Wildlife

South Carolina is home to a wide variety of habitat types, including hemlock-blanketed mountains, rolling sandhills, flooded cypress forests, and sunny palmetto beaches. This naturally lends to a wide variety of wildlife species. You can even see black bears and dolphins in the same day, as it only takes a few hours to drive between the mountains and the coast!

The South Carolina State Parks offer numerous opportunities to get outside and experience the state’s wildlife, including its rare and endangered species.

Come take a walk on the wild side!

Current Happenings

Winter Waterfowl

Cold winter weather brings a special group of guests to our South Carolina State Parks: ducks, geese, and swans; who are collectively known as the waterfowl. All of these birds share special adaptations such as short legs and webbed feet to help them survive in their mainly aquatic environment. Ducks offer the most variety of the waterfowl, and can offer the bird watcher and nature enthusiast some entertaining behavior to reward those who venture outdoors during the depths of winter. They can be classified into two groups based on their feeding behavior: they are either divers or dabblers.

The divers include ducks that completely submerge themselves in search of a meal. They tend to have legs set far back under their bodies to make them more efficient swimmers, but the trade off is that they are pretty ungainly on land. They also tend to have a little more trouble taking flight, and have to run across the water’s surface to get in the air. Read more.

Critter Close-Up

The Bobcat
The bobcat is the only native wild cat found in South Carolina today, although we once had mountain lions here as well. Weighing between 10 and 25 pounds, the bobcat is a small, muscular cat with hind legs that are longer than its front legs. Don’t confuse it with the larger Canadian lynx, though, which looks similar and lives in some of the same northern areas (lynx don’t live here in the South). To tell them apart, look for the distinctive black bars on the bobcat’s front legs and a black-tipped, stubby tail which gives it its name. Also to help tell them apart, the lynx has very large feet (to keep it from sinking into the snow of its northern habitats) and long black ear tips – neither of which the bobcat has.

Range
The bobcat can be found in much of the United States, in southern Canada, and down to northern Mexico. It’s quite adaptable and can live in wooded areas, semi-desert, swamp habitats, and even along urban edges. It’s still found in much of its original range and its populations are considered healthy in most areas… although it has disappeared from parts of the Midwest and the Northeast because of habitat changes.

Diet
The bobcat is an opportunistic hunter that will happily eat a wide variety of prey. Depending on availability, a bobcat will eat animals ranging in size from insects to small rodents, and even occasionally up to a deer. However, bobcats prefer mammals between 1½ and 12 pounds and they have a particular fondness for cottontail rabbits and cotton rats. Yum yum. Read more.

Meet Our State Game Bird

The Wild Turkey

The wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) was designated as South Carolina's official State Wild Game Bird in 1976 and it is also the official game bird of Alabama, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts. There’s only one other type of turkey in the world, the Ocellated Turkey; it lives in Central and South America.

The wild turkey was a very important food animal to the Native Americans and it was the Aztecs who domesticated it. Descendants of the Mexican domesticated turkeys were later introduced into Europe in 1519 by Spanish explorers and it’s interesting to know that the Pilgrims brought farm turkeys with them when they sailed to the New World because they didn’t realize that turkeys occurred wild here.

The Amazing Comeback Kid
Even though wild turkeys were once very abundant (and they are again today), they had vanished from much of their original range by the early 1900s. Because of heavy hunting pressure and habitat loss, turkeys had completely disappeared from the northeast and game managers estimate that there were once as few as 30,000 alive. The birds were eventually protected, though, and trap-and-transfer programs were begun. When these efforts were combined with habitat protection and the return of the mature forests that the birds need, success was remarkable. Today, turkey numbers are healthy and hunting them is again legal across the entire country. They are now even living in Hawaii, where they weren’t found originally. Current estimates say that there may be around 7 million of these birds alive today. Read more.

Turkey Links:

National Wild Turkey Federation

The Turkey

Learn more about our state game bird, as well as the other South Carolina state symbols.

Other Links: State game bird & State symbols