Making It Grow Minutes

You can easily distinguish between our two local vultures if you see them in flight. The slightly larger turkey vulture has a V-shaped wing pattern when soaring; the black vulture’s wings are held out straight and have white feathers at the tips.

Our native turkey vulture has almost no negative consequences associated with its behavior. Due to its amazing sense of smell, it can locate decaying animal remains from a mile away, even under trees.

These birds in flight have a V-shaped wing structure easy to spot as they are usually seen soaring in the sky, teetering slightly. The turkey vulture is truly nature’s vacuum cleaner.

Nature’s evolutionarily perfect scavengers, our vultures, are Johnny on the spot to deal with roadkill.

I have an uplifting ride to work as I pass the Fort Motte Garden Club Garden Spot, the Pollinator Friendly Garden maintained by Nina Mack, Julia Wolfe and friends, and then I go down a hill to cross the Congaree River and check out its water flow.

In the United States we have vultures – the black and turkey vultures in the southeast and the California condor out in the Golden State, each in a different genus but the same family.

The annual Sunbelt Ag expo in Moultrie, Georgia, allows growers to see the most up-to-date farming technology in the country. In addition to acres of exhibits, the organizers also select the Swisher Farmers of the Year for Southeastern states.

One of the features at U S C’s A C Moore Herbarium that I find fascinating is at their website.

Another of the native orchids Herrick Brown, curator of the A C Moore Herbarium at U S C talked about when he joined us for a program was the rattlesnake plantain.

Orchids in South Carolina? Yes, we do have orchids although they have their own special charm which is more subtle than some of the drop dead gorgeous tropical species.

Dr. Herrick Brown, the curator at the A. C. Moore Herbarium, will help identify plants for you...

It may be that fireflies first started glowing to warn off predators that they contain a toxin and taste horrible.

Once you discover the natural phenomena of our diverse state ecosystems, your world gets wider and wider without leaving home.

When I was young, we had lots of fireflies in our Columbia backyard in the summer. But when we went to camp or my grandparent’s summer retreat in Saluda, North Carolina, the numbers seemed exponentially greater.

Agent Carmen Ketron, recently on our SCETV program Making It Grow, told us she’d seen the synchronous firefly display at the Congaree National Park. This phenomenon occurs at the end of May or early June for about two weeks every year.

Our state and nation owe Harry Hampton a great debt for his love of wildlife and years of work promoting that the Beidler Tract not be logged but instead preserved as what is now the Congaree National Park.

It wasn’t until Russian Mennonites came to the northern parts of the US and Canada in the late nineteenth century that sunflowers became a crop of interest in the US.

The list of other birds that relish these seeds is lengthy, a short list includes ring-necked pheasants, quail bobolinks, goldfinches, meadowlarks, nuthatches and tufted titmice.

The N R S C Plant guide for sunflowers is fascinating. Among some of the sayings associated with sunflowers from the Teton Dakota tribes is “When the sunflowers were tall and in full bloom, the buffaloes were fat and the meat good.” Many tribes recognized the value of an infusion of sunflowers to treat chest pains.

Annual sunflowers, important in the cut flower industry, are grown commercially for seeds eaten by humans and birds, and for cooking oil. Sunflowers are one of the few important food crops that originated in north America.