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

Leatherback Sea Turtles Nested at Edisto Beach State Park

Nona Rowcliffe and Corinne Campi were scheduled for the dawn turtle patrol on May 29, 2009 at Edisto Beach State Park. At first, nothing seemed out of the ordinary that morning. Three loggerhead sea turtles had come onto the beach that night to lay their eggs, but as the two women continued down the beach, they were met with a surprise when they discovered some very unusual tracks on the beach! These tracks were much wider than the loggerhead tracks that they were accustomed to, and the body pit was huge! Initially Rowcliffe thought that park campers had played a trick on the turtle patrol: “The tracks were so huge and wide, I thought someone drove a tank onto the beach or that someone had tried to make fake turtle tracks!” Campi, a summer intern at the park, questioned whether these tracks were from a loggerhead turtle or were instead possibly from a critically endangered leatherback sea turtle.
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Meet Our State Migratory Mammal

South Carolina’s official Migratory Mammal is the Northern Right Whale.

Because of the hard work by a group of school children at Alice Drive Elementary School in Sumter, the Northern Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis) was named South Carolina’s state migratory mammal by Act Number 58 in early June 2009.

Right whales can be seen off the coast of South Carolina from late-November through January during the breeding and calving season. The adults range from 35 to 55 feet long and can weight over 100 tons (with females larger than the males). The newborns, in comparison, are 13-20 feet long and weigh approximately 1 ton. In 2008, 23 calves were documented and in 2009 39 newborns were seen! Read more

Learn more about our state migratory mammal as well as the other South Carolina state symbols.