Another Data Point

 

Snowy Egret (black bill, yellow rain boots)

I put in under the highway bridge for a quick tour through the marsh. The tide is about 2 hours from low, so exploring the interior of the marsh will be minimized, but that falling tide should bring more birds to the water's edge as the silty shoreline becomes exposed.

The paddle down is quick, with about 2mph current behind me. I head in at the first turn for a clockwise trip. There are quite a few Yellow-Crowned Night Herons and Snowy Egrets. The Snowy Egret likes to pick critters out of the sand and silt, so this is ideal feeding for them. Right now, they outnumber the Great Egrets for sure. 

Willet protesting

I find an old bottle as I cross the lower center of the marsh. Unfortunately, it is not embedded in a calved bank, so it is no good for figuring deposition rate of soil in the marsh. 

I head almost all the way to Milford Point. A good chunk of the horizon is the old army engine factory on the Stratford side of the river. It is long abandoned - one of those brown field properties that the owners hang on to, paying taxes and insurance etc. hoping that someone will come along and not only buy the property but pay for cleaning up toxic soils. Back when that factory was in full operation, the M.O. would have been to dump old solvents out back on the ground. It seems that a good government project might be to buy the land, clean up the worst, and then cap and plant it with shrubs and trees. You couldn't build houses on it, but it would make pretty good open wild land.

Hires bottle at lower right. Broken milk bottle stem center left.

 I head back through Nell's channel. I find a glass "Hires" root beer bottle halfway through. It is about 16 inches below the surface in a calved bank. I remember those bottles, but it was from kid time, so that 16 inches of silt on top of it is a reasonable match to other artifacts.