Marshes: The Disappearing Edens 9780300145021

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Marshes

Marshes The Disappearing Edens William Burt

Yale University Press New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. Copyright © 2007 by William Burt. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Sonia L. Shannon. Set in Bulmer type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in Italy by Eurographica SPA. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burt, William, 1948– Marshes : the disappearing Edens / William Burt. p. cm. Includes bibliograhical references and index. isbn: 978-0-300-12229-9 (clothbound : alk. paper) 1. Marshes. 2. Marshes—North America. I. Title. qh87.3.b87 2007 578.768097—dc22 2006026961 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Frontispiece: Least Bittern (pl. 8) Cover: Spartina Tufts (pl. 1)

to Carol, in loving memory

We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and the booming of the snipe . . . Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Contents List of Color Plates ix Preface xi Introduction 1 1. Connecticut Home Marsh 17 2. To Maryland and a Big-league Meadow 41 3. Manitoba Sedges 61 4. South and Along Coasts 79 5. West and Water 101 6. Mountain West and Water 117 7. Saskatchewan Plains, Sloughs, and a Certain Eden 133 Afterword 163 About Photography 165 Bibliography 169 Acknowledgments 173 Index 175

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Color Plates 1. Spartina Tufts

16. Swamp Rosemallows

2. Slender Blue Flags

17. Marsh Marigolds

3. Coast Milkweed and Sagittaria

18. Silverweed

4. Calopogons

19. Perennial Salt-marsh Asters

5. Large Blue Flags

20. Virginia Rail on Nest

6. Clapper Rail on Nest

21. King Rail on Nest

7. King Rail

22. Nest and Eggs, King Rail

8. Least Bittern

23. Sharp-tailed Sparrow

9. King Rail, in Motion

24. Least Bittern, Peeking Out

10. Least Bittern, Peering

25. Least Bittern, Wings Out

11. Least Bittern, Peeking

26. Least Bittern and Cattail Blades

12. Least Bitterns

27. Dawn

13. Red Maple at Marsh Edge

28. Three-square and Spikegrass

14. Sweetflags

29. Nest and Eggs, Laughing Gull

15. Sweetgale and Sedges

30. Salt-marsh Fleabane and Spartina ix

x Color Plates

31. Spartina patens

61. Salt Marsh in Fog

32. Moon and Pines, Marsh Edge

62. Roseate Spoonbill

33. Black Rail in Spartina

63. Purple Gallinule

34. Black Rail

64. Laughing Gull

35. Black Rail, Wings Up

65. Common Moorhen

36. Sea Pinks

66. Alligator, Loafing

37. Spikegrass and Spartina, Early Light

67. Creeks and Salt Marsh, from Air

38. Marsh Ferns and Spartina

68. Algal Mat

39. Black Rail, Emerging

69. Sod Bank, Marsh Edge

40. Black Rail at Nest

70. Evening, Tidal Creek

41. Nest and Eggs, Black Tern

71. Sweetbay and High-tide Bush, Marsh Edge

42. Sensitive Ferns

72. Rushes

43. Watershields

73. Evening Sky

44. American Bitterns

74. Sedge Meadow and Stream

45. American Bittern at Nest

75. Snow and Sedges

46. Yellow Rail, Peeking

76. Yellow Pond Lilies

47. LeConte’s Sparrow

77. Evening Marsh and Clouds

48. Yellow Rail

78. Bulrushes, Evening

49. Sora

79. Spikerushes

50. Fireflies and Lightning

80. Reeds and Water, Sundown

51. Sedge Wren Singing

81. Sedges and Pools

52. Fireflies over Marsh

82. Pied-billed Grebe

53. Lily Pads and Bladderworts

83. Young Franklin’s Gull

54. Prairie Marsh

84. Pied-billed Grebes

55. Live Oaks, Marsh Edge

85. White Pelican

56. Millet and Pool

86. Western Grebes

57. Evening Marsh and Pools

87. Eared Grebes

58. Salt Marsh Detail

88. Duckling Blue-winged Teal

59. Low Tide

89. Young Pied-billed Grebe

60. Salt Marsh and Pools

90. Muskrat

Preface I think of marshes as withholding, mysterious, exclusive, full of unseen goings-on. Who knows what lurks out there among the stems and shadows—what birds build nests, what flowers grow, what hidden beauty lies? I became enthralled first as a teenager, by peek-a-boo rails and bitterns on a cattail island in Connecticut; then later by other birds, in other marshes—and gradually, inevitably, by the beauty of the marsh itself. The thrall endured. For more than thirty years now I’ve been prowling marshes of all kinds, all over North America, day and night alike, with all kinds of ungainly camera gear; and what you see here, in these photographs and stories, is what I have to show and tell. Most of the photographs portray either the marsh scene—near or far—or the mystery birds within. They are selected solely for pictorial qualities, and as such they make no pretense to a balanced, let alone comprehensive, sampling of marsh subjects. This volume is an evocation and an exploration, not a catalog of marshland life, and so some plants and birds are generously represented whereas xi

others—indeed some entire phyla—are absent altogether, depending on my predilections and, not least of all, my photographic fortunes. Most of the scenes were photographed with large-format view cameras, which, while cumbersome, are always my first choice, because they enable such high reproduction quality. Most of the birds, on the other hand, were photographed with specially designed 35mm equipment, as described in the concluding section, ‘‘About Photography.’’ Some of these marsh birds, in particular the smaller rails, are among the most intriguing, most vexing, and most eagerly pursued of all bird species: nocturnal, little known, exceedingly elusive and almost impossible to see—and harder still, of course, to photograph. I hope that this portrayal of the marsh achieves two things. First, through the travel observations and the stories, I hope to provide a true and telling look at what the state of the marshlands is today, in twenty-first-century North America. To that end I tell just what I see, and where, however grim or glorious, and I tell what others saw, the early naturalists, in days gone by. Most of all, though, after all the searching and striving with a camera, I hope to bring the marsh to others, so they too can see some of the treasures out there— still out there—in these withholding Edens.

xii Preface

Introduction How could a person not be intrigued by marshes? I’ll never know. I’ve always been intrigued by them, first as a young boy lured by their hidden treasures, then later as a bigger boy—well, lured by other hidden treasures. It’s true, the marshes are invaluable resources, as the biologists remind us: they filter and clean water, contain floods, provide a nursery for fish and shellfish, waterfowl, and countless other kinds of wildlife, including nearly one-third of all threatened and endangered plants and animals. So yes, the marshes are invaluable: to us, never mind the creatures that actually live in them. But for me, the appeal has never had much to do with such utilitarian adult concerns. I’ve always been drawn to marshes because they are such mysterious concealing places with this lure of the forbidden and the out-of-bounds, like the prohibited frontier beyond a little boy’s backyard. And I’ve been drawn to them because they are so full of birds: they were the hidden treasures that first lured me, and after many years still do. No other acreage I know so artfully conceals so 1

many different birds—and strange, elusive, tantalizing birds, such as the prowling rails and bitterns, gallinules, furtive wrens and sparrows, dashing blackbirds, and a whole circus of aquatic kinds that honk and hoot and quack and splash and dabble, dive, and sink like submarines. But again, it’s not just the birds that pose the lure. It’s atmosphere; it’s that pervading secrecy, and hiding. You can hear the voices easily enough—the songs and choruses, the jibber-jabber and the blurts and cheeps and squawks—but you cannot see the characters, except by shady glimpses and chance meetings, and you can only wonder at what goes on among the chinks and shadows. Then there is the wildness and the beauty, as only marshes have. ‘‘In the marsh the wilderness makes its last stand,’’ wrote the old New England naturalist Edward Howe Forbush nearly a century ago, and the words ring ever true today. In much of our manhandled world the marshes are the last real pockets of frontier, the last uncharted Edens, and we need those Edens, even more today than Forbush did in his day. Beauty: yes, it’s everywhere in marshes. It’s in the unity of stems and blades, the randomness of tufts and tousles and the slickness of wet pads and leaves, and in the flow of distance, and the long reach to the sky. The landscape of the marsh is soft as prairie, its tones and colors gently graded, textures muted—features winsome to the eye, but never easy to convey with a lens and camera, and the two dimensions of a photograph. The expanse alone tends to read as monotone, and flat as carpet. You need some other, countervailing element in there: a top-heavy sky with bulging clouds, perhaps, or a decisive backstop of clumped trees, or hills, or looming mountains. Or you need lines: the outlines of bright pools, or winding creeks; or some kind of punctuation: scattered flowers, pools or potholes, tufts, what have you. You need something to lend tension, and dimension. Close up, though, a marsh can be an endless source of line and pattern, intricacy and pencil-sharp detail, and sometimes color, and the problem then can be one of too much opportunity and indecision! In any case, this fifty-plus photographer remains an indulgent boy when it 2 Introduction

comes to marshes. When I see a new one I can hardly wait to pull on boots and venture in and get the feel of it, see and hear what’s in there, and then maybe bring the camera in and try to snatch some of that aura and allure, frame up a slice of it and take it home and keep it. But alas, not everyone is so fond of marshes. To some they are noisome and unseemly places full of mud and slime and simple plants, and low life forms that croak and buzz and multiply, and gather in great numbers to annoy you. To some they are malignant, even dangerous: cauldrons of miasma and disease, decay, and perilous uncertain depths. And then to some they are mere obstacles to profit, idle wastes in need of costly reconfiguration before they can be tilled and planted, or surveyed for take-out joints and hair salons and office parks and airports. Alas, despite their acknowledged value our marshes have been ditched, drained, dumped in, and bulldozed over with such efficiency in recent decades that more than half of all original acreage has been lost—and the loss continues, at a rate of three hundred thousand acres per year. It’s happened everywhere in North America, in degrees ranging from decimation to complete annihilation. In some states—Ohio, Iowa, and California, to recognize the most industrious examples— more than 90 percent of all original wetlands have been erased, in deference to the seeming need for more marinas, shopping malls and racetracks, and every last possible arable acre for agriculture. And marshes face another peril now, as if any more were needed: invasive plants. In the Northeast, two scourges in particular are snuffing out vast tracts of our remaining marsh: purple loosestrife, the pretty femme fatale of inland fresh marshes; and Phragmites, the tall plumed reed now overtaking much of our last tidal river marshland. But so much for elegy and doom. Some wild marshes do remain, and they hold many riches, still, as I hope these photographs attest. Most marshes of these chapters are among my personal favorites, and the ones I keep returning to, time after time, drawn not only by their birds but by their atmosphere and beauty. They are not the biggest or the ‘‘best,’’ necessarily, or the most ‘‘productive’’—not in any measurable way, at least, for I have no marshaled Introduction 3

facts on their surpassing size, or plant diversity, or number of nesting birds per acre, say, or ducks produced per annum. But they are certainly among the biggest and the most productive, and they are, importantly, among the wildest. These are not the managed marshes of the refuges, but the neglected ones: the uncut gems, and the relics of real marsh wilderness, so far as we still have them. They are the inspirations for this book.

4 Introduction

plate 1. Spartina Tufts Old Lyme, Connecticut, August 1981

plate 2. Slender Blue Flags Lyme, Connecticut, June 1981

plate 3. Coast Milkweed and Sagittaria Iberia Parish, Louisiana, May 2001

plate 4. Calopogons East Haddam, Connecticut, June 1983

plate 5. Large Blue Flags Near Ellsworth, Maine, June 1982

plate 6. Clapper Rail on Nest Old Lyme, Connecticut, June 1974

plate 7. King Rail Old Lyme, Connecticut, June 1975

plate 8. Least Bittern Old Lyme, Connecticut, August 1994

plate 9. King Rail, in Motion Old Lyme, Connecticut, June 1975

plate 10. Least Bittern, Peering Polk County, Iowa, July 1993

plate 11. Least Bittern, Peeking Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge, Missouri, June 1993

plate 12. Least Bitterns Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge, Missouri, June 1993

one

Connecticut Home Marsh Uncharted wilderness, a vestige of the Wild Frontier: that’s what Grandfather’s kingdom-by-the-river was to a young boy of the tended Boston suburbs. There was no end of wildness to explore: streams, green tangles, hemlock groves and open beech woods, and sheer granite cliffs with promontories sloping down into the river. Along the banks you could find arrowheads and sunning black snakes, ospreys rowing overhead, and sometimes even big bald eagles. But it was another, less accessible frontier that really stirred my teenage curiosity, out in the channel, just a few hundred feet beyond the dock yet somehow distant as the Congo: Goose Island, a neglected nowhere land of mud and tide and waving blades of cattail. One July evening I rowed out across the channel, stepped off into the greasy mud along the bank and tied up the boat, and set out among the cattails to see what I could see. I made way to a little opening, where the mud was fissured with

17

clear rivulets; and here, as the dusk closed in I stood, enthralled. Strange slender forms stepped out from the shadows and probed the mud like chickens, without the least regard to my unlikely presence. They were rails, the first I’d ever seen: Virginia rails and sora rails. Marsh wrens skulked among the reeds, tails cocked, and scolded with a harsh chack-chack. A lone silhouette came gliding by, low, its neck scrunched up like a heron’s, but this bird was small, hardly bigger than a meadowlark—my first least bittern.

Strange slender forms stepped out from the shadows and probed the mud like chickens, without the least regard to my unlikely presence. They were rails, the first I’d ever seen: Virginia rails and sora rails. I was enchanted by this shady world, and other rowboat explorations followed, up the cove and down and up the winding creeks, through narrowing corridors and ever taller reeds until all orientation in the world around was lost. I’d found my own little Everglades, and it was my calling that summer to explore them and find their hidden birds.

Long ago, in the last years of the nineteenth century, the marshes of the lower Connecticut were widely known as a shooting ground for the very birds I’d seen in the July dusk: the rails. In those days rails still plied the marshes in great numbers, especially in fall, and especially in the wild rice marsh upriver, at Hadlyme; and in great numbers they were shot. Skiffs were poled over the marsh at flood tide, flushing the bewildered birds and affording easy targets, thanks to the feeble, spluttering, leg-dangling flight of these most cover-dependent of all birds. Often a hundred or more would fall, mostly soras, to a single gunner on a single tide. For some, this sportsman’s history remains the most notable Americana associated with Connecticut River marshes. 18 Connecticut

For me, quite another piece of history evoked the Connecticut past: the discovery in June, 1884, of the nest of a little-known bird called the black rail, downriver on a sprawling flat of salt meadow called Great Island. The man was Judge John N. Clark, of nearby Saybrook, and the nest was the third ever found. To this day, Great Island remains the northernmost nesting site ever known for the black rail on the East Coast. Did Clark’s black rails still haunt Great Island? Stirred by the thought, I set out to search his olden meadow, and while I never found his legendary rails, I did find a whole new waiting world that begged investigation: the world of the salt marsh, where fine salt-meadow cordgrass, Spartina patens, lay in lyric tidetossed mats and tufts. Pretty, pampering material, that fine fluffy cordgrass, a real pleasure to stray through; and aromatic, pervading the June air with its inimitable salty-sweet bouquet. But there were other grasses, and other fetching salt-marsh plants: black grass, Juncus gerardi, heavier and darker than the patens, splotching the meadow like cloud shadows; and dainty blue-green spikegrass, Distichlis spicata, where the meadow is lower and wetter, more accessible to tides; and, where the marsh is wetter still, staying the front line before the tides, the coarserbladed salt-marsh cordgrass, Spartina alterniflora, fringing the shorelines and even springing from raw mud. And the tall, scepterlike big cordgrass, Spartina cynosuroides, along creeks and channels; and various sedges (Scirpus), and rushes (Carex)—all were in vast supply. And there were flowers, late in summer: rosemallows, gerardias, goldenrods, fleabanes, salt-marsh asters of two kinds; and the ethereal sea lavenders, tingeing the meadow with a blue-grey mist. . . . I got to know them all, and I got to know the special salt-marsh birds, the king and clapper rails, seaside and sharptailed sparrows. And best of all I got to know the feel of the salt meadow, not just the catalog of names but the sensory detail, and the assuring luxury conveyed by all that life and open space and grass. I’ve since wandered in bigger, wilder, and far richer marshes, but none again were ever quite like these, at the mouth of the Connecticut, where it was all new. Connecticut 19

But so much for boyhood reminiscences. What of these river marshes now? How have they fared in the ensuing thirty years? Great Island, stronghold of that fluffy cordgrass? I take a drive down Smith’s Neck Road, past old stone walls and pasture grown to cedar, not yet subdivided, and I stop at the State Landing for a look. Something new, right at the water’s edge: an observation deck, with weatherproofed interpretive displays. Plaques, with notes on the exhibits: Fishes of the Tidal Marsh, Ducks—Family Anatidae (Over thirty species of ducks, geese, and swans breed, migrate, or winter in Connecticut . . .), and Terns—Sterna species. . . . Okay, okay, some information. I look out across the channel, and the sprawling island: all marshy meadow, still. Some added nesting boxes, new osprey nesting platforms, but all pretty much the same. I look upriver, and now—at once—something does look wrong. The meadow ends, abruptly, at a solid wall—a wall of reeds, tall and imposing, like the phalanx of a marching army. Still distant, subtle to the naked eye; but wrong. I drive a mile upriver for a closer look, and here the army is established, thick and fast, across the entire north end of the island, and all river marsh above it. Only some thin strips, along the inside shore, remain unoccupied. Another mile upriver, now I drive down Ferry Road, to the new state Department of Environmental Protection facilities: a veritable villa, with Marine Headquarters building, laboratory and garages, State Pier, and the bristling research vessel John Dempsey at its berth.

The dread invasive common reed, Phragmites australis, overtaking native cattail marsh on the Connecticut River estuary. 20 Connecticut

Impressive. Some facilities for the public, too: a pruned park, with picnic tables and pagoda; and a classy modern boardwalk, stretching south along the river to a high-perched observation deck. I follow the boards, taking in the ease, the solid reassuring spring, the marina-quality opulence; and I climb up to the deck . . . and here it is, the confluence of rivers—the Connecticut, the Lieutenant, the Duck— and all their arrayed marshes, sprawling southward to Great Island. Marshes, meeting place of land and sea: last bastion of frontier. Timeless, aboriginal, enduring. But are they? What do I really see? I see reeds, the giants of that marching wall I saw down at Great Island, except that here they are not a wall, but an entire landscape. Here, there is no other marsh. No, what I see here is not wilderness, nor marsh frontier, but marsh usurped: a place where real marsh used to be.

