a tailored tuxedo, to make them stand out with contrast among our eastern songbirds. Our Kingbird is a member of the Tyrant Flycatchers of family Tyrannidae. In fact, the Eastern Kingbird is the type species that sets the mold for their whole family. Our Flycatchers here in the Southeast share many similar traits: an upright posture, a slightly hooked bill, a large mouth, good eyesight, and agile wings. They use these common features to hawk, grabbing prey from the air.

Eastern Kingbirds love large open habitats including prairies, pastures, farm fields, meadows, marsh edges, clearcuts, open savannas, barrens, and beaches. Here they will post up on a post, hang on a wire, or cling to a limb to survey their kingdom. They’ll dart into their domain to sn**ch insects out of the air all throughout the day, only deviating to dash at intruders and trespassers. Not only do Eastern Kingbirds fiercely defend their territory from other Kingbirds, they also have a penchant for harassing Hawks who hover over their home. Crows, Owls, and Eagles oft aren’t spared from their wrath and will likewise get an earful if they loiter too long. Eastern Kingbirds, like other Flycatchers, have fairly simple vocalizations. Their call is a short, sharp, high-pitched, metallic buzzing, “T’Zee” and their song is a frantic jumble of high-pitched, crisp metallic notes, often bouncing up and down, ending with a buzzing scream.

-Tom A.

05/29/2026

This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the venerable Bog Cheeto: Orange Milkwort (Senega lutea) [Syn. Polygala lutea].

All told, we have about 15 species of Milkwort in the Lowcountry, some of them quite rare. Orange Milkwort, however, is one of those inescapable, hard to miss, can’t mistake it wildflowers found throughout the coastal plain of South Carolina. It is a regular sight in bogs, Carolina Bays, pocosins, roadside ditches, pine flatwoods, and the like and grows in most all of our saturated, sandy, acidic soils throughout the coastal plain of the Southeast. The foliage of Orange Milkwort is an almost sickly lime-green, simple, opposite, with entire margins, and possessing a distinct succulent quality. When broken, the leaves exude a toxic, milk-white sap used to repel herbivores. That sap gives it the common name of “Milkwort”. The leaves of Orange Milkwort are hard to spot early in the year, existing as a small ground-level rosette just a few inches across. All told, the plant will barely crest a foot high in bloom.

Orange Milkwort blooms from late April into September. Its bloom is neon-orange in color and composed of many small, densely packed flowers that overlap with each other like scales. These compound flower clusters first emerge in a near spherical arrangement but elongate with time into a bottlebrush-shaped cylinder, eventually growing to resemble a stubby “Cheeto puff” in size, shape, color, and texture. There’s just nothing like it! Orange Milkwort isn’t a stellar pollinator plant. It’s often self-pollinated and most frequently visited by small bees. Orange Milkwort, along with many other Milkworts, have ant dispersed seeds. Their seeds each possess a structure called an elaiosome. This is a fat and protein packed nugget used to bribe ants into carrying the seeds back to their nest. Once the ants pick the seed clean of tasty bits, they’ll discard it just outside their nest in the colony’s waste bin. Here an Orange Milkwort seed can germinate in a nutrient rich pocket of ant refuse, giving it a better head start. Even that small edge is a distinct advantage in wet, sandy, acidic soils where soil nutrients are usually greatly limited by weathered dirt and adverse soil chemistry.

-Tom A.

05/27/2026

Introducing our Summer 2026 Hutchinson House Archaeology intern, Jayne Flynn!

Originally from Kalamazoo, Michigan, Jayne is a rising second-year in the Clemson University Masters of Science in Historic Preservation program based in Charleston, SC. She found a love for tangible history and museums as an undergrad history major at Wake Forest University. Jayne is excited to help with cleaning and cataloging artifacts that will be on display in the Hutchinson House. In her free time, she loves to embroider and be outside!

Jayne started her internship on May 4 and we are very grateful to have her work with us this summer. Since starting earlier this month Jayne has been tasked with cleaning and identifying artifacts found at the site for potential inclusion in the museum.
Featured in this photo above is a Tussy Wind and Weather glass lotion made and distributed circa 1925.

We can't wait to see all the things she accomplishes!

05/23/2026

Happy World Turtle Day!

For more information about the Turtles on Edisto see Tom's Flora & Fauna Friday articles linked below.

