For generations, a herd of wild horses has made their home on a long barrier island at the southern tip of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Mark Darrough camped among the Shackleford Horses and learned a thing or two about survival.
Words & Photos by Mark Darrough
“The gates were flung wide, and the herd trotted forth to liberty, snorting disapproval of man and his strange ways.”
— Melville Chater, National Geographic, 1926
The fading twilight cast darkening shades of blue and purple across Back Sound. As I paddled at low tide, I could see the thin island known as Shackleford Banks in the distance. I weaved my sea kayak through sandbars, the last shaped like a giant arrowhead, and landed beside a saltwater pond nestled against a dark, dense maritime forest. Hoof prints along a small clearing of sand led into the trees.
There, I pitched my tent. A thunderstorm hit several hours later, 45-mph gusts smacking the tent poles against my face as I lay there wide-eyed on an increasingly wet air pad. Sleep was impossible. I cursed myself for not building a trench around my tent or tying ropes from the rain fly to nearby trees and shrubs.
When the rain let up near sunrise, I slept in chunks. But I slept well knowing I was alone on an island with wild horses.
Whether brought over by Spanish or English ships or later by English settlers migrating down the coast, by the mid-1600s there was an abundance of wild horses living on a string of barrier islands protecting the North Carolina coast, where the Neuse, Pamlico, and Chowan rivers empty into large sounds. Though each herd is named after the island upon which they live, collectively these horses are called Banker horses, or Banker ponies. The islands veer sharply west at Cape Lookout, where Shackleford separates Back Sound from the Atlantic. I had come to see the Shackleford horses.
Spotting fresh hoof prints on a narrow beach between the sound and the forest, I took a horse path up to the rear dunes dominating the western end of the island. Near the top, I noticed a small live oak tree at the edge of the forest. Beside it stood a stallion with a wild, windblown mane of blond hair and a thick, reddish-brown winter coat. Spread out on the dunes beneath him was his family of mares and offspring, known as a harem.
I stood there for a moment transfixed; a group of wild horses grazed on grassy dunes rolling down toward the vast blue of the Atlantic, where, above it, the winter sun ran a low parallel arc along the island.
When I recalled the moment days later to Margaret Poindexter, president of the Foundation for Shackleford Horses, she could relate.
“I remember that feeling. … They were on the island when my grandfather took me there as a kid, and they have enchanted me ever since,” Poindexter said.
After four days on the island, I returned home to Wilmington, North Carolina, and took a hot shower before spreading my wet gear on our front porch. Soon, the sense of natural contentment acquired through solitude gave way to trivial thoughts such as what new show we could stream that night.
Only hours before, I was paddling across a large body of water in thick sheets of rain, imagining myself as Jack London rowing up the Yukon; now, I was asking my wife to turn up the heat and where she’d put the nail clippers. Later that night, I curled beneath our down comforter, thinking of the words of Charles Dickens: “ … certain it is that minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.”
The next morning, I brushed aside a nagging sense of frailty and thought of two horses who had walked by my tent on the beach. I recalled heading after them and soon found myself between them. The stallion pinned his ears back and began galloping, giving me a wild side glance as he passed just a few feet away from me.
Sue Stuska, a biologist for the National Park Service, later told me the stallion pinned his ears back to show “anger or aggression.”
“You were definitely in the way,” she explained. “And you were really lucky he didn’t let fly and kick you as he went by. … These guys are dangerous, to you and to each other. They can kill each other.”
Scientists now believe that horses originated in North America thousands of years ago and began leaving the continent when the most recent landform of the Bering Land Bridge appeared. They spread west across the high steppes of Asia into Europe, Arabia, and North Africa, where they became domesticated over thousands of years. By the time large waves of European settlers arrived, North American horses were long extinct.
In 1526, a Spaniard named Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón landed somewhere between the Santee River and Winyah Bay in present-day South Carolina. His ship had sailed from Hispaniola with about 600 Spanish settlers, a group of enslaved Africans — the first documented group in North America — and around 100 horses, likely the first European horses in the continental United States.
Ayllón soon decided to go south to Sapelo Sound, more than 30 miles down the coast of what is now Savannah, Georgia. But disease and hunger killed most of the settlers, including Ayllón. Infighting among the colonists, one of the first documented slave rebellions in what’s now the United States, and resistance from Native Americans who lived there hastened the decline of the settlement. Within months the 150 surviving settlers returned to Hispaniola; the horses remained.
