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He glides through the reeds along a bank in a 384-acre tract that just became a bird habitat sanctuary, in the shade of bottom hardwood and bluff pines.
"You can see gar cruise along the surface, open the bill and 'pop,' " Boyd says without breaking paddle rhythm.
Audubon South Carolina and its partners have won a fourth consecutive bird habitat conservation grant, this one to help buy the Dorchester County acreage in the swamp that they are protecting tract-by-tract. They now own or have under conservation easement 10 percent to 15 percent of the buffer land along the 40-mile run of the swamp from near St. Matthews to the Edisto River at Givhans.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grant is for $1 million. Why this kind of money for a largely ignored swamp off the edge of the Charleston metropolitan area?
Four Holes feeds one-third of the flow of water into the Edisto River. The Edisto feeds two-thirds of the water into the ACE Basin, the landmark public and private conservation effort that has preserved more than a quarter-million wetland acres along the developing Lowcountry coast. For wildlife and natural habitat, the swamp links the basin environs nearly all the way to the Santee Cooper lakes.
That corridor of natural buffer lands is a big reason why creatures and a natural ambiance are abundant in the counties outside Charleston. The swamp is, in effect, the headwaters of a river basin that the Nature Conservancy has called "one of the last great places."
"It's a tremendous statement of the value the Fish and Wildlife Service places on Four Holes Swamp and the Edisto River that they continue to fund this at the maximum level," said Norman Brunswig, executive director of the state chapter of the National Audubon Society, which owns the Beidler Forest sanctuary in the swamp.
The ACE Basin effort was a flagship project in a long-term effort to protect areas identified as critically important to birds along the Atlantic Flyway, said Craig Watson, Fish and Wildlife Service wildlife biologist, who works with the funding program. The flyway is a major migrating route for birds across North America.
It's a stopover for a sky full of species that includes ducks, sparrows, blackbirds, heron, warblers among spectacular birds like the painted bunting and the swallow-tailed kite.
"Norm has taken a little piece up there and begun to protect a huge corridor for birds. What he has done is like no other Audubon chapter that we work with," Watson said.
To win the grant, Audubon and partners committed $18 million in matching funds, mostly money spent doing nearby habitat protection work. The program on the average leverages $4 in matches like that for every $1 spent, Watson said.
