The Outer Lands: A Natural History Guide to Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, Block Island, and Long Island
Dorothy Sterling
Language: English
Pages: 200
ISBN: B00MO38WVK
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Did you know that horseshoe crabs have been around for 200 million years? That mussels "spin" long anchor lines and climb steep slopes with them? Do you know what a "Beetlebung" tree is?
This is all part of Dorothy Sterling's fascinating description of The Outer Lands, and the plants and animals that inhabit this peninsula and chain of islands along our New England coast.
THE OUTER LANDS Revised Edition A Natural History Guide to Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Block Island, and Long Island DOROTHY STERLING ILLUSTRATED BY WINIFRED LUBELL Foreword to the revised edition by Robert Finch W W. NORTON & COMPANY New York • London CONTENTS FOREWORD MAPS PREFACE IBIRTH OF THE OUTER LANDS The Big Ice • The Hills • Plains and Ponds • The Sea’s Work • Wind and Weather • 5000 A.D. IITHE OCEAN BEACH Tides • Waves • Sand • The Wanderers • Mole Crabs and
another bait worm, eats itself into house and home. As it burrows, it swallows most of the sand it dislodges. It digs a U-shaped tunnel with “entrance” and “exit” shafts that end at the surface of the beach. Living at the curved bottom of the U, the worm crawls up one shaft to feed and backs up the other to discharge wastes. Its castings, resembling those left by earthworms, appear on the flats as coiled strings of sand. A saucer-shaped depression a few inches away marks the head end of the
fish skeletons, bird droppings has almost disappeared from view. Like fallen leaves in the woods, the buried beach litter decays, forming pockets of soil. Here and there in the sandy soil of the upper beach, a few plants manage to grow. Sea Rocket Baked. by the sun, blown by the wind, showered with salt spray, these plants are stunted and scraggly. Although they are only a few yards from the sea, they cannot grow in salt water. Instead, they resemble desert plants. Like the cactuses of the
to the sea again to provide the islanders with a sheltered harbor. The Sea’s Work If you had been able to fly over the Outer Lands at the end of the Ice Age you would have seen barren gravel banks. The hills and plains were there, dusted with boulders and pockmarked by kettle holes. But there were no beaches, no stretches of green marsh, no dunes or woods. Cape Cod, wider than it is today, ended abruptly at the Truro highlands. Long Island’s south shore fronted on the Atlantic Ocean without the
Although it is the moon that starts the earth’s waters moving, the tides that reach our shores are shaped by different coastlines, currents and ocean bottoms. Two high and two low tides advance and retreat on the Outer Lands every day, but from beach to beach the height of the tides and the time of their arrival varies. At Provincetown, tide tables must be read attentively, for the drop between high and low water can be as much as eleven feet. Forty miles away at Nauset Harbor, the tidal range