Maps

 I wait for the morning drizzle to subside before heading over to the Wheeler Marsh for a short trip. By the time I put in, the tide is near maximum ebb current. This makes for a pretty speedy trip downriver to the marsh, but it also means that I will have little time to poke around when I am there.  It is in the upper 40's, with no wind, and an overcast sky. While there is some low surface fog at the put-in, this disappears within a couple hundred yards.

As I reach the top of the marsh, a pair of Harriers lift off from the spartina. One briefly flies towards me, but then wheels around and heads out low over the marsh.

A lot of my recent thinking about the marsh pertains to maps. I have been collecting old bottles from the banks as they become exposed in order to come up with an estimate for the rate of soil accumulation in the marsh (currently, 1 foot takes about 50 years). My samples come mostly from the area near Nell's Island and in the channel at the very top of the marsh. A large part of the remainder of the marsh is more of a mud flat where there are almost no cut banks to extract a bottle from.  

Information about the marsh tends to be anecdotal prior to 1900. So far, I've read that there was a shoal running across the main channel from Nell's Island to Stratford with a depth of about 3 feet. This was (also anecdotally), blown/dredged out sometime around 1850. Supposedly, the marsh was more of a bay prior to the dredging with the river passing around either side of Nell's Island. I have located a couple maps from the 1830's and 1840's. One of them clearly shows Nell's Island and neither of them shows any marsh. However, one has to think about who made the map and what was the map's purpose. Prior to about 1940 or so, marshland was viewed as wasteland. If one couldn't build on it, farm on it, mine it, or flood it, it was useless. 

So, an 1840 map drawn for the purpose of land use is an unreliable scientific document, except that we can assume that Nell's Island had a bit more height to it than the rest of the marsh, which is still true. One possibility of this open bay idea is that the person who wrote about the 19th century marsh was looking at one of those old maps. The first detailed scientific based maps of the marsh are USGS topographic maps from about 1900, and they show the marsh, more or less, as it currently is.  Well, it seems there is an art project here for me to work on.

1926 map of the marsh

I head down Nell's Channel, and as I near Milford Point, about 75 Canada Geese fly by to the east of me. With the tide dropping, I have to keep moving so as not to get stuck in the mud flat.  Coming across the bottom of the marsh, I eventually total about 300 Canada Geese, most of which were floating up near Milford Point. There is a good current to work against all the way around to Cat Island. The marsh is really draining fast.

I find the two Harriers once again as I leave the top of the marsh on my way back upriver.

Harrier - the white butt patch is a good ID marking