Phragmites australis, or just Phragmites, also known as common reed, is a ruthless rampant bully of a plant, a perennial that grows up to sixteen feet tall, in dense, bamboolike monoculture stands. In Connecticut, researchers have found it in peat samples dating back three thousand years, so the species is, confoundingly, a native plant, and a once rightful and respectful member of the wetland plant community. But in the past forty or fifty years, something has gone very wrong with Phragmites on the eastern seaboard. Since about 1970 it has behaved like an aggressive alien, spreading and overtaking wetlands like unchecked disease, snuffing out the rightful plants and ousting native birds, acre after acre. At the mouth of the Connecticut, scientists say, it has been spreading at the ghastly rate of more than 1 percent per year in the more saline, Spartina-dominated lower marshes, and more than 2 percent in fresher marsh upriver. It spreads both by seed dispersion and by extension of its rhizomes (underground stems) and stolons (aboveground stems)— and, like some creation from a 1950s horror movie, by regeneration from small cuttings, so that mowing and chopping the plant to bits may only speed the spreading. Phragmites moves inexorably, displacing all in its way, a true floral juggernaut. Connecticut 21

The explanation for this crazed behavior by a ‘‘native’’ plant? Scientists have long suspected that an alien strain, or subspecies, was introduced to North America from Europe or Asia, perhaps by means of choppings used as packing material, and that, like many another species introduced to foreign soil, it has simply run wild without check. This suspicion was confirmed, in 2000, when Yale graduate student Kristin Saltonstall showed that the Connecticut reed is, after all, of a genetically distinct Eur-

The other ignominious invasive, purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria), infesting inland freshwater marsh near Middlebury, Vermont.

asian subspecies. In New England, it seems, the native strain has been replaced almost completely by the alien, and the same fate now threatens all of North America. But does it matter? What do we really have to lose, should the metastasis continue? We lose the native marshland scene, of course: the landscape, the wildness, and the natural beauty. Take in the view next time you’re driving south of New York City on I-95, past Hackensack, if you want to see an all-Phragmites scene, the stalks and tassels stretching seamlessly for miles, transforming one of the Northeast’s most extensive freshwater wetlands into a monoculture waste. And we lose the native plants and birds: life forms, and whole communities of life forms, that can live nowhere else. The aromatic cordgrass of salt meadows? The cattails, rushes, sedges, rosemallows, salt-marsh asters, and sea lavenders? Phragmites overruns them all, entombs them, just as surely as macadam or concrete. The marsh-specific native birds are lost as well. It’s true that the odd resourceful marsh wren or least bittern will use Phragmites as a nesting cover, and hordes of blackbirds, tree swallows, and sometimes even bobolinks have found that it makes nifty roosting cover on migration. But the specialized marsh-dependent birds are

22 Connecticut

displaced completely. Seaside and sharp-tailed sparrows cannot do without their fine Spartina, nor Virginia and king rails their accustomed sedges, rushes, cattails. So they are condemned, with no place to go. Regarding fishes, and the hosts of invertebrate life forms at the bottom of the food chain, the case is not so clear: the few preliminary studies have found approximately equal numbers in both natural and Phragmites-dominated marshes. But even if these small-prey populations should maintain their numbers in Phragmites marshes, there remains the insuperable problem of their ‘‘unavailability.’’ Don Temple, manager of Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina, explained it to me one October day. Phragmites ‘‘locks them up,’’ he says, so these prey species can’t be reached by wildlife that would feed on them. And the plant itself has ‘‘practically zero food value,’’ he adds. Temple is not a man enamored of Phragmites. So what we have to lose, effectively, is the marsh itself. What then to do? Unlike filling in, or paving over, ruin by reed does at least hold out hope of reversibility. When it is removed—assiduously, thoroughly, repeatedly removed—the original marsh plants reappear. The original seedbed is still there, abeyant. But reed is not discouraged easily, or cheaply, according to George O’Shea at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge on the Eastern Shore of Delaware. Ever since 1978, when they saw their river marshes fast becoming wall-to-wall Phragmites, O’Shea and colleagues have been working hard to beat back the invader. ‘‘It’s a tough plant,’’ he says, with a sportive mix of admiration and disdain. Mow it, or hack it all away? It grows right back. All that does is remove the material that’s already dead, he explains, for the real animal is in the underground rhizomes, which grow up to 250 lateral feet per year, sending up shoots every four or five inches. Deracinate it, then, and chop it all up into bits, stalks and rhizomes alike? That would only stimulate it, O’Shea says; the bits themselves will take root and ‘‘regenerate like amoebae.’’ Burn it? Again, this only removes the aboveground biomass, and the plant will only come back with a vengeance, with the ash assisting Connecticut 23

as a fertilizer. And few fires are as ferocious as a Phragmites conflagration, he adds: it towers, roars like a freight train, and rages through the marsh like a prairie fire. You do not want to be downwind. One researcher even tried to suffocate Phragmites, O’Shea tells me; covered some plants with opaque plastic for two years, uncovered them, and—surprise— new shoots appeared. Tough plant, indeed. Only one means of attack has made real inroads at Prime Hook: a two-stage, two-year program of preseason burning followed by aerial spraying with ‘‘Rodeo,’’ a systemic herbicide labeled safe for use in wetlands (it allegedly breaks down completely on contact with either soil or water). After the dead stalks (culms) are burned off in early spring, usually in March, the spray is applied the following August or September, when the plant is tasseling and the chemicals will be absorbed and sent down to the rhizomes for storage. Then the next year biologists repeat the process, burning early and spraying later with a half-strength mix. The result, according to O’Shea, is ‘‘a ninety-nine percent kill.’’

One researcher even tried to suffocate Phragmites, O’Shea tells me; covered some plants with opaque plastic for two years, uncovered them, and— surprise—new shoots appeared. The cost, to rid one acre of Phragmites? Take $50 per acre per year for chemicals, add $25 per acre per year for helicopter time, double the total for the two applications, and you get about $150 per acre for the complete two-year treatment. And then of course there is no guarantee that seed will not find its way back again, on the wind, on the water, or on the feet of birds. . . .

I descended the Old Lyme observation deck one recent winter afternoon, reflecting, after a long look out over the Phragmites. So it’s come to this, my boyhood 24 Connecticut

marsh frontier. We may not have the marshes any more, but heaven knows we have facilities: upscale modern boardwalks, observation decks and benches and pagodas, interpretive displays; and all these are fine, of course, for lounging fishermen and fresh-air Sunday walks, polite hellos. But where would a boy go now to find some wildness, and some real marsh to explore? Two miles north of the Ferry Road facilities, along the river, lies Grandfather’s old rocky headland home, and my old marsh frontier, Goose Island. The place was sold some years ago, all but a few back-corner acres, which my dad kept for his retirement home. That place is gone now too, sold, and the house itself bulldozed away by the new owner, I’m told, to make way for a riverside Taj Mahal, with pool and pool house. It happens here, in this well-heeled river valley. As in so many places not yet touched by city sprawl but within easy reach, the aura is no longer one of wildness but desirability, and upscale real estate: of water views and private woodsy drives, and trophy houses perched on every opportune ridge and shore and promontory. Even more insidious, though, to me, is what occupies Goose Island, and the other marshes in the estuary: the invasive reed, Phragmites.

Something good has happened since I looked out from that observation deck, and I have the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection to thank for it. In the year 2000 a ‘‘phrag control’’ team, headed by Paul Capotosto, began a program of repeated cutting and herbicidal spraying, not unlike the Delaware plan except that it employs a three-year rather than a two-year regimen, and the spraying is done not by air but from the ground, by hand, a far more tedious means, Capotosto concedes—and about four times as costly—but Connecticut law proscribes all aerial spraying. The program is largely state-funded, with some help from conservation organizations. Thus far, Capotosto and team have cut and sprayed about seven hundred acres in the estuary, and they like what they are seeing: native plants burgeoning— Connecticut 25

cattails, bulrushes, fleabanes, rosemallows; birds reappearing. And the project will continue, Capotosto says, here and elsewhere in Connecticut. Within the decade, he feels, his team should have the entire estuary largely under control. He is optimistic. And committed. ‘‘We’re in it for the long haul,’’ he says. That is good news for the Connecticut River estuary, and it comes none too soon. How pitiable these Old Lyme marshes, now. They seem little more than pretty frills, fringing their river towns like furbelows, or doilies, and I say this not because I view them with more traveled or more jaundiced eyes, but because they are diminished Edens. Three-quarters of those cattails were already gone when Capotosto’s team began, and the rest would surely follow soon without this rescue operation; and it would not be long, I fear, before the last lone rail flapped off to seek home elsewhere. What if the phrag control were discontinued? What would the picture be in yet another thirty years? I can see pleasure boats and jet skis, well-kept lawns, tame swans and mallards begging bread. And reed, everywhere the silent reed. Where would a boy go then?

26 Connecticut

plate 13. Red Maple at Marsh Edge Lyme, Connecticut, October 1976

plate 14. Sweetflags Hadlyme, Connecticut, May 1978

plate 15. Sweetgale and Sedges Pittsburg, New Hampshire, September 1978

plate 16. Swamp Rosemallows Old Lyme, Connecticut, August 1981

plate 17. Marsh Marigolds Colebrook, New Hampshire, May 1979

plate 18. Silverweed Old Lyme, Connecticut, May 1981

plate 19. Perennial Salt-marsh Asters Old Lyme, Connecticut, September 1981

plate 20. Virginia Rail on Nest Old Lyme, Connecticut, June 1977

plate 21. King Rail on Nest Old Lyme, Connecticut, June 1975

plate 22. Nest and Eggs, King Rail Old Lyme, Connecticut, June 1975

plate 23. Sharp-tailed Sparrow Old Lyme, Connecticut, June 1974

plate 24. Least Bittern, Peeking Out Polk County, Iowa, July 1993

plate 25. Least Bittern, Wings Out Old Lyme, Connecticut, August 1994

plate 26. Least Bittern and Cattail Blades Old Lyme, Connecticut, August 1994

two

To Maryland and a Big-league Meadow Heading southward from Vienna, Maryland, you come into flat, wide-open farming country. You pass neat plats with bounding lines of trees, abandoned houses, collapsed sheds and fields lain fallow, logged-over lots with bone-bare standing snags, and vultures perched in stark still-lifes. Bleak, unfriendly country. You pass unfriendly signs, with rusted bullet holes: No Trespassing. Beware of Dog. No Hunting. You recall stories: locals confront visitors, at gunpoint. The country closes in with loblolly pines, dark and forbidding. Some marshy openings appear, and some drowned trees, bone-white and bleak; and more unfriendly signs, with bullet holes. Then at last you break out into friendly country, to the sight of creeks and pools and sprawling green: mile after mile of sprawling salt-marsh green. You’re in Dorchester County, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay, and you’re headed out across a marshland unlike any other on the eastern seaboard, the Elliott Island marsh. This is no snug, New England kind of marsh; this is a 41

big-league marsh, as wide and flat as prairie: thirty square miles of spikerush, spikegrass, and Spartina. You could roll out a dozen of those Connecticut River estuary marshes here, and have square miles to spare. Boots on, for a short get-acquainted sally: calf-length Wellingtons will do. You step out from the road and find it safe and solid, a surprise, and easy as an upland stroll. Wiry-fine salt-meadow cordgrass (Spartina patens) occupies this high, dry zone, and subtly lower, wetter zones, where it mingles with the dainty blue-green tines of spikegrass (Distichlis spicata). In zones wetter still the pleasant patens is replaced entirely by the taller, coarser kinds of plants, less pleasant to walk through: salt-marsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) in the more saline situations, and Olney’s three-square (Scirpus olneyii) in the fresher ones, and—least pleasant of them all—the well-named needlerush ( Juncus roemerianus), whose steely tips pierce pants and flesh alike with ease. Vast, impressive country; primitive and wild. Lone clumps of pines stand in the distance, hazy and distorted in the summer vapors. These are the plains of Africa, you might suppose; these pines might be acacias, and there might be giraffes. . . . Distant songs of meadowlarks come in, and laughing gulls drift past; a sharp-tailed sparrow jumps out from the grass ahead and speeds away, drops, and disappears. Willets call, and seaside sparrows sing from nearby wetter regions of alterniflora; but the meadowlarks and sharp-tails are about the only birds that build their nests, oddly, in this benign Spartina patens. Be careful, though: watch out for hidden sinkholes, grassed over and sometimes impossible to see. That pretty patens is not always so benign, as I have all too suddenly discovered. By day, yes, it is a vast, impressive country. And wistful, atmospheric, like the plains and prairies. But by night the marsh is much a different story. On the dark drive out you hear new voices from the car: the rousing calls of chuck-will’s-widows, the lazy honkings of green tree frogs—at their northern limit here, on the Delmarva Peninsula—and the yacking of a yellow-breasted chat, perhaps, in nearby thickets. The pine woods darken. In the headlights deer eyes glow, and a great horned 42 To Maryland

owl coasts past the car; then suddenly the world is bright and open, full of sky: moonlight jiggles on the water, hazes the grass, and silhouettes the distant pines. No wistful country this, not any more; this is a night world taut, charged full of possibility. Birds call, where by day there were none: marsh wrens, Virginia rails, and sometimes clapper rails, or croaking moorhens; and maybe a barn owl overhead, or a seaside sparrow, or swamp sparrow. And maybe yet another, subtler call comes in from far out on the meadow, low and unbirdlike, froggy, repeated with a metronomic regularity: the call of a bird no bigger than a sparrow, slate-grey and speckled on the back with white, and emblazoned with red eyes. A bird of rarity, and rare beauty, the black rail. Black rail, the legend of Judge Clark’s Great Island, and Connecticut past: it’s here. The Elliott Island ‘‘mystery bird.’’ Searching for that lost bird of the past, and hoping to get photographs, I once spent many days and many nights for three successive summers in that sometimes lovely, sometimes diabolical salt marsh. Diabolical, I say? A salt marsh can be diabolical, I learned, on a breezeless July day. The sun blazes, the marsh steams, and your sweat runs with the merest of exertions, stinging face and neck, and if that’s not sufficiently discouraging you always have the prickling of mosquitoes, most plentiful on just such soggy, sultry days. Not to mention the whizzing, pelting deerflies. And horseflies. And then those waiting sinkholes I already mentioned, all the better to snag you just when you’re preoccupied. You’re walking along blithely, or stoically, as the case may be, when all of a sudden fummmmp, your waist is at ground level and you’re wondering how it could have happened. It happens mostly after dark, though, when you’re wandering by flashlight and can only guess at the topography. But back to those bewitching birds, the red-eyed rails. At night you can actually glimpse one, sometimes, if you sneak up slowly when a male is calling; but you must attempt to do so only with the greatest care, to ensure that the bird does not get stepped on. The rule, when a bird stops calling and its exact location is unknown, is that you must stand stock-still: if you so much as shift your feet, it must be with utmost care. To Maryland 43

By day, it seems these phantom rails do not exist. They are there, of course, threading through the lower grass like mice; but so facile are these mouse-birds in their close and filamentous world that you could walk among them every day, hour after hour in their salt-meadow home, and never catch a glimpse of one. What did it take, then, to photograph them? It took three seasons’ searching, learning and unlearning and relearning; and the testing, retesting, and rebuilding of equipment, many times. And it took luck. But I’ve found other and less trying picture treasures in the marsh at Elliott. Sea pinks, for example: five-pointed, five-petaled starlike little beauties that suffuse the grasses in clouds, like milky ways. And crimson-eyed rosemallows, showy and commanding, with big white cups that loom like peering faces. And seaside goldenrod, salt-marsh fleabane, and both kinds of salt-marsh asters, annual and perennial. . . . By August, the salt marsh is in full bloom. But the night birds have gone silent, all except a few anachronistic marsh wrens, still rattling away, and their songs are all but lost in the overwhelming din of crickets. The nights belong to crickets now. In winter Elliott Island marsh is a refuge for the open country birds of prey, in particular the rough-legged hawk, which makes one of its southernmost major stations here. Bald eagles have increased in recent years, and are quite plentiful at Elliott, a few pairs even nesting now on some of the hummocks. I’ve never seen the marsh in midwinter but I stopped once in late October, and roused myself to get out there early, at the break of day. The spikegrass was dull with frost but still blue-green and new-looking against the brown bed of Spartina; then when the skimming sunlight touched it, all the frost ignited, and transformed at once into a billion scintillating pinpoint beads of dew. The meadow was still, silent, empty, almost melancholy, but as the sun rose a meadowlark began to sing, another meadowlark, a song sparrow, then a marsh wren, and for a while that sunny morning by the marsh the birds had resurrected springtime. A tentative, halfhearted springtime. Almost melancholy. A month later I stopped by again and spent a white, fogged-in November day. Again the marsh was silent, but a few short-eared owls were abroad, wafting in and 44 To Maryland

out of the fog and barking; and a single sedge wren scolded with his springy chip notes. The grasses all had faded to a pallid khaki now, with just a few last hints of gold, and yellow. There was no green left.

Vast, impressive country, primal and pristine. But will it stay that way? I asked Henry T. (‘‘Harry’’) Armistead, noted naturalist and bird man and a pilgrim who has walked the little road and watched this marsh for the better part of half a century. Does he see any lurking threats? Until recently, he says, a big and growing problem was the nutria—a beaverlike rodent from South America with a long, ratlike tail and a big appetite, introduced to the Eastern Shore in the 1940s by boosters of the local fur trade. Nutrias eat away the root mat of their adopted marshes and open them up, pock them with pools, dissect them with canals. The extent to which this truly injures the marsh is a matter of contention among biologists, but in recent years the animal became alarmingly abundant at nearby Blackwater Refuge, Armistead recalls; and it became quite common then at Elliott, too, especially in the fresher marsh at the north end. But it is a threat no longer. The animal has been exterminated in the past few years, almost completely, as a result of vigorous trapping at Blackwater Refuge. You don’t see or hear it any more at Elliott, Armistead says. But he sees other problems: sea-level rise, for instance, he thinks may be inducing sinking, or ‘‘subsidence’’ problems in some places. ‘‘To me, Elliott just seems wetter, and with sparser vegetation than it used to have,’’ he says. Armistead is concerned about repeated winter burning, a local custom common wherever there are big marshes, primarily because it makes access easier for trappers. Some biologists approve the practice, because it keeps the marsh open and accessible to feeding birds, and because it provides an instant ‘‘nutrient release,’’ which fertilizes new plant growth. But Armistead has seen it kill trees in the hummocks, including several used as bald eagle nesting sites. He’s concerned about the construction of diked impoundments, a practice To Maryland 45

irresistible to many wildlife bureaucrats and civil engineers, and one that may be therapeutic in the case of marshes on the arid western plains, say, where containment helps conserve what precious little water has not already been diverted for irrigation. But the practice is meddlesome and pointless, even counterproductive, when applied to pristine tidal coastal marshes such as this one. In fact one of these structures, a three-mile ring dike, was built at Elliott some years ago, with the help of Ducks Unlimited; and whenever Armistead has walked around this dike, he says, he has found ‘‘almost nothing, literally, inside of the dike, all the birds being on the outside.’’ He notes a similar situation at nearby Deal Island Wildlife Management Area, where another prime piece of tidal marshland has been diked. Birdlife burgeoned inside that dike for the first few years, he recalls, but since then it has rapidly and steadily declined. Armistead has one other concern for Elliott, and it’s a big one: Phragmites, the metastatic reed that has infested river marshes in Connecticut and elsewhere in the Northeast. It’s still a minor player here at Elliott, he says; but it has established some substantial beachheads, particularly at the northern end, where it is extending fingers from the roadside ditches out into the switchgrass, the cattails, and the Olney’s three-square, even out into the pure Spartina patens marsh itself, the very heart and essence of the marsh and home of the black rail. That scares me, more than the burning, the building of dikes, and even the effects of rising sea—more than all these put together, really—because I’ve seen what the Phragmites juggernaut can do. I’ve seen it spread and overtake whole marsh communities, whole landscapes, and transform a small but vital estuary system into a near-monoculture waste, not unlike the one at Hackensack, New Jersey, just south of New York City. Soon, I fear, without continued and relentless effort by the state control teams, the last of the wild Connecticut River cattail marshes would succumb. And that would be a tragedy, of course. But it would be a minor tragedy—a minor-league tragedy—compared to what could happen here, to a big-league marsh in Maryland. Here, at Elliott Island marsh, there is so very much more to lose. 46 To Maryland

plate 27. Dawn Elliott Island, Maryland, October 2000

plate 28. Three-square and Spikegrass Elliott Island, Maryland, November 1999

plate 29. Nest and Eggs, Laughing Gull Near Wachapreague, Virginia, May 1997

plate 30. Salt-marsh Fleabane and Spartina Elliott Island, Maryland, November 1999

plate 31. Spartina patens Elliott Island, Maryland, August 2001

plate 32. Moon and Pines, Marsh Edge Elliott Island, Maryland, September 1993

plate 33. Black Rail in Spartina Elliott Island, Maryland, June 1985

plate 34. Black Rail Elliott Island, Maryland, June 1985

plate 35. Black Rail, Wings Up Elliott Island, Maryland, June 1985

plate 36. Sea Pinks Elliott Island, Maryland, August 1992

plate 37. Spikegrass and Spartina, Early Light Elliott Island, Maryland, October 1999

plate 38. Marsh Ferns and Spartina Elliott Island, Maryland, September 2001

plate 39. Black Rail, Emerging Elliott Island, Maryland, July 1985

plate 40. Black Rail at Nest Elliott Island, Maryland, July 1985

three

Manitoba Sedges After zigzagging through the little town of Douglas, Manitoba, Route 340 beelines south across a marshy basin, which sprawls soft and green for a long ways to either side. To the west, this sea of sedge extends about two miles, then merges into solid grassland specked with cattle; and to the east it extends farther still, and not to any such pastoral destination but reaches ever more wild, more vague, and inaccessible. For five miles there is nothing but the waving sedges, huddled willow shrubs, and the odd slow stream or pool. Then meadow merges with the deeper, darker green of tamarack and sphagnum, and a mile-long lake appears, Sewell Lake, clear blue and pristine, ringed by meadows traced with trails of moose and elk. Then other lakes appear, with their thin bands of marsh: blue holes in the blanket of green tamarack. Here is the sort of wilderness a person dreams about, unsullied by the centuries and seen by few human eyes. 61

