Barrier Island is no Barrier to Science Education

By Jerald Byrd

Explorers from Emory University traveled ashore an undeveloped barrier island during Fall 2007 and charted discoveries about its ancient natural habitats and themselves amidst their embrace of environmental studies.

Oak, pine and moss-laden Sapelo Island off the Georgia coast was home in mid September 2007 to 13 students, faculty and staff of the Department of Environmental Studies by way of special source of funds and course design.

Modern and Ancient Tropical Environments known as ENVS 241, along with a departmental endowment from benefactors Dr. Edward K and Frances L. Turner, brought the group to this geologically affiliated family member of the Bahamas.  This required field trip constituting 30% of their grade was for many of these students their first taste of lab work where the confines of lab study were the salt marsh, surf, creatures both stinging and creeping, even the crystalline midnight sky, of this reserve that is five hours’ drive from Atlanta and 30 minutes’ distance from the state’s mainland by boat.

Flying is not an option except for the many egrets, sandpipers, and turkey vultures, to name a few of the avian species soaring the heated, drenched air.  Nor can visitors take their cars to the island since there is no bridge from the coast.  However, there are vehicles for the researchers and scattering of residents on this 17-square-mile wildlife sanctuary thanks to the daily ferries that run morning to evening.  These vessels are under the operation of the state Department of Natural Resources and cost riders the sum of $1 each way.

For students visiting Sapelo, textbooks are largely shut but eyes are fully open.

"Here the students get it,” said Dr. Anthony Martin, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Studies, who teaches this course and was accompanied by faculty colleagues Dr. Steve Henderson, Oxford College, and Dr. Jessica Seares.

"Yes, it was very worthwhile,” commented Chandra Vonscherr on the scheduled rigors of the trip.  A senior majoring in Environmental Studies and Political Science, she added, “This trip changes your perspective.  It’s a lot more exciting and efficient than just accessing this material in a book.”

The stirrings of their scientific Saturday evolved from the amphibious to the terrestrial, when not long after dawn they traversed the sea to the opposite shore and then climbed aboard the back of a flatbed truck awaiting them from the University of Georgia Marine Institute.  This post, founded in 1953, provided them with dorm-style, and air-conditioned, accommodations equipped with kitchen facilities that were a welcome sight come supper time.

A few moments after placing luggage in rooms and provisions in refrigerator, the student crew was attending an introductory lecture beneath a canopy of oaks surrounding the stucco structures that 60 years ago were prized getaway for the site’s wealthy patron, magnate R.J. Reynolds.

Then as now the hush that is fortress from urban dwelling is essentially audible.

"Close your eyes, relax,” said Henderson.  “Be quiet.  Be still.  It’s not only good for you, it’s healthy,” in his pointing to a means of scientific observation and cultural appreciation of Sapelo from its Pleistocene origins and subsequent thawing more than 40,000 years ago to its pre-Columbian, Spanish, British, French, African enslavement and post-Civil War remains.

They proceeded then on foot toward the interior of the island where the evidence of human habitation leaves its centuries of traces yet ironically gives the island its state of preservation.

“This is not a pristine island,” Henderson noted, “it just appears that it’s pristine.  What we see here is not what it would have looked like in the 1800s.”

Where there now is dense flora, he points out, there had been logging.  Pines would have been harvested for ships of their day, and also the live oaks seen draped with Spanish moss – a botanical relative of the pineapple, he notes– would have been cleared for their naturally occurring contortions and strength that came in handy for the bows of sea-going vessels.

In the early 20th century Sapelo became the private hunting grounds of white landowners and accordingly became a celebrity hotspot, so to speak.  Aviator Charles Lindbergh landed a plane on the beach, and Presidents Calvin Cooledge and Herbert Hoover were also feted at the island.  The owner of the Hudson Automobile Company, Howard Coffin, had title to the island until 1933 and is responsible for the many buildings there today.  At the height of the Great Depression and in need of cash, he sold the retreat to tobacconist Richard Reynolds, who added a few more structures of his own.  He used his money to help leave the island intact in its present state of marine and estuarine research.  Some public funds did the rest.

Martin uses this wide open research lab sharing knowledge and seeking hypotheses from students every step of his metronomic and pedagogic way.

The flow of water through the island isn’t merely picturesque landscape; it is a hydrology lesson about ebbing and rising of tides.  A mud flat teeming with fiddler crab provides biology instruction on the origin of the mud itself.  Critters have to leave behind something after they eat, he reminds everyone.  The sand beneath his feet is a geology lesson.

“You are looking at the Appalachians here,” Dr. Martin says, “bits of ground material at your feet,” the result of hundreds of millions of years of pulverizing, washed down rivers out of the interiors of continents such as North America.

On a bright and breezy Sunday morning the faculty members drive their students to the more remote northern end of the island, where on a beach he points out a research marker at a sea turtle’s former nesting site.  He makes a rare find there as well: alligator tracks on the beach.  A ghost crab darts by.  The sea is rough and waves crash against the shore.

“I feel that I almost learned more this weekend than I did in three years at Emory,” said David Simms, a senior majoring in Biology and Environmental Studies.  “You don’t get that unless you take a field course.”

Said Mari Bales, “This is a much faster, easier and more imprintable way of learning about ecology than reading chapter after chapter in a textbook.”

A perhaps definitive lesson this field trip left for future nature explorers: “Bug spray – I think everybody learned that they need to bring a lot of bug spray,” said Ms. Vonscherr.