[Into the Swamp]

By Jan DeBlieu
Photography by John Huet

In a lush sanctuary in South Carolina, filled with shiny dark alligators and brilliant green damselflies, a mother introduces her son to the joys of swamp life.

Shortly after dawn on a steamy mid-June morning, biologist Jackie Litzgus; my son, Reid; and I made our way through an overgrown clearcut on the edge of the Francis Beidler Forest, in coastal South Carolina. The sun, a deep orange, shone weakly through the moist air. We walked single file, letting Litzgus go first to watch for poisonous snakes. Except for the rattle of a pine warbler, all was quiet.

Reid and I had come to Audubon's Beidler Forest sanctuary for two reasons. First, I wanted to learn more about Litzgus's study of the spotted turtle, a petite, threatened species that ranges as far north as Ontario. Second, I wanted to introduce my son to the mysteries of a southern coastal swamp. With its deep stands of cypress and tupelo gum and its thriving education program, the Beidler sanctuary was a good place to do both.

The previous evening Litzgus had found a female turtle digging a nest in the old clearcut and had watched her lay three eggs. "It's very unusual to see a turtle actually laying," Litzgus said. "You've got to be really careful, because if you approach her too early, you'll scare her off the nest." Now Litzgus was slipping through the vegetation, on her way back to the nest site to examine the eggs. Behind her Reid walked slowly, careful to step where she had stepped, chastened by her warning about snakes.

As parents, we wish so much for our children: a good education, health, happiness, love. Like many conservationists, my husband and I also pray that our son will learn to cherish the natural world. Reid likes to go hiking, kayaking, and birdwatching, but at nine, he's also very silly. As we pushed into the thick growth, I could only hope he would focus on what Litzgus was doing.

The nest was next to an old stump, in a thicket of wax myrtle and elder. Litzgus squatted down, pushed her two long braids out of the way, and began digging in the dirt with her fingers. She frowned deeply, then stiffened. "Oh, no," she said. "Oh, no. This can't happen." A small tunnel led down into the soil, but it was empty. A predator had already found the eggs.

"This isn't allowed to happen," Litzgus said, anguished. But of course, it does happen. Reid looked puzzled. I tried to keep the disappointment from showing on my face. "They were predated from below," Litzgus said. "A snake must have crawled in and gotten them. Unless--wait." She dug carefully into a wall of the tunnel, scratching away the soil until she found a side chamber and three gleaming, healthy eggs. "Yes!" she cried, standing up and raising her fists and face to the sky. The turtle had placed her nest right next to an old mole tunnel. Her eggs had not been disturbed after all.

Slowly Litzgus extracted the closest egg and coddled it in her palm, careful not to let it roll. Slightly more than an inch long, it was a smooth, translucent white, tinted with dirt. On the side facing up, we could see a small, opaque white spot, the embryo resting atop the nutritious yolk. Reid watched intently as Litzgus brushed soil off the shell. She measured the egg's length and width, then wrapped it in a piece of survey tape and clipped the tape to a tube-shaped spring scale, to be weighed.

As Litzgus jotted down her findings and began processing the other eggs, Reid wandered a few yards away to pick some blackberries. I stayed beside the nest. Litzgus carefully replaced the eggs, arranging them as she had found them. Alongside them she buried two button-size temperature probes. She stood up, brushed her hands on her pants, and reached for a telemetry antenna. "Let's see if we can find Mom," she said. The purse-size receiver emitted a series of chirps. Litzgus waded ankle deep into a puddle along the path and listened intently to the signal. She began probing the mud with a stick. "Aha." Stooping for a moment, she dug down and extracted a black hump.

The turtle had delicate, lemony spots on her shell and body. Toward the back of her shell was what looked like a wad of gray gum--the radio transmitter, sealed in a protective case--and an eight-inch whip antenna. Her skin was a mottled sunset orange; her feet had long, elegant black claws. As we examined her, she worked her legs as if trying to swim away. "She won't bite," Litzgus warned, "but she'll claw."

Reid quickly withdrew his hands, but peered curiously at her face. "Look at her mouth, at that shape," he said. It was a straight line, with an inverted V in the center. It gave the turtle a gruff appearance.

"Her irises are orange," Litzgus said. "See? The males don't have that. And the female's faces are lighter, too."

