It’s as if I’d caught the woods in the midst of undressing, the treetops already bare, empty branches raised to the sky, while lower down the leaves still flame in their fall colors: scarlet for oak, gold for hickory. The loblolly pines, in their sober evergreen, seem unimpressed.
Here, at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, the pines are the reluctant stars in a slow-moving drama. As the land slopes down towards the water, I leave the hardwood trees behind, and the pines assert their full glory. For me, as a birder, walking through a pinewood is a challenge, the desire to constantly look up into the canopy in search of birds vying with the need to look down for the roots that trip the unwary. At last I hear, then see, a small mixed flock: chickadees, golden-crowned kinglets, brown-headed nuthatches, tiny birds in constant motion from pinecone to pinecone, tree to tree. The nuthatches, like the loblolly pines, are at the northern edge of their range – for now.
The glory of the pines is in their structure: tall straight trunks that erupt at the top into a mass of horizontal branches: a perfect platform for a bald eagle nest. In breeding season, Blackwater is home to the greatest concentration of bald eagles on the Atlantic Coast. It’s what this Refuge is known for, although it was created to support migratory waterfowl along the Atlantic Flyway.
I love to visit Blackwater as fall transitions into winter, after the cold fronts have swept down from Canada across the Great Lakes and Midwest, driving hundreds of thousands of geese and ducks before them. The winged travelers descend on places like Blackwater like teenagers on an illicit party. They preen and strut, gorge on food, erupt in squabbles, and make a ruckus until well after dark. Today’s trip – done in response to a possible government shutdown at the end of the week - is too early for the full spectacle.
The attention that I would have given to the great flocks of geese goes instead to the landscape, to witnessing forests becoming marsh and marsh becoming open water. Standing at the edge of the marsh, I’m surrounded by the ghosts of pine trees. Reduced to broken snags, their bark peeling, their white skeletons revealed, these trees have succumbed to the saltwater that creeps ever inland. For this is a place where climate change past and climate change present meet. The land is slowly sinking as it recovers from the Ice Age, while the sea is slowly rising due to global warming.
As the saltwater creeps ever higher and further inland, it’s as if the land is dissolving. At the landward edge the big tracts of forests still stand, but as I walk downstream those tracts fragment, become smaller blocks surrounded by tidal creeks. As the creeks widen and become marsh, the pine forests become pine islands, close enough together at first that I can picture how they once were connected. Looking from the shoreline out to deeper water, I can see how the islands shrink and separate until, in the distance, only isolated snags remain to haunt the marsh.
While marsh replaces forest, the marshes are vanishing too, over 5,000 acres lost since the 1930s, drowned by the rising sea. With the marsh goes a whole food chain that is critical for the geese, the bald eagles and a whole host of other species.
But there’s hope. A partnership between the Fish and Wildlife Service, The Conservation Fund, and National Audubon Society has worked to improve the health of priority areas of surviving saltmarsh. Land levels have been raised using sediment dredged from the Blackwater River, and the new land surface planted with hundreds of thousands of plugs of marsh grasses.
And, in a recognition that Nature can create saltmarshes better and more cheaply than we can, Refuge managers are now working with private landowners to buy land in places that are especially vulnerable to rising water levels. In the coming decades, these farm fields and woods will slowly transform to marsh, ensuring that this vital habitat continues to exist.
In the Visitor Center at Blackwater, there is a quote from Mollie Beattie, the first woman to lead the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: “What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself”.
What will we choose to save?
Ghost pines at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Photo: Eileen McLellan