Morris Island Lighthouse has stood sentinel over Charleston Harbor's southern entrance since 1876, its 161-foot iron tower rising from what was once a thirty-acre barrier island. When construction finished, the lighthouse sat 1,200 feet inland from the waterline. Today it rises directly from the surf, surrounded at high tide, a monument to coastal erosion that has consumed the island beneath it at an average rate of seventeen feet per year. The lighthouse ceased active operation in 1962 when the newer Sullivan's Island Light assumed its duties, but the skeletal tower remains a navigation landmark and the most visible symbol of the Lowcountry's shifting shoreline. The waters around Morris Island form part of the Lighthouse Inlet Heritage Preserve, a 650-acre estuarine sanctuary that shelters one of South Carolina's most concentrated shorebird nesting areas. American oystercatchers, black skimmers, least terns, and Wilson's plovers nest on the shifting sandbars each spring and summer, while bottlenose dolphins hunt mullet and menhaden in the tidal creeks year-round. The preserve's intertidal zones yield whelk, olive, and lettered olive shells, and the spartina marshes that fringe the inlet host egrets, herons, and roseate spoonbills during migratory windows. Morris Island eco boat tour excursions depart from Folly Beach, navigating the narrow channels between barrier islands that recreational kayakers cannot safely cross. Captains time departures around tidal cycles to access sandbars and oyster beds that emerge only at mid-to-low tide, and most boats carry fewer than fifteen passengers to minimize wake disturbance in nesting zones. The route passes decommissioned fortifications from the Civil War era, including remnants of Battery Wagner on the northern tip of Morris Island, and skirts the edge of the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge before circling back through Folly River. The lighthouse itself stands as an engineering artifact from the post-Reconstruction era, designed by the U.S. Lighthouse Board to replace an 1837 tower that succumbed to Confederate shelling. Its iron skeleton, fabricated in sections and bolted together on site, was among the last wave of such structures built before electrification rendered them obsolete. Save the Light, a local preservation group, has campaigned since 1999 to stabilize the tower, which now leans three degrees off vertical due to foundation erosion. The lighthouse remains on the National Register of Historic Places, and though its lantern room was removed in 2000 for safekeeping, the frame endures as a fixed point in a landscape defined by impermanence.