Singleton and Related Genealogy Pages
A history of many families.
- 2018| Name | Evelyn Virginia WAGGETT [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] | |
| Birth | St. Charles, South Carolina  [2] |
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| Gender | Female | |
| Education | she attended the Cadet Nursing Program, graduating in 1947 [2] | |
| HIST | of Mayesville, South Carolina What makes a legend? Create a hardcopy of this page What makes a legend? Dabbs has hundreds of reference books about various aspects of nature. She prefers Chan Robbins' bird book, she said. BY IVY MOORE ivym@theitem.com Take a turn into Black River Swamp and begin the lengthy drive to Wenee Woods, home of Sumter's only Legend of Conservation. Keep your windows open, and you'll hear the song of many different birds you might not see. But you can bet Evelyn Dabbs will recognize every one of the calls. She's the area's "bird lady" and "butterfly lady," so called by the thousands of schoolchildren who have benefited from field trips to the home she shares with husband Tommy Dabbs. When you reach the Dabbses' house on the bluff, named for the Wenee Indians who once lived there, hummingbirds swoop and buzz about the many feeders on the porch, summer tanagers - red as cardinals! - American goldfinches, prothonotary warblers, chickadees, tufted titmice and many other species of birds flit in and out of the trees surrounding the house. And it's at least 10 degrees cooler than in town - with not a mosquito in sight. It's been 40 years since Evelyn Waggett Dabbs, now 84, obtained her federal permit to band migratory songbirds. This, of course, post dated by several years her interest in nature, which she said started in St. Charles where her brother John introduced her to the local flora and fauna on long walks in the countryside. "I wasn't particularly interested in birds, but I was always an outside girl," Dabbs said. "John and I were forever combing ditch banks for crawfish. We didn't kill them, we just looked to find them and just took walks in the woods. He taught me to hold snakes when I was about 7 years old. He did a good job." Indeed, he must have, as in May Dabbs became one of only 16 South Carolinians named a Legend of Conservation by the S.C. Wildlife Federation. Over the past 40 years, she's studied and banded thousands of birds, cataloguing volumes of information about migration habits and population, and in recent years she's been concentrating on the insect order lepidoptera, which includes butterflies and moths. Dabbs maintains a large butterfly garden near the house. Arranged primarily by color, it's filled with plants that provide food for both larvae and adult butterflies, many of which were moving from blossom to blossom early Wednesday morning. As she walked from area to area, Dabbs identifed the colorful insects by name and provided information about their habits. Back inside in the living room filled with reference books, binoculars by her chair, Dabbs talked about her many years of nature study, the conversation punctuated by flashes of color as a variety of birds swoop to her many feeders and a burbling fountain that serves as a birdbath. She and Tommy reared their family in Sumter, on Dabbs Street, moving to the country 33 years ago. She did some bird banding in town, but no demonstrations. "When I got out here, school groups and others immediately started coming," she said, "and I gave hands-on bird banding demonstrations three or four times a week through the school year. Audubon Societies and some college students, one group from Converse, came." A rough estimate is that more than 5,000 students have visited Wenee Woods to benefit from Dabbs' knowledge. Reflecting on all the birds she's studied, Dabbs was still able to name a favorite. "I guess the woodpecker is my favorite bird," she said. "They were completely wiped out here after Hurricane Hugo (in 1989)." Dabbs used to bake cornbread especially for the woodpeckers, who would come onto the deck to eat it. "The red-bellied and the downy woodpeckers - oh, they loved it!," she said. "Hugo took the trees down, and of course woodpeckers sleep in holes in trees at night. We did not see a woodpecker here for at least six months after that. I had cornbread out, and a woodpecker that came had no idea what it was about." Expressing dismay about the tree cutting and trimming in Sumter's historic district, Dabbs said she worries about the birds, now nesting, that will be displaced if the trees are cut. "They did that years ago," she recalled. "There were oak trees lining Calhoun Street, and the red-headed woodpeckers were nesting in them, and they cut them down. They don't care. It is so sad." While the number of birds around the house at Wenee Woods seemed large to a city dweller, Dabbs said it's the winter that brings "hordes of birds," and she takes delight in the arrival of birds not often seen in the area. "Last winter we had purple finches, which is unusual," she said. One bird she misses is the rufous-sided towhee, which she said, "We don't get in the swamp. We get white-breasted nuthatches and Carolina wrens, and protonotary warblers come to the hummingbird feeders; the male is a beautiful, total yellow. Summer tanagers come for the peanuts." A few minutes later a totally red male tanager flew to a feeder at the window to enjoy some peanuts. Dabbs said she got her banding license through her study of Baltimore orioles in town. "I banded 240 orioles before we moved out here," she said. "I have a friend who lived