Yet it is a gentle wilderness compared to its big-league brother marsh in Maryland, with its steamy heat and whizzing horseflies and mosquitoes. I’ve spent many hours in this big Manitoba meadow, too, and I can tell you it’s about as Elysian as a place can be: cool, dry, zesty by day and relatively free of insects, and by night still and solemn, yet enchantingly alive. And it’s a shallow, easygoing marshland in most places, a little spongy and shaky sometimes but safe enough, I think, and generally a pleasure to wade through. But it’s under cover of dusk, or early dark, that Douglas really comes into its own. There’s no stroll I can think of, anywhere, like a stroll along that little road on a June evening, when the air is savory and cool and the meadow misty and withholding, the great volume of the sky enthralling, mesmerizing, like the dreamy waters of a pool you almost wish you could fall into. With darkness come the lights of fireflies, and stars, and the bright lines of meteors. One night, when I was out very late, a fireball meteor plowed through the sky, burning white and brilliant as magnesium, then cooling to metallic green, then purple, and then fading altogether but for a still-glowing vapor trail. The glow died out, progressively, from top to bottom, then suddenly lit up again along its length, and then died out for good. But it left a solid streak of cloud, a lasting and irrefutable scar. Some nights you might see artificial meteors and fireballs, a few miles to the south, over Shilo Armed Forces Base. But it’s what you cannot see that really twiddles your imagination: bitterns thunder-pumping, snipe winnowing, and soras piping back and forth in play from all parts of the meadow. From a roadside pool, close by, comes a big splash—not a plunging cannonball or boulder, as it might seem: it’s only an alarmist beaver. You hear the negligible music of Nelson’s sharp-tailed sparrow, barely audible, a sort of wheezy last-breath ringing gasp; and the simple buzz-songs of LeConte’s sparrows, repeated all night long with almost tiresome regularity. But even more persistent are the sedge wrens—pert, puckish little jobs hardly bigger than a kinglet—which pound out their hard-noted songs repeatedly, with the most determined and unflagging energy. Just how these tidbit birds keep going 62 Manitoba

as they do, all day and all night, for tens of minutes at a time, I do not know. They sing late into the season, too, well into August, even September, when the other meadow birds have long since fallen silent and the trilling crickets are their only company. That is some stamina, some tried and true machine. They cannot get enough of singing, it would seem.

But it’s what you cannot see that really twiddles your imagination: bitterns thunder-pumping, snipe winnowing, and soras piping back and forth in play from all parts of the meadow. Sedge wren: the bird is aptly named, and aptly common here at Douglas marsh. Except for some open boggy spots, and clumps of willow shrubs, there is nothing to the landscape here but fleshy, shiny-bladed sedges. In fact this boggy meadow would be properly called a fen, because it is ‘‘calcareous’’ wetland—set in a limy bed, that is; and a botanist would tell you that the plants reflect that geologic influence. I know another, smaller fen just like it, directly to the south, at Esmond, North Dakota. Farmer Leon Arnold first took me out there late one evening, and it too was full of chipping sedge wrens, and LeConte’s sparrows, and the telltale ticking notes of a bird I haven’t mentioned yet. This North Dakota fen is an almost perfect scaled-down replica of its big Douglas model. It too is full of sedges, wet beneath and spongy, but quite walkable; and it has the very same boggy pools, skimmed over with the meager greens of algaes, bladderworts, and quillworts. So intensely alkaline are these open areas, I suppose, that little else will grow. Oh yes, the author of those telltale ticking notes. Douglas marsh, like Elliott Island marsh in Maryland, half a continent away, has its own celebrated ‘‘mystery bird’’; and it too draws bird seekers from around the globe. Elliott has its black rail, Douglas its yellow rail. The yellow rail, like other rails, spends most of its life submerged, deep in the finery of vegetation. It is small, as rails go, about the size of a bluebird with the tail Manitoba 63

cut short; and it is an amazing piece of camouflage: a straw-colored bird in straw. But even more amazing is its motion: this is a bird that threads, flows, pours its way through the sedges, smooth and silent as a snake. You can actually watch it go, follow it with your light at night, ten feet away, and still fail to appreciate its motion. The bird just melts away. The call notes, too, are unlike those of any other rail, or any other bird, or indeed any other living thing, for they are nothing more than clicks—mechanical, typewriter-clicks in groups of twos and threes, inanimate as any sound you’ll ever hear. One damp night I stepped out from the car to find the whole marsh clattering with these yellow rails, in so mad a racket that it seemed electrostatic, like a gang of bug zappers on a busy night. Fifteen or twenty? Thirty? Forty? I could not even count the birds, so many and so frenzied were the calls. Most years, though, there are far fewer. If you want to walk out and try to see that strange typewriter-bird, ask Douglas resident Larry Ploughman. He knows the marsh well, and owns much of the best access to it. So this nocturnal yellow rail, like the black rail, is hard to see, and of course hard to photograph. And so of course I had to try. I spent whole nights out in the sedges, stepping carefully and sneaking up, with my photo apparatus, until at last I got what I was after. And again, just as in Maryland, the pictured bird itself proved less enchanting, ultimately, than the aura of the marsh itself: the spicy air, the cool, the meadow richness all around, the deep sky overhead; and the companion presences you cannot see, the voices. Whatever the voices holding forth out there, soras, sedge wrens, sparrows, or the ticking yellow rails, they can confound the senses. Eye and ear deny each other. What you see is utter stillness—darkness, stars, the silvered arcs of sedges—and what you hear, meanwhile, is all that busyness, and life. Those voices. But one thing about this Douglas marsh can be unsettling, even fearsome, when you’re out there by yourself at night. I heard about it more than once on my first visit, years ago. I heard about it at the local general store, when a genial red-haired fellow 64 Manitoba

told me about the cows he’d lost out on the meadow, to ‘‘quicksand.’’ And then I heard about it along the road one evening, when I was wading knee-deep in mud and water and a military man stopped his jeep abruptly and all but ordered me to get out. ‘‘Don’t you know there’s quicksand out there?’’ Quicksand. It recalls an experience I had some years before, after slogging through a marsh in Connecticut, at so-called Dead Man’s Swamp: not really a dangerous place, as the ominous name suggests—or so I thought. I’d floundered ashore after a strenuous exertion and was met by a man, a hunter, who wanted to talk about the ‘‘springs.’’ Look out for them, he warned; and with animated eyes he recalled the time he’d misstepped and suddenly found himself cold and in the dark, unable even with the tip of his rifle to find the surface. Obviously, he’d managed to bob back up again. In any anecdote involving muddy, miasmatic places like swamps and bogs and marshes you can expect hyperbole, and even an element of superstition. But how do you know when there might be some truth you ought to heed? I basically believe the hunter’s story about the ‘‘springs,’’ I think, though it might have been embellished just a little; but about the perils of Manitoba ‘‘quicksand,’’ I’m more skeptical. Cows, yes, not noted for their analytic minds (or their agility), could wander into open mire, and sink; but could a person, even if he tried? The notion that quicksand can suck you downward is certainly a silly one, useful though it is in television westerns, and literary works like The Hound of the Baskervilles, the Sherlock Holmes episode by Arthur Conan Doyle in which the ‘‘great Grimpen Mire,’’ that no-man’s-land of ‘‘green-scummed pits and foul quagmire,’’ evokes more evil than the villain. Springs? Quicksand? They are ideas that prey upon you easily when you’re wading through deep regions in a Manitoba marsh, at night. But at any other time I believe that anywhere, in any sort of marsh, wherever rank vegetation has taken hold, it’s safe to step upon it. And so far, for me, the tenet has proved safe. Marshes are not such vile places, really. Some can be nasty, some of the time— Manitoba 65

never really treacherous, perhaps, but surely nasty. Dead Man’s Swamp, for example, with its tall lacerating blades of bulrush, and a floating mat that gurgles as it sinks beneath you; and its reputed ‘‘springs.’’ But again, some marshes can be soothing, pampering, pleasant as the village green; and this Douglas, Manitoba, marsh is one of them. No place is more salutary to the senses—except, of course, on those dark nights when you’re out there wading in the sedges, waist-deep and alone, and the uncertainty of quicksand comes to mind. . . . But then what would a marsh be, what would any wild place be, without uncertainty?

66 Manitoba

plate 41. Nest and Eggs, Black Tern Douglas, Manitoba (Canada), June 1994

plate 42. Sensitive Ferns Near Pembroke, Maine, July 1995

plate 43. Watershields Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge, Maine, July 1995

plate 44. American Bitterns Stutsman County, North Dakota, June 1994

plate 45. American Bittern at Nest Stutsman County, North Dakota, June 1994

plate 46. Yellow Rail, Peeking Douglas, Manitoba (Canada), June 1987

plate 47. LeConte’s Sparrow Douglas, Manitoba (Canada), June 1994

plate 48. Yellow Rail Benson County, North Dakota, June 1991

plate 49. Sora Douglas, Manitoba (Canada), June 1987

plate 50. Fireflies and Lightning Douglas, Manitoba (Canada), June 1993

plate 51. Sedge Wren Singing Benson County, North Dakota, June 1992

plate 52. Fireflies over Marsh Benson County, North Dakota, June 1992

four

South and Along Coasts ‘‘The Atlantic salt marshes,’’ wrote the southern naturalist Brooke Meanley, ‘‘are the last frontier of the Eastern United States.’’ It’s true, and for the marshes on the Gulf as well. All other coastal lands have long been used and reused, shaped and reshaped by the hand of man, but not the coastal marshes, by and large; they are much the same today as they were when they first emerged, centuries and tens of centuries ago. And they are vast. The most extensive marshes anywhere in North America, by far, are the coastal marshes of the Gulf and south Atlantic states. Yet I’d seen little of that ‘‘last frontier.’’ So I planned a tour, a southern expedition. It was high time. I’d begin in Texas, head east along the Gulf to Florida, and continue north up the Atlantic seaboard to New Jersey, ultimately, just short of the megalopolitan Northeast. I stopped first at the noted Texas refuges—Annahuac, Brazoria, San Bar79

nard—but did not stay long. They were manhandled marshes, ditched and diked and neatly edged, like so many commercial fish farms. Of course there are important marshes in that state—at Aransas Refuge, for one, noted winter home of the endangered whooping crane—but I couldn’t get in close and see them. Not without a boat; not on this trip. So I shuffled over to Louisiana, where the real marsh and the real fun begins. I’ve read that the entire length of the Louisiana coast, for ten to fifty miles inland, is wetland of some kind; and that despite its notorious losses on the Mississippi delta—almost a million acres since 1950—the state still has about three million acres, or about 40 percent of all the coastal marsh in the contiguous United States. So, it would seem there is no doubt: no other state has anything like Louisiana’s acreage of coastal marsh.

. . . zany purple gallinules and moorhens, black-necked stilts and squadrons of pink spoonbills, carnivals of feeding herons, egrets, ibises. . . . The show is endless, phantasmagorical, a kaleidoscopic dreamland full of birds. Not all Louisiana marshes are enchanting, though. Not to my eye; not on the Mississippi Delta south of New Orleans, around Grand Isle, where I spent a hot spring Sunday afternoon. I tooled south through ticky-tacky tourist towns and depressed fishing towns, past flooded yards and floating litter, and then out across the bleakest salt-marsh no-man’s-land I’d ever seen, dingy and monotonous beneath a hot white sky. Even the few native birds were dull and dingy: mud-grey clapper rails, and mud-grey seaside sparrows. But if there’s a way to make nature’s bleakness even bleaker, be assured, man alone can find a way, and find a way he had, with makeshift dumps along the road—old bedding, ruptured easy chairs and sofas, metal desks and bloated bags of garbage; and manufactured islands of hydraulic fill, heaped on the tidal marsh itself and graded smooth. Two of these

80 South

new islands were already bearing enterprise: one a speculation condo town, one a power transmission station. No, to see the pretty marshes in Louisiana you go west, past Baton Rogue and over the Atchafalaya basin, past Lafayette, then southward at Lake Charles, to Cameron Parish. Here, at Creole, near the coast, you come into a very different marshy country: the freshwater prairie marsh, full of fleshy lancelike leaves of ‘‘bull tongue’’ (a kind of arrowhead, or Sagittaria), and the floating saucepan leaves of lotus; and birds, birds everywhere, birds in the air and in the water, on the shores and in the thick of vegetation: bizarre southern and deep-southern water-loving birds of all kinds and shapes and sizes, colors and configurations: zany purple gallinules and moorhens, black-necked stilts and squadrons of pink spoonbills, carnivals of feeding herons, egrets, ibises. . . . The show is endless, phantasmagorical, a kaleidoscopic dreamland full of birds. Terns dive, laughing gulls cry overhead, and boat-tailed grackles screech and flaunt their show-off tails, while alligators grump-grump-grump from hidden pools.

What would it take to rouse their sense of wonder? If not pink wading birds with paddle bills, and rainbow-iridescent hens with candy-yellow legs and toes— or pink-legged black-necked stilts with needle bills—if not these, then what? Yet despite this endless omnipresent zoo, this impromptu crazy show of wings and voices, shapes and colors and activity, most people go about their business blithely, without even noticing. The cars go hell-bent by, the fishermen and crabbers fish and crab, and drowse, and never even stop to look and wonder at this pageantry about them. What would it take to rouse their sense of wonder? If not pink wading birds with paddle bills, and rainbow-iridescent hens with candy-yellow legs and toes— or pink-legged black-necked stilts with needle bills—if not these, then what?

South 81

Elephants that glow blue and circle the night sky? A person wants to take these sleepers and shake them, wake them up and show them. None of us is awed enough by the wonders in our own backyard, of course; but this backyard? These wonders? Edward Abbey, please, the writer with the good big angry heart and the good words. He had just the words for those unstirred by earthly wonders: How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas. To see our world as a space traveler might see it, for the first time, through Venusian eyes or Martian antennae, how utterly rich and wild it would seem, how far beyond the power of the craziest, spaced-out, acid-headed imagination, even a god’s, even God’s, to conjure up from nothing. Yet some among us have the nerve, the insolence, the brass, the gall to whine about the limitations of our earthbound fate and yearn for some more perfect world beyond the sky. We are none of us good enough for the sweet earth we have, and yet we dream of heaven. Or we don’t even dream at all, and it’s not so much heaven that matters, or earthly wonders, but earthly pelf and power, influence and empire. Bah! Of course not all you see is pretty pristine wetland here in Cameron Parish. You see the print of industry: plank roads, laid willy-nilly through the marsh for access to the oil rigs, and fenced-off petrochemical facilities; and human poverty and squalor: hovels, trailers on cement blocks, yards full of junk appliances, junk cars. The real way to see these flooded prairie marshes, the way to get out into them, would be by boat. But I took the easy way, rolling through the national refuges on auto loop roads: through Cameron Prairie Refuge, bright with blue and yellow flowers—creeping primrose-willows, pickerelweeds, and blue flag irises—and 82 South

home to a shapely gooselike brown bird with a long periscopic neck, the fulvous whistling duck; and through Locassine Refuge, home of the king rail. I heard the calls, in several places. Then, on my way back to the car I watched in disbelief as two of these big marsh hens walked right out and strode across the open parking lot, as leisurely and casual as chickens in a barnyard.

And how much of it there was, miles and miles of pure Spartina patens, broken only by embayments, guts, and the occasional cut canal, or proprietary plank road (one posted sign: Keep Out. Texaco.). In the southwestern corner of the state, just east of purgatorial Port Arthur, Texas—an unearthly skyscape of refineries, sickly lights, tall stacks topped with gassy fires—I drove through Sabine Refuge and a country of continuous saltmeadow cordgrass, the old familiar tufts, rising and falling like picture-perfect waves at sea. And how much of it there was, miles and miles of pure Spartina patens, broken only by embayments, guts, and the occasional cut canal, or proprietary plank road (one posted sign: Keep Out. Texaco.). How nice to know it’s there, all that pristine grass with all its nooks and shadows and interstices and all that’s in there hidden, secret, whatever it might be.

In Florida, too, on the Gulf, I found some reassuring salt-marsh inventory, at Lower Suwanee National Wildlife Refuge, where a fine and pristine estuary system is retained. And in Georgia, on the pretty Sea Islands, inspirations for the celebrated poem by Sidney Lanier, The Marshes of Glynn. But I’m going to skip all that and scoot up north to the Virginia Eastern Shore, where I found not only some of the finest salt marsh I’d ever seen, but one of the finest of the world’s wild places. I spent a misty morning off the little town of Wachapreague, on a salt-marsh island. Laughing gulls swirled overhead and clamored, and sat on heaped-up South 83

nests, and for the morning I was one of those old naturalist-explorers of the past, an A. C. Bent out in the teeming sloughs of North Dakota, say, or a William L. Finley on the early marshes of the Klamath. Yes, I know, these were only laughing gulls, undiscriminating riffraff equally at home in coastal dumps or shopping malls, or fast-food parking lots; but out here on the wild free spaces of the marsh, where they go to nest, their numbers were exhilarating. And you’d never even guess that these black-hooded breeding-plumaged beauties, at home on their breeding marsh, could be the same garbage-picking sleazes that you see off-island. And let me say, my island-of-the-past illusion was not all illusion. These ocean marshes of Virginia come as close as any on the continent to what the naturalists of old once saw. Other birds, not just the schizophrenic gulls, live in these vast salt marshes. Clapper rails lurk in the tall alterniflora along tidal guts, and canopy their basketfuls of eggs against the pirate eyes of fish crows, and no doubt the gulls, and other cruising villains overhead. And with the dingy rails live dingy seaside sparrows, stuffing their small nests under the dead-grass wrack washed up by tides. Bolder birds, such as Forster’s terns and willets—sometimes even beach-loving oystercatchers and black skimmers—place nests directly on the wrack, in plain view. I saw many shorebirds that May day: about a hundred whimbrels traveling high together, calling, and groups of yellowlegs and dunlins, black-bellied plovers, knots, turnstones, and many of the smaller ‘‘peeps,’’ veering past in silver-flashing schools and settling on the flats and vanishing, like smoke. But all these were only transients, intent on other wetlands far away. Except for Elliott Island marsh, nearby in Maryland, this salt-marsh complex in Virginia is, to me, the finest wetland wilderness in eastern North America. But I found another salt-marsh beauty farther north, up in New Jersey. It is much smaller, and more proximal to man, of course—and it holds nothing like the teeming life of the Virginia marshes—but it is within its limits just as much a wilderness, and just as much an Eden. New Jersey, did I say? 84 South

Home of Atlantic City and casinos, toxic dumpings, gangland murders? And Elizabeth refineries, those sci-fi landscapes of steel pipes and tanks and stacks dispensing smokes into an already amber sky? And nearby Hackensack, once home to a real marsh, Hackensack Meadows, and now home to a stadium called the Meadowlands? And to pollution, landfill, and Phragmites? No, I hadn’t had the best impression of New Jersey. But then I discovered the marshes at Great Bay, near Tuckerton.

