Alley Pond Park Wetland Nature Preserve: July 2010

This wetland preserve is my passion. I want nothing more (and also nothing less) that to make this into a world class nature preserve on the eastern edge of New York City. This is a very personal idea but it is not something that can be accomplished alone. Building a constituency of talented folks, who work together on a share vision, is one of the “essentials’.

This week I had the chance to share ideas about the preserve with two friends and teaching colleagues. I’ve known and worked with Frank Cantelmo for 30 years and with Paula Lazrus for only a few years. Frank is an aquatic ecologist by training and a brilliant teacher of evolutionary biology and ecological thinking. Paula is a superbly creative teacher and trained archaeologist who teaches both history and science from the perspective of human induced changes to the natural landscapes. Spending the day with them, in the preserve, deciding what we can do with our different student groups makes for one of those 'unforgettable' days. We have a great deal of overlap within our student groups whether it is ES major students or beginning freshman science students. How can we work together and with our different levels of students?

We decided to run one major orientation tour and field walk with our classes early in the fall semester. I’ll focus on the preserves overall geography and its watershed character; Frank will do its ecosystems and its wonderful aquatic and estuarine nature and Paula will provide them with the human and landscape perspectives. How’s that for being interdisciplinary! When that is all said and done and the students have seen the ‘whole’ we’ll then allow them to select from a variety of structured and unstructured investigative trips and activities that we will design for them. It will be their option to join in but I’d bet that it will be the highlight of their term.

I have to add that this particular day (7-22-2010) was really hot; it also was exceedingly humid and the mosquitoes absolutely loved it; and because it is July some of the overgrowth was almost impassable. None of us escaped unscathed. So you might think that it wasn’t all that great a day. Well it was a tough day. But sharing something special with friends and colleagues tips the balance. It turned out to be one of those really great, ‘unforgettable’ days.

As we approach the 4th of July week-end I have a few moments to get back to something I started a couple of weeks ago - describing the ‘parts’ of the preserve which, when added together, form the most beautiful whole; in mid-June I wrote about the main stem -Alley Creek- and now what I’d like to write about is the ‘kidneys’ of the land - the valuable wetlands which line the creek; the metaphor of 'marshes as kidneys' is well placed because they have a remarkable capacity to clean water and reduce waste loading by biological processes; there are many different types of wetlands in the world and we have several different types in this small valley. I’ll talk about the freshwater systems at other points but since I began with Alley Creek last month I’ll talk just briefly about our ‘salt marshes”.

Probably more correctly termed ‘tidal marshes’ these landscapes border Alley Creek either as a ‘narrow ribbon’ or as a broader ‘expanse (from1 to 10+ acres); they have the most remarkable origin, geology, history and ecology of any of our local ecosystems. How, in a brief post, can I convey the importance and character of these living landscapes??? Well I think a couple of well-chosen pictures will help immensely so I will be sure to include those at the end but I’d also like to mention some other sources of information that I value deeply;

first there is this brief quotation:

“Along the eastern coast of North America, from the north where the ice packs grate upon the shore to the tropical mangrove swamps tenaciously holding the land together with a tangle of roots, lies a green ribbon of soft, salty, wet, low-lying land, the salt marshes.”

So begins the finest description of our tidal marshes ever written -the truly famous book by John and Mildred Teal “Life and Death of the Salt Marsh”. This is a somewhat older book (out of print but still widely available in used book stores and libraries). I find that young people, new to this field, are oftentimes unfamiliar with this great work. That is a shame because there is so much to learn here! There is no better exposition of the role of the salt marshes than this short text. If you have not read it (or have not read it recently) it would be an enlightening look into a wondrous world.

The genius of the book is that it is so simple that when you read it you think about the marshes you know best. Read it in Maine and you think of the pocket marshes between the headlands, read it in Maryland or Virginia and you see the great expanse of the Chesapeake, read it in south Queens or Brooklyn and you visualize Jamaica Bay. When I read it, I can’t help but see Long Island Sound, the upper East River and the Alley Wetland Preserve. Besides being beautiful it is also important. This book did more to change the opinion of wetlands and wetland destruction than any other single factor. The New York State Tidal Wetlands Act was passed by the legislature two years after the publication of this most influential book.

A much more recent source of educational information about the marshes of the Alley is our own organization’s publication History and Ecology of Little Neck Bay (62 p) by Aline Euler and Dyan Freiberg, two of our most talented staff educators; they have compiled all the information we have about how the bay and its component ecosystems and written it in a way for teachers and students to understand; I value my copy very highly because it contains the old photos, maps, ecosystem descriptions and organism ‘biographies’ that come together in this valley. It is not an on-line publication but we do have remaining copies for sale at the center and I can guarantee that any teacher or student of this area would be thrilled to own this remarkable collection of ideas.

What about the marshes themselves?

How can one understand their life and function?

Well, there is no better on-line source about the marshes of this area than the on-line publication Tidal Marshes of Long Island Sound. If you are a teacher or budding naturalist interested in marshes and estuaries then you must check out this publication. I use it regularly with all of my students and the accessibility of the text and the quality of the diagrams make this a 'must have' for anyone who wants to really understand this system.

Finally, what can one say about our past, present and future marshes?

Today the marshes are actually growing back (YES!) after many years of losses. Some of the regrowth is natural; some has been designed and implemented as ‘mitigation’ projects required as payment for loss of marshes elsewhere; This re-growth of marsh surface is significant and in some ways bodes well for the future.

The area of the entire wetland preserve today is listed by the NYC Parks Dept. NRG as 131.92 acres. However, before being dissected by three major roadways and the LIRR, it was part of a much more continuous, open and extensive ‘wetland complex’ that can only be estimated from old maps and photos; The famous Alley salt meadows stretched to the edges of Little Neck Bay to the north filling this broad glacial valley from one valley wall to the other. It must have been a remarkable sight. Estimates from old maps easily place the extent of former marshes and tidal flats somewhere between 250 and 300 acres (my best guess and I have done this calculation several times from several maps is 272 acres).

In 1988 NRG did an Entitation (plant community) survey (from scaled aerial photos which I still have those photos) of the entire valley and reported that all ‘intertidal’ environments -(tidal flats, Alley Creek, and all the bordering high and low salt marshes) - tallied 38.45 acres(!) Simple math tells us that only between 12 and 15 % (depending on what you would like to use as your starting number) of the original area of tidal wetlands remain (!)

We can not afford to lose another inch to thoughtless, heartless, development.