Once called the “wildest woman in America”, this fearless knife-wielding naturalist has lived off the land for 53 years, fighting to preserve Cumberland Island for future travellers.

Every week, 84-year-old Carol Ruckdeschel walks the wind-whipped beach on Cumberland Island, Georgia. Wearing white rubber boots, and with her dark hair in pigtail braids, she jots down everything she finds in a field journal: spoonbills, sandwich terns, shearwaters, sea oats, moon snails, micromolluscs, whelks, calico crabs. This morning, she records a committee of vultures perching on a dead snag. Bottlenose dolphins swim offshore. Feral horses lope along the dunes. Shark teeth glint in the sand.

Then, she comes across the carcass of a loggerhead turtle. She kneels beside it and extends her measuring tape. As she’s done some 4,000 times before, she cuts it open and performs a necropsy, investigating how it died, what it ate and recording every detail in fieldnotes so thorough and exquisite they once inspired curators at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to travel 700 miles (1,126km) south from Washington DC to meet her in person.

Ruckdeschel moved to Cumberland in 1973, and for the past 53 years, the ecologist and naturalist has been one of the only full-time residents on one of the Atlantic’s most remote and biodiverse barrier islands. Dubbed “the Jane Goodall of sea turtles” for her pioneering research and “the wildest woman in America”, due to her snake-rearing, knife-wielding, roadkill-scavenging lifestyle, Ruckdeschel lives off the land and largely off the grid alone in a protected wilderness she fights tenaciously to preserve for future travellers.

The lure of a wild Island

Measuring more than 36,000 acres and located 18 miles (30km) north-east of Jacksonville, Florida, Cumberland is the largest and southernmost of the 14 barrier islands strewn off Georgia’s Atlantic coast. It’s also among the least visited of the 10 National Seashores managed by the US National Park Service (NPS).

Almost no cars are allowed on the island – there is no Uber, taxi or shuttles. There are no paved roads, trash cans, stores or amenities. There’s not even a place to purchase a bottle of water. Visitors bring what they need and take it all away with them when they go. A single sandy road cuts north to south through palmetto-studded maritime forests and saltwater marshes. Seventeen miles (27 km) of beaches are lined with towering sand dunes where rare, endangered shorebirds and four species of sea turtles nest.

To help keep Cumberland wild, a maximum of 300 visitors are permitted on the island each day. Every visit requires a reservation months in advance – whether for day-trippers taking the ferry, visitors spending the night at one of five campsites or guests staying in one of the 17 rooms or cottages at the island’s lone business, the Greyfield Inn.

At the turn of the 20th Century, powerful American families like the Carnegies and the Rockefellers maintained sprawling, Gilded Age estates on the island’s remote, private stretches. Their younger scions still holiday there today.

Unlike her few part-time neighbours, Ruckdeschel isn’t here by inheritance. After visiting the island for the first time in 1960 as a 28-year-old biology researcher at Georgia State University, she couldn’t get it out of her mind. “[I could] go walking off in the woods on the trails and be alone and hear silence,” she says.

In 1973, Ruckdeschel left Atlanta and moved to Cumberland full-time, taking a job as a caretaker at a friend’s family estate. The year before, the US government had designated the island as a protected National Seashore and began buying up all available parcels and plots and making deals with homeowners to transfer their properties to the park after they pass away. Over time, most of the island’s few residents passed away or left, leaving their heirs to use their properties as holiday homes. But not Ruckdeschel.

In 1978, she used the last of her savings to purchase one of the only structures the NPS hadn’t yet acquired: an abandoned wooden cabin on the island’s remote north end built by emancipated Black residents in the 1800s.

“My house was about falling down when I got it,” Ruckdescel recalls. During the next two years, she used driftwood and found materials to make it livable.

It Isn't easy living full-time in a place that’s only accessible by boat and has no markets, gas stations, postal service or landfill. But the island was “priceless” to the biologist, and she set out to learn everything she could about it.

In those first few years, a friend on a neighbouring island taught Ruckdeschel how to perform sea turtle surveys, and for a time, she monitored sea turtle hatches for the NPS.

During her walks along the beach, Ruckdeschel noticed that more and more dead sea turtles were washing ashore. By completing a necropsy on each one, she discovered that many were drowning in shrimping trawlers, and her findings led to changes in legislation and in net design. Over time, Ruckdeschel amassed one of the world’s largest collections of sea turtle skulls, shells and skeletal remains. For years, she housed them in the hand-hewn Cumberland Island Museum she built beside her house, with a lab, library and floor-to-ceiling shelving for the carefully catalogued specimens. This past autumn, Ruckdeschel transferred the collection to the NPS, and as of 2005, there are plans to display it at the Georgia Natural History Museum.

