Our Wet Lands

 When you come to our house you can see an old black and white photograph of the island that was taken from an airplane after World War II.  In the photograph the entire island from the village to the south end is solid sand with not a living thing from the ocean to the sound.  It looks dry as a chip.  This was before the National Seashore was established and Park Service began the process of restoring the natural dune system that had been destroyed in years past by abusive ecological treatment (the early English explorers cut all the live oak trees for shipbuilding back at home).

Now, after nearly seventy years of Park management, our wetlands are back and the ecology is more healthy than for the past three hundred years.  When Jon and Kahran were here we went riding out through that former dry land to show them where the baby shrimp and crabs come from.

Since we do not have leaves than change color here, our autumn color changes affect our grasses and wetland vegetation.  If we were here in springtime, we would see new green grasses emerging and upon a closer look might find tiny baby shrimp and little crabs swimming in these waters.

The wetlands are the life nursery for all of our seafood and we are glad that things here got turned around when we became a National Seashore.  Now we don’t know what will happen with global warming as the sea level is very obviously rising.