In 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh’s ships, captained by his cousin Sir Richard Grenville, carried horses from the breeding ranches of Hispaniola and headed north to the Outer Banks to bring food and supplies to the newly formed Roanoke Colony. When the seven English ships reached an opening into Pamlico Sound, the largest galleon grounded on some shallows — the first of many ships to be damaged or sunk off the Outer Banks, which gave the area the reputation as the Graveyard of the Atlantic.
“It is at this point, many historians believe, that the animals on deck were shoved overboard either at her grounding, in order to lighten her load and float her, or when she was careened on the beach to have her bottom repaired,” wrote Carolyn Mason, former president of the Foundation for Shackleford Horses. (She produced an account of the Shackleford horses later accepted into the National Archives at the Library of Congress.)
Based on various historical accounts, hundreds of horses made it to the Outer Banks in the ensuing centuries. There, they adapted to its harsh habitat and learned to drink fresh water by stomping their hooves into the sand until water gurgled up from springs beneath them. They thrived on the islands.
Melville Chater brought national fame to the Outer Banks horses in a 1926 National Geographic article, describing the 5,000 to 6,000 “supposed descendants” of Raleigh’s Barbary horses on the chain of barrier islands:
“Our quest landed us on a naked sun baked spit, where men were driving the so-called Banker ponies along the beach into a coral made of timbers from old wrecks. … The United States seemed worlds away. … The heat drove some of them to a waterhole on the beach, where they lay prone and drank the brackish fluid. It was a wild animals drinking place, for the banker ponies slake their thirst by scooping holes in the sand with their forefeet. The gates were flung wide, and the herd trotted forth to liberty, snorting disapproval of man and his strange ways.”
When Poindexter was telling me about the wild horses that have captivated her since her childhood, she mentioned a Princeton University biology professor who has spent decades studying the behaviors of the Shackleford herd and has helped in their preservation.
The professor, Daniel Rubenstein, “probably has the most historical knowledge of the Shackleford herd of anybody alive,” she told me.
From his home study in New Jersey, Rubenstein joined me over video call while I tried to tap into his knowledge of the horses. His face bore the weathered lines of a life lived mostly outdoors. He closed his eyes for long periods of time as he spoke, like he was pulling from a database culled from over 48 years of research.
I was late to our meeting, slightly disheveled after a sleepless night spent pacing around my house while jolts of tingling pain hit my sunburned shoulders. Of all the foolish mistakes I made camping on the island — not digging a trench before the thunderstorm, forgetting a sleeping bag on my second trip, sinking knee-deep into a muddy oyster bed — paddling around the east end without a shirt on led to some sort of enlightenment. Maybe William Blake was right when he wrote, “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” Or so I hoped.
Rubenstein explained what first led him to Shackleford as a grad student in 1973, when the field of behavioral ecology — the study of animals’ ability to adapt to ecological pressures such as hurricanes and limited food and water sources on an exposed barrier island — was in its infancy.
Because Shackleford horses are protected within a small and isolated environment, they provided Rubenstein “a wonderful laboratory, a lens on animal behavior.”
“I was interested in how these horses adapt to a unique, harsh environment. Behavior is a front-line response, is the first response to the problems that animals face, problems posed by nature, right? So, for example, you were hot, you took your shirt off, you got sunburned; that’s a behavioral response, probably not too adaptive if you didn’t sleep very well. And so if that happened over and over again, you wouldn’t be around. … So your predilection to things is shaped by how well you solve the problems posed by nature.”
In the 1970s, the field of behavioral ecology was just beginning, he told me. Instead of simply looking at what animals do as “sort of evolutionary, genetically controlled behavior — that this group does that and this other group does that,” as Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz viewed animal behavior — the big question at the time was how genetics affects things such as sociality in animals.
Zoologist Richard D. Alexander, Rubenstein’s mentor when he was studying at the University of Michigan, told him there are no automatic benefits for living in groups. But there are automatic costs, such as increased competition for scarce resources and disease transmission, like we saw at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Most social animals attempt to reduce those costs by living with family members.