We admired her a minute more, then Litzgus placed her back in the mud. "Why don't you put her back near her eggs?" Reid asked.

"Because when you work with wild animals, you always put them back where you found them," Litzgus explained. "You don't want to alter their behavior."

We made our way out of the clearcut in silence. Reid walked a little more slowly than usual, and he held his mouth slightly open in an expression I couldn't read. I was a little afraid to ask if he shared the buzz of wonder I felt. As we went up a rise toward a small pond he said, awe in his voice, "It's so beautiful here."

At nearly 12,000 acres, the Beidler Forest sanctuary encompasses the largest stand of cypress and tupelo swamp left in the world. In 1890 Francis Beidler, a lumber baron, purchased a tract of land known locally as the Four Holes Swamp with the intention of logging its cypress. But after journeying west and visiting Yellowstone National Park, Beidler became a conservationist. He steadfastly refused to log the Four Holes Swamp, and in the 1960s his heirs sold it to Audubon and the Nature Conservancy. (The conservancy is still a co-owner of the property, but Audubon manages it.)

In the mid-1970s Audubon built a one-story wooden visitors' center with expansive windows opening onto the swamp. Its front is decorated with murals painted by local schoolchildren. Inside, dried indigenous plants and displays about the swamp cover the walls. Natural objects like alligator plates, sweet-gum balls, and crayfish claws fill a small table; children are invited to pick them up and try to guess what they are.

Each year 12,000 visitors pass through the center's doors. Many of them live in the area. But it's worth traveling to Beidler from afar to walk the mile-and-a-half boardwalk, which passes through part of a 1,763-acre virgin swamp forest. Deep within the humid, windless groves, shaggy, reddish bald cypress trunks--some of the sanctuary's cypresses have been dated at 1,100 years old and exceed nine feet in diameter--rise from chocolate-colored mud. Prothonotary warblers flash among the trees. Cypress knees stick up through the water like crooked wizards' hats.

The sanctuary staff offers guided two-hour and four-hour canoe trips, which must be arranged in advance. Normally the trips are suspended in summer, when the swamp's water levels drop, but the week before our visit there had been several days of rain.

One morning, looking for some adventure, Reid and I pushed a canoe into the deep, black waters of Singletary Creek. In the distance we could see three johnboats, each with a fisherman lazily casting a line. We turned upstream. "Reid," I said casually, "just so you know, there might be some alligators in this water."

"Mom," he said, trying not to sound panicked, "there's one right in front of the canoe!"

The bumpy object I had mistaken for a submerged log fixed me with a dark eye and swam off to the left. I turned the canoe to the right. "Cool," I said, trying to sound like an intrepid explorer. As the gator swam away, its tail worked the water like a thick, black whip.

"I don't know if I'm going to like this," Reid said.

On the far bank we spotted three 10-foot-long alligators, their skin shining dully in the sun. These relicts of another time range far into North Carolina, and there are hundreds of them in the Beidler Forest. Beyond them, in the heart of the swamp, the ground was soft and dark. Young, spindly trees rose from it like charmed snakes. They looked exceedingly fragile next to the scattered older trees, which had trunks as thick as pillars. Brilliant green damselflies with black wings zipped through the forest; these were known as ebony jewel wings. One lit on the bow of the canoe, two feet from Reid. "I've never seen a bug like that," he said in delight. A great blue heron flew close overhead, startling us. In the silence of the swamp, its wings sounded like the creaking of a great machine.

As we paddled, the trees closed thickly around us, and the air became still and hot. A pollen scum coated the surface of the water. I looked through the forest and wondered if I would have the patience to track an animal like the spotted turtle through such country. Reid swatted impatiently at a mosquito. "Let's go look for some more alligators," he said.

Jackie Litzgus fell in love with spotted turtles in 1991, when she was a biology instructor at a canoe camp in Ontario. At the time very little was known about the breeding behavior of the species. Litzgus attached radio transmitters to some females and began searching for nests, mostly in sedge and sphagnum moss hummocks. One evening she picked up a signal from a rocky outcrop above a bay. Thinking the turtle had been killed and carried off, she climbed the rocks and noticed a patch of moving lichen. It was the turtle, burying her eggs in a small crack between the rocks. Litzgus soon found more nests in the outcrop, surprising her advisers and the scientific community at large.

