Tidelands

(This column was published in the October 23, 1995 Buffalo News.)

   The tidelands of our eastern seashore between Long Island and Georgia are a 
world apart.

   Driving across New Jersey between open pastures quite similar to those of 
Western New York, we briefly pass through an impenetrable appearing belt of 
pine and oak forest and suddenly emerge to find ourselves looking out over 
miles of salt marsh. These are the tidelands.

   Everything is different here.

   The sights: A broad vista of cordgrass replaces our marsh cattail. Water 
channels and mud flats streak browns and blues across the chartreuse meadows. 
White egrets pose silently or flap lazily overhead.

   The sounds: Instead of the strident roar of Niagara River speedboats, we 
hear the soft sound of distant motors: the unhurried popping of two-cycle 
engines on flat-bottomed fishing dories or the still deeper chugging of larger 
tug-shaped craft making their way out to sea. Nighttime brings the hyena 
cackles of clapper rails.

   But most of all the smells: The pungent salt smell borne in by sea breezes 
is most noticeable, but with it we sense less pleasing odors. Decaying plants 
and fish, a mix of nitrogen and ammonia compounds, what cooks recognize as 
that of meat that has "gone off." And sulfur -- that same hydrogen sulfide of 
chem lab -- here the foul breath of oxygen-lacking bacteria living in the deep 
ooze. Partly ameliorating these dismal emanations is the fresh smell of marsh 
plants, of chlorophyll doing its work. It takes us outsiders some time to get 
used to this rich brew.

   It is difficult to realize that these calm prairies of spartina, these 
placidly curling channels and creeks and the tranquil ocean front dunes beyond 
them represent a harsh and unforgiving region. At this season apocalyptic 
hurricanes bring devastation to the dunes and marshes and destroy beach front 
properties, and there are less dramatic yet equally insistent forces at work. 
Constant daytime onshore, nighttime offshore winds grind everything with salt 
and sand. Twice daily tides flood the marshes. Plants and animals here must 
acclimate to lives half soaking in cool brine, half baking in the hot sun.

   Despite these constraints, the tidelands are rich with life. Salt marshes 
and estuaries sustain twice as much organic matter per acre as the most 
fertile agricultural soil. For example, just one of these acres can support a 
million fiddler crabs.

   At the margin between the dunes and the marshes we watch hundreds of these 
half-inch crabs scuttle sidewise across the sand. They seem to be everywhere. 
If all of these tiny arthropods grew to full size we would be inundated with 
them. But we needn't worry. The roster of their enemies is endless. Thousands 
of shorebirds -- sandpipers and plovers, turnstones and dunlin, dowitchers and 
yellowlegs -- swarm over the mud flats and beaches, their bills ever probing 
the mire. Herons and rails stalk the channel edges. Gulls patrol the shore. 
Other adversaries include larger crustaceans, fish and fishermen.

   We watch one gull hunting between beach front waves. Each time the water 
retreats it cocks its head and peers about, then dashes to a bubble in the 
sand to peck out and gobble the still wriggling crab.

   There is other plant life here too. In many areas intrusive phragmites has 
overwhelmed the cordgrass and in sandy spots we find among more familiar 
goldenrods and pokeweed lovely sea myrtles, sagebrush relatives with cottony 
white blossoms. Signs of the South are a few sharp-leaved yuccas and prickly 
pear cacti. And at inshore marsh edges bayberries abound. Every chance I get I 
break off a twig to smell its lovely after-shave fragrance.

   Each time I visit the tidelands I find myself more spellbound by this 
remarkable ecological region, so unlike our own.