“What makes horses special is that they’re like neolocal modern Western humans: Both sons and daughters leave home to go reproduce. … As highly social animals, how do they get those benefits [to outweigh] the costs when there’s no genetic sharing to reduce those costs? That’s what drove me to study the horses,” Rubenstein said.
One of the Banker horses grazes on grassy dunes covering the western end of Shackleford Banks. The town of Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, can be viewed in the distance.
The Banker horses, as these horse populations are called today, adapted to the Outer Banks by learning to dig for springs and find thin layers of fresh water at the surface of saltwater ponds, to graze on marsh and dune grasses, and to retreat to the maritime forest during storms.
Not all horses survive the fierce hurricanes that thrash the islands most summers. Initial reports presumed the horses of Cedar Island, about 40 miles to the north of Shackleford, survived Hurricane Dorian in 2019, but officials later discovered 28 horses had drowned when a wall of water hit the island. Their bodies washed ashore on nearby beaches while others were lost at sea. Several of the 21 survivors managed to swim to nearby islands.
Other horses across the Outer Banks survived by retreating to dry high ground under sturdy live oak trees, their powerful haunches pointed windward to stabilize against 100-mph gusts. Experts observed groups of horses sensing a change in air pressure and joining other harems — a rarely observed behavior — to ride out the coming storm.
“It is harsh out there. … If the tide comes up and they’re in the wrong place, they can get washed out to sea,” Rubenstein said, noting the five wild horses that drowned when Hurricane Isabel swept them off the Rachel Carson Reserve in 2003.
In the late ’90s, Rubenstein received a call from Mason, then a librarian at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point and later a president of the Foundation for Shackleford Horses.
“She said, ‘Professor, you don’t know me, but we have a problem.’ And the problem was the park service wanted to kill all the horses,” he recalled. Because the federally protected island is outside the purview of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, “they could eliminate them if they wanted to. But we protested.”
The people of Harkers Island, Beaufort, and nearby coastal towns joined in the protest; many saw these horses as intrinsic to their own histories. Two options remained to placate the park service: conduct an expensive experimental study to determine the number of horses that would ensure healthy vegetation growth, or identify the minimum number of horses that could survive a shock like a hurricane and rebound in a genetically sustainable manner. Rubenstein and other biologists determined that number to be 130, and Congress accepted that figure.
Today, the population size ebbs and flows from 100 to 130 and back down again. Some mares are injected with PZP, a fertility-control vaccine limiting population growth and, for some, increasing their life spans. Moreover, some foals are removed from the island for adoption.
Rubenstein believes the island and its horses are connected much deeper than by place and time, that the wild vitality of each depends on the other.
“As it became more wild, Shackleford matched the feral nature of the horses. When the people left, the horses then reclaimed their natural abilities,” he said.
My last day on the island, I packed my gear and paddled slowly through the shoals around the eastern tip. A mare grazed on an escarpment above the beach, and later, as I paddled through a tidal creek beside a muddy oyster bed, I saw a lone stallion walking through the marsh at low tide.
I progressed slowly through a maze of creeks and inlets and dragged my boat over the sandbars between Great Marsh Island and Blinds Hammock. When I entered the deeper waters of the sound, its strong rising current pushed me directly toward Shell Point, where my car awaited. At last, I had figured out the tides.
Nearing Harkers Island, I turned my kayak and looked back at the long, thin strip of Shackleford, now 2 miles to my south. Basking in the early spring sun, I understood then why I had come: Like the horses, humans can adjust and become better equipped to handle the challenges of nature (my sunburn aside). Not only are we more capable, but we also become more free.
This story was published in Issue No. 1 of The Bitter Southerner magazine.
Mark Darrough was born and raised in Colorado, spending summers at his family’s mountain adventure camp at the base of Longs Peak. He spent five years in Africa as a photojournalist and worked two years as a reporter for Port City Daily in Wilmington, North Carolina where he was awarded Best Photo Essay and Best General News Photography by the N.C. Press Association. He grew up reading adventure classics like All the Pretty Horses, Grapes of Wrath, and The Call of the Wild, each developing a deep admiration for man’s relationship with nature. He currently covers environmental issues along the coast, and lives in Wilmington with his wife and English shepherd. View more of his work at markdarrough.com.
