The protection of Brooklyn’s salt marsh requires constant awareness and upkeep, lest we find the