Nature on the Boardwalk

Although I was not feeling my best this morning, we had signed up last week for a Nature Walk along the Town Boardwalk.  We met Betsy Trimble, the  Town of Duck Assistant Public Information Officer, in the Town Hall, and while we were waiting I asked her about the two photos in the rear lobby of the building outside the restrooms, which have always intrigued me.  Betsy said both names - Scarborough and Hines - were local ones, but other than that she did not know who they were.  Andrew looks especially tough, as if he had weathered more than one Outer Banks storm.

Betsy introduced us to Rhana Paris from the N. C. Aquarium, who was leading the hike and who proved to be very informative about both flora and fauna along the way.  We began in the lot adjacent to the Town Hall, a fragment of a maritime forest where we learned a Food Lion had threatened to build before wiser heads (and pockets, and zoning) prevailed.  Oak trees and beeches predominated here, but farther out the land turns swampy and then extends over the waters of Currituck Sound, which is technically an estuary where fresh water and sea water mix. There were several cypress trees growing here with their signature knees surrounding the trunk.

We were a small but enthusiastic group of nature-lovers, and we enjoyed getting to know one another.  Rhana clearly loved her subject, and she reminded us of Ranger Randy at Fort Macon State Park who could also identify every bird-call and plant along the way.

Out by the kayak landing, Rhana stopped and talked about the continuing research the Aquarium was doing on the water in the Sound.  Lowering a bucket to capture a sample, she brought out several instruments she used to measure ph, salinity, turbidity, and dissolved oxygen. I was surprised to learn that the water here was 95% fresh; I would have thought it was 50/50, with the ocean just a half-mile away.

I peered into this little instrument to see the scale of the water's ph, which hovered at about 8.5 - again a little bit of a surprise, more basic than acidic.

We spotted this snapping turtle in the mud below; the only other creatures were a frog and a butterfly (which did not show up in my photographs), plus two ospreys which Rhana identified by their cries and then pointed out, circling high above us in the sky.  "There's usually a cottonmouth down there, too," she said, but we were glad we did not meet him.

The marsh grasses were beautiful, spartina and black needle rush.  I plucked a piece of long grass that was segmented, like bamboo, and she said it was a grass.  Then she recited a mnemonic poem that I thought was a lovely little thing, something that Ogden Nash might have written:

 Sedges have edges, 

rushes are round, 

grasses have knees 

that bend to the ground.

That is, the "knees" of grasses are joint-like nodes found along round, hollow stems. The stems of sedges and rushes are solid; in cross-section the rushes are round, while those of sedges are triangular and so have "edges."

Long vines climbed up the trunks of some of the trees, which Rhana told us included Virginia creeper and, as I had already recognized, poison ivy.  There were also wild Southern grapes, although too early for fruit, either muscadines (red) or scuppernongs (white).  There ought to be a mnemonic poem for that too, I thought; perhaps this:

Muscadines are red

scuppernongs are white,

but both smell as sweet

On a warm summer night.

 

We eventually made our way to the Waterfront Shops, where we thanked Betsy and Rhana and bid farewell to the others, filled with all the new things we had learned.