Five miles of open salt marsh—in New Jersey, just a two-hour drive from New York City and the Bronx. Five miles of open space, and grass, and looping lines of creeks, and pools. . . . I found no Phragmites, no toxic dumps, nor anything else unseemly there that late October afternoon, only mud and cordgrass, creeks and pools, and a horizonto-horizon sweep of golden grass as pretty as I’d ever seen. A little road runs out across, spanning creeks on one-lane bridges, passing two or three marinas, and continuing across unbroken marsh for several miles, dead-ending finally at Little Egg Inlet, on Great Bay. In all, the road traverses some five miles of open salt marsh. Five miles of open salt marsh—in New Jersey, just a two-hour drive from New York City and the Bronx. Five miles of open space, and grass, and looping lines of creeks, and pools . . . intriguing pools. Unusual. They cluster in close groups, curving, bulging and extruding into inkblot squiggles, and connecting playfully in Byzantine arrangements. Where else, this fancy show of pools and mazes? This doodling interplay of land and sea? I’d never seen a salt marsh like it.

I came back one damp November day to find the whole marsh shrouded in a fog, transmuted, a place of perfect stillness penetrated only by the outside call of some South 85

woebegone yellowlegs, or gull, or wayfaring flock of dunlins. In fog, more even than the dark of night, I think, a marsh is an enchanted place; and safe, insulated for the while against the noise and nonsense and unsightliness of worlds beyond. The insulation is but vapor-thin, of course, and transitory, but for a person there within, in his own safe private time and place, it is reality enough. I reveled in it, that November day.

In fog, more even than the dark of night, I think, a marsh is an enchanted place; and safe, insulated for the while against the noise and nonsense and unsightliness of worlds beyond. The insulation is but vapor-thin, of course, and transitory; but for a person there within, in his own safe private time and place, it is reality enough.

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plate 53. Lily Pads and Bladderworts St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, Florida, May 1997

plate 54. Prairie Marsh Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge, Louisiana, May 1998

plate 55. Live Oaks, Marsh Edge St. Simon Island, Georgia, May 2001

plate 56. Millet and Pool Brigantine National Wildlife Refuge, New Jersey, October 1999

plate 57. Evening Marsh and Pools Deal Island, Maryland, October 2000

plate 58. Salt Marsh Detail Great Bay, near Tuckerton, New Jersey, November 1999

plate 59. Low Tide Coosaw River, South Carolina, May 2000

plate 60. Salt Marsh and Pools Great Bay, near Tuckerton, New Jersey, May 2000

plate 61. Salt Marsh in Fog Great Bay, near Tuckerton, New Jersey, November 2000

plate 62. Roseate Spoonbill Everglades National Park, Florida, March 1986

plate 63. Purple Gallinule Everglades National Park, Florida, March 1986

plate 64. Laughing Gull Near Wachapreague, Virginia, May 1997

plate 65. Common Moorhen St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, Florida, May 1997

plate 66. Alligator, Loafing St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, Florida, May 1997

five

West and Water One One cozy Christmas morning when I was a boy I received a hulking book, called Birds of North America. It was a reissued work, originally published in 1917, and it was something of a hodgepodge, with a mix of classic color paintings by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, old photographs, and text accounts by long-departed naturalists such as T. Gilbert Pearson, Edward Howe Forbush, and the old nature sage himself, John Burroughs. The writings were not only quaint, but hopelessly outdated, as even a fourteenyear-old could see; and the old photographs of birds, all antique black-and-whites . . . well, they were evocative, at best, when not downright amusing. Some were photographs of subjects plainly shot and stuffed and wired in place, like prepared museum exhibits; some were of young birds recruited from the nest, and lined up

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on a handy branch; and some—the only photographs of subjects wild and free— were so awful as to be almost laughable. Most of these bird subjects were much too far away to begin with, and then so soft and woolly and so poorly lit that you could hardly recognize the species, let alone get any real feeling for the creature. Of course that’s how it was with most bird photography in those days, when lenses and plates were slow and cameras big and cumbersome as furniture. The efforts were tremendous, the rewards meager. Yet I sat for hours with that big book and those old black-and-whites, intrigued less by the photos of the birds than by the photographers themselves—in particular two sturdy young ones, pictured hauling their big cameras in far-western places: clawing up a sea-lashed cliff in Oregon, intent upon a colony of murres; standing in the waters of a shallow lake, with camera trained on pelicans; teetering in a spindly fir tree, with western tanagers; and dangling sixty feet above the ground in a big sycamore, with nesting golden eagles. But it was the places, more even than these giddy records of adventure, that intrigued me most in those old photos, in particular the lakes and marshes of the desert west: vast, remote, otherworldly, and full of strange birds. One of these pictured Edens was especially haunting: a reedy shore, with flurried, ghost-white Caspian terns, and the waters of a lake beyond with prehistoric cormorants, riding the waves like plesiosaurs. How tame, how devoid and dull the lawns and neighborhoods of my suburban East. I longed for those old places, and old days.

But who were these two young sturdies with big cameras who adventured in those western bird oases? And just where were the oases? For nearly a decade, from 1899 to 1908, William L. Finley and H. T. Bohlman were fast companions, working together and sharing a joint credit line for most of their photography. They were widely published in their day and widely celebrated, Finley in particular, and they were influential conservationists who called attention 102 West

not only to commercial slaughter of colonial nesting birds but to destruction of their nesting grounds. On their testimony a law would pass, long overdue, preventing massacre of herons for their plumes; and a president would set aside two of the country’s first refuges for nesting birds. The two men did much of their photography in two major lake basins, in northern California and southern Oregon, both known for their great colonies of birds: the Klamath and the Malheur. These were the pictured Edens of my boyhood book.

‘‘Here lay the land of my dreams,’’ wrote Finley. ‘‘After nearly twenty years of waiting, I was looking out over this place of mystery that lay far beyond the northern rim of my own home hills.’’ In May, 1905, Finley and Bohlman set out across the Cascades from Ashland, Oregon, and first looked out across the Klamath Basin, then a little-settled country strewn with shallow lakes and marshes—about 185,000 wetland acres, it is estimated now. ‘‘Here lay the land of my dreams,’’ wrote Finley. ‘‘After nearly twenty years of waiting, I was looking out over this place of mystery that lay far beyond the northern rim of my own home hills.’’ A ‘‘place of mystery,’’ yes; and a place of birds, as they would soon see. After two weeks exploring on the Klamath River they went overland to Merrill, Oregon, and boated down Lost River to Tule Lake, where they spent five days photographing birds. Then they hauled their boat to nearby Lower Klamath Lake, and rowed out among the mazes of ‘‘tules,’’ or bulrushes, which grew twelve feet tall and clumped together in a complex of innumerable floating islands; and here they found big colonies of nesting pelicans and double-crested cormorants, western grebes, California and ring-billed gulls, and Caspian terns. They spent two weeks here on the Lower Klamath, cruising and photographing by day and camping by night on the floating islands. The matted tules made an ideal bedding, they found, West 103

except that a body tended to sink slowly through them, and in time down to the water—an imperfection they discovered in the morning, when they woke. In all, Finley and Bohlman spent six weeks photographing on the Klamath lakes and marshes. But they fulfilled another mission, too, at the behest of the National Association of Audubon Societies: to obtain testimony on plume and market hunting in the region. Two years before, they learned, in 1903, plume hunters had sold $30,000 worth of slaughtered grebes; and in the fall of 1904, market hunters had sold 120 tons of ‘‘waterfowl.’’ Impressed by the bounty of the birds, Finley described these Klamath marshes as ‘‘the greatest wildfowl nursery in the U.S.’’ But even more impressive was the primal marsh itself. ‘‘The lure of the marsh was in its wildness,’’ he wrote. ‘‘I hope that the marsh will defy civilization to the end.’’ Was it defiant still, this onetime land of Finley’s dreams? Now, nearly one hundred years later?

In the spring of 1908, three years after their adventures in the Klamath, Finley and Bohlman set out for another little-known bird mecca of the West, Malheur Lake. One earlier naturalist had reported on the birdlife of the Malheur: Charles Bendire, an army captain stationed at nearby Fort Harney in the 1870s. Captain Bendire had no fondness for that desert region, calling it ‘‘fully as desolate, if not more so, than the worst part of Arizona.’’ But of the region’s lakes, and their abounding birds, he was more enthusiastic, if only in his matter-of-fact scientist’s sort of way. He noted their ‘‘immense hordes’’ of transient waterfowl in spring and fall, and great numbers of breeding ducks, coots, grebes, and other waterbirds, particularly at Malheur Lake. From a high perch above the Harney Valley, Finley and Bohlman got their first look at the marshes of the Malheur: ‘‘The wide wastes were silent in the summer sun,’’ Finley recalled, ‘‘—hazy, far away, mysterious.’’ They descended, made way to the marsh edge and launched their canvas boat, meandered out through a 104 West

maze of waterways and tules, and at once they began finding birds: soras, coots, and swimming ducks with broods in tow—mallards, pintails, redheads, gadwalls, cinnamon teal. In one opening they counted fifteen thousand Canada geese; in another, two thousand three hundred raft nests of eared grebes: ‘‘the greatest village of floating homes I have ever seen,’’ in Finley’s words. They also found the floating homes of western grebes, ‘‘by the hundreds and thousands.’’ They meandered for miles, reaching the edge of the open lake at last, to find the tules matted down by other colonies of birds: cormorants, white pelicans, California and ring-billed gulls, great blue and black-crowned night herons; and then still other colonies beyond, ‘‘gleaming white through the vast extent of green tules—acres, square miles of birds.’’ What they did not see, and would have seen had not a ruthless crew preceded them a decade earlier, was the gleaming white of thousands of American (great) egrets, then also nesting on the Malheur islands. Now, except for a single forlorn pair of white birds flying in the distance, the only evidence of egrets was a few of the old stick nests, with some bleached bones inside. Grebes, too, they learned, had been a major victim of the plume hunters. Finley and Bohlman spent weeks out in these Malheur marshes, too, camping and photographing. They got lost, more than once, and boated for days among the labyrinthine tule islands, unable to relocate their base camp; so they brought back not only photographs, but stories of adventure. And they came back with testimony, once again: to the wealth of birdlife, and the devastation wreaked by plume hunters. It was compelling testimony, evidently, for that very year, on August 18, 1908, President Roosevelt declared Malheur Lake a national bird refuge. Just ten days earlier, on August 8, the Lower Klamath marshes had become a refuge too—one of the nation’s first—by decree of the same sage presidential pen. So all would be well, then, with these two great wetland treasures of the West? The marsh would ‘‘defy civilization to the end’’? Sadly, no, and Mr. Finley must have known. In 1905, even as he first set out to West 105

see his long-awaited ‘‘land of dreams’’—the lakes and marshes of the Klamath— even then, the government was planning to undo them. The very next year, in 1906, work on the so-called Klamath Reclamation Project was begun, and within two decades, the digging and the damming largely done, most of his tule marsh was gone. At Malheur, too. Again there would be ‘‘reclamation’’—drainage, diversion, irrigation—and by the mid-1920s Malheur Lake would be near-desert. Today, of the Klamath lakes and marshes Finley and Bohlman saw, less than 25 percent can even be considered ‘‘wetlands,’’ even by the most inclusive bureaucratic definition of the word. Maybe even less, some say. At least three-quarters of those Klamath lakes and marshes are drained and dry and gone forever, poof.

What, though, of the remaining 25 percent? Are those marshes still as Finley and Bohlman found them, and still full of birds? Maybe so, and maybe they’re worth seeing. Maybe 25 percent is not so bad, as surviving wetland goes these days in the United States. In some states—seven, to be exact—Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Iowa, California, and Ohio—more than 80 percent of all original wetlands have been destroyed. In three states (California, Iowa, and Ohio), that figure is more than 90 percent; and in two, Iowa and California, losses have reached more than 95 percent. Iowa, by one authority, has lost 99 percent to agriculture. Ninetynine percent. But if you really want to get depressed about such things, consider this much-cited computation: for the past two centuries, Americans have destroyed sixty acres of wetlands every hour. So, maybe a loss of 75 percent is not so bad. In any case, the counts of birds are still impressive in the Klamath Basin, especially the waterfowl. Up to three million ducks, geese, and swans pass through in spring and fall, by U.S. Fish and Wildlife estimates, and that’s about three-quarters of all waterfowl still using the Pacific Flyway. Bald eagle counts are high, as well. 106 West

Their winter numbers are the largest recorded anywhere in the lower forty-eight: up to a thousand or more, some winters, at Lower Klamath and Tule Lake Refuges combined. Many other kinds of wetland birds convene to nest in spring and summer, too; and by the thousand. So it seems there is still much to recommend these Klamath lakes and marshes. There are good numbers.

So the numbers are impressive at both lakes. The birds. But what of the lakes, and marshes—the places of my boyhood book? What would a William L. Finley find if he went back today? It’s much the same at Malheur Refuge. Despite its wetland loss, and loss of birds to plume and market hunting, it too produces some big counts: thousands of migrant sandhill cranes, and avocets, and tundra swans; tens of thousands of migrant ducks and snow geese; and thousands of breeding gadwalls, redheads, cinnamon teal, and other waterfowl. So the numbers are impressive at both lakes. The birds. But what of the lakes, and marshes—the places of my boyhood book? What would a William L. Finley find if he went back today?

From the desert town of Burns I headed south to Malheur, one windy grey fall day in 2001, to find the lake beset by drought, and the water so far receded from the shore that I could see it only from an overlooking ridge. Also scouting from the ridge were two befuddled duck hunters, outfitted and ready in full camouflage attire, with dog and pickup truck and boat in tow, but not a place to launch. And no ducks to hunt, needless to say. I drove the dusty refuge roads and found two ruffled ponds, very small, and a single skittish flock of teal, which rose and curved and sped off in the raking wind. All other ponds and creeks were dry, their beds skinned over hard, and cracked, West 107

their surrounding tules stiff and mummified. Not a good year, 2001, to see Finley’s Malheur Lake. I’d picked the region’s worst drought year in two decades, and one of the worst in half a century.

Not a good year to see the Klamath Basin either, I suppose. But here I was, in Oregon, committed, so I drove on down to Klamath Falls; and yes, there would be water troubles here, all right. I learned it in a hurry when I stopped for gas, and asked the attendant about motels ahead at Tule Lake, down near the refuges. ‘‘Oh, there might be something still down there,’’ she said dismissively. ‘‘But maybe not. They’re all moving out, because the farmers can’t get any water. It’s all going to save some fish. . . .’’ She had war in her eyes, and I dared not ask her how the fish were doing. Or the marshes, or the birds. The trouble is, as it was neatly nutshelled in the New York Times, there are just ‘‘too many claimants for too little water.’’ The claimants are (1) the farmers— whose farmland, once full of lakes and marshes, arguably ought not to have been drained and farmed in the first place; (2) the fish—which include two species of federally endangered suckerfish and, downstream, the threatened coho salmon; (3) the area’s native American tribes and commercial fishermen, downstream— all, dependent on the salmon; (4) the refuge birds—including 80 percent of all the waterfowl using the Pacific Flyway, and the largest wintering bald eagle population anywhere in the United States except Alaska. Legally, the first priority goes to the endangered species, which is to say the suckerfish; the second goes to the native American tribes; the third to agriculture; and the fourth and last to nonendangered wildlife, and the refuges. Effectively, though, because the refuges are last in line for water, so too are populations of the endangered fish—which inhabit two of the refuges, Tule Lake and Clear Lake. Showdown was inevitable. The scene was set for trouble long ago, with the Klamath Reclamation Project’s promise of cheap land and water, and the ensuing 108 West

rush to settlement. All it took to spark a crisis, after years of free and easy irrigation and depletion, was the addition of two factors: the recent legal recognition of new ‘‘users’’—the native Americans and the native endangered fish—and, finally, a year of major drought. The drought of 2001, let’s say: the year of my visit. According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife, water had become so low in Upper Klamath Lake, the basin’s major reservoir, that any further decline would directly jeopardize the two endangered suckerfish (and the coho salmon runs, downstream); so the Bureau of Reclamation felt it had no choice and closed the headgates, leaving ruined crops and angry farmers. So angry were some farmers, initially, that at least one covert effort was made to reopen the headgates. Into this embattled region, then, where food and livelihoods and lives of species were at stake, I drove south through hills and furrowed farmlands to the northern California town of Tule Lake, then westward into refuge country, through a gauntlet of hand-scrawled signs along the road: Call 911. Some Sucker Stole Our Water. Sarcastic, bitter, angry signs. Cries for attention, commiseration. You could almost hear the voices, see the faces: Federally Created Disaster Area. And Water for Farmers, Not for Suckers. Not a comfortable situation. I was an outsider here, a snooper in a troubled land. Homes and happiness lay in the balance, and here comes along this lone outsider, touring fancy-free and searching for his pretty marshes and his pretty pictures, and his traces of the gauzy past. But it was my pretty marshes that belonged here, was it not? The water, too, and all the birds and fishes, even silly-sounding suckerfishes, they belonged here too; and they had been here for some time, had they not? And a good deal longer than the farmers? My sympathies reversed, when I recovered from the onslaught of those signs. Other lives hung in the balance too, after all; and the lives of actual species, entire kinds. They need water too and they, unlike the farmers, cannot pick up and move and live another kind of life. Either they live here or they don’t live. And this is not a country meant for sugar beets and onions and potatoes, West 109

moreover; it’s meant for tules, and fish, and pelicans and eagles. And ducks, geese, grebes, and about 220 other bird species listed for the Klamath Basin, not to mention countless other kinds of living things. . . . Further provocation was forthcoming, as if it were needed, from a shady lawn beside the road, not two hundred yards from the refuge headquarters and visitor center. Here, surely, was the sign to end all homemade signs: a sarcastic masterpiece that must have cost someone a lot of trouble, time, and money. It was a big, all-metal job supported by huge posts and painted with a counterfeiter’s care, white-lettered on official outdoor-recreation brown, in painstaking simulation of the signage posted on all federal parks and refuges and other public lands: Please Thank the U.S. Fish and Wildlife for Destroying the Ecosystem and the Economy of the Klamath Basin. So, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It’s their fault? I was all too mindful, reading this, that it was for farmers that these marshes had been bled and butchered in the first place, so the water could be piped away to irrigate and plant the desert—and the temptation, here, was to be sarcastic in return. Take that, sarcastic farmers! But my mission was to see the lakes and marshes that remained: the 25 percent. What would Finley and Bohlman find today? At Tule Lake, my first destination? They wouldn’t recognize the place, wouldn’t even find those waterways and tule mazes of a century ago. They would find a lake, alright, but just a lake; just water lapping at a frothy shore, and dikes, and flooded pasture with emerging weeds. No tules here, not any more. Not at Tule Lake. At Lower Klamath Lake? Finley’s onetime ‘‘land of dreams,’’ where he and Bohlman cruised by boat and camped on matted tule islands? They wouldn’t recognize it either, I’m afraid; they would find only a manufactured complex of neat dikes and ponds, square ponds, laid side by side like sewer pits, or fish farm ponds. I drove along the dikes, hoping for some traces of the tule islands, but the only tules here were fencelike rows along the dikes, in ditches, and then some isolated dusty stands, long since marooned and dead of thirst: only the desiccated husks, 110 West

still bowed in place. Some of the ponds were dead dry too, their beds baked hard and crazed, and crusted white with alkalai. In one pond two monster machines were groaning away, and moving earth around. Only two of these diked units at the Lower Klamath—along the highway, for all public eyes to see—held any real water, and waterfowl. They held real ducks, hundreds of them, maybe a thousand ducks or more; but these ponds were missing something. And the ducks were missing something: they were ducks without a flora, without any gracing tules, sedges, cattails, or floating-leaved aquatics— without any living ambience or cover whatsoever, as if set free in a big swimming pool. They had their official designated ‘‘wetland,’’ I suppose; but they did not have marsh. But does anybody care? Does it matter that the real marsh here has been replaced by water-regulated compounds that resemble borrow pits, or excavated fish farms? Not here, apparently. What matters here is ducks, and duck production. ‘‘The lure of the marsh was in its wildness’’? Sorry, Mr. Finley, but what seems to matter now is numbers.

