Remembering Kent Island: Stories from the Chesapeake

Booey.

Part I

THE CHESAPEAKE BAY’S KENT ISLAND

First Things First

The Chesapeake Bay’s foundation was formed some thirty-five million years ago when a bolide—a bright, explosive fireball from the far edges of our solar system—slammed into earth at what is now the lower tip of the Delmarva Peninsula. Obliterating plants and animals alike in one cataclysmic cosmic breath, the event threw debris, both earthly and extraterrestrial, hundreds of miles, leaving a crater twice the size of Rhode Island and almost as deep as the Grand Canyon.

A series of ice ages caused fluctuating sea levels. At times coastal regions were dry land and at other times underwater. Glaciers formed and melted and formed again, carving channels through the coastal plains that would one day evolve into tributaries of the Chesapeake. When mastodons and saber-toothed tigers roamed our planet ten to twenty thousand years ago, the last of the glaciers thawed and flooded the ancient Susquehanna River Valley. The valley drained southward into the bolide crater, forming the earliest dimensions of the bay. On shore, conifer and hardwood trees began to grow, providing habitat for various plants and animals. Nomadic Paleo-Indians from the north began to roam and hunt the forests of the region. Sea levels rose and the Chesapeake Bay continued to expand, establishing its current proportions three to four thousand years ago.

The Chesapeake Bay is our nation’s largest estuary, a tidal body where salty sea water mixes with fresh water from inland rivers and streams. The level of salt content varies depending upon location, depth, season and rainfall. Depending on how you measure, the Chesapeake is a couple hundred miles long and, including tributaries, covers 4,500 square miles of surface. At any given time, the Bay holds fifteen to eighteen trillion gallons of water, yet it is fundamentally shallow, with an average depth of 21 feet. There are deep, dark depressions, however, the deepest being the 174-foot cavity off Kent Island’s Bloody Point.

Captain John Smith wrote of the Chesapeake Bay: Heaven & earth never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation. Courtesy of Nancy Sadler.

A large prehistoric animal tooth dredged from the bay with a modern shark’s tooth and a quarter to illustrate its formidable size. Courtesy of the Kent Island Heritage Society.

As it is with every place the mighty Chesapeake touches, natural history is Kent Island’s history. It’s what we live. It’s what we breathe. It makes us the people we are.

Our history begins here.

SUMMER TO FALL

Morning breaks over the Eastern Shore mainland and the sun shines across Kent Island, as it has since the island’s creation. Summer is ending and fall is in the air. The thunderstorms so common in humid June, July and August have subsided. Air and water temperatures will soon begin to drop noticeably.

The waters surrounding the island—the Chesapeake Bay, Eastern Bay, Prospect Bay, Kent Narrows and Chester River—support more than three thousand species of plants, fish and animals. The first links in the ecosystem’s food web consists of free-floating microscopic plankton, underwater plants and bay grasses, tiny creatures called benthos and detritus. Oysters, clams, jellyfish and horseshoe crabs that feed on the basic strand of the web are in turn prey for such higher-level predators as blue crabs, fish and turtles. Striped bass, or as we call them, rockfish, and bluefish feed on smaller species, while various marine mammals and some of the waterfowl that call the bay home return the favor. Humankind makes a meal of almost everything.

Oysters are one of the most famous of the Chesapeake Bay’s denizens. They grow on hard aquatic reefs known as beds, bars or rocks. Filled with nooks and crannies, oyster rocks can possess up to fifty times the surface of an equally sized mud bottom. Flatworms and mud crabs flourish here. Goby fish, blennies and toadfish often use oyster rocks as their primary habitat. Other species of fish and crabs, as well as terrapin, visit to breed, find food or seek sanctuary. Oysters also help the Chesapeake filter out pollutants. As the season changes, oysters and other shellfish begin to slow down their metabolism.

Underwater bay grasses are sensitive to dramatic changes in the bay’s salinity and chemical balance. Most need specific levels of clean salt, fresh or brackish—a mix of salt and fresh—water to survive and are, similar to oysters and clams, unable to migrate when conditions change. Late summer and early autumn is the height of hurricane season, a time when these critical links in the ecosystem are often most vulnerable.

Blue crab populations peak this time of year. Our favorite crustaceans are preparing to spend the cold months buried in the bay’s deep mud. Hibernating reptiles and amphibians, including diamondback terrapin, prefer embankments and the bottoms of shallow rivers and creeks. Yellow eels turn silver before heading out to sea to spawn. Rock and bluefish are near the top of the water, fattening up on smaller fish—Atlantic menhaden, bay anchovies or alewives. They’ll compete with seagulls and terns that swoop down on the same prey.

