The following morning I hook up with Barry and his co-worker, Alexandra Wilke, an ornithological conservationist, at a dock in Oyster. We climb aboard a 19-foot Carolina skiff with its trademark rectangular hull that looks like an amphibious landing craft and as we creep, wakeless, up the harbor, Barry points out a number of structures and parcels of land around us.

“The funny looking boat with the high cabin and the crane on it belongs to the contractor that we use to build our oyster reefs,” he says. “Across the road there is a riparian forest restoration project. Hundreds of acres for migratory songbird habitat. This other piece of property is the Anheuser-Busch Coastal Research Center. There are tanks that we use for curing our eel grass seeds.”

When we make the open water of Mock Horn Bay, Alex takes us to Ship Shoal Island, Wreck Island, Little Cobb Island and the southern point of Cobb Island. All the while she shows us islands that are rookeries for oystercatchers (one of her specialties), great black-backed gulls, gull-billed terns, brown pelicans and so on. We walk gingerly among nests etched in the sand. She tells me how the piping plover (a protected species) population has increased from 100 to 200 birds due in part to a program that removed raccoons and red foxes from the islands.