In 1996 Litzgus received her master's degree and went to work as a laboratory technician. But she missed spotted turtles. "They've become a passion," she said. "The spots on their back look to me like constellations. I think they're so beautiful." She discovered the Beidler sanctuary in 1998 and enrolled in the University of South Carolina's doctorate program. By last summer she had radios on 15 turtles: 11 females and 4 males.

"It's been interesting to see the differences in behavior from north to south," she said. "The turtles in Ontario are bigger, and they hibernate for seven or eight months. If it's a short summer, a female may not lay a single nest. In South Carolina they hibernate for just a month or two, and they may lay two or three clutches of eggs." Scientists had never observed the species laying more than one clutch in a season. Litzgus has also found that nesting season tends to be much longer in the South--two months, compared with two weeks in Ontario--and that turtles at Beidler do not hibernate in groups for warmth, as they do up north.

Because of their beauty and small size, spotted turtles are popular in the pet trade, especially in Europe and Asia. They are threatened throughout their range but have yet to be included on the U.S. endangered-species list.

A few hours after Reid and I watched her exhume the turtle nest, Litzgus stood talking to 8 of the 26 children in that week's Audubon Antics, a weeklong day camp. A second group of campers was painting papier-mache turtles; a third was listening to a presentation by a veteran fossil hunter. Litzgus would talk with them later. "Listen," she said, turning on her receiver. "I've hidden a radio transmitter somewhere on the boardwalk. Let's see who can be the first to find it." The receiver chirped loudly as she pointed the telemetry antenna straight down the walkway.

"It sounds like a baby alligator calling its mother!" said Manning, an enthusiastic 10-year-old.

"It does," Litzgus agreed. She led the group a few yards into the forest and turned the antenna right and left. The signal grew faint, then louder, then faint. The transmitter was on a dogwood branch just above the walkway, but Litzgus had to show the children where it was.

Now she took the group to an upland grove of hardwoods and palmettos to track a female turtle that she knew was in the area. Reid trailed toward the back, acting shy. Several times he glanced over at me, as if making sure I was still close by. The other children, mostly eight- and nine-year-old boys, jumped over logs and poked among shrubs, looking for animals. Through the woods a doe and two heavily spotted fawns glanced at us, then moved away.

"Look," called a boy named Jake, "a snake. A really small snake." A delicate ringneck snake only six inches long lay among some roots. Litzgus picked it up and showed the group the pale, thin band that encircled its neck. "Where should we put it back?" she asked.

"Exactly where we found it!" several children cried.

We hiked on, following the beeping radio signal. The undergrowth was low and thin, making it easy to walk. A copperhead lay coiled at the base of a gum tree; its buff and deep-brown markings blended perfectly with the mottled soil. Two boys shrieked when they spotted it. Reid stood watching as it slid lazily behind the tree. Just a moment ago, hanging close by my side, he had seemed so young. Now he was once again a lanky boy, self-possessed and on his way to independence. "Wow," he said, focusing on the ground where the snake had been. "That was amazing."

The turtle had burrowed into the root ball of a fallen gum. Manning and another boy spotted the whip antenna sticking up among vines and twigs. "You guys are good!" Litzgus said. She picked up the turtle, pointed out the claws, and let the children hold her one by one.

I sat on a log a bit away from the group, watching. The campers were all from the nearby towns of Summerville and St. George. Quite likely their parents thought of the swamp as buggy and unpleasant, even dangerous. Yet the children were taking in everything with delighted smiles. I looked at my son in his baseball cap and rubber boots, waiting his turn to hold the turtle. "That's as big as she'll get," Litzgus was saying. "She might be 50 years old. She could live to be 100." Reid lifted the turtle up, inspected her face, and gave an incredibly silly grin.

"I have to go to the bathroom," one of the boys said. Uh-oh, I thought.

"Me, too."

It was clearly time to head back to the center. The children tore off through the trees, laughing and whooping. There would be no more wildlife watching today, not in that section of the forest. "Mom," Reid called impatiently, "come on!" Litzgus and I looked at each other, grinned, and set off to follow.

Jan DeBlieu's book Wind won the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing in 1999. She lives with her husband and son on the North Carolina Outer Banks.