Photos 1-4 Chicken Turtle https://edisto.org/chicken-turtle/
Photos 5-7 Eastern Box Turtle https://edisto.org/eastern-box-turtle/
Photos 8-10 Eastern Snapping Turtle https://edisto.org/eastern-snapping-turtle/

All Photos Courtesy of Tom Austin

05/22/2026

This week for Floral and Fauna Friday it’s the doubloon of the dunes, the Isometric Sand Dollar (Mellita isometra).

Combing the beach, roaming the shore, surveying land’s end for castaways galore. There’s something universally satisfying in beachcombing for the human psyche. The curiosity, the hunt, the discovery of something strange and something new, a captivating sight just for you. For me, my favored find has long been those tokens cached in by the currents, the Sand Dollars.

Sand Dollars belong to the order Echinolampadacea. All are echinoderms within the same phylum as starfish and sea urchins. Like other echinoderms, Sand Dollars have a single digestive or***ce located at the center of their underside, an internal shell-like skeleton called a test, and they move around the sea floor slowly and methodically using hydraulicly actuated tube-feet. Their round, flat body resembles an oversized coin in shape, hence the Sand Dollar name.

In the center of a Sand Dollar’s back is a flower pattern with five petals called the petalloid. This structure is a string of pores permitting the passage of specialized tube feet that act as the Sand Dollar’s gills. At the center of their upper surface, between the petals, is a small, delicate five-pointed star called the madreporite, which functions like a pressure valve to help equalize the hydraulic pressures of their circulatory system. Some Sand Dollar species have rounded slots, called lunules, punched through their bodies. The largest lunule is called the a**l lunule and is located towards the rear of the body. The others are smaller ambulacral lunules. The purpose of Sand Dollar lunules isn’t fully understood, but it is believed that the larger lunule helps establish one-way flow to expel waste and water while the Sand Dollar is buried. The smaller lunules help the Sand Dollar transport and funnel food from the top of its body down to its central mouth down below. Underneath, you’ll find another flower-like pattern of radial grooves extending from the mouth to the edges of the body. These are ambulacral grooves, or food groves, which hold specialized tube feet and cilia for conveying food to the central mouth.

Here along the shores of South Carolina we have one principal species of Sand Dollar, the Isometric Sand Dollar (Mellita isometra). You may know it instead as the Keyhole Sand Dollar (M. quinquiesperforata), but recent genetic work determined what once was one species is really three, with the latter having residence in the tropical Caribbean, a third species (M. tenuis) occupying the Gulf Coast, and the Isometric Sand Dollar depositing here on the Carolinas’ coasts. These three species all look very much the same. So just know that my description for the Isometric Sand Dollar applies to the other two as well. Isometric Sand Dollars are circular in shape, about three to four inches across, are flat as a pancake but with a slight dome, and have five rounded rectangular lunules, with the a**l lunule being larger. Live Isometric Sand Dollars are greenish-brown and covered in fine “hairs”. When Sand Dollars die and decompose, their calcareous internal test is left behind. This smooth, bone-white skeleton is what one most often finds while combing the beach. If you happen to find a live Sand Dollar, do appreciate the wondrous beauty of this archaic invertebrate life form. Then promptly return it to Davey Jones’ locker. It’s illegal to collect or harm living Sand Dollars in South Carolina.

Isometric Sand Dollars live their lives in the shallow waters along the beachfront of the East Coast. They bury themselves just beneath the sand below any tumultuous tides above. Here in the ever-churning sand, they methodically riffle through each grain in search of morsels to make their meals. Feeding below the sand not only anchors them against rogue currents and hides them from patrolling predators, but also allows them to scavenge for food using both sides of their body.

-Tom A.

05/20/2026

🐝 Buzz Buzz! Happy World Bee Day!

Bees are the powerhouses of the pollinator world. They do the lion’s share of pollination. Adults eat mainly nectar and feed their larvae pollen and nectar. Our native bees, especially Bumble Bees, do the bulk of the pollination in natural areas and small gardens. Honeybees, an exotic domesticated species, pollinate agricultural fields and orchards.

For more information about the Bees on Edisto, see Tom's Flora & Fauna Friday articles linked below.

Photos 1-3 https://edisto.org/bumblebees/
Photos 4-7 https://edisto.org/carpenter-bees/
Photos 8-9 https://edisto.org/cellophane-bees/

All Photos courtesy of Tom Austin.