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At Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Birds, Turtles, And Humans Have Created An ...

Cape Hatteras is a thin, fragile landscape often at the mercy of the weather. It's a tenuous setting for both humans and wildlife, more so when the two are crowded together. The piping plover, a threatened species, has drawn the ire of more than a few locals who would like to see it gone. Aerial of Cape Hatteras via NASA, bottom photo of bumper sticker by Bob Mishak.

Editor's note: Cape Hatteras National Seashore is one of the jewels not only of the Atlantic Seaboard, but also of the National Park System. Its wide, sparkling beaches are popular with visitors of all kinds -- humans, birds, and reptiles included -- and that creates problems at times when some of the wildlife are protected by the Endangered Species Act. In a two-part series, the Traveler looks at the differing viewpoints, the resulting friction, and the tough spot the National Park Service has found itself in in trying to manage the seashore for both humans and wildlife. To help gain an understanding of how the conflict arose, in part one we lay out the landscape, both geologically and as wildlife habitat.

Barrier islands are tricky things -- if you want to build something and have it stay intact, that is -- as they're constantly in motion. Unlike the Rocky Mountains and the colorful Southwest -- landscapes where you can tick off geologic epochs, from the Paleocene through the Miocene and Pliocene to the Holocene, while staring at a 1,000-foot-tall butte or cliff -- barrier islands are ground-up, endlessly tumbled, spit out geologic remains.

In the case of capes Hatteras and Lookout in North Carolina, the sands are eroded bits of the Appalachian Mountains constantly being shipped downstream by rivers and deposited in the Atlantic, where surging longshore currents constantly rearrange them. Hurricanes accentuate these effects, shuttling veritable boatloads of sand downstream, shoving around entire barrier islands such as those that comprise Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout national seashores, and even tearing islands in half.