Explore Pine Island Sanctuary

Welcome to the Outer Banks as they used to be.

When Audubon North Carolina assumed full management of a nearly 3,000-acre parcel of pristine marsh, uplands, dunes and maritime forest in Corolla, North Carolina, we became the stewards of one of the last remnants of the storied Currituck Sound landscape.

Audubon now protects a mosaic of marsh, sound and forest in a region that was famed for waterfowl hunting and bass fishing, and is now a popular vacation destination. The first Audubon Center in North Carolina came to fruition when the National Audubon Society, through the generosity of Mr. Earl Slick and his family, received ownership of parcels of land on the Northern Outer Banks, nearly 30 years ago. The family continued to use the Pine Island hunt club on the property and maintained the property until Audubon took full management in 2010.

The Story of the Landscape

Currituck Sound is a shallow, brackish water system located between the Outer Banks and the mainland in the northeastern region of North Carolina. This Important Bird Area (IBA) is comprised of an extensive system of marshes, creeks, channels and open water, as well as the Donal C. O’Brien Sanctuary and Audubon Center. The region has experienced rapid residential and commercial development in the past decade but historically it was a wild, road-less area.

Currituck Sound's abundant waterfowl and appeal as a remote getaway attracted wealthy businessmen seeking hunting opportunities in the nineteenth century.

"They bought up vast tracts on the Outer Banks and the marshy islands of the sound," writes Thomas Schoenbaum in Islands, Capes, and Sounds. "Sumptuous clubhouses and lodges were built on these tracts," including a rambling two-story hunting lodge built at the Sanctuary in 1913.

Local residents worked in the hunt clubs as guides and caretakers. According to Schoenbaum, "in this heyday of market hunting, 'battery-boxes' equipped with huge 'punt guns' blanketed the air with shots, and brought down a whole flock of birds with a single burst, until the practice was outlawed in 1918."

Although hunting diminished the huge concentrations of waterfowl, in the 1970's the Sound still supported an estimated 300,000 waterfowl. Today, numbers have declined considerably, but the Sound is home to a few thousand ducks, geese and swans annually, including Snow Goose, Tundra Swan, American Green-winged Teal, Lesser Scaup and Northern Pintail. The sanctuary’s shrub thickets and forests provide good habitat for migrant songbirds, and the marshes support rails, bitterns and wading birds. The sanctuary harbors 170 bird species, as well as seven amphibian species, 17 reptile species, 19 mammal species and more than 350 species of plants.