ACE Basin Getaway

My Spring Break from school has been a busy one but I was determined to take one day for an excursion to the Lowcountry’s ACE Basin. This is the land of vast nature preserves, a protected watershed region totalling some 1.6 million acres.

On Wednesday I drove south the 60 miles or so to the Bear Island Wildlife Management Area. As this site claims (accurately!) Bear Island is a birdwatcher's paradise.

Here can be explored the 18th and 19th-century rice fields that brought wealth to plantation owners and enslavement to Africans brought (and bought) to toil in swampy waterways like this one. 

Wooden trunks like these continue to be used to control water levels in the former rice fields of the ACE Basin whose name comes from the confluence of the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto Rivers. 

These are happy places for me full of seemingly endless walking and driving trails that lead to waterways where birds of all shapes and sizes may be found. You will also see alligators and sometimes snakes, lizards, raccoons, deer, wild hogs and other land animals. 

Two other wonderlands in this area, similar in layout to Bear Island, are the Donnelley WMA and the Ernest Hollings National Wildlife Refuge. 

My blog documents numerous visits to these great places. See the above links and/or go to search this blog space in the column on the right.

Recent Camera Captures

 The Christmas gift camera feeder continues to be a hit attracting a variety of birds but also an unwelcome squirrel (keep reading). This post features some of the recent activity with 20-second video clips.

Yellow-rumped Warbler 
(aka butter Butt for the splash of yellow it shows from behind on its behind lol)

Tufted Titmouse
(easily recognizable for its "jaunty crest of gray feathers, big black eyes and rust-colored flanks" per the above website)

Ruby-crowned Kinglet
(one of North America's smallest songbirds)