Nature Notes: From Bog to Forest
The inch or so of rain we had on Saturday and Sunday morning really greened up the open spaces. It was readily apparent on driving around the outback areas of Southampton and East Hampton on Monday. The vegetation had been getting thirsty. Its thirst was thusly quenched.
The South Fork is small compared to the rest of Long Island and tiny compared to the rest of New York State, but its flora ranks among the most diverse in America. Where else can you find a cranberry bog in the shadows of a pitch pine forest and a stone’s throw from heathlands and dunes? That is why after so many years pursuing birds, then fish, my main pursuit for the past 20 years has been plants.
Montauk always had the second largest prairie on Long Island after the Hempstead Plains, which is reduced to less than 50 acres or so. Since the Montauk grassland abuts the coastal waters of Block Island Sound, it is considered a maritime grassland. But if you went to Ohio where the Appalachian chain of mountains meets the lowlands, now mostly used for agriculture, you would find the same grasses that grow here: Indian nut grass, big bluestem, Deschampsia, little bluestem, and several others as well as many of the same forbs.
Montauk’s grasslands used to be kept low by fires, first set by the Montauketts, later, by the settlers who grazed their livestock in Montauk. Grasslands thrive on periodic fires. Ticks, however, don’t do so well under those conditions. Now, those same fields are slowly growing up into a savanna ecotype. They have as many shrubs as grasses and are difficult to navigate on foot without a trail to guide you through them.
They are rapidly becoming heathlands like those of Scotland and Ireland, with differing species but similar in aspect. The shads, highbush blueberries, chokeberries, black cherries, sumacs, and other shrubs and small trees dominate. They manage to resist the desiccating effects from the persistent onshore winds blowing off the ocean in summer, while taller trees don’t fare so well, except in the Point Woods where the tall bluffs shoot the wind over their tops.
You will find an enduring heathland at Shadmoor State Park, but less than a mile west of Montauk Point, a woodland as rich as any on Long Island with five species of oaks, including the rare southern red oak, Canada serviceberry, two species of hickories, alternate-leaved dogwoods, American beech, American holly, an occasional basswood, witch hazel, mountain laurel, tupelos, and red maples.
But you won’t find any native pines there. One has to go all the way to the west edge of Hither Woods where Montauk meets Napeague to find pitch pines growing in profusion. Over the last two centuries, they’ve marched out onto Napeague from the rest of Amagansett and came to an abrupt halt on the east side of the Walking Dunes. The rest of Hither Woods is a classic Appalachian deciduous woodland, with oaks, beech, ironwood, hickories, sassafras, tupelo, holly, red maple, and several other tree species.
For a time in the late 1600s and up until the middle of the 1800s, the lumber of Hither Woods was harvested, and the hilly morainal land became mostly grasslands used for grazing sheep, cattle, and other livestock. By 1923, when it was studied in detail by the eminent botanist Norman Taylor, it was already half grown up and was partially covered with eastern red cedars. Since then, the cedars have been replaced by the typical deciduous hardwoods that grow there today.
If you explore Napeague you will find that it is largely made up of heathy vegetation, pitch pines, bear oaks, and a formidable dune plain that stretches north from Montauk Highway all the way to Napeague and Gardiner’s Bays. It is practically treeless except near the highway, and dominated by bearberry, beach heather, and several low-growing flowering forbs. It is a vegetation type found nowhere else in the state.
Napeague is dotted to the west and east with potholes, “dune slacks” in England, which have a wonderful variety of cranberries, orchids, cotton grass, and many other small plants that need to keep their feet wet throughout most of the year. There are spots where the underlying water table touches the topsoil. Almost all of Napeague is barely five feet above sea level, and the freshwater aquifer it hosts is only 40 to 50 feet thick.
Leave Napeague’s west and you will come to the Stony Hill woods, which are unique because they have very little understory or forest floor carpet and are dominated by American beech, sweet birch (also called black birch), and a handful of maples, hickories, oaks, sassafras, and other woodies with a few pitch pines. They have very little of the lowbush blueberry-huckleberry carpet that typically coats openings in the pine barrens farther to the west.
The wide expanse of ocean dunes between East Hampton Village and Napeague is certainly unique. In the rest of New York, only the Sunken Forest dunes of Fire Island rival them. Those dunes are dominated by American beachgrass and other seashore-duneland plants, and have a healthy canopy of pitch pine, bear oaks, beach plums, bayberry, and highbush blueberry. Their natural status is only marred by a large number of Japanese black pines, which always seem to be in some stage of dying. There are several lines of dunes; some of them have even climbed the rise between the duneland and flatland to the north, formerly agricultural, to perch on its top.
This march inland, now put to rest by landscaping and building, can also be witnessed along Bluff Road in Amagansett, which runs east to west along the top of the old geologic bluff deposited by the retreating glacier’s alluvial outwash.
Between the village of Sag Harbor and Three Mile Harbor, a neighborhood known as Northwest Woods is a vast expanse of woods, much of which is covered with pines, mostly pitch pines to the south, white pines to the north, but a mixture nonetheless. Oaks and pitch pines are common in Wainscott’s woodlands, as typically seen along Daniel’s Hole road. They grade into the white pine-dominated Northwest Woods, which runs all the way to Gardiner’s Bay and Northwest Harbor, both parts of the Peconic Estuary. If you ride along Bull Path, Old Northwest Road, Swamp Road, and Northwest Landing Road you will see how dominant the white pines can be. A few reach 100 feet in the air and are three to four feet in diameter. If you look between the larger boles, you will see a plethora of white pine offspring. The white pine forest, at least for now, is succeeding itself.
Except for a smaller version on Shelter Island, this is the only native white pine forest on Long Island, and how it has persisted so long as such in the face of global warming is the basis of a long-standing botanical conundrum. White pines are common in New England and upstate New York, where they form a large part of the northern transitional forest, which eventually becomes North America’s version of the Siberian taiga, dominated by spruce, larch, aspens, birch, and other more boreal conifers and deciduous tree species.
I have long puzzled over these white pines and have come to the conclusion that it is the fault of the water table. The temperature of the water, which sits at root level for most of these pines, is in the mid-50s for most of the year. Thus the pines are drinking cool water when they are transpiring. The evaporation of the water from the needles’ surface further cools the trees. They think they are in Maine, when they’re actually 300 miles to the south on little old Long Island. They are the original geothermal cooling pumps.
Northwest is the only spot on Long Island, other than on Gardiner’s Island, where persimmons, if only a few, are found.
I haven’t even touched on the various wetland ecotypes, chief among them the extensive salt marshes bordering the tributaries of the Peconic Estuary. I will point out, however, that there is another native conifer, the fifth and the rarest on Long Island, after the pitch pine, eastern red cedar, white pine, and common juniper. It’s the Atlantic white cedar, but you will have to leave East Hampton and travel to North Sea or the Nature Conservancy’s Sagg Swamp Preserve in Sagaponack to see one.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].