Overview: On November 8, 2008, my husband and I were able to take a fascinating boat tour of the magnificent mouth of the Cape Fear River. The tour originated on Oak Island in Brunswick County, North Carolina and ended miles upstream in Carolina Beach, New Hanover County, North Carolina. This tour was offered at the North Carolina Environmental Education Conference and led by naturalist Andy Wood, education director of Audubon North Carolina.
Directions: The tour described here started at Fort Caswell on Oak Island. Fort Caswell is located on the expansive grounds of the North Carolina Baptist Assembly (map; call ahead (910) 278-9501 to schedule a tour of the old ruins of Fort Caswell). To arrive at Oak Island from the Triangle, take I-40 east nearly 140 miles to US-17 S. Continue on US-17 S for approximately 10 miles until merging onto NC-133 S. Follow NC-133 S onto Oak Island until it ends, then continue on Country Club Road until reaching Fort Caswell. Need a place to stay? Try the historic (c. 1859) Brunswick Inn located in Southport, NC.
History, Ecology and Personal Observations: Our journey began at Fort Caswell (Oak Island, NC), a historic North Carolina fort constructed between 1826 and 1836 that saw action during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Fort Caswell was captured by Confederate forces in 1861 and only abandoned after the fall of nearby Fort Fisher (across the Cape Fear River) to the Union on January 15, 1865. Two days later, on January 17, 1865, the Confederate Army ignited their magazines and exploded over 10,000 pounds of gun powder, blowing out an entire wall of the fort. The site remained in use intermittently by the U.S. Army or Navy until just after World War II. Walking the grounds, we paused to take in the fort itself—weathered walls and openings framing slices of sky—and tried to imagine the violence that had once torn through what now felt like a quiet coastal relic.
Fort Caswell overlooks the mouth of the Cape Fear River, and the setting immediately pulls your attention outward. Even in November, the place felt alive: butterflies (including fritillaries and sulphurs) flickered through the sunlit patches, and brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) cruised low over the water with that prehistoric steadiness pelicans seem to own. The day’s purest gift came near the fishing pier, when we spotted a pod of three bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) surfacing and sliding through the river mouth—close enough that the arc of a back and the soft exhale felt intimate. Presumably, they were doing what dolphins do best here: feeding on small fish, including mullet (Mugilidae), and members of the mackerel and tuna (Scombridae) and drum and croaker (Sciaenidae) families.
After lingering over the dolphins, we boarded our catamaran and headed out with Audubon naturalist Andy Wood, who narrated the layered history and ecology of the Cape Fear as the shoreline drifted by. Until the 1790s, he explained, the Cape Fear River (previously known as the Clarendon River) was a shallow—roughly 6 to 12 feet deep—freshwater system bordered by bottomland hardwood forest and hardwood swamps. Those swamps included bald cypress (Taxodium distichum), water tupelo (Nyssa aquatica), and even nutmeg hickory (Carya myristiciformis), the rarest species in its genus. Today, the river has been dredged to a depth of roughly 50 feet to accommodate shipping, which has also increased saltwater influx from the Atlantic. That saltwater incursion has reshaped the ecosystem in and around the river and was largely responsible for the end of the regional rice industry in the early 1800s.
Despite those sweeping alterations, some of the most hopeful parts of the story are small and sandy: islands and bars protected as bird breeding sites. The North Carolina Audubon Society has preserved a number of these places, and as we passed them, Andy’s numbers made the quiet landforms feel suddenly crowded with life. Battery Island, for example, supports North Carolina’s largest colony of wading birds, including about 10% (nearly 15,000 breeding pairs) of all American white ibises (Eudocimus albus). The island also supports 230 pairs of great egrets (Ardea alba), 250 pairs of tricolored herons (Egretta tricolor), 215 pairs of little blue herons (Egretta caerulea), 40 pairs of black-crowned night herons (Nycticorax nycticorax), and over 60 pairs of additional wading birds. We passed Battery Island slowly enough to photograph it twice, the low shape of it sitting in the river like a living rookery waiting for spring.
Another Audubon site, South Pelican Island, holds a different cast: brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) (760 pairs), royal terns (Thalasseus maximus) (1100 pairs), sandwich terns (Thalasseus sandvicensis) (530 pairs), and laughing gulls (Leucophaeus atricilla) (2200 pairs). Even from the water, it wasn’t hard to believe—this river mouth feels like a crossroads for wings.
As we continued upstream, it was impossible not to feel disoriented by the scale of change stacked along the banks. Fresh water has been replaced by salt water; hardwood swamps have been replaced by Sunny Point, the largest munitions port in the world; and Confederate blockade runners have been replaced by deluxe yachts and commercial vessels. And yet, there were also moments where the river still felt old—especially where the shoreline revealed raw geology, like a coquina rock formation near Carolina Beach State Park, a reminder that even the most altered places still carry deep time in their bones. Fortunately, some sections of this important North Carolina river have been preserved, and one such place—Carolina Beach State Park—is the subject of my next entry.
Sense of Place 