I found one hopeful outpost in the Klamath Basin, about sixty miles north of Lower Klamath and Tule Lakes. It’s called Klamath Marsh, and it took me by surprise one frosty autumn morning. I was driving through this high, dry country of dark pines, and here it was, suddenly, this wide-open swathe of tules, sedges, and mirror-perfect creeks and pools, about ten miles across and wild and undisturbed as it could be, except for the lone road that shoots across. No digging or diking here; no segregated ponds, no water-pumping stations; nothing but the frosted marsh and distant streaks of pine, and fir, and the blue sky, and distant mountains. And the perfect pools, jarred only by the bobbing up of pied-billed grebes. Other birds were there, no doubt, unseen and silent in the marsh; but what would they be? What would a person hear, on a soft spring evening? Marsh wrens, soras, yellow rails? West 111

Here it is then, Mr. William L. Finley, a bastion of your Klamath Basin marsh that ‘‘defies civilization.’’ Still.

Two On this high note I moved on, westward from the Klamath Basin and across the Cascade Range, then southward on Route 5, straight down the middle of the Sacramento Valley. To either side lay blue-grey banks of mountain ranges, dark and ominous, like the cloud banks of advancing storms: the Coast Range to the west and the Sierras to the east. Between them stretched the valley floor, fifty miles across and flat and cultivated as could be: every last tillable acre, mile after southward mile, from valley wall to valley wall.

And the remaining wildlife? About three million waterfowl still use the Pacific Flyway, and they have to spend the winter somewhere. Where do they go? Once, these flat farmed lands of the Central Valley—the Sacramento and San Joaquin combined—were strewn with lakes and marshes, four million acres of them, covering almost one-third of the entire valley. These wetlands were both permanent and seasonal, and supported birds and fish and other wildlife in stupendous numbers, including wintering populations of more than half of the thirty-five million birds then using the Pacific Flyway. But no more. Settlement and cultivation has absorbed them all—and most of the valley’s river water, too, through the Central Valley Project of the 1930s and 1940s, which dammed it, canalized it, and dispersed it over thousands of square miles for irrigation use. And the remaining wildlife? About three million waterfowl still use the Pacific Flyway, and they have to spend the winter somewhere. Where do they go? They go to the only wetlands allocated to them, the national wildlife refuges. A

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string of these reservations is maintained in the Central Valley, expressly for these waterfowl dispossessed. I pulled off Route 5 and into Sacramento Refuge, the valley’s northernmost and the first to welcome the arriving southbound autumn skeins, but this southbound visitor found a chilly welcome: a vending machine, at a modern auto-pay station. I did as directed, put in my three dollars and took out my official dated ticket, high-tech California style. Wildlife refuge, or amusement park? Oh well, I was invested now. Might as well go take my ride on the wildlife drive. Signs, almost at once: Speed Limit 20. And Visitors Must Remain in Their Vehicles Except at Designated Park-and-Stretch Locations. Park-and-Stretch Locations. Well, they do make sense here in this Central Valley, where alas there is no water room for birds except upon these ponds. But the reality was a hard one. No water room for birds? Here, over these thousands of square miles of cultivated valley, one-third of them once under lakes and marshes— no room left except on these provided ponds? Imagine. And here they were, the ponds, square ponds; and elevated ponds, no less, set not in but on the surface, so you can sit tight in your car and watch the swimming, diving, and dabbling of the ducks at your eye level, like fish in an aquarium. More signs: Only Vehicles Beyond This Point. And Wildlife Only Outside of Vehicles. And again, They’ll Be Out Here If You’re In There. Okay, I understand; these reservation ponds are all that these birds have, and they just cannot be disturbed. But it’s hard to see these remnants of wild marsh reduced to live exhibits-at-a-distance, to be viewed from your encapsulating car. Not a thing about the place was wild, except the waterfowl itself; even the live vegetation was inapt and unconvincing—merely upland weeds and grasses, mostly, and clumps of cattail set in neatly, periodically, like ornamental shrubs on office lawns. I suspect this project might have even been a showpiece, and a proud example of the modern re-created marsh. ‘‘Re-created marsh’’: another of those euphemistic insults to the language and

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the natural world alike. What is it about that oxymoron, though, that so riles a person who loves marshes? I think it’s the implicit arrogance, and the implication that mankind is even capable of such a thing, with just the will and the technology. But it’s also the implication that because we can, or think we can, then it’s no big deal if we wipe out prime native marshland in the first place, however rich and rare and beautiful. Marshes are complex creations of almost inexhaustible variety, occurring in all kinds of climates, soils, and hydrologic situations in all regions of the globe, and it’s the very height of egotistic folly to suppose we can create them by just gouging out selected sites and moving earth around, and maybe stirring in a few of the right seeds or bulbs or chemicals. Marsh, like life itself, owes its creation and distinction not to formula but to time, and the mysteries and alchemies of nature. The endeavor is well-meaning—an effort to restore, make something productive in the face of ruin—and it had succeeded here at Sacramento Refuge, had it not, with these elevated ponds? The place was mad with waterfowl, hundreds and thousands of them mixing and confabulating on the water, lounging on the grassy shores and dikes: snow, Ross’s and white-fronted geese, pintails and mallards, wigeons, shovelers, coots. . . . So these square ponds work, like parks in cities work for people. They hold birds. But are they any substitute for what was lost, the mirror lakes and marshes that once filled the Sacramento Valley? Are we happy with square ponds and dikes and auto roads with ‘‘stretching stations,’’ and jam-packed birds with nowhere else to go? To many people—perhaps most—one kind of marshy place is as good (or bad) as any other. Developers think that way, and many farmers; and so does the law, in many cases. ‘‘Wetland mitigation’’ law, so called, is premised on the principle. Need to build, and fill in a little inconvenient wetland? Go ahead, the law is engineered to say; you can proceed, if only you’ll ‘‘create’’ a like amount of ‘‘wetland’’ elsewhere, so we can call it even. No matter that the marsh or bog at stake took tens of centuries to build, or that it hides rare orchids or rare birds that can114 West

not live elsewhere; no matter, just as long as you’ll agree to dig out some kind of wetland somewhere that will pass inspection. Wetland ‘‘mitigation,’’ really. That is one master dandy of a euphemism. Under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, enacted in 1989, a developer can legally fill in, pave over, build on, or otherwise annihilate almost any wetland acreage in his way, if only he agrees to compensate—if not by creating some himself, as mentioned, then by purchasing the acreage from a so-called mitigation bank. Thus, with the nifty-sounding putative objective of ‘‘no net loss,’’ the policy can achieve its real aim, to make life easy for developers, while seemingly preserving wetland acreage overall. But does anyone honestly believe that it’s so simple? Think of the time, and the recurrent rising and falling and decaying, the accruing and the steeping—the alchemy—that goes into the creating of your average piece of native marsh, or bog, or fen. Think of the assimilated stems and blades, millions upon millions, year after year, and all the life they have sustained within, all the creatures they gave home and food and cover to: all the unseen animalcula and teeming fishes, frogs and toads and turtles, meadow voles and muskrats, clinging wrens and creeping rails and bitterns; and then all their long-gone industry: their crafted pathways, woven nests and incubated eggs and tended young . . . and all the summer flowers, come and gone: the orchids and the asters, pinks and gentians, fleabanes, mallows. . . . Does anybody truly think that all this can be scooped away, or drained, or filled in with tons of rubble, gravel, subsoil, or concrete—and then the loss repaid, elsewhere, with so much labor and machinery and so many bags of additives or plantings? Some people evidently do. Or say they do, when given a good vested reason. I for one know next to nothing about soil chemistry, nutrient recycling, nitrogen retention, or any of the other chemical bases of what makes marshes marshes. I’m no ecologist, or scientist, but I do have eyes and ears and wit enough to know real marshes when I see them, and I know that they aren’t made by simply digging holes. And the ecologists agree, it seems, at least to some extent; for it’s been found West 115

that many types of wetlands, especially certain bogs and fens, have complex chemistries beyond their understanding. Researcher Carol Johnston, of the University of Minnesota, sized it up this way for Audubon magazine: ‘‘We’re very good at digging holes in the ground and calling that a ‘mitigation wetland.’ ’’ Moreover, Audubon reports—as if the mitigation schemes themselves were not injurious enough—it’s been found that many participant developers were not even taking the trouble to do the ‘‘mitigating.’’

So much for my Sacramento marshes, then, and the several other Central Valley refuges I saw, none of them uplifting. So much for all far-western refuges I saw. But there are still other western possibilities: the refuges of Idaho, and Utah, and other mountain states of the interior. I’m not done yet.

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six

Mountain West and Water I set out on a zigzag expedition southward from Alberta, Canada, stopping first at Benton Lake National Wildlife Refuge, on the arid plains near Great Falls, Montana. I took the designated Wildlife Drive, and saw about what I’d expected to: dribs and drabs of ducks, grebes, coots, a few black terns and yellow-headed blackbirds, and a minor colony of Franklin’s gulls in jutting tule marsh. Modest populations, all. The refuge is itself a modest one, a small shallow lake with a small marsh set on a cultivated plain; and alas this refuge, too, like others in the west, had water problems—problems of not only quantity, but quality. The gist, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service leaflet, is this: with continued irrigation farming over the years the refuge had gone nearly dry, and had remained so until 1965, when the Bureau of Reclamation came to the rescue by providing ‘‘return irrigation flows,’’ ensuring a steady supply of water—and, along with it, a steady supply of 117

toxic metals: selenium, nickel, cadmium, and arsenic. And pesticides. And excess leached-out salt. So, here is a choice for Hobson, if there ever was one: water that’s too little, or too toxic? Which is the better? After this cheerless bit of history, and the consoling word that authorities are monitoring the situation, the leaflet bids a cordial goodbye: ‘‘We hope that you have enjoyed your drive.’’ Thus politely ushered on, I barreled off and took the highway west for lands of greater promise. I’d head first for Idaho, and its three major wetland refuges; then Utah, and one of the great bird refuges of North America; then back east to Colorado, and a noted mountain refuge there.

At Camas Refuge, my first in Idaho, I found the jarring, mangled sort of landscape that a person might take as a proving ground for earth machinery, with dominating dikes and dike roads, canals, and raw square ponds that looked like borrow pits, with a few adventitious strips of cattail marsh. A desperate scene, fragmented and confused, worked and reworked like a hash. Desolate, despite the real live ducks and coots that went about their business blithely, obliviously, wherever they found water. This is no viewer-jaundiced picture, by the way, no biased or extremist cant based only on the superficies: the refuge is a work of engineering, through and through. Consider some of Camas’s official figures, trotted out in their leaflet like the highlights of a sales brochure: twelve miles of dikes, thirty-one miles of canals, thirty-five miles of roads, and sixty-four miles of fences; and then twenty-five water-control structures, eight bridges, ten buildings. . . . What would the place be, though, without all the engineering? I didn’t ask it in so many words, but manager Gerry Deutscher sensed the question, and replied in no uncertain terms. It would be ‘‘just another upland big-game refuge,’’ he said. That is, a refuge without water. And without cattails, tules, ducks and coots and white-faced ibises. Water, once again: the crux of it is water. And when it comes 118 Mountain West

to water in the West, Deutscher reminded me, irrigation is the first concern, with wildlife coming in a distant second. Always.

Grays Lake Refuge, seventy-five miles to the southeast, presents a fresher, brighter picture of blue pools, green marsh, and an upsweeping cultivated plain, all set among steep mountains. Unscathed, compared to mangled Camas, at least from a distance. But this refuge, too, has a history of civil engineering, dating back to 1906: the very year that work began on the Klamath Reclamation Project, out in California. Ditches were cut, and a big canal, to divert water far downstream for irrigation. So, while the lake itself is natural in origin, Grays Lake is a controlled wetland system now, its water ‘‘regulated,’’ as the pleasant info-leaflet goes, to ‘‘balance the needs of wildlife with various off-refuge interests.’’ The engineering here is hidden and healed over, and the scene agreeable, at least. And the marsh still holds impressive colonies of birds: up to forty thousand Franklin’s gulls, some years; and up to two hundred pairs of greater sandhill cranes, putatively the largest nesting colony in the world.

My last stop in Idaho, and the last before the big one down at Brigham City, Utah, was Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge. Bear Lake itself, like Grays, lies in a basin ringed by mountains, but unlike marshy Grays it is much more a lake: an open bowl of water about twelve miles long, half in Idaho, half Utah. But the refuge itself—that which I could see, at least—is much less wild, and less appealing to the eye: just a complex of created dikes, canals, and squared-off ponds with tule marsh, and fenced-in pasture. Canvasbacks and coots were in the ponds, and white-faced ibises in the marsh; some sandhill cranes were striding in the pastures, leggy and conspicuous as deer.

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At the mouth of the Bear River, where it empties into Utah’s Great Salt Lake, lies a marshy delta; and on that delta, one of the great bird meccas of the West, and all the world: Bear River Refuge. It’s one of those places that I’d read about and hoped to someday see, long famous for the numbers of its waterfowl and shorebirds. Nineteenth-century explorer John C. Fremont wrote of waterfowl that rose with a sound like ‘‘distant thunder,’’ and the simile may still be apt today, by some accounts. It’s nice to think so, anyhow. It’s nice to think that someplace in the West today the rushes stretch for miles, and the birds still ‘‘rise like thunder.’’ After a rumbling drive out across the July desert, over pocked and buckled pavement strewn with stones, I arrived to find not a desert Eden but the relics of what looked like an abandoned military base, with maintenance building, fences, heavy earth equipment, roads, and steel-railed bridges. And then more roads and dikes, canals, water-control structures, and square ponds of tremendous size. And signs, of course, but I’ve said enough about those artifacts so I’ll mention only one, the most peculiar: Curb the Carp. Plainly something had been curbing them for they lay dead and dying all around, and reeking, wherever there was water. Ring-billed gulls stood by. Marshes were a negligible feature, at least within the portion of the refuge I could see, accessible by road. I saw only a few thin strips of cattail, and incidental cattail islands here and there, some few tules, and very little other flora here of any kind. But then the region is considered desert, isn’t it. The place did have redeeming features. It had mountains, and a flame-pink evening sky; and it had birds: avocets, and black-necked stilts, and white-faced ibises. Dramatic birds. One evening, on one flooded square-mile flat, thousands of avocets sat roosting, and I do mean thousands, all in one field of view. Another evening on another flat the roosted birds were white-faced ibises—thousands yet again; and they took off in squadrons, up to fifty at a time, and filed away in strings across the mountains. And they continued, squadron after squadron, yet the roosting birds seemed undiminished, an inexhaustible supply. Avocets, stilts, ibises: long legs, long bills, long reedy silhouettes. Ancient 120 Mountain West

silhouettes—the very ones you think of when you think of tules, and the alkaline expanses of the West: the ones you might imagine filling skies and marshes of an early day, and streaming across mountains. Yet it was the ‘‘water-fowl’’ that awed the region’s first explorers. Camped at the Bear River delta in September, 1843, John C. Fremont noted the enormous resting flocks. At the crack of a rifle shot, he wrote, they rose ‘‘for the space of a mile round about, with a noise like distant thunder.’’ From the same spot six years later, in October, 1849, explorer Howard Stansbury also wrote of the impressive waterfowl: ‘‘Thousands of acres, as far as the eye could reach, seemed literally covered with them,’’ he wrote, ‘‘presenting a scene of busy, animated cheerfulness, in most graceful contrast with the dreary, silent solitude by which we were immediately surrounded.’’ Since then much has happened to those ‘‘animated’’ marshes in the desert, sad to say, and their history is neither distinguished nor surprising. They were drained, by Mormon settlers, in the West’s first successful large-scale campaign to irrigate the desert. The upstream waters were diverted and the marshes drained with such industry, such assiduity and thoroughness, that by 1920 they were almost gone. Of forty-five thousand original acres, only two to three thousand had remained. In 1910 and again in 1920, meanwhile, due to the resulting drying and stagnation, two botulism outbreaks killed three million birds. Then, as recently as 1983, the remaining marshes were beset by an antithetical, ironic kind of cataclysm: flooding. Great Salt Lake rose, overflowing the refuge dikes and inundating marshes with salt water, killing vegetation and so damaging the dikes and water-control structures that the refuge was declared ‘‘inoperable.’’ By 1989 the waters had receded, the dikes were visible again, and a team of refuge staff and volunteers embarked on cleaning up debris, repairing dikes, water-control structures, and displays, and refurbishing the twelve-mile auto tour route. So now we have it, the refuge as it is today, infrastructure and amenities intact: forty-seven miles of dikes and forty-seven water-control structures, one new pavilion, restrooms, one demonstration pond, one kiosk. It may be a ravaged refuge, Mountain West 121

bereft of native marsh and unprepossessing as a military base in disrepair, but it has its working infrastructure, and its birds.

The last of my mountain marshes, in southern Colorado, was Monte Vista Refuge, a neat, well-tended grassy complex where the ponds and marshes are contained and well-defined, like water hazards on a golf course. The Montes here were smaller and more distant than those looming titans at Bear River, and the birds were far, far fewer. A posted sign, Spring Creek, had something to say: ‘‘Spring Creek once flowed about 8,000 gallons of water through this area, creating a wetland haven. . . . Many wells were drilled to pump water for farms, ranches, and the refuge. In the mid-1960s, the spring ceased flowing. Water for wildlife is now maintained by pumped wells and irrigation ditches.’’ The old story, once again. You see it all across the desert West: the water is diverted, spent, and yet another wetland paradise goes dry. Ruin, or near ruin, is followed by regret, then a great expensive flailing effort to undo the damage and restore some vestige of what was. At best, some vestige. Is there not some surviving Eden somewhere out there in the West—just a partial Eden, maybe? Just a pristine piece?

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plate 67. Creeks and Salt Marsh, from Air Wachapreague, Virginia, September 2000

plate 68. Algal Mat Great Bay, near Tuckerton, New Jersey, October 1999

plate 69. Sod Bank, Marsh Edge Near Wachapreague, Virginia, May 1997

plate 70. Evening, Tidal Creek Near Onley, Virginia, November 2001

plate 71. Sweetbay and High-tide Bush, Marsh Edge Saxis, Virginia, September 1993

plate 72. Rushes Bear Lake, Utah, June 2000

plate 73. Evening Sky Bear River Refuge, Utah, July 2000

plate 74. Sedge Meadow and Stream Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, October 2001

plate 75. Snow and Sedges Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, October 2001

plate 76. Yellow Pond Lilies Elk Mountains, Colorado, July 2002

seven

Saskatchewan Plains, Sloughs, and a Certain Eden At last I was on my way, high in the cab of a jouncing pickup, eyes on the horizon. I’d waited a long time to see what lay out there along the prairie trail, beyond the rain pools; it had been a year since I’d made the drive in my ungainly Oldsmobile, only to be stopped short by those pools. Now, in my rented 4 × 4, there would be no stopping me. I bumped and splashed on through the pools, chin forward in anticipation. Every eyeful now was new, every stretch of plain and rolling hill and marshy hollow, each flitting mix of sparrows, pipits, longspurs . . . but the real lure lay yet ahead, in the thin distance: the Eden that I’d read about. Was it still there?

