The snake-wrangling 84-year-old who lives on a remote barrier island

Once called the "wildest woman in America", this fearless knife-wielding naturalist has lived off the land for 53 years, fighting to preserve Cumberland Island for future travellers.

Every week, 84-year-old Carol Ruckdeschel walks the wind-whipped beach on Cumberland Island, Georgia. Wearing white rubber boots, and with her dark hair in pigtail braids, she jots down everything she finds in a field journal: spoonbills, sandwich terns, shearwaters, sea oats, moon snails, micromolluscs, whelks, calico crabs. This morning, she records a committee of vultures perching on a dead snag. Bottlenose dolphins swim offshore. Feral horses lope along the dunes. Shark teeth glint in the sand.

Then, she comes across the carcass of a loggerhead turtle. She kneels beside it and extends her measuring tape. As she's done some 4,000 times before, she cuts it open and performs a necropsy, investigating how it died, what it ate and recording every detail in fieldnotes so thorough and exquisite they once inspired curators at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to travel 700 miles (1,126km) south from Washington DC to meet her in person.

Ruckdeschel moved to Cumberland in 1973, and for the past 53 years, the ecologist and naturalist has been one of the only full-time residents on one of the Atlantic's most remote and biodiverse barrier islands. Dubbed "the Jane Goodall of sea turtles" for her pioneering research and "the wildest woman in America", due to her snake-rearing, knife-wielding, roadkill-scavenging lifestyle, Ruckdeschel lives off the land and largely off the grid alone in a protected wilderness she fights tenaciously to preserve for future travellers.

The lure of a wild island

Measuring more than 36,000 acres and located 18 miles (30km) north-east of Jacksonville, Florida, Cumberland is the largest and southernmost of the 14 barrier islands strewn off Georgia's Atlantic coast. It's also among the least visited of the 10 National Seashores managed by the US National Park Service (NPS). 

Almost no cars are allowed on the island – there is no Uber, taxi or shuttles. There are no paved roads, trash cans, stores or amenities. There's not even a place to purchase a bottle of water. Visitors bring what they need and take it all away with them when they go. A single sandy road cuts north to south through palmetto-studded maritime forests and saltwater marshes. Seventeen miles (27 km) of beaches are lined with towering sand dunes where rare, endangered shorebirds and four species of sea turtles nest.

To help keep Cumberland wild, a maximum of 300 visitors are permitted on the island each day. Every visit requires a reservation months in advance – whether for day-trippers taking the ferry, visitors spending the night at one of five campsites or guests staying in one of the 17 rooms or cottages at the island's lone business, the Greyfield Inn. 

At the turn of the 20th Century, powerful American families like the Carnegies and the Rockefellers maintained sprawling, Gilded Age estates on the island's remote, private stretches. Their younger scions still holiday there today.

Unlike her few part-time neighbours, Ruckdeschel isn't here by inheritance. After visiting the island for the first time in 1960 as a 28-year-old biology researcher at Georgia State University, she couldn't get it out of her mind. "[I could] go walking off in the woods on the trails and be alone and hear silence," she says.   

In 1973, Ruckdeschel left Atlanta and moved to Cumberland full-time, taking a job as a caretaker at a friend's family estate. The year before, the US government had designated the island as a protected National Seashore and began buying up all........

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