two blocks away that also fed them, so they all go to her every winter now. They are so beautiful." Besides birds and butterflies, Dabbs has "deer, a few rabbits, raccoons, squirrels and possums, and we can hear coyotes at night," she said. "I have seen three cougars in 33 years. The last one was about four years ago. He came across in front of my car, and I watched him go across the field. It seemed he got across the field in four leaps." She has also been involved in saving seabirds covered in petroleum oil. "Someone brought me an oiled cedar waxwing one time," Dabbs recalled. "I couldn't even tell what kind of bird it was. I worked with it a while. We worked with oiled pelicans and other seabirds on the beach once, and we learned that Dawn dishwashing soap is the only shampoo that would cut the grease." When birds are banded, naturalists are able to trace their migratory patterns. Often they come back to Dabbs' nets. "I banded a woodthrush late one afternoon and released him; the next year at the same time that bird was right back. A white-throated sparrow, I had the same one to return from Canada four years in a row," she said. "I had reports of birds I'd banded as far north as Nova Scotia and as far south as Panama - and all in between." The birds Dabbs banded - around 14,000 over the years, with the help of volunteers Lynn Watson and Cathy Brown - are mostly songbirds, hawks and owls, "everything except endangered birds. I did a lot of herons and egrets." She also got permission to band the endangered Kirtland's warbler. "I was hearing it here, but I hadn't seen it," she said. "Early in the mornings, I'd hear it, and I'd spring out of bed, run outside in my gown with my binoculars and try to find it. I knew it was there. I wrote the lab and asked permission to band it, but I never saw one." Dabbs said she is "so disappointed" she doesn't get many snakes these days. "We used to see them, at least one most every day, usually rat snakes. We had a lot of copperhead moccasins," she said. As she talked, Dabbs' excitement became more and more evident. "When the students came out, I'd always try to let each one hold a bird and even band it," she said, "and in those days, we'd always come upon a snake, and I'd pick one up and let the children touch it." Over the years, she only got bitten once, Dabbs said, laughing at the memory. "I'd picked up a red-bellied snake and all the students had touched it, and I had set it back down on the ground," she said. "Then the teacher (who'd been afraid to touch it) asked me to pick it up again. Well, the snake had had about enough, and it bit me on the finger. Not a good thing to teach children not to be afraid of snakes!" She also taught the children about spiders and other insects, emphasizing that knowledge is important to keep them from killing animals and destroying their habitats. "You know how some people will see a spider and immediately step on it, or pick up a hoe to kill a harmless snake," she said. "I hope those field trips saved a few insect lives." Never a hunter or trapper herself, Dabbs said, "I didn't believe in killing anything." While she's not a vegetarian, she said, "I don't care about eating meat. If it's put before me, I will eat it, but I'd really prefer not to." A teacher once told Dabbs she'd done a survey on children who had been on one of Dabbs' field trips a few years previous to the survey, asking them which of their field trips they'd liked most and learned the most from. "She said, without exception, they all said 'the bird lady's house,'" Dabbs said. "I think if everyone could hold a bird in their hands and then let it go, it would really make a difference in their lives and make them want to know more about nature." So, what makes a legend? In Dabbs' case, it's curiosity. "'Curious' is the word I'd choose to describe myself," she said. "I want to know everything there is to know, especially about nature." Her house a mini-museum of fossils and specimens and a library of books on every conceivable plant and animal, Dabbs appears to be well on the way. Her daily agenda during the recent drought includes visiting her sister at a local assisted living center and, she said, to "water, water, water. I never stop moving." Posted in Panorama on Sunday, June 12, 2011 [5, 8] | |
| _UID | 89B74210CD534AEA93762C1CCD83492EFEE3 | |
| Death | 4 Oct 2018 | at her home (Sumter, Sumter County, South Carolina) |
| Burial | 8 Oct 2018 | Salem Black River Presbyterian Church Cemetery, Mayesville, South Carolina [7] |
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| Person ID | I149761 | Singleton and Related Families |
| Last Modified | 9 Oct 2018 | |
| Father | Dr. John McPhail WAGGETT d. Bef 30 Jan 2014 | |
| Mother | Charlotte HORRICKS d. Bef 30 Jan 2014 | |
| _UID | FEFCFE43E7054244A00184D9FC5485B636FA | |
| _UID | FEFCFE43E7054244A00184D9FC5485B636FA | |
| Family ID | F102411 | Group Sheet | Family Chart |
| Family | Thomas McBride “Tommy” DABBS, b. 1927, Sumter, Sumter County, South Carolina d. 27 Sep 2017, at his home, (Mayesville, South Carolina) (Age 90 years) | |||||||||
| Marriage | 25 Dec 1947 | Sumter County, South Carolina [2, 3, 4, 6, 9] |
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| _UID | 8E9A5653B950468C88C3FB60DA1EAF352E41 | |||||||||
| _UID | 8E9A5653B950468C88C3FB60DA1EAF352E41 | |||||||||
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| Family ID | F102395 | Group Sheet | Family Chart | ||||||||
| Last Modified | 18 Oct 2017 | |||||||||
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