As we boat up to Deveaux Bank, a horseshoe of sand off South Carolina’s Seabrook Island, thousands of feathered bodies drift in the sky, skim the water, and mill on the dunes. A cacophony of trills, chuckles, and screeches fills the air, as does the salt-tinged pungency of seabirds conducting their daily business.
It’s late May, and we’re here to see the site of a groundbreaking discovery: This mile-long shifting sandbar just southwest of Charleston issurvival of the Hudsonian whimbrel, North America’s only such species, providing the rare shorebird with food and refuge on its globe-spanning migration. “Deveaux isn’t aplace they stop—it’s theplace they stop,” explains Felicia Sanders, the shorebird biologist for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR), and the one who solved what until her discovery had remained a mystery.
