Good Morning Lowcountry

Point of view

The favorite view of the Lowcountry for this pluffmudder is the view from the water.

Barbara Bergwerf

Island Turtle Team member Tee Johannes' toes guide a couple of hatchlings along the beach toward the ocean.

It doesn't matter if it's a long shot from seaward, or the marsh-tops green, pillowtop cloud white and rare blue of the creek from your vantage point in a small boat, or just the sweeping panorama of a lonely beach and maritime forest from your eyes swimming just above the waves out in the surf. We like to watch the tide from the tide's perspective as it recedes and leaves phosphorescent pink and green streaks on the wet sand.

As we stumble up through the sucking cauldron of foam and leave foot indentations in our gray South Carolina sand, we realize human ones aren't the only footprints that will be left on the beach this summer.

Sea turtles heavy with eggs and gravity climb up Lowcountry beaches year after year late at night and early in the morning.

These are their nesting grounds.

Because South Carolina's sea turtles are endangered, people for years have been helping them with labor, delivery, storage and hatching, and often illness and hospitalization.

SCETV has turned its lens on "The Turtle Ladies of Charleston County," those members of "turtle teams" who patrol the beaches, relocate nests vulnerable to predators or high tide, monitor nests and sit up all night at hatching time waiting for the volcanic eruption of tiny heads and flippers from the sand.

Humans help nudge the hatchlings to the ocean's edge.

GMLc has performed this task. It took hours, and wine was involved.

Stomping of ghost crabs who came out to eat the hatchlings was necessary. But all turtles that hatched in the middle of that night made it to the ocean successfully, even the "wrong-way" ones.

The documentary includes the work of the S.C. Aquarium Sea Turtle Hospital ... for example, an ultrasound being performed on a 70-year-old loggerhead named DeBordieu (one of those French names locally pronounced as Debby-Do).

"There's just a mystique about them," Mary Pringle, project leader of Island Turtle Team, told ETV. "What an honor it is to be allowed to interact with such an ancient, mysterious and wonderful thing as a loggerhead turtle."

"The Turtle Ladies of Charleston County" airs Thursday night at 9. It provides us the following figures:

-- 1 sea turtle hatchling per 1,000, on average, will reach adulthood with or without human help.

-- 4 to 6 is the number of nests a mother turtle will lay in a season.

-- 19 groups of humans protect sea turtles along the S.C. coast.

-- 20 to 30 years from the time a female turtle hatched on a Lowcountry beach, she will return to lay her own eggs there.

-- 64 days, approximately, are needed for the eggs to incubate in the sand.

-- 115 eggs are in the average nest.

-- 200 pounds is the weight of an average adult turtle.

-- 80 years is the estimated lifespan of a sea turtle.

Revisiting a classic

Moving from the small screen to the big screen, the Gibbes Museum of Art will screen "Gone With the Wind," that frothy piece of Civil War fiction, at 6 p.m. June 13 at the Terrace Theater.

It seems to GMLc that the only realistic point of view in the tearjerking saga of Scarlett, Rhett and happy slaves on the plantation was the pullback camera shot of rows upon rows of wounded and dying soldiers at the Atlanta railway station.

The Gibbes presents the classic 1939 Academy Award winner as part of its current exhibition, "Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art." Objects from the film are on view at the Gibbes.

The Terrace Theater is at 1956 Maybank Highway on James Island. The Mark Sterbank Jazz Trio will play before the screening.

Tickets are $25-$35 and benefit education outreach programs at the Gibbes. On June 14, Gibbes' Community Day, everybody gets into the museum free from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

GMLc
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