Happy Birthday Tom Yawkey!

In honor of Tom Yawkey’s birthday and team bonding, we recently had the pleasure of getting a team tour of the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center! If you haven’t had a chance to go yet, please check it out! Tom Yawkey grew up with a love and respect for nature and the land around him. Because of his decision to buy up land for conservation purposes North, South, and Cat Island in the mouth of Winyah Bay now make up the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center.

We had the pleasure of having Jim Lee as our tour guide, naturalist, and storyteller. He is retiring in April so schedule a tour with him as soon as you can because he is INCREDIBLE. He was able to answer our questions about the land and tell us about Tom that we left inspired and pondered how the world could be if we protected our wild places. Check out the information on how to book a tour HERE.

Jim Lee introducing himself and getting to know our group!

In addition to having a wonderful tour guide we also had Thomas Rainwater along with us for the tour. He is a Clemson and Department of Natural Resources employee conducting long term research on alligators out on the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center. To learn more about Thomas’ amazing research and what he does check out his work by clicking this page!

Thomas Rainwater and our BIET selfie!

We are so grateful to have had this opportunity and can only stress how awesome and important it is to protect and conserve habitats like Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center. Tom Yawkey was remarkable and the foundation that is set up because of him is doing great work following his footsteps. Below are some photos we snagged around Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center while enjoying our outing–the photos don’t even do it justice so you will have to go out and explore it!

Did you know in addition to loving nature, Tom Yawkey loved baseball and at one point owned the Boston Redsox!  

Beautiful live oaks surrounded by fields of different grasses.

Long leaf pine forests with the endangered red cockaded woodpecker!!