Rachel Carson Reserve

Yesterday we attended another interesting “Friends of Fort Macon” program at the Tsunami Grill, like the one we attended on January 9.  We sat with head ranger Randy Neuman and we asked him about Rachel Carson Reserve.  “Lots of birds there!” Randy said enthusiastically.  Randy loves birds, and we took a bird-watching walk with him last year.

The speaker at the luncheon was Paula Gillikin, who has been a caretaker at the Rachel Carson Reserve for eleven years.  Paula talked about the Reserve, which is the large island one sees on the other side of Taylor’s Creek from downtown Beaufort, and part of the N. C. Coastal Reserve & National Estuarine Research Reserve.  Accessible only by ferry, it consists of Carrot Island, Bird Shoals, and Sand Dollar Island, none of which we have visited.

This pristine land was saved from development in 1977 by Beaufort residents and civic organizations working together to prevent the development of a resort.  To this day, the island is undeveloped, and we hear that sometimes one can see some of the wild horses that live there walking along the shore.  The horses were imported from Cape Lookout (also accessible only by ferry), part of a herd of one hundred or so that we were able to see up close two years ago. 

The herd of 29 horses in the Reserve are managed and their numbers kept under control by contraception.  We wondered about that, and Paula showed us a slide showing her shooting a female horse with a tranquilizer dart containing contraceptive.  When the herd was too large in the past, sometimes these horses used to swim across the channel to Beaufort.  These feral horses did not originate here, but were likely imported from Spain in the 16^th century; the commonest explanation for their presence on all these islands along the East Coast, and the one which we like to believe, is that they escaped from shipwrecks.  Like the horses we have seen in the past at Corolla in the Northern Outer Banks, DNA tests showed that they came from Spanish stock.

Today, we went to Beaufort to check the ferry schedule; not all the ferries operate this time of year, and some of them operate on a reduced schedule.  This is something we want to do while we are here.  So we packed a picnic and had lunch at Grayden Paul Park, looking across Taylor’s Creek; the island was such a short distance away that one could believe a horse could easily swim across. 

The gulls were not interested in our tuna sandwiches and kale salad, but high overhead we spotted three or four hawks, lazily circling.  They may have been ospreys; next time we see Ranger Randy we can show him a photo and he will tell us.  There is not a bird anywhere in the area that Randy cannot identify, by sight, song, or call!