. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. White ibis A HISTORIAN'S COAST Scott D. Taylor Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang Wen my wife and I visit the beaches at Bogue Banks or Bear Island, our 4-year-old daughter delights in watching the gulls and sandpipers. The shorebirds enthrall her, and like all children, Vera revels in a good chase. Watching her among the hundreds of birds, it is impossible to imagine our ocean beaches and salt marshes without those great flocks. That was not the case a century ago. Then, we could have scanned the same wide s
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. White ibis A HISTORIAN'S COAST Scott D. Taylor Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang Wen my wife and I visit the beaches at Bogue Banks or Bear Island, our 4-year-old daughter delights in watching the gulls and sandpipers. The shorebirds enthrall her, and like all children, Vera revels in a good chase. Watching her among the hundreds of birds, it is impossible to imagine our ocean beaches and salt marshes without those great flocks. That was not the case a century ago. Then, we could have scanned the same wide shores and the sea around them without spying a single tern or gull, blue heron or snowy egret among the salt marshes. T. Gilbert Pearson, a young naturalist from Guilford College, documented the demise of our coastal birds. One scene from his 1937 autobiography stands out most vividly. By David Cecelski in my mind. Exploring the barriers near Beaufort in 1898, he stumbled on market hunters destroying a seabird rookery near Beaufort. The sight nearly turned his stomach. "For hours," he wrote, the seabirds were "driven up and down the beach and the roar of guns was almost ; By the time the shooting subsided, the huge nesting site had disappeared in a cloud of sand, blood and feathers. Pearson had witnessed a common- place scene. Between 1880 and 1900, the slaughter of coastal birds was relentless. To supply plumage for ladies' hats, market gunners ravaged some of North Carolina's most common marshbirds, shorebirds and seabirds. Egrets, herons, willets, cormorants, ibis, shearwaters and piping plovers all teetered on the brink of extermination. Least terns, laughing gulls and snowy egrets — visible today by every pier or marsh — had vanished altogether. Sixty years before Rachel Carson penned her famous warning about DDT and American birds, a no less deafening "silent spring" had de- scended over the North Carolina coast. It fell to Pea
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookcollectionunclibra, booksubjectoceanography