Living off the land

After Ruckdeschel’s Friday morning surveys, she hikes back through the maritime forest to what she calls her “homestead”. Along her cabin’s wood walls, rain barrels capture water for her outdoor shower. Out back, her courtyard is lined with scrap wood, stacked cooking pots, ceramic bathtubs where she cleans animal remains and five-gallon buckets. Weathered picnic tables in the compound’s courtyard are shaded by moss-draped oaks and longleaf pines. Beyond the courtyard is her chicken coop, which opens into a garden enclosed by wire fencing and roofed with terraces covered in grapevines.

The rain buckets under the cabin’s tin roof water her garden via a drip line. She collects water from a pump and well. She heats her home and often cooks with wood she’s gathered and split. Very few visitors hike or bike as far north as Ruckdeschel’s place, which is located 15 miles (25km) up the rutty road from the public ferry terminal, and just steps from the First African Baptist Church, where John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette were wed in 1996.

Ruckdeschel says it took years to develop her garden to the point that it could sustain her. “Everything over here that you need or want, you pay for one way or another,” Ruckdeschel says of life on the island. “I just happen to have paid in time.”

During her half-century here, she’s hunted, scavenged and eaten the island’s wealth of boar, horse, possum, racoon, armadillo and manta rays. “I don’t just go hunting, but if there’s something bothering, pestering or messing with my garden or something like that, I’ll eat it,” she says. It’s also finders-keepers. “There’s the creek with fish and clams and oysters and shrimp… I’ll throw the net or find something dead on the beach.”

She may make the rare visit to the mainland and its grocery stores, but for the most part, she lives off the land. The grapefruit, lemon and loquat trees she planted decades ago are now mature and she grows tomatoes, okra, squash and other vegetables.

Yet, she notes that a curious deer recently infiltrated her plot and devoured virtually everything but her okra. “The garden’s going to be behind,” she laments, “but you do what you can.”

‘Boots on the ground’

Recently, Ruckdeschel’s main preoccupation has been Cumberland’s maritime forest – one of the best-preserved in the country.”[It] is an endangered ecosystem… and we’ve got the most of it anywhere on the Georgia coast.” After generations of human intervention on the island – including cattle grazing that decimated the ecosystem – this rewilded forest is finally reaching maturity, she says.

The effort to preserve Cumberland and allow this rewilding to occur has been tireless. But federal protection of the seashore didn’t stop the threats of development.

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During Ruckdeschel’s decades here, people have sought approval for expanded van tours into the protected wilderness, tried to swap parcels of land to allow for new development and even threatened to build a commercial spaceport on the mainland that would have launched unmanned rockets (which are prone to fiery explosions) right over Ruckdeschel’s roof. Ruckdeschel has fought it all.

Some battles, she has won: she was a driving force in securing federal wilderness designation for the island’s north end in the 1980s. Some, she’s lost: she’s been arguing for years that the feral horses first introduced by European settlers centuries ago have no place in Cumberland’s ecosystem and suffer from disease and lack of food sources. But she’s found few allies in her pitch to eradicate or rehome them.

Each time a new threat to Cumberland Island’s natural balance arises, Ruckdeschel has been the “boots on the ground,” as she puts it, sounding the alarm to conservationists.

In the old days, she’d write to her friend, the late US President Jimmy Carter, an advocate for ecological conservation in his home state of Georgia. These days, she reaches out to conservation groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center, or her own grassroots network of fellow citizen scientists and ecological defenders through the organisation she founded, Wild Cumberland.

“Without being aware of it, I slipped into this conservation mode,” she says. “I didn’t want to spend my time doing that. I just wanted to learn the island.”

Right now, Ruckdeschel is fighting an arrangement between the NPS and wealthy landowners that would allow for the construction of new homes on the island for the first time in decades. She’s also watching a pending NPS proposal that would raise the daily visitor limit on Cumberland from 300 to 750, expanding the presence of e‑bikes, and even developing concessions and new facilities – dramatic changes for a place with little to no infrastructure.

To Ruckdeschel, these plans spell “potential devastation”, not just for flora and fauna but for visitors’ ability to experience the island in its natural state, without crowds, commerce and other trappings of life on the mainland.

Even at 84, Ruckdeschel says she won’t stop fighting to protect her island home – she just hopes there is still time left to walk through the maritime forest or survey the beach. "I learn something new every day,” she says. “And that’s what I love.” (BBC)

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