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As a boy I’d read about another, imaginary Eden marsh, invoked by Roger Tory Peterson in his elementary book, How to Know the Birds. ‘‘Wet feet are the price you would pay’’ if you’d venture into a marsh, he wrote. ‘‘But your bird list will soar, for few environments have a higher density of birds than a swamp or marsh— nine or ten per acre on an average, and often far more than that. . . .’’ Then he went on to describe an early-morning cattail marsh in spring, with its full tantalizing cast of characters: noisy rails and gallinules, coots, and pied-billed grebes; bitterns and long-billed marsh wrens in the reeds, and ‘‘short-billed marsh wrens’’ (sedge wrens) in the grassy edges; red-winged blackbirds calling and displaying, swamp sparrows trilling, swallows skimming, ducks dabbling, and herons stalking—all these and more, some of which I’d never seen, in this one little dreamy haven of a cattail marsh.

Every eyeful now was new, every stretch of plain and rolling hill and marshy hollow, each flitting mix of sparrows, pipits, longspurs . . . but the real lure lay yet ahead, in the thin distance: the Eden that I’d read about. Was it still there? Trouble was, no real marsh I knew could begin to live up to this imagined idyll. In Massachusetts, where I lived, you were lucky to find a marsh that held a single rail, or bittern; and while the river marshes in Connecticut, where I spent summers, held some respectable marsh-bird populations—marsh wrens and Virginia rails, primarily, and a few least bitterns—I soon came to the sobering belief that this scene portrayed by Peterson was just not possible, not on this earth, anyhow; not any more. But then I hadn’t yet seen North Dakota, and the Northern Plains. Years later I was there, in North Dakota, driving north from Jamestown into rolling Benson County, when I saw my first prairie ‘‘potholes.’’ They were at once so bright and colorful, so dashing on the pallid plains, and animated, full of gabbling water birds and screeching blackbirds. Since that memorable June day 134 Saskatchewan

I’ve seen hundreds of those North Dakota potholes, or sloughs (pronounce slews), and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single one, however small, that did not have some conspicuous display of birdlife. Potholes, sloughs, call them what you will, they are exhilarating, sometimes almost overwhelming for their unending busyness and noise, especially to the unaccustomed easterner, whose own scant wetlands are almost barren by comparison. There is always something going on, and usually a multitude of things: ducks rocking on the water—redheads and shovelers, mallards and pintails, wigeons and blue-winged teal; grebes bobbing up and diving, coots nodding along or yanking at the vegetation, sometimes with their rust-faced charcoal young in tow; and marsh wrens babbling, black terns hawking, yellow-headed blackbirds swaying with the reeds and puffing themselves up in show, flaunting their white-flagged wings like fashion models. Come evening and the bitterns begin to pump, soras whinny, snipes streak past and winnow overhead. But the colors alone draw your attention, every time: the mirrored blues and glowing greens, and ostentatious red and yellow dashes of the blackbirds. Here, on the atmospheric Northern Plains, there is no denying the posh sloughs. They are the highlights, the bright oases. So it was in these, the prairie sloughs, that I’d found my real-life Eden marshes.

In June, 1901, some ninety years before my own first Benson County junket, another easterner saw North Dakota for the first time: Arthur Cleveland Bent, the slender, self-effacing businessman from Massachusetts who would write the classic twenty-three-volume series, Life Histories of North American Birds. He too was wide-eyed at the space, the endless plain and the abounding birds; but then he, in 1901, had much more to be wide-eyed about: settlement and cultivation were just beginning to sweep through. In the east, the fertile Red River Valley had already fallen to the plow, but to the west, in Nelson County and beyond, a person could ride all day over miles and miles of virgin prairie broken only by some occasional lone farm. Saskatchewan 135

You can just imagine the impression that the big new country must have made on him. The freedom, the zesty air, the tall skies and cargoes of great clouds, the prairie to explore at will, and the beckoning of new birds—small wonder that the memory never faded. Of all Bent’s travels to find birds, and they were many, all over North America, it was his days in North Dakota, and elsewhere on the Northern Plains frontier, that lingered most in memory. Time and again in those Life Histories volumes it is the plains, and the plains birds, that he recalls most fondly: I have never enjoyed anything more keenly than the long drives we used to take over the virgin prairies of North Dakota, drawn by a lively pair of unshod bronchos [sic], unconfined by fences or roads, with nothing to guide us but the narrow wagon ruts which marked the section lines and served as the only highways. In those days the prairies were like a sea of grass, as boundless as the ocean and nearly as level, where only the distant horizon marked the limit of our view. You can just imagine the impression that the big new country must have made on him. The freedom, the zesty air, the tall skies and cargoes of great clouds, the prairie to explore at will, and the beckoning of new birds—small wonder that the memory never faded. But it was the sloughs, those busy blue-and-green oases, that proved most unforgettable: ‘‘The scene was full of animation, stirring the enthusiasm of the ornithologist to the highest pitch, and we lost no time in picketing our horses and preparing for a closer acquaintance with the inhabitants of such a bird paradise.’’ That was Bent’s recollection two years later, in 1903. But even at the end of his life, when he was in his eighties, still working on the Life Histories, the mem-

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ory remained. In volume twenty, the last to be completed in his own hand, he remembered yellow-headed blackbirds: ‘‘Although it was some fifty years ago that I heard it, the rhythmic swing of that impressive chorus still seems to ring in my ears whenever I think of a North Dakota slough and its yellow-headed blackbirds.’’ North Dakota has changed much since Bent’s visits early in the century; it is no longer a land of boundless virgin prairie and sloughs everywhere alive with water birds. The prairie is all but gone, broken, lost to agriculture, traded-off for patchwork landscapes neat and geometric as linoleum; and many of the sloughs have now been drained and filled, uncounted thousands of them, and those that do survive are often poorer places, ploughed right up to their marshy edges and sometimes even dumped in, dotted not by ducks and coots but by clots of hay or flotsam, or discarded tractor tires. Alas, it is no longer a land a naturalist might wish to write so rhapsodically about. I’ve come to see that—slowly, reluctantly— as I’ve come to know the region better. Yet elsewhere in the U.S. prairie pothole region, the situation is no better. Adjacent Minnesota, for instance, has destroyed roughly half of its marsh legacy, and Iowa 95 percent. North Dakota’s loss now stands at more than 50 percent, with continued losses of twenty thousand acres every year; but its rolling Missouri Coteau still holds the best of what remains in the United States, and the region as a whole continues to produce at least 50 percent of all North American waterfowl. So it’s not gone altogether; there are still vestiges of the North Dakota that used to be.

When you read about Bent’s travels on the western plains, you read about a country of smooth hills and shallow marshy lakes—not in North Dakota, but in the southwestern corner of Saskatchewan, a far end of the earth more sprawling and more primitive than any part of the Dakotas. If there was one place Bent held in even greater awe than frontier North

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Dakota, it was upon these plains of western Canada; and here, among the many lakes and sloughs, one lake impressed him most of all: Crane Lake. It was the ‘‘crowning glory,’’ as he called it, and ‘‘the gem of all that wonderful bird country.’’ One morning in June, 1905, not far from those very rain pools I’d splashed through—perhaps along that very prairie trail—four men came bumping and squeaking across the plain in a horse-drawn buggy, among them the businessman from Taunton, Massachusetts. The men were keen upon a destination, a basin full of creeks and pools and open water so teeming with nesting birds, they had been told, that nowhere in all the Canadian Northwest was its equal known. And when they found the gleaming lake that day, they were not disappointed. Birds were everywhere, in the air and on the water, on the shores and in the reeds. Gulls rose and swirled, ducks passed in smoky clouds and gathered far out on the water; white pelicans sailed high, impassively. Willets, avocets, and marbled godwits chided, yellow-headed blackbirds creaked and brayed; the scene was dizzying, overwhelming. Anxiously they tethered horses, pulled on boots and waded in, as bitterns flapped away, grebes dove and disappeared. Bent waded out into the reeds, and into deeper water, and here he began finding nests: of yellow-headed blackbirds, tied fast a foot or two above the water; of coots; of canvasbacks and redheads in the taller clumps; and of American bitterns, no less than five, in water about kneedeep. Five bittern nests, in a single place and in a single day! He waded on in water deeper still, out toward a little island, past floating nests of western and horned grebes. He returned ashore, retrieved his camera and donned longer waders, and set out again for the little island. In water now up near his armpits and the limit of his waders he continued, half bobbing, half tiptoeing along with camera and plateholders held up overhead. It was a ‘‘risky business,’’ as he put it, but he gained the island safely. The island was a haven for nesting ducks, he found; they rose in numbers from the shores, and from small ponds: mallards and shovelers, pintails and blue138 Saskatchewan

winged teal, gadwalls, canvasbacks and redheads, ruddies, lesser scaups. The air about them filled with raucous avocets and willets, and marbled godwits; and raucous common terns, which had colonized one end of the island. Six days later he was back, in the cold and rain, and the spectacle of ducks was even greater. Clouds of ducks rose from the marshes, the water, and the little island, and distant skeins passed to and fro. He found a colony of western grebes: swanlike, distinguished-looking birds with ‘‘fiery red eyes’’ and ‘‘javelin-like beaks.’’ The next year, 1906, Bent returned to his little duck island, only to find that a resident coyote had been living well on duck eggs. Ducks were few. But the western grebes had increased explosively, to a thousand pairs or more; the reeds held countless nests, and the striking birds themselves were gliding everywhere upon the water. In all, Bent figured that thirty-two species of birds were nesting at the lake, in an area no greater than one mile square. On the little island alone, that first year, he found sixty-eight duck nests in two hours’ time; and estimated that 150 pairs were either nesting or preparing to.

How tame and tiny, now, that idyllic marsh of Peterson’s. How passé and how provincial it seemed now, the mere object of a boyish reverie. Here, in this teeming lake of Mr. Bent, lay the real marsh of a person’s dreams. But was it still there?

I rumbled on beyond the rain pools, over muddy flats, and on along the prairie trail. What would it look like? A bright silver sheet, I fancied, under a leaden sky: I pictured it in old-time black-and-white. I imagined fringing reeds, dark birds massed on the water and a distant murmur, louder and louder as I drew near. . . . All very nice, very pretty, very pure; but reality might have snuffed it out Saskatchewan 139

completely years ago, I knew, and that silver sheet might now be nothing more than vapor. What lay ahead might be another Klamath, or another Malheur: bonedry plain and maybe a few manufactured dikes, and ponds. Square ponds. Or a gouged-out modern reservoir, and modern dam.

All very nice, very pretty, very pure; but reality might have snuffed it out completely years ago, I knew, and that silver sheet might now be nothing more than vapor. What lay ahead might be another Klamath, or another Malheur. Those rain pools of last year might actually have spared me. But I knew better, really; I’d done a bit of research, now, and I had a good idea what might be there. A line appeared on the horizon—nothing too incongruous, but artificial, surely: an earthen dike, with a trace of rutted road upon it. I followed it about a mile, westward, then north along a wide canal, to a great cauldron full of waving rushes, open pools, and a growing murmur, then a babel, of commingled voices: Crane Lake, no doubt about it. The dike continued, in a long loop around. The dike, I’d learned, had been the handiwork of Ducks Unlimited of Canada. Not long after Bent’s last visit, in the rainy heyday of 1906, the lake had begun to dry: a regular occurrence here on the hard-pressed Northern Plains, where cycling between wet and dry is quite the natural scheme of things (the usual cycle: about nine years of lean precipitation, then one of plentiful). But add human settlement and cultivation to this marginal regime, and irrigation—and a string of notoriously dry years, culminating in the drought years of the ‘‘dirty thirties’’—and you have trouble. In 1948, Canadian naturalist Earl Godfrey paid a visit and found the lake bed mostly dry, with grasses springing up and Baird’s sparrows singing on new territories. Then in the rainy 1950s the lake revived, attracting colonies of pelicans and gulls and terns. But in the 1960s it went nearly dry again, and remained so, posing

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a very bleak prognosis: the lone feeder stream was now so spent on irrigation that only half of the original flowage reached the basin. Enter Ducks Unlimited, with a proposal for some serious civil engineering: a circular containment dike, eight miles around, to hold remaining runoff in an area about one-quarter that of the original basin, and thus minimize evaporation, and retain some scaled-down semblance of the original system. Plans were approved, and they proceeded, in 1981, with a few extra embellishments: two concrete control structures, fifty earthen ‘‘nesting islands,’’ and five gravel ‘‘loafing bars,’’ all uniformly manufactured. A far cry my pristine fantasy, to be sure. Fifty nesting islands, and five gravel loafing bars? It sounded like some kind of inventory ordered up for a new Disney park. Not to mention the intrusion of the dike itself, of course; the cataclysmic digging, filling, and disruption, and indelible disfigurement. Never again, even in the rainiest of futures, eons hence, would this be the same lake A. C. Bent saw long ago. Never again, barring passage of another ice age, and a good deep glacial scraping. But the scene itself did not look disfigured that fine summer morning. The manufactured loafing bars and nesting islands were obscured, scarcely even visible in all the waving green, and there was little other overt evidence of tampering, except for the encircling dike itself; but even that seemed small and almost incidental, by the great Saskatchewan scale of things. To the east, a plain stretched flat for several miles—part of the old lake bed, no doubt, but agreeable and natural in this grassland state; and to the west lay nothing but the stems of bulrush, millions upon millions dark and waving. Beyond them lay only the sandy ramparts of the hills, sunstruck and thin as ether in the distance, insubstantial as the blue gas of the sky itself. Among the rushes were small pools and labyrinthine corridors, most hidden but betrayed by honks and splashes of cavorting coots, the oinking of eared grebes, and the bubbly courtship quacks of ruddy ducks. Invariably, whenever I could see

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through to open water there was some mix of these three companions, the coots nodding and pumping along, the grebes gliding, and the ruddies drifting stiffly with their heads and tails erect. Yellow-headed blackbirds screeched, and puffs of ducks rose in the distance, terns hovered and dove—common, Forster’s, black— and in the distance Franklin’s gulls were massed together, swirling, as if about a hive.

Franklin’s is the gull of prairies. You’re apt to see it in loose groups anywhere on the Northern Plains, racing past low in the wind, wings raked, or wheeling in the tranquil blue so high sometimes that your eye catches only the white glints; or floating in the lakes and sloughs, or standing idle on the shores, benign and smooth as dolls. It is the wild gull, emblem of the rolling plains and pristine skies, and the remote lakes and marshes it seeks out for nesting. And it is a winsome gull, dovelike and softly featured, black-hooded and grey-mantled and clean white below, and tinged with rosy-pink in spring. Its flight is swift and graceful, its wild, far-carrying cries affecting and well-suited to its land of distances. Despite its omnipresence and familiarity, though, it does keep one aspect of its life a secret: the location of its nesting colonies. A Franklin’s nesting colony, wrote Arthur Cleveland Bent in the Life Histories, ‘‘is one of the most spectacular, most interesting, and most beautiful sights in the realm of North American ornithology. The man who has never seen one has something yet to live for.’’ The birds congregate in massive numbers—up to several thousand pairs, and once many more—and they build nests close together in a single shallow lake or slough. But these colonies are few and far between— and, to the dismay of early ornithologists, are apt to shift location from year to year, depending on the caprices of precipitation and local water levels. ‘‘Like the Indians of the plains,’’ wrote Bent, ‘‘they are a wandering, nomadic race, and for some mysterious reason, unknown to any but themselves, they move about from place to place, choosing each season the locality which suits their fancy.’’ 142 Saskatchewan

Bent himself had watched in longing many times as they streamed out across the plains by morning, and returned by evening; and he had even tried to follow as they hied their way home over the horizon. But their cities had remained elusive.

A Franklin’s nesting colony, wrote Arthur Cleveland Bent in the Life Histories, ‘‘is one of the most spectacular, most interesting, and most beautiful sights in the realm of North American ornithology. The man who has never seen one has something yet to live for.’’ Then one day in Saskatchewan, in June, 1905, he was riding over the plains in a buggy with one Herbert K. Job, another eastern ornithologist, when they came over the crest of a hill overlooking a low plain. They stopped, scanned with a field glass, and made out the distant glimmer of a lake—and, above, a hovering white cloud. ‘‘We knew at once that we had won the long-sought prize,’’ he wrote. The two lost little time in making way across the intervening mile, tethering their horse and wading out to meet the churning cloud, impeded little by the flimsy reeds and knee-deep standing water. Gulls rose and the big cloud swelled, the clamor grew, and the heaped-up nests of reeds began appearing, some holding eggs, some young. The nests were placed in every possible situation, and so close together it seemed miraculous that each owner could find and settle on its own. Clouds and clouds of the beautiful birds were rising all around us, and the din of their voices was terrific, as they hovered over, circled around, and darted down at us in bewildering multitudes. If we kept still they would gradually settle down all around us, but if we gave a shout the result would be startling as the whole surrounding marsh would seem to rise in a dense white cloud, and the roar of their wings mingled with the grand chorus of cries would be almost deafening. But they were very tame and we had plenty of opportunities to admire the exquisite beauty of their plumage, Saskatchewan 143

seldom surpassed in any bird; pearl gray mantles, delicate rosy breasts, black heads, and claret-colored bills and feet. Bent guessed that this colony held fifteen to twenty thousand pairs of birds. Today, that colony of a century ago is gone, and the lake itself merely a ghost print on the empty plain. But just a few miles to the north and west, secluded among low hills and skirted by low plain, lies Bent’s old ‘‘crowning glory,’’ Crane Lake, still green with rushes and still boiling with birds; and home now to my cloud of Franklin’s gulls. This was a modest colony compared to Bent’s—hundreds of pairs, I’m sure, but I don’t think thousands—yet those hundreds were impressive, still. Near dusk they streamed in from miles around to join their growing cloud, and the din they made was audible at least two miles away: faint, but elemental and unyielding, like the roar of distant ocean. But this was a living roar— a roar of voices.

I made many trips out to the lake, and had some good adventures. One day I saw a real tornado, sinuous and silver in the distance, thrilling, and all too brief. It withdrew into the parent cloud, and then a rousing storm of wind and cold drew past, with racing wisps of cloud and periodic spears of lightning. One day three prehistoric birds flew by, black against the sun, legs trailing and long sickle-bills protruding: white-faced ibises, unusual in Saskatchewan. One day I launched a pontoon floating blind with a mounted camera outfit, and it was fun to see the world from a grebe’s or coot’s eye view, moving out among the birds in open coves and channels, selecting targets and trying to work in close. Eared grebes were trusting, but surprisingly the coots were wary, always honking loud and making for the reeds, heads nodding, when approached. Ruddy ducks were wary, too; but wariest of all, except for the larger ducks, which allowed no approach at all, were the little pied-billed grebes. Almost always they would either steam away or sink like submarines and disappear. 144 Saskatchewan

So much fun was it out there, though, and so laser-focused was I on the birds, that I failed to notice a rather elemental change on the horizon; and when at last I did see the big black wall approaching, it was nearly on me. Lightning flashed, and yes, I got the implication, thank you, as if it were needed. Here I was, chest-deep in open water half a mile from solid shore and surrounded by a metal frame, the frame of the blind, with all manner of other metal photographic gear about me . . . and I leaned out to see that I, or we, this metal-framed craft and I, were the only things emergent for a thousand yards around, in a cove about the size of a small New England bay. Almost at once I heard the plat, plat of rain . . . so my camera gear was now imperiled, too.

