Nature Notes: Sea Creates, Takes Away
A few weeks ago I was in the hamlet of North Sea with two California friends from my yippie days in Santa Barbara. We stopped at Conscience Point, where the first settlers to settle Southampton, from Lynn, Mass., came ashore in 1640. We then went on to Scallop Pond, which is a longstanding tidal pond receiving saltwater from Great Peonic Bay twice daily by way of the two Sebonac inlets and West Neck Creek farther to the west and southwest.
Scallop Pond is one of those coastal ponds of which Southampton has so many and is one that almost never closes like those that dot the town’s ocean shoreline. For many years there was a dairy farm on the pond’s northwest side that was owned and operated by the owner of Standard Oil of New Jersey.
Now that property is owned by the individual who owns Robins Island to the north and is kept in its natural state like Robins Island.
By the looks of it on Google Maps and when standing next to it, the salt marsh on the south side of Scallop Pond, which stretches all the way to Bullhead Bay to the southwest, is in fine shape and as big or bigger than any other tidal marsh on the South Fork including the one bordering Napeague in Amagansett.
California’s coast has a different geological origin and is not well known for its tidal marshes, called “sloughs,” the way Long Island and the rest of the East Coast is. My friends were in awe at its expanse, interrupted here and there by a few small treed hummocks, remnants of the land that covered the area for a long time after the glacier retreated when sea level was much, much lower than it is today. Beyond the marsh one could see the oak, hickory, and beech forest that makes up the Wolf Swamp Preserve, which, like most of the marshland, is owned and managed by the Nature Conservancy.
There were at least three osprey nests on poles scattered across the marsh, not all of which were active this summer. Two ospreys were sitting on one, a few great white egrets where working the marsh close by. Like all of Long Island’s salt marshes, the Scallop Pond one is ditched in a reticulate fashion to control the breeding of the salt marsh mosquito, an invention of the 1930s. Notwithstanding the extensive ditching, with time slowly filling in, something was lacking that is so noticeable in the other ditched marshes on the South Fork and elsewhere on Long Island. There was hardly a stem of the Eurasian reed Phragmites australis poking its head up on the horizon. The only phragmites we saw was a narrow ragged interrupted band along the dirt road leading in to Scallop Pond as we entered.
The marsh aroused unhappy memories in my buddy from U.C. Santa Barbara college days. He grew up on the east side of San Francisco Bay, whose shore in his childhood and up into the 1960s was used as a dumping ground for municipal waste from the East Bay area. I was reminded of my time in San Francisco in the late 1950s and 1960s when the west side of the bay was also a dumping grounds for city garbage. That deposition has long been stopped and the marsh is growing back in patchwork fashion. Ironically, one of the new marsh species taking over is not phragmites, but saltwater cordgrass, Spartina alternifolia, a longstanding native in our marshes, but, ironically, an unwanted invasive in the Bay Area.
Long Island salt marshes were also badly mistreated, not by garbage dumping, but by ditching and filling with dredge materials right up into the 1970s. Fortunately, such misfortune never befell the Scallop Pond and West Neck Creek salt marshes, as it did the ones in Three Mile Harbor, Accabonac Harbor, and Shinnecock Bay.
Phragmites, sometimes called ditch reed after the way it intrudes along the edges of vector control ditches, is rampant in the marshes along the edges of those water bodies. Fortunately, the large volume of sandy materials from the numerous dredgings of the Napeague Harbor inlets over the years were deposited on Hicks Island and close-lying beaches, not on the marsh itself. Thus, Napeague Harbor salt marshes have relatively little ditch reed growing in them.
Long Island’s salt marshes were considered wastelands right up unto the 1960s. Then a man from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Tony Taormina, got busy and championed not only Long Island’s salt marshes, but also its freshwater ones, and with others wrote state legislation protecting them on Long Island and throughout New York. Vigorous enforcement of the state’s rules and regulations protecting marshes by the likes of Charles Hamilton and others situated at the regional office in Stony Brook quickly put an end to marsh degradation. Today, save for the earlier ditching and invasive phragmites resulting from it, Long Island’s salt marshes have recovered.
They would survive well into the future, but another challenge lies ahead. Rising sea level, which created them early on, now threatens to take them away. A casual observation of the Scallop Pond marshes forebodes just such a happening. The moon tides coming in from the Great Peconic can reach all the way to the dirt road on occasion. Storm-driven tides flood over it. Such evolution is good for inhibiting the growth of phragmites, but ultimately leads to the marshes’ drowning. Some of the marshy islands in Jamaica Bay in New York City have already gone under and attempts to revive them have been only partially successful to date. The Great South Bay bordering the Atlantic Ocean is full of such marshy islands, many of which are beginning to suffer the same fate.
Thus, our outing to the Scallop Pond marshes was both reassuring and nettling. The planet is warming up, glaciers are melting at a faster rate than ever, the seas are rising. Will the our salt marshes be spared? That is the question.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].