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 1 898, 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 continuous." 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 Pearson, a tough, unassuming 

 Quaker, to lead a citizen movement to 

 restore the seabirds' raucous melody 

 to our shoreline. 



20 MARCH/APRIL 1996 



