![]() Waterfowling in South Carolina is always a roll of the weather forecast, but when it’s cold enough up north, the Delta fills with all eighteen of the state’s legal species of duck-blue-winged and green-winged teal by the tens of thousands, wigeon and gadwall, pintail, shovelers, and mallards. It’s a natural treasure, and it’s amazing how few people know about it.” Especially given the ducks that winter or migrate through the Delta each year. We have one of the longest stretches of undeveloped coastline on the Atlantic. “We have endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers and sea turtles, huge flights of waterfowl and rare plants and enormous bird rookeries. “Everything is here,” says Mike Prevost, a wildlife ecologist who works with forestry and conservation interests in the Delta. It is the largest river delta on the Eastern Seaboard, part of a nearly half-million-acre cluster of public and private lands that reaches from the Francis Marion National Forest to Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge and the enormous state holdings at Santee Coastal Reserve and the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center. 17, the river’s north and south branches unspool across a vast wedge-shaped expanse of tidal forest and marsh. South of Georgetown, on the ocean side of U.S. The river itself drains the second-largest watershed east of the Mississippi River, its basin stretching from the South Carolina shore to the foothills of North Carolina. South Carolina’s Santee River Delta is a vast, little-known, and critical assemblage of conservation lands in the Lowcountry, a reliquary for rare landscapes and rare species, and a Serengeti for Southern ducks. In a landscape utterly transformed by man, where is the truly wild? And how far were those ducks? I press my face against the reeds, estimate the distance to the farthest decoy, and watch for the next flight to wheel in across the Santee Delta. The marsh where I hide was once a vast swamp forest, until it was drained and felled, plowed and diked, turned into a place of riches and misery, hope and despair, awash in such epic sweeps of human and natural history that fixing things in precise relation is a vexing calculus. In every direction, slave-built levees draw straight lines across the horizon. Slave-built canals score the landscape for square mile after square mile. The mosaic sprawls to the horizon, all the way to the South Carolina shore, and as far up the rivers as the tides exert their push and pull. ![]() Here, where the land gives way grudgingly to the sea, it’s barely land at all, but a flat plain of half water, half marsh. Click to see more photos from this story.
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