Lightning flashed, and yes, I got the implication, thank you, as if it were needed. Here I was, chest-deep in open water half a mile from solid shore and surrounded by a metal frame, the frame of the blind. . . . At this, I began to run. But ‘‘run’’ is not quite the word, is it, for what you do when you try to make tracks quickly in four feet of water, in chest waders, from inside a floating blind. But what is the word? ‘‘Slog’’ is not right either; I wasn’t that slow. So ‘‘run’’ it is, let’s say, but it’s a surreal, slow-motion sort of running, like the kind a child does in his dreams when the monsters are close by, and what a whimpering dog does too in his dreams, for all we know, when the lions are close behind and gaining. At any rate I did it, I ran, and ran interminably, it seemed, in pursuit of the indifferent shore. Lightning flashed like steel, and balls of rain hit the water and pocked it with deep cups, and hit me, and smacked the plastic I held tight around the camera gear; and I ran as it were in that resistant medium with arms leaned out into the blind ahead, as if pushing a big desk across a floor, alone in that big bay as anyone could be, without so much as a clump of reeds or a straggling coot for company. Even the water birds had abandoned me and taken cover, every one. Saskatchewan 145

At last I floundered out and dragged the blind up on shore, exhausted and of course soaked through, yet strangely rather pleased, and exhilarated by the whole ordeal. I took the blind out late at night a few times, too, and what a different world that was, without all the transparency and space and the activity and friendly noise, only the lifeless reeds and pewter moonlight and the channels empty now, and cemetery-still. I heard lone outbursts now and then—abrupt, impertinent, like the blurts of children when they should be sleeping: brief quacks and splashes or escaping wings, or the familiar oinks or madman laughter of eared grebes, or the squawks of night herons, or disgruntled coots; or the lone cries of the Franklin’s gulls. One night I heard a distinct crunching, like a person chewing on raw celery. I sneaked up and homed in with my light, and a muskrat looked up squinting from his covert in the rushes, still clasping a round stalk. Other sleepless birds included western grebes, marsh wrens, and one steadfast ruddy duck, still courting. What few birds I could see at night were far back in the many alcoves, cul-desacs, and winding avenues among the reeds; and I had fun trying to get in close to them for pictures. But again, the fun got me into trouble. At first, the light of the moon alone had been enough to keep me oriented; I had only to keep in sight the north-south rampart of the dike. But more than once, after a long pursuit of some evading target, I looked up and out to find that there was no dike, only sky-high walls of reeds, and I was hopelessly disoriented. A compass? Yes, of course that would have been the answer, but I hadn’t thought of it, so I had to use the moon itself for navigation. Knowing it lay just south of zenith, I could always turn so it lay over my right shoulder, and then head back due east and strike the dike at some point, eventually, above or below the pickup truck. But after one long serpentine pursuit of an eared grebe I looked out, dizzied, to find that the sky had clouded over. There was nothing to do but wait, and worry, and grow anxious, until the moon burned through again.

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Most hours at the lake were anything but anxious, especially in the serene evening, after nine p.m. One calm and lovely evening, late, when the sun was low, I sat on the slope of the dike, just to soak it all in. The hills were yellowed and the reeds ablaze with green, the water coated bright with blue, and there was not so much as a nodding of the rushes anywhere, not a ruffle on the blue, except where the water birds were busy, making the most of the late light. Coots tugged at underwater plants and shepherded their cootlets; grebes bobbed up with minnows pinched in their bills, and streamed to and from their fluffball young. Yellow-headed blackbirds flew to their young, low in the reeds, and Franklin’s gulls streamed in to join their massing cloud. The sun sank and it grew quieter, cooler, and I sat reflecting on how lovely it all was, and how lucky I was, when a wild and whooping madman laughter rose up from the hills, shattering the serenity and piercing me with fear. Suddenly I was alone, awfully alone and about to be killed and cut apart by Huns; and the Huns were beside themselves with joy at the idea. But soon the howling stopped, and I recovered my wits enough to realize that they were just coyotes. Then, from another hill, came one extraordinary howl in answer. It wavered slightly, found its pitch and bellowed long and soulfully, then fell; then after a pause it rose again, still higher, and lingered still more resolutely than before. Then it trailed away, and stopped. Slowly the serenity returned, the birds resumed their busyness, and the Huns were not heard from again. Dusk deepened, and bitterns began to pump. I thought about Mr. A. C. Bent, and pictured him out there among the mazes years ago, prying through the reeds and peering as the grebes slid off, and bitterns flapped away, and I wondered what he would think if he could sit here now, on the manmade earthen dike. How different would he find it now, his ‘‘crowning glory’’ of a century ago? He would find it smaller now, of course, an oasis of not thirteen square miles but just a little more than three; and darker, more crowded in with rushes, a laby-

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rinthine complex now of lesser lakes and creeks and pools: no big colony of western grebes here now, without all that wide-open water. And he would find the manmade dike, of course, and the disrupted earth. But again how slight a scar it seemed, with so much Saskatchewan all around and overhead; how timeless, and how unassailable the scene. You think big and euphoric here beside this blue lake, on these big plains of western Canada; and with good reason. Saskatchewan is one of the roomier regions of the globe, after all; the whole province holds scarcely a million people—about the number shoehorned into Phoenix, Arizona, say, or San Antonio, or Dallas. Chicago has three times as many people. Some desert regions are more densely populated: Australia, Libya, and Algeria. You think big and euphoric here because what’s around you is so clearly, openly tremendous, and then here is this isolated lake and all this concentrated color and this life, this thriving. But you shudder a little, too, at the difference you see: the vital, all-or-nothing difference between this one unlikely lake and the eternal stillness all around, and overhead—between marsh and no marsh, life and no life, a watered Earth and a waterless galactic void. How easily Earth might have been just another stony planet drifting, turning. . . . It’s not the perfect Eden, but on all the plains of North America, and perhaps the world, it may be about the best we have. Is it enough? Is it marsh enough, and hope enough? It is, I guess. It has to be.

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plate 77. Evening Marsh and Clouds Crane Lake, Saskatchewan (Canada), June 2000

plate 78. Bulrushes, Evening Near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (Canada), June 2000

plate 79. Spikerushes Near Eyebrow, Saskatchewan (Canada), June 2000

plate 80. Reeds and Water, Sundown Crane Lake, Saskatchewan (Canada), July 1997

plate 81. Sedges and Pools Near Brandon, Manitoba (Canada), June 2000

plate 82. Pied-billed Grebe Crane Lake, Saskatchewan (Canada), June 2000

plate 83. Young Franklin’s Gull Crane Lake, Saskatchewan (Canada), June 2000

plate 84. Pied-billed Grebes Crane Lake, Saskatchewan (Canada), June 2000

plate 85. White Pelican Crane Lake, Saskatchewan (Canada), June 2000

plate 86. Western Grebes Crane Lake, Saskatchewan (Canada), July 1995

plate 87. Eared Grebes Crane Lake, Saskatchewan (Canada), July 1995

plate 88. Duckling Blue-winged Teal Crane Lake, Saskatchewan (Canada), July 1995

plate 89. Young Pied-billed Grebe Crane Lake, Saskatchewan (Canada), June 2000

plate 90. Muskrat Crane Lake, Saskatchewan (Canada), June 2000

Afterword What have I learned, for all these travels and investigations? How do our marshes fare one hundred years and more since the early naturalists first ventured into them and reveled in their teeming birds? I saw many blighted marshes, to be sure: blighted by the bully plant, Phragmites; by landfill; by drainage schemes for ‘‘reclamation’’; and by almost every other human means imaginable, from ad hoc dumping here and there to wholesale agricultural conversion, as in most of Iowa, and California’s Central Valley. But that’s only half the story. I saw disappeared and disappearing marshes but I saw some nearly pristine jewels, too, still wild and free and brimming with the birds and flowers that belong. We have a number of these jewel marshes, big and small alike, in North America. Some of the biggest are those explored here: the Maryland Spartina marsh of chapter 2, the Manitoba sedge meadows of chapter 3, and so on, concluding with the mythic lake of the last chapter, once a bird man’s glory of the Northern Plains. No doubt we have still other sprawling glories, somewhere, that would hold a naturalist equally in thrall. 163

And we have many lesser glories—lesser in size, that is, but not in bounty, or in beauty: many of the potholes on the Northern Plains, for instance; and many of the fine salt marshes still intact along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, such as the golden grass surprise of chapter 4, near Tuckerton, New Jersey. And we have many rich and varied fragments in the least auspicious places, sometimes, but precious and alluring nonetheless. Some of these photographs were taken in the tiniest of marshes, even in small pools and ditches by the road on some occasions. So just look at what remains, if you’d despair at what’s been lost. Riffle through these photographs and note the colors and the textures, the detail, and above all the variety of the life you see; and keep in mind that it’s all life and color of the present, not the past: it is still there. And it’s just a sampling. These pictures represent a hefty mortal effort, you can be sure, but they give you no more than an inkling of what’s out there in the marsh. They are mere glimpses. I hope they are intriguing glimpses, though, and that together they convey the feeling, if not the fullness, of these Edens we still have.

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About Photography Like all things in the natural world, the subjects of these marshland photographs fall into two essential categories: those that can fly, swim, run, hop, or slink away, and those that can’t. For those that can’t, I’ve used large-format (4 × 5) cameras, primarily for the inherent sharpness and exquisite detail, but also for the more contemplative and careful process that their use requires: you don’t shoot a picture, you compose it on a five-inch groundglass under a black cloth. I’ve used both the monorail ‘‘view’’ and the flatbed ‘‘field’’ types, and have come to prefer the lighter and more compact field type for its obvious logistical advantages in places marshy and precarious. The movements of a field camera are more limited than the view’s, but the range of its front and back tilts in particular, which I use most, are almost always more than sufficient for my work in the natural world. I usually prefer a lens of ‘‘normal’’ focal length (a 180mm Schneider Symmar-S, or Apo Symmar), for its tastefully natural perspective, and absence of intruding optical effect. But sometimes, when the reach of a longer focal length is indispens165

able, I use a modest telephoto: a 360mm Nikkor-T. And I sometimes use a modest wide-angle lens—a 90mm Schneider Super Angulon—though only rarely, because I dislike the stylistic, even flamboyant perspective of most wide-angle lenses. The effect can call attention to itself, like a writer’s fancy prose, and it often comes across to me as a sort of optical showing-off. My preferred sheet film is plain old Ektachrome 64, though I’ve sometimes used the faster 100-speed films. I’ve tried the other 64-speed films on occasion, made comparisons, and almost always come back to the Ektachrome, primarily for its moderate contrast and its understated rendering of greens. The only filters I use are graded neutral-density filters, and I use those only to control large areas of overwhelming brightness, such as skies. Occasionally, I’ve used the 35mm format for photographing ‘‘landscapes,’’ but only when there was no other way: when I wanted to photograph a dusk scene full of blinking fireflies, for instance, and no large-format lens would have the speed (maximum aperture) to record even a trace of those weak lights.

For photography of animated subjects, primarily birds, I’ve used ordinary 35mm systems, but by two unorthodox and very specialized means: close approach on foot, with a specially designed outfit incorporating multiple diffuse flash units; and not-so-close approach, by water, with long lenses from a floating blind. The first approach, with diffuse flash, evolved in the course of photographing two nocturnal marsh birds, the black rail and the yellow rail. To this end, after many trials and many, many errors, I devised a system employing multiple flash units, as many as four, together with diffusion screens, camera, power winder, and a macro lens of modest focal length (50 to 200mm)—and of course a flashlight to see and focus by—all mounted to an aluminum frame, with sturdy struts and an extending shoulder brace. Admittedly unwieldy, and a little strange, not always easy to explain to passersby, the contrivance was nonetheless portable, and with it I could manage (usually) to negotiate a marsh at night. And, while portable, this 166 About Photography

outfit could be depended on for lighting as fine as any studio could produce. Fine light means soft light, and that’s what the diffusion screens were for: nothing is more distressing photographically, I feel, than the hardened glassy look of raw, unsoftened flash, which can render living birds as lifeless as ceramics. But the system gave substantial depth of field, too—crucial, in my view, to fine environmental bird photography. The bird’s surroundings matter too, after all; and far too many photographs abandon that big piece of the picture, in effect, by casting it into a mushy, obfuscating blur. With this outfit then I went to work on the two rails, improving and refining it from time to time. The beauty of it, again—and only slowly did I learn to appreciate this fully—was that it allowed mobility and it assured good lighting, so I was free to stalk birds at large, away from the confines of the nest vicinity, where I could catch them doing things more interesting than sitting on eggs or tending young: singing, for instance, or half hiding, or creeping stealthily. There was one hitch in this ‘‘portable studio’’ approach, however, and it was a major one. In order to light the subject properly and retain that precious softness of the flash, I needed to get close—very close—within four to eight feet—and of course my subjects were not amenable to that proximity. So I had to employ some special strategies, such as stalking in the dark at night, or setting up near nests or singing perches. My second means for photographing birds of marshes, in particular the swimming and diving birds of prairie sloughs, was with a long lens from a floating blind. For that pursuit I built a modular, transportable assembly incorporating three pontoon sections and a four-part aluminum frame, with a ‘‘cowcatcher’’ out in front to deflect reeds and other flotsam, and a camouflaged fabric cover to conceal the photographer within. Other features included an adjustable camera post, flash mounts, and waterproof storage boxes. I should say that this mobile blind was designed for use only in a shallow prairie lake, never in water more than chest-deep; and that only the craft itself did the floating, never the photographer himself. I merely did the pushing and the piloting. About Photography 167

In chapter 7, ‘‘Saskatchewan,’’ I recall some of my rather comical adventures in this lacustrine enterprise.

Here, finally, are a few notes on the 35mm equipment I used, and on the photographs of birds in general. The particular camera systems I used, for what it may be worth, were Canons. With my special flash outfit I used only the old mechanical ‘‘F-1’’ cameras, with ‘‘FD’’ macro lenses (50mm f4, 100mm f4, and 200mm f4). For a time I used this old F-1 system from the floating blind, as well, with a 400mm f4.5 lens; but recently I’ve used a more modern auto-focus ‘‘EOS’’ system, with a 500mm f4.5 lens. I haven’t used digital cameras for any of these photographs. The two slow Kodachromes, 25 and 64, are my eternal favorites, especially for use with the soft-flash system. They are sharp, smooth, natural in their color rendering—I dislike the candied colors, especially greens, of the other slow-speed films—and they are long-lived, as anyone knows who has gone through the old family slides and found those Kodachromes still bright and true after nearly half a century, even when they have been stored in less than kind conditions. When photographing from the floating blind in natural light, however, I’ve used primarily the faster Ektachrome 100 films.

None of the photographs are of captive birds, if it need be said, or of birds restrained or baited in any way, except for the careful use of tape-recorded calls in one instance (the black rail). No props or perches were placed in the pictures, nor vegetation pulled up or cut away for a clear view; all scenes are just as they occurred in nature, except that at certain nests (American bittern, black rail) the foreground cover was held back temporarily, then brushed back into place.

168 About Photography

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. 1919. Life Histories of North American Diving Birds. U.S. National Museum Bulletin 107. . 1921. Life Histories of North American Gulls and Terns. U.S. National Museum Bulletin 113. Source of quotations on pp. 142, 143–144. . 1923. Life Histories of North American Wild Fowl (part 1). U.S. National Museum Bulletin 126. . 1925. Life Histories of North American Wild Fowl (part 2). U.S. National Museum Bulletin 130. . 1927. Life Histories of North American Marsh Birds. U.S. National Museum Bulletin 135. . 1958. Life Histories of North American Blackbirds, Orioles, Tanagers, and Allies. U.S. National Museum Bulletin 211. Source of quotations on p. 137. Bisport, Alan. 2000. Marshes Under Seige from Native Reeds. New York Times (October 8), Connecticut section: 10. Brewer, T. M. 1875–1876, 1876–1878. Notes on Seventy-nine Species of Birds Observed in the Neighborhood of Camp Harney, Oregon, Compiled from the Correspondence of Capt. Charles Bendire, 1st Cavalry USA. Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History 18: 153–168; 19: 109–149. Source of quotation on p. 104. Burt, William. 1994. Shadowbirds. New York: Lyons and Burford. . 1995. Stalkers of the Marsh. Smithsonian 26/2 (May): 98–103. . 2001. Rare and Elusive Birds of North America. New York: Rizzoli/Universe. Chapman, Frank M. 1907, 1908. Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist. New York: D. Appleton and Co. Clark, John N. 1884. Nesting of the Little Black Rail in Connecticut. Auk 1: 393–394. . 1897. The Little Black Rail. Nidologist 4: 96–99. Dahl, Thomas E. 1990. Wetlands—Losses in the United States, 1780s to 1980s. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Report to Congress. Dahl, Thomas E., and Gregory J. Alford. 1997. History of Wetlands in the Coterminous United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey Water Supply Paper 2425. Ducks Unlimited Canada. Undated. Executive Summary, Crane Lake Project. . Undated. Completed Project Sheet, Crane Lake Project. (File #67–30.) Finley, William L. 1923. The Marshes of the Malheur. Nature Magazine 1/4: 46–48. Source of quotations on pp. 104, 105. . 1923. Hunting Birds with a Camera. National Geographic (August): 161–201. Source of quotations on pp. 103, 104. Floor, Keith. 2003. Pots of Gold. Audubon 105 (December): 58–64. Forbush, Edward Howe. 1914. The Sora Rail. Bird Lore 16: 303–306. Source of quotation on p. 2. Fremont, John C. 1845. Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842 and to Oregon and North California in the Year 1843–44. Washington: Blair and Rives. Printed by Order of the House of Representatives. Source of quotations on pp. 120, 121. Gates, David Allen. 1975. Seasons of the Salt Marsh. Greenwich, Connecticut: Chatham Press. Godfrey, W. Earl. 1950. Birds of the Cypress Hills and Flotten Lakes Region, Saskatchewan. Bulletin No. 120, Biological Series. No. 40. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada. 170 Bibliography

Gorman, James. 2002. Aggressive and Invasive Reed Raises Concern. New York Times (March 17): www.nytimes.com. Haramis, Michael, and Robert Colona. Undated. The Effect of Nutria (Myocastor coypus) on Marsh Loss in the Eastern Shore of Maryland: An Enclosure Study. Laurel, Maryland: USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. Hey, Donald L., and Nancy S. Philippi. 1999. A Case for Wetland Restoration. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Hotchkiss, Neil. 1972. Common Marsh, Underwater and Floating Leaved Plants of the United States and Canada. New York: Dover Publications. Houston, C. Stuart. 1982. Oology on the Northern Plains: An Historical Preview. Blue Jay 40: 154–157. Jackson, Donald Dale. 1990. Orangetooth Is Here to Stay. Audubon 92 ( July): 88–94. Job, Herbert K. 1898. The Enchanted Isles. Osprey 3: 37–41. . 1902. Among the Water-fowl. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. Kerasote, Ted. 2001. Running on Empty. Audubon 103 (September): 23. Line, Les, ed. 1990. The Last Wetlands. Special issue, Audubon 92 ( July). Luoma, Jon R. 1985. Twilight in Pothole Country. Audubon 87 (September): 66–84. Mathewson, Worth. 1986. William L. Finley: Pioneer Wildlife Photographer. Corvallis: Oregon State University. McKee, Russell. 1974. The Last West: A History of the Great Plains of North America. New York: Crowell. Meanley, Brooke. 1975. Birds and Marshes of the Chesapeake Bay Country. Centreville, Maryland: Tidewater. Source of quotation on p. 79. . 1981. Birdlife at Chincoteague. Centreville, Maryland: Tidewater. Mitchell, H. Hedley. 1924. Birds of Saskatchewan. Canadian Field Naturalist 38: 101–118. Mitchell, John G. 1992. Our Disappearing Wetlands. National Geographic (October): 3–45. Munroe, J. A. 1929. Glimpses of Little-known Western Lakes and Their Bird Life. Canadian Field Naturalist 43: 70–74. Nadis, Steve. 1999. When It Comes to Building New Wetlands, Scientists Still Can’t Fool Mother Nature. National Wildlife 37: 14–15. Ness, Erik. 2001. Restoration: Murky Deal. Audubon 103 (November–December): 13. Source of quotation on p. 116. Niering, William. 1966. The Life of the Marsh. New York: McGraw-Hill. . 1997. Wetlands. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Peabody, P. B. 1905. The Nesting of the Yellow Rail. Warbler 1: 49–51. . 1922. Haunts and Breeding Habits of the Yellow Rail. Journal of the Museum of Comparative Oology 2: 33–44. Pearson, T. Gilbert, ed. [1917] 1936. Birds of America. New York: Garden City Books. Peterson, Roger Tory. 1962. How to Know the Birds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Source of quotations on p. 134.

