Hundreds of dead chickens found floating in SC river. Stench noticeable, riverkeeper says

As his canoe came closer to the mass of refuse floating in an Edisto River tributary, Hugo Krispyn knew the unsightly mess was more than trash from somebody’s home.

Hundreds of rotting chickens, half concealed in feed sacks, bobbed in a crook of the river’s North Fork, on the Aiken-Lexington county line just below a bridge, he said.

“When I got there and you could smell and see it, I knew right away it wasn’t household trash,’’ he said. “They are very dead. A lot of them looked to be full-grown chickens.’’

Krispyn, the Edisto Riverkeeper, said he reported his findings to the S.C. Department of Natural Resources because it is illegal to dump animal carcasses in rivers. Dead animals could spread disease in rivers, which is a concern for recreational users and cities that rely on rivers for drinking water.

It’s unknown how the chickens got into the river or where they came from, but rural Aiken and Lexington counties are hotbeds for poultry production in South Carolina. Scores of farms dot the landscape. By law, poultry farms are supposed to find other ways of disposing of chickens that die before they are ready for market than dumping them in rivers, Krispyn said. Often, those birds are disposed of on the farms.

S.C. Department of Natural Resources spokesman Greg Lucas said the agency had checked into the matter and referred it to the S.C. Department of Environmental Services, the agency that investigates pollution in South Carolina.

Lucas said his agency had received multiple calls Wednesday about the dead chickens. DES spokeswoman Laura Renwick said her agency is investigating.

In an email Thursday afternoon, Renwick said the department’s agricultural staff communicated with major poultry farm operations, learning that none of the facilities reported a mass die-off of birds. The department is trying to determine if the chickens in the North Fork could have come from a smaller, non-commercial farm, she said.

The North Fork of the Edisto is one of two main stems that form the Edisto, a panoramic blackwater river that winds from central South Carolina through the Lowcountry to the Atlantic Ocean. The river forms part of the ACE Basin nature preserve between Columbia and the coast south of Charleston.

Krispyn questioned whether the chickens had some type of infection that prompted someone to dump them in the river to avoid scrutiny. But more than that, dumping dead chickens in a river is offensive and just plain wrong, Krispyn said.

“If this is a commercial producer, they ought to know better and act better and be called out for what they have done,’’ he said. “There is hardly a circumstance I can think of where dumping that in the river doesn’t make whatever happened worse.’’

This story was updated Thursday Aug. 22 with additional information from the Department of Environmental Services.