on the Peconic Estuary

Yesterday, by chance, I was at two of the most beautiful locations on the East End. One is a private house on a low bluff overlooking Red Creek Pond and Peconic Bay in Squiretown, north of Hampton Bays and just beyond a large area of preserved pine barrens and wetlands in the Hubbard Creek/Red Creek area. The other is the Salm estate in North Sea over looking Scallop Pond, Cow Neck, Peconic Bay and sitting in the middle of a largely undeveloped area of woodlands, wetlands and farmland still owned by the Salm family. The house itself consists of two restored old farmhouses now joined together plus outbuildings. Scallop Pond is a Nature Conservancy preserve connected to salt water by a complicated estuarine system that eventually exits into Peconic Bay at Sebonac Inlet (not far from where NYC mayor Bloomberg just purchased an old estate). The whole area is one of the best preserved parts of the East End and the Salms, always great preservationists and conservationists, have played a major role in keeping it that way. The occasion for the visit was a benefit for the Peconic Baykeeper. By a nice coincidence, Kevin McAllister, the director of the Peconic Baykeeper, keeps the Baykeeper boat on Little Weesuck Creek just opposite us in East Quogue. McAllister is one of the great defenders of our beleaguered waterways and wetlands (the South Shore as well as the Peconic system) and the organization deserves all the support it can get. Yes, this is a plug; is the web site.

The whole run of the north-facing shore of the South Fork -- actually starting far west of the Shinnecock Canal at the mouth of the Peconic River and continuing east through the Flanders marshes, the Hubbard and Red Creek areas, Squiretown and Squires Pond, Sebonac and North Sea, all the way to Jessup's Neck (the Morton Refuge) and the Sag Harbor wetlands and even beyond into the north slope of East Hampton Town -- constitutes a single biome or environmental unit. The Ronkonkoma moraine is here invaded by salt water and itself has a high water table with fresh water oozing or flowing out from underneath. The moraine which itself is eroded in places, forming high bluffs that overlook the bay and are surrounded by ponds and wetlands as well as sandy/pebbly beaches created by erosion from the bluffs. The whole is a major part of a grand estuary and closely connected to the Peconic Bay system and all its subsidiary bays. Although neither Cow Neck nor the Salm homestead is open to the public there are public roads in the area including a dirt road that goes west from Scott Road in North Sea to Scallop Pond.

I got out for a nice walk yesterday and briefly this morning before the deluge but there was little to report. An Eastern Phoebe was working the bushy edge between the woods and the marsh. Swallows and martins were active yesterday but entirely out of sight this morning -- the first morning that I did not see anything of these aerial acrobats since the early spring.

Eric Salzman