Nature Notes: Patient Opportunists
On Sunday I had the pleasure of leading a small group on a poke-and-look nature walk along the Long Pond Greenbelt trails south of Sag Harbor, sponsored by the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt. “Poke-and-look” because we shuffled along slowly, conversing, asking questions, answering them, and taking in the wonderful flora on either side of the trail as we wended our way towards Crooked Pond.
Crooked Pond is my favorite of the Greenbelt chain of ponds that stretches from Otter Pond on the north to the tip of Sagg Pond on the south, where it meets the ocean. It’s my favorite pond because it is in the very center of the South Fork and the watershed divide running east to west runs through its north half. North of this divide, water runs off to the Peconics, south of it, to the ocean.
Its surface is the very surface of the upper glacial aquifer, the top layer of freshwater under the ground across Long Island, and the only one that stretches from Montauk Point to New York City. The pond’s water level rises and falls as the aquifer fills with rainwater or loses it to evaporation. Normally, it is a typical freshwater pond with half the surface covered water with lily pads. The edge is defined by some sedges and rushes; behind them are tupelos, sweet peppers, swamp azalea, red maple, and other wetland woodies.
When it’s high, it’s hard to walk around it without getting your feet wet. On this particular day, we were lucky. It’s been a dry late spring and summer. The evaporation rate had been driven by the hot sun, and a large portion of the shore, which normally would be underwater, was exposed to reveal a unique wetland flora that you only find during such droughty conditions.
Jean Held was along. She knows the ponds in the greenbelt system as well as anyone. She’s been observing and photographing them for 50 years or so and knows the plants along the shores as well as I do. When we reached the pond’s west edge behind Dai Dayton, the society’s co-leader, my eyes caught this little pinkish foot-high daisy-like flower that resembled an aster, but asters weren’t out yet. While I was mumbling to myself and searchingthrough the dusty catacombs of my gray matter, Jean came to my rescue. It was the state-endangered rose coreopsis and there were several, all peeking in bloom, I might add. I had seen my last in the late 1980s during a similar dry period on a trip with Russell Hoeflich, but on the east side of the pond.
It was accompanied by a most unusual assemblage of other small flowering plants including the thread-dew, a sundew insectivorous plant with twinkling pink-purplish stems glistening with the tiny glandular drops that insects are attracted to. Tony Hitchcock, who with his wife used to run the Hampton Classic event each year, explained that because the soil was bereft of minerals after thousands of years of leaching out, the sundews had evolved to get their minerals from insects that were trapped in the gooey threads. Then another walker pointed to one of them that had recently entrapped a small moth and was in the process of digesting it.
Within that many-colored tapestried carpeting were white-headed pipeworts, yellow perts, small greenish stems of Juncus and Carex rushes and reeds, and many more, almost all in flower. Above them the tupelo branches reached out, their leaves already turning burgundy red. Last to leaf out in the spring, first to turn and fall at the end of summer, that’s the tupelo, pepperridge, bung tree, or black gum, call it what you will. The perfumey scents wafted out from the line of sweet peppers, Clethra alnifolia, standing tall beneath them and just coming into bloom.
Search the pond’s perimeter with a turning head and you see the entire shoreline interrupted by a large glacial erratic here and there, but nary a phragmites stem. How this pond escaped the onslaught of this Eurasian invasive that has taken over so much of the shores of other ponds in the area is a mystery. I guess it’s too long a row to hoe by a rhizome underground from Long Pond a few hundred feet to the north.
There are a few other ponds on the South Fork that have similar flowery edges during dry spells, but none as far as I can tell have the rose coreopsis. The roots and other propagules of these patient opportunists wait quietly under the water, under the ice, under the snow, for the chance to burst forth when the water recedes and the shore expands every so often when rainfall is scant. Apparently, they never fail to take advantage when such an opportunity comes along every three or four years.
In the 1980s the Long Pond Greenbelt system was up for grabs. Southampton Town, the Nature Conservancy, Group for the South Fork, the Southampton Trails Preservation Society, and many individuals worked tirelessly to see that most of it fell into public and not-for-profit hands, and it largely has.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].