This is bird note.

We've got what looked like roughwing swallows likely.

There's a redwing blackbird.

On the banks of South Carolina's Cumbi River,

ornithologist Drew Lanham looks across a wetland that was once rice

plantation built and farmed by enslaved people. Today this transformed landscape

attracts a unique set of birds.

All the birds that we're hearing are probably birds that enslaved people would have heard. So imagine being out there in what we call pluff mud, this marsh mud that

wants to suck you down into it and having to work in the mosquitoes, the biting flies, cottonmouth snakes, alligators

for no pay.

Day after day, those enslaved black people, each one whose life mattered.

After the Civil War, many birds continued to rely on these wetlands. Now biologists manage the water levels in the former rice fields to support migratory shorebirds, ducks, and rare species such as the black rail.

Many don't know, but it's important to not forget,

to not bury that history under the pluff

or let it be drowned out by the water but to amplify it those black hands

that created so much are still working. You can hear more about the environmental legacy of the people who created

these rice plantations on the threatened podcast. Listen in your podcast app or at birdnote.org I'm Ari Daniel.