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Petry, Loren C., and Marcia G. Norman. 1963. A Beachcomber’s Botany. Greenwich, Connecticut: Chatham Press. Potter, Lawrence E. 1930. Bird-life Changes in Twenty-five Years in Southwestern Saskatchewan. Canadian Field Naturalist 44: 147–149. Riley, Laura, and William Riley. 1992. Guide to the National Wildlife Refuges. New York: Macmillan General Reference. Ripley, S. Dillon. 1988. Revealing the Secret Lives of the Little Phantoms of the Marshes. Smithsonian 19/5 (September): 38–45. Saltonstall, Kristin. 2002. Cryptic Invasion by a Non-native Genotype of the Common Reed, Phragmites australis, into North America. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99/4 (February 19): 2445–2449. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Arthur Cleveland Bent Papers, c. 1910–1954. Washington, D.C. Stansbury, Howard. 1852. Exploration of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah Including a Reconnaissance of a New Route Through the Rocky Mountains. Printed by Order of the Senate of the United States. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Co. Source of quotation on p. 121. Stein, Theo. 1994. Phragmites: Common Reed to Super Weed. Middletown, Connecticut: Middletown Press (August 1): A1, 8. Steinhart, Peter. 1990. No Net Loss. Audubon 92 ( July): 18–21. Stevens, William K. 1995. Restoring Wetlands Could Ease Threat of Mississippi Floods. New York Times (August 8): C1, 4. Taber, Wendell. 1955. In Memoriam: Arthur Cleveland Bent. Auk 72: 332–339. Teal, John, and Mildred Teal. 1969. Life and Death of the Salt Marsh. New York: Ballantine Books. Teale, Edwin Way. 1946. A. C. Bent: Plutarch of the Birds. Audubon 48: 14–20. Tiner, Ralph W., Jr. 1984. Wetlands of the United States: Current Status and Trends. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. . 1987. A Field Guide to Coastal Wetland Plants of the Northeastern United States. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Brochures (authors unstated): 1994. Benton Lake National Wildlife Refuge. 1994. Grays Lake National Wildlife Refuge. 1995. Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. 1996. Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge. 1999. Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuges. 1999. Malheur National Wildlife Refuges. Vileisis, Ann. 1997. Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Weske, John S. 1979. An Ecological Study of the Black Rail in Dorchester County, Maryland. Master’s thesis, Cornell University.

172 Bibliography

Acknowledgments I’m grateful to Jean Thomson Black, at Yale University Press, for her helpful spirit and enthusiasm for this project; and to Roland C. Clement, for introducing me to her. And I’m grateful to the other very helpful people at the Press, including Laura Davulis, Jessie Hunnicutt, and Kim Hastings. Thanks to Brooke Meanley, for encouraging the idea of such a book in the first place, and for his insights on the marshes of the South, especially, which he knows well. And thanks to Noble Proctor, naturalist extraordinaire, for his encouragement in this and other projects, and for his particularly keen and helpful commentary on the manuscript. For their comments on the manuscript, or parts thereof, thanks to Henry T. (‘‘Harry’’) Armistead, naturalist of the Maryland Eastern Shore; to Dave Mauser, at Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuges in California; to Margaret Lowman, at New College of Florida; and to Laura Meyerson, at the University of Rhode Island. 173

For their observations on the ravaging invasive plant, Phragmites, I’m grateful to Paul Capotosto, of Connecticut’s Department of Environmental Protection; to George O’Shea, at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge (Delaware); and to Don Temple, at Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge (North Carolina). And I’m grateful to the following biologists, for their insights on other wetland issues: Gerry Deutscher, at Camas National Wildlife Refuge (Idaho); Richard Roy, at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge (Oregon); Dave Mauser, at Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuges (California); Jon Hicks, at the Bureau of Reclamation in Klamath Falls (California); and Rob Bundy, at Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge (Idaho). Thanks to Judith Hassen at the Klamath County Museum, Klamath Falls, California, for providing records on water histories of the Klamath Basin Refuges. For their help in the field, particularly in locating certain marsh birds, thanks to Doug Johnson, Ray Greenwood, and Don Petriezewski, all at Northern Prairie Research Station at Jamestown, North Dakota; Ron Bell and the late Mike Callow of Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge (Missouri); Carl and Linda Kurtz; Mike Male and Judy Fieth; Dave Lambeth; Judith Archer; Adam Burt, my son; and my dear late friend Carol H. Kimball, for her support and company on some recent camera travels. Finally, I’m grateful to the late S. Dillon Ripley and the late Roger Tory Peterson, both, for encouraging my photography of birds.

Some of my photographs of the more elusive marsh birds in this book, and some of my descriptions of those birds in chapters 2 and 3, have appeared in various magazines over the years, including Smithsonian (August 1991, May 1995), Audubon (November 1982, September 1987), National Wildlife (February 2002), and Living Bird (Summer 1997). Some were featured also in my earlier books about elusive birds: Shadowbirds (1994), and Rare and Elusive Birds of North America (2001). An adaptation of chapter 1, about Connecticut River marshes, appeared in Connecticut Magazine (September 2005). 174 Acknowledgments

Index Abbey, Edward, 82 agriculture: and loss of wetlands, 3, 106; and water usage, 108, 109, 110 alligators, 81, pl. 66 American bittern, 138, pls. 44–45 American (great) egret, 105 Annahuac National Wildlife Refuge (Tex.), 79–80 Armistead, Henry T., 45–46 Arnold, Leon, 63 arrowhead (Sagittaria), 81, pl. 3 asters, salt-marsh, 19, 22, 44, pl. 19 avocets, 120, 138, 139 Baird’s sparrow, 140 bald eagle, 17, 44, 106–7, 108 Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge (Idaho), 119, pl. 72 Bear River Refuge (Utah), 120–22, pl. 73

Bendire, Charles, 104 Bent, Arthur Cleveland, 84, 147; Life Histories of North American Birds, 135–39, 142–44 Benton Lake National Wildlife Refuge (Mont.), 117–18 big cordgrass (Spartina cynosuroides), 19 Birds of North America, 101 bitterns, 62, 134, 135, 147. See also American bittern; least bittern black grass ( Juncus gerardi), 19 black rail, 19, 43–44, 46, pls. 33–35, pls. 39–40 black skimmer, 84 black tern, 135, 142; nest and eggs, pl. 41 black-bellied plover, 84 blackbird, yellow-headed, 135, 137, 138, 142, 147 black-crowned night heron, 105 Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge (Md.), 45 bladderworts, 63, pl. 53 blue flag iris (large blue flag), 82, pl. 5

175

blue-winged teal, 135, 138–39, pl. 88 Bohlman, H. T., 102–6 Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge (Tex.), 79–80 ‘‘bull tongue’’ (Sagittaria species), 81 bulrushes, 26, 103, pl. 78. See also tules Burroughs, John, 101 California gull, 103, 105 Calopogon, pl. 4 Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge (La.), 81, 82–83, pl. 54 Camus National Wildlife Refuge (Idaho), 118–19 Canada goose, 105 canvasback, 119, 138, 139 Capotosto, Paul, 25–26 Carex (rushes), 19 carp, 120 Caspian tern, 103 cattails, 22, 26, 46, pl. 26 Central Valley (Calif.), 112–16 Central Valley Project (Calif.), 112 chuck-will’s-widow, 42 cinnamon teal, 105, 107 clapper rail, 19, 43, 80, 84, pl. 6 Clark, John N., 19 Clean Water Act, 115 Clear Lake National Wildlife Refuge (Ore.), 108 coastal marshes: in Connecticut, 17–26, pl. 13; Gulf and south Atlantic states, 79–84, pl. 59; in Maryland, 41–46, 84, pls. 27–28, pl. 32, pl. 57; in New Jersey, 85–86, pl. 56, pl. 58, pls. 60–61 coho salmon, 108, 109 common tern, 139, 142 Connecticut River marshes, 17–26, pl. 13 containment dike, at Crane Lake, 140–41 coots, 104, 114, 119, 135, 138, 141–42, 147 cordgrass. See big cordgrass (Spartina cynosuroides); salt-marsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora); salt-meadow cordgrass (Spartina patens) 176 Index

cormorants, 103, 105 Crane Lake (Saskatchewan, Can.), 138–42, 144–48, pl. 77, pl. 80 crane, sandhill, 119 Dead Man’s Swamp (Conn.), 65, 66 Deal Island Wildlife Management Area (Md.), 46, pl. 57 desert, and water, 117–19, 120, 122 Deutscher, Gerry, 118–19 diking, of marshland, 45–46, 80, 110–11, 117–19, 140–41 Distichlis spicata (spikegrass), 19, 42, pl. 28, pl. 37 Douglas, Manitoba, Canada, 61–66, pl. 50, pl. 52 ducks, 83, 104, 114, 135, 142; at Crane Lake, 138– 39; and diked wetlands, 111; and Klamath Basin, 106. See also canvasback; cinnamon teal; gadwall; mallard; pintail Ducks Unlimited, 46, 140–41 dunlin, 84, 86 eared grebe, 105, 141–42, 144, pl. 87 egrets, 81, 105 Elliott Island marsh (Md.), 41–46, 63, 84, pls. 27–28, pl. 32 farming: and irrigation, 106, 117–19, 120; and use of water, 108, 109, 110 fen, 63 ferns, pl. 38, pl. 42 Finley, William L., 84, 102–6 fireflies, pl. 50, pl. 52 fish, endangered, 108, 109 fleabane, salt-marsh, 19, 26, 44, pl. 30 Forbush, Edward Howe, 2, 101 Forster’s tern, 84, 142 Franklin’s gull, 117, 119, 142–44, 147, pl. 83 Fremont, John C., 120, 121 freshwater marshes: in American west, 103–

16, 117–22; in Canada, 137–48; in Louisiana, 81–83; in North Dakota, 133–37 Fuertes, Louis Agassiz, 101 fulvous whistling duck, 83 gadwall, 105, 139 gallinule, purple, 81, pl. 63 geese, 105, 106, 114 Georgia, and Sea Islands, 83, pl. 55 gerardias, 19 Godfrey, Earl, 140 godwits, 138, 139 goldenrod, 19, 44 Goose Island (Conn.), 17–18, 25 grackle, boat-tailed, 81 Gray’s Lake National Wildlife Refuge (Idaho), 119 Great Bay (N.J.), 85–86, pl. 58, pls. 60–61 great blue heron, 105 great egret, 105 Great Island (Conn.), 19–21 Great Salt Lake (Utah), 120, 121 grebes, 104, 105, 135, 138, 147. See also eared grebe; pied-billed grebe; western grebe gulls, 138, 140. See also California gull; Franklin’s gull; laughing gull; ring-billed gull Hackensack Meadows (N.J.), 85 herons, 81, 103, 105 high-tide bush, pl. 71 ibis, glossy, 81 ibis, white-faced, 119–20 irrigation farming: and marsh drainage, 106; and wildlife refuges, 117–19, 120 Job, Herbert K., 143 Johnston, Carol, 116 Juncus gerardi (black grass), 19 Juncus roemerianus (needlerush), 42

king rail, 19, 23, 83, pl. 7, pl. 9, pl. 21; nest and eggs, pl. 22 Klamath Basin (Calif. and Ore.), 103–4, 106–7, 108, 110, 111 Klamath lakes (Calif. and Ore.), 103–4, 106–7, 109, 110–11 Klamath marshes, 84, 106–7, 111 Klamath Reclamation Project (Calif. and Ore.), 106, 108–9, 119 Klamath River, 103 knots, 84 land development, 114–15 large blue flag, 82, pl. 5 laughing gull, 81, 83–84, pl. 64; nest and eggs, pl. 29 least bittern, 18, 22, pl. 8, pls. 10–12, pls. 24–26 LeConte’s sparrow, 62, 63, pl. 47 lily, yellow pond, pl. 76 lily pads, pl. 53 Locassine National Wildlife Refuge (La.), 83 loosestrife, purple (Lythrum salicaria), 3, 22 Louisiana coastal marshes, 80–83 Lower Suwanee National Wildlife Refuge (Fla.), 83 Malheur Lake (Ore.), 104–6, 107–8 Malheur National Wildlife Refuge (Ore.), 107–8 mallard, 105, 114, 135, 138–39 market hunting, 104 marsh fern, pl. 38 marsh hen, 83 marsh marigold, pl. 17 marsh wren, 18, 22, 43, 44, 135 Maryland, and Elliott Island marsh, 41–46, pls. 27–28, pl. 32 Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge (N.C.), 23 meadowlark, 42, 44 Meanley, Brooke, 79 milkweed, coast, pl. 3 Index 177

millet, pl. 56 Mississippi Delta, 80–81 Missouri Coteau (N. Dak.), 137 Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge (Colo.), 122 moorhen, common, 43, 81, pl. 65 muskrat, pl. 90 native American tribes, and water use, 108, 109 needlerush ( Juncus roemerianus), 42 Nelson’s sharp-tailed sparrow, 62 New Jersey, and Great Bay marsh, 85–86 North Dakota sloughs, 63, 134–37 nutria, 45 O’Shea, George, 23–24 Olney’s three-square (Scirpus olneyii), 42 owl, short-eared, 44–45 oystercatchers, 84 Pacific Flyway, 106–7, 108, 112 Pearson, T. Gilbert, 101 pelicans, 103, 105, 140, pl. 85 pesticides, and irrigation farming, 118 Peterson, Roger Tory, How to Know the Birds, 134 ‘‘phrag control,’’ 25–26 Phragmites australis (common reed), as invasive species, 3, 20–26, 46, 85 pickerelweed, 82 pied-billed grebe, 111, 144, pl. 82, pl. 84, pl. 89 pintail, 105, 114, 135, 138–39 Ploughman, Larry, 64 plover, black-bellied, 84 plume hunting, 103, 104, 105 potholes (sloughs), 134–35 Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge (Del.), 23–24 primrose-willow, creeping, 82 purple gallinule, 81, pl. 63

178 Index

quicksand, 65–66 rails. See black rail; clapper rail; king rail; sora rail; Virginia rail; yellow rail redhead, 135, 138, 139 reeds, pl. 80. See also Phragmites australis (common reed) ring-billed gull, 105, 120 Roosevelt, Theodore, 105 roseate spoonbill, 81, pl. 62 rosemallow, 19, 22, 26, 44, pl. 16 Ross’s goose, 114 rough-legged hawk, 44 ruddy duck, 139, 141–42, 144 Sabine National Wildlife Refuge (La.), 83 Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge (Calif.), 113–14 Sacramento Valley (Calif.), 112–16 Sagittaria (‘‘bull tongue’’), 81 salmon, coho, 108, 109 salt marshes. See coastal marshes salt-marsh asters, 19, 22, 44, pl. 19 salt-marsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora), 19, 42 salt-marsh fleabane, 19, 26, 44, pl. 30 salt-meadow cordgrass (Spartina patens), 19, 42, 46, 83, pl. 1, pls. 30–31, pls. 37–38 Saltonstall, Kristin, 22 San Barnard National Wildlife Refuge (Tex.), 79–80 San Joaquin Valley (Calif.), 112 sandhill crane, 119 Saskatchewan province, Canada, 137–48 scaup, lesser, 139 Scirpus, 19. See also sedges (Scirpus) Scirpus olneyii (Olney’s three-square), 42 Sea Islands (Ga.), 83, pl. 55 sea lavender, 19, 22 sea pink, 44, pl. 36 sea-level rise, 45, 46

seaside sparrow, 19, 23, 43, 80, 84 sedge wren, 45, 62–63, 64, pl. 51 sedges (Scirpus), 19, 22, 61–66, pl. 15, pls. 74–75, pl. 81 sensitive fern, pl. 42 Sewell Lake (Manitoba, Can.), 61 sharp-tailed sparrow, 19, 23, 42, pl. 23 short-eared owl, 44–45 shoveler, 114, 135, 138–39 silverweed, pl. 18 slender blue flag, pl. 2 sloughs, 63, 134–37, 138 snipe, common, 62, 135 snow goose, 114 song sparrow, 44 sora rail, 18, 62, 64, 135, pl. 49 sparrows. See LeConte’s sparrow; Nelson’s sharp-tailed sparrow; seaside sparrow; sharptailed sparrow; song sparrow; swamp sparrow Spartina alterniflora (salt-marsh cordgrass), 19, 23, 42 Spartina cynosuroides (big cordgrass), 19 Spartina patens (salt-meadow cordgrass), 19, 42, 46, 83, pl. 1, pls. 30–31, pls. 37–38 spikegrass (Distichlis spicata), 19, 42, pl. 28, pl. 37 spikerushes, pl. 79 spoonbill, roseate, 81, pl. 62 springs, and quicksand, 65–66 Stansbury, Howard, 121 stilt, black-necked, 81, 120 suckerfish, 108, 109 swamp sparrow, 43 swans, 106 sweetbay, pl. 71 sweetflag, pl. 14 sweetgale, pl. 15 switchgrass, 46 teal. See blue-winged teal; cinnamon teal Temple, Don, 23

terns, 81, 140. See also black tern; Caspian tern; common tern; Forster’s tern Texas wildlife refuges, 79–80 toxic metals, and irrigation farming, 117–18 tree frogs, green, 42 Tule Lake (Calif.), 103, 110 Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge (Calif.), 107, 108 tules, 103–4, 105, 110–11, 117. See also bulrushes turnstones, 84 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 110 Virginia, ocean marshes of, 83–84, pl. 67, pls. 69–70 Virginia rail, 18, 23, 43, pl. 20 Wachapreague, Virginia, 83–84, pl. 67, pl. 69 water: claimants for, 108–11; diversion of, and wetlands, 3, 106, 114–16; problems related to, 117–22 watershield, pl. 43 western grebe, 103, 139, pl. 86 wetland mitigation laws, 114–16 wetlands: destruction of, 3, 106; and diked units, 111; as national wildlife refuges, 112–14; varieties of, 63, 115–16, 134–35 whimbrel, 84 white pelican, 105, pl. 85 white-fronted goose, 114 wigeons, 114, 135 wildlife refuges, 112–14 willets, 42, 84, 138, 139 wrens. See sedge wren yellow rail, 63–64, pl. 46, pl. 48 yellow-breasted chat, 42 yellow-headed blackbird, 135, 137, 138, 142, 147 yellowlegs, 84, 86 Yellowstone National Park, pls. 74–75

Index 179

William Burt is a naturalist, photographer, and writer with a passion for wild places and elusive birds. He is the author of two previous books, and his photographs and stories have appeared in Smithsonian, Audubon, National Wildlife, and other magazines. Scott Provost