Go on beautiful, get out of here," Emmy Minor says to a brown pelican, its pouch heavy with a load of fresh fish. "Time to fly." It's feeding time at the Sanctuary on Sapelo (SOS), Emmy and Al Minor's bird rehabilitation center on the Georgia Coast: time to thaw 125 pounds of fish (today it's thread herring), split the frozen rat carcasses (leftovers from a zoo), and dice up donated beef hearts. Retirement is not supposed to be like this. Emmy and an osprey. Photo: Gail Krueger. "I've got myself into something I can't get out of," Emmy says. There's …

Kris Williams is the "Turtle Babe" of Wassaw Island. At 33, the attractive, square-jawed blonde heads the oldest volunteer-based sea turtle conservation project in North America. What a babe. Optimism comes as naturally to Williams as the tide comes to the beach. It has to, because sea turtle conservation in Georgia isn't easy. "Awareness is higher than it's ever been and that gives me hope,'' Williams said. "Conservation programs are rampant, particularly in Third World countries where there were none before, and that gives me hope.''" The Caretta Research Project -- named for the caretta caretta, a threatened loggerhead sea …

James Holland was a crabber for more than 30 years. Now he's the president and full-time field director of the Altamaha Riverkeeper, an activist group he founded to clean up Georgia's biggest river basin. James Holland -- he doesn't wear fleece. The rough-hewn Holland -- with his missing front teeth, ninth-grade education, and fierce determination -- embodies the new environmental movement in the Deep South. This movement is led by people who wouldn't be caught dead in a trendy coffee shop. They buy the trappings for a wilderness trip from Wal-Mart and the Piggly Wiggly. They don't have memberships in …

Chris Slay wears bib overalls and wire-rimmed glasses, occasionally recites poetry, and watches right whales for a living. Once more into the breach. David Wiley, National Marine Fisheries Service. After this year's dismal right whale calving season, the poetry that comes to Slay's mind is darkly pessimistic. The rarest whale of them all may be getting rarer. The Northern right whale, the most endangered of the big whales, travels south each winter from Canada's Bay of Fundy to give birth in its only known calving grounds, the warm, shallow coastal waters off south Georgia and north Florida. Few whales showed …