Some what DR-Salt marsh?

G

Gerald N

Active member
Hunted a salt marsh in RI today for the first time and in keeping with my pact to be more careful I went out with the sun high in the sky since I was unfamilar with the water. I have been around salt marshes in RI and MA and this one is really odd. While I have encountered tree stumps and standing dead wood in salt marshes; this one has marsh that is free and clear of stumps but the waters alongside are full of stumps. At dead low tide they are still under 12-18'' of water and I have never observed any trees growing in salt water before, especially below sea level. Also I was picking up shrub root balls as I picked up decoys. I set out decoys by boat on high tide and waded for them in the afternoon. My only thought was that it was a fresh water bog/kettle hole that was adjacent to salt water marsh and a storm event many decades or centuries ago breached the land divide and slowly the fresh water swamp evolved into a salt water marsh.

Interesting place to hunt but leaving on the dead low with slightly less water than normal I was barely making headway speed figuring I would clip a stump but somehow I got lucky.

Any thoughts?
 
Tough to say from your description. Here's a link to the bible on wetlands classification.
http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/wetlands/classwet/[url]
 
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Here in SE TEXAS we have what you call salt water intrusion. There are also cypress stumps in what is now a salt water marsh; some of them five ft. across. These trees were logged in the 20's and 30's. Due to dredging of the Neches river and canals cut for oil drilling over the years, salt water has destroyed what were once fresh water marshes. The Texas Parks and Wildlife are presently attempting to reclaim these marshes through building levees and using salt water barriers to restore back to the original fresh water marshes.
 
C~

Any chance it was a former Cranberry Bog ? - fairly common along the NE coast. The ones I'm familiar with on eastern LI were separated from tidal flow by a man-made berm/low dike. If the Cranberry farming were abandoned, a freshwater swamp would likely grow up. Our freshwater wooded swamps - just landward of our saltmarshes - usually have Red Maple, Tupelo and/or Pitch Pine as canopy trees - with numerous shrub species in the understory. A breach in the dike would allow salt water to return and kill off the whole swamp.

Also, most Atlantic saltmarshes are affected by both sea level rise (a foot per century, more or less) and also subsidence. So, the tidal waters are probably reaching further landward than in the past.

I'm sure a local ecologist from their DEC/DNR or USFWS can provide some harder information.

All the best,

SJS
 
With the exception of the pines our tree growth is the same in wetlands. We will get some white pines in our wetlands. I am in cranberry country and the breaching of a berm is along the lines of what I was thinking but your post seems more realistic.
 
We have open water areas down here that are full of pine stumps and roots. They are relics from when sea level was lower and what is now marsh or open water was pine savannah/shrub-scrub wetlands. As the sediment erodes from around them, they get exposed. Some are thousands of years old, but are still well preserved.
 
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