On the Waterfront in Charleston

 

A continuing benefit of subscribing to the Post and Courier newspaper is becoming aware of events around the Lowcountry. 

Recent news of the upcoming Charleston Race Week was a case in point. I held on to the article announcing the big annual regatta to be held April 16-19. This would, in fact, be the 30th annual race week. 

A week or so out I penciled in Friday morning for my opportunity to check it out. I had an 8:30 a.m. medical appointment I felt wouldn’t take too long (it didn’t). I then needed to hit the post office to mail a new Amazon book sale (first one in a while-yay!). 

Here's my Amazon author site. Sorry for the shameless plug! 

Soon enough I was at Waterfront Park where I came upon a photo or video shoot by the iconic Pineapple Fountain. 

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.

ACE Basin- No Bears but Many Birds and Gators at Bear Island

 

It was good to get out of the house Sunday and make the lengthy drive south to the ACE Basin. The vast protected preserve is worth the drive time because it’s always a great commune with nature. And it’s so quiet out there except for the calls of birds and the grunts of alligators. And we did see lots of both. 

To follow are my photographs that show some of what can be seen at the precious preserve called the Bear Island Wildlife Management Area.

This long road dissects the 12,000-acre undeveloped property. It extends from the entrance straight to the outer limits of Bear Island.