The shallows, from the shoreline to ten feet deep, cool off first. In a few weeks, if it’s a hard winter, they’ll be icing over. Before that happens, though, migrating flocks of waterfowl from the north will pass through. Tough, well-insulated geese, swans and ducks have migrated to the Chesapeake for thousands of years. The bay used to be a winter haven for millions of these visitors—they thrived on the small shellfish once visible under water that has become increasingly murky.

Shorebird nests are empty, but the muskrats in their marshy burrows and lodges keep right on having babies. Everybody prepares for Mother Nature’s long winter’s nap in their own way.

Charles Weezer Jones proudly displays his catch to his little brother Jeb, who doesn’t appear overly impressed. Courtesy of Nancy Sadler.

WINTER TO SPRING

Woodlands once covered up to 95 percent of the Chesapeake Bay’s watershed and Kent Island was likely no exception. These deep hardwood and evergreen forests created a wildlife habitat and acted as giant natural pollution filters—forests absorb runoff like a sponge, slowly releasing nutrients and sediment that would otherwise overwhelm the ecosystem. Mature trees create deep root systems that help prevent erosion of soil. Forests that border streams contribute to their healthiness by cleansing ground water before releasing it into the flow, and helping to maintain water temperature.

These streams feed into rivers that in turn flow out to the bay. As winter subsides and temperatures rise, resident catfish and sunfish will be joined by spawning shad and sturgeon. Freshwater tributaries support a multitude of benthic organisms, and when insect larvae here begin to hatch, an essential food source for hungry fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians is born. The streams meander through wetlands and tidal marshes that connect the inland to the bay and are critical links in both the food web and the pollutant filtering system of the Chesapeake. Vegetation grows here, and life thrives.

Oyster tongers carved holes in ice to work during the bicentennial winter of 1976–77, one of the coldest on record. Courtesy of the Kent Island Heritage Society.

Shrub wetlands are bogs along the edges of the forest where woody plants grow and birds and small animals feed. Closer to shore’s edge are the marshes, made up of grasses and hydrophytes—plants that have adapted to periodic water saturation. Cattails, reeds and three-squares are examples of the numerous wild plants that grow here. The marshes on Kent Island are brackish, as is typical for the middle environs of the Chesapeake. They tend to be saltier toward the south and fresher in the bay’s headwaters.

As the weather warms, nature stirs. Tundra swan are getting ready to go back to such places as the Arctic Coast and osprey and herons will be hungry when they return from their holidays as far away as South America. Great blue herons are headed to the privacy of their rookeries for mating season. Eagles are beginning to lay and incubate eggs. Most fish went deep or left the bay for winter, but as the thaw broadens, the croaker, spot and bluefish return from the Atlantic Ocean. Winter’s over when the perch and rockfish begin their spawning runs in earnest. These fish will spend the summer months feeding in our shallower waters, getting bigger and bigger.

Thousands of horseshoe crabs come ashore to lay millions of eggs. These prehistoric throwbacks, beautiful in their ugliness, have been welcoming spring with the rebirth of their species for four hundred million years. They existed before there was a Chesapeake Bay, or even an Atlantic Ocean.

For now, lots of nature is still asleep. Oysters and clams have slowed their metabolism down to the minimum. Blue crabs are inactive as well, settled into the deepest trenches of the bay. Once they emerge, they’ll reproduce and this new generation will grow so fast that they’ll literally be bursting out of their shells. Young crabs make an exact copy of themselves from inside every five days or so, then slough their hard outer layer. Within the span of a week to ten days, they’ll go from being called a hard crab to a peeler, a buster, a soft crab, a paper shell and back to hard crab again. The process slows as they get older; they shed their outer shells eighteen to twenty-three times over a two-year life span. They grow bigger and fatter with each molting.

Time goes on but there are constants in this world. The eighteenth-century French essayist Montaigne wrote, Let us permit nature to have her way: she understands her business better than we do.

Seasons change. It’s nature’s way.

NATIVES AND NEWCOMERS

Approximately twelve thousand years ago, as the planet was warming and hunter-gatherer tribes around the world were experimenting with agriculture, pottery and storytelling, nomads from the north began exploring the Chesapeake Bay. They followed the great bison, caribou and mammoth down the shores and through the forests of this rather newly formed estuary. In their quest for survival, the bay’s pristine magnificence may have been overlooked by these ancient nomads, but the plentiful game, fish, shellfish and shelter they found most likely made an impression.

Despite the natural lure of the environs, for thousands of years there were no real Chesapeake