Lowcountry’s dirty little secret: Empty promises that development won’t hurt anything
Barry Lowes came to The Island Packet office unannounced, and I can’t forget that sad moment.
He gave me a framed photograph of a red and orange sunset over Baynard Cove Creek on Hilton Head Island, dark palmetto fronds framing it like a Carew Rice silhouette.
He had taken the photograph in his back yard, where he documented hundreds of different types of birds.
Lowes dropped by because he was leaving town six years ago. He said his wife, Philomena, had a terminal illness. He said the children thought they should come home to Canada. He said he’d be back.
When he left, I read a note he’d taped to the back of the photo.
“The island is under relentless pressure to develop and change this paradise,” he wrote. “Sad — but your voice is quietly firm in defense of this special place. I hope that our trails will cross again one day. Meanwhile, there is digital.
“Embrace each day, David, and share your special gifts with us all.”
Lowes had a lot of his spectacular photographs to give away when he packed to leave. I will always treasure mine, especially today as I hear that he died Feb. 8 near Toronto at age 93.
Lowes was Hilton Head’s best-known birder for about 30 years. He led the Audubon Christmas Bird Count for more than a quarter-century. He was a photographer.
And he was our conscience.
When Lowes was a child, his eighth-grade teacher used his own money to sign up all his students as Junior Audubon members.
“Every month we got a colored print, and with me, it stuck,” Lowes told the Packet. “I became infected, and like malaria, it has been with me for a life.”
He would end up traveling the world to watch birds, one time following Darwin’s route down through Patagonia to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America.
Lowes was watching something different when he discovered the Lowcountry. It was a television. The Family Circle Cup women’s tennis tournament in Sea Pines was on, and he heard birds singing in the background. He knew their calls, and they ended up calling him south to live half a year from 1982 until he had to leave in 2014.
Even after he left, he still came back for visits.
This was the first winter he did not come back. He always arrived as regularly as the banded piping plover he would see year after year on the same stretch of beach in Sea Pines, showing up on almost the same date after traveling more than 1,000 miles.
That story opened my eyes to the magical miracles of birds, and I don’t know a towhee from a titmouse.
“He was an educator of the first degree,” said Jane Hester of Bluffton.
She and two other now-retired local school teachers — Lois Lewis and George Westerfield — went with Lowes and Charlie Bales on the Christmas Bird Count for decades, combing Palmetto Bluff, then getting in a boat to canvas the May River.
“He believed in inclusion,” Hester said. “He wanted as many people as possible to be involved with nature and with birds.”
Maybe that helps explain why the Hilton Head Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count, which includes the Bluffton area, has the third-highest number of participants in North America, Hester said.
Lowcountry ‘business machine’
Lowes was a clear voice for the birds. His call was a gut punch to the Lowcountry conscience.
I want to let him get on his soapbox one more time.
My last long conversation with Lowes came the morning after he was honored at an Audubon meeting as he stepped down from the board.
He said he didn’t have a lot of good to say.
He said we’ve ruined the habitat for birds by making yards look neat, by leaving no natural buffer around ponds, by bush-hogging underbrush that birds need to survive, and by building on every corner.
“It’s all about habitat,” he said. “It’s as if you knocked down all the houses in a neighborhood and then said, ‘Not as many people live here anymore.’ It’s the same with birds. It’s sad what you’re seeing.”
He said he’s tired of the empty promise that development that won’t hurt anything.
“They’ve got the spiel, and those who are innocents don’t understand that it’s just a scam,” Lowes said. “The developers say, ‘We’ll look after it.’ They don’t.”
He warned against using the Joiner Bank strip of sand offshore, which the birds loved, as a source for sand to pump onto Hilton Head’s beaches to fight erosion.
He said that in a community that prides itself on being “green,” most of the green he saw was money.
“Everywhere you look, the emphasis is on business and ‘We’ve got to get more business here,’ ‘We’ve got to get more people on the island,’ and the very thing that brought and attracted the original people was the tranquility and the efforts to keep it that way.
“And ever since, it’s just been a steady march of turning it into a business machine rather than a community that is sensitive to the environment.”
Camp Timberlane
Barry Lowes was an early riser who spent a large portion of each day outdoors.
In 1958, he and his wife created Camp Timberlane in Ontario, Canada, to get kids plugged into nature.
That’s where he spent his summers, in a cabin he’d make you think was next door to Henry David Thoreau. The camp is still going, still plugging the original vision “to create a community where kids could spend their summers, connect with nature, learn new skills, become part of a family and express their individuality.”
He wasn’t a bleeding heart, Hester said. He had no qualms with hunting, or culling the local deer and raccoon populations.
“But he did see the big picture of where we are going at all times, and tried to steer us in the right direction,” she said.
Lowes said we each can do our part.
We can have our flower beds, but leave the edges of the yard natural. We can provide water for birds, keep cats inside and keep dogs leashed on the beach.
“You’re not remaking the world,” he said. “But you are leaving a footprint to make the world better. Just do what you can do, and do it well.”
This story was originally published February 16, 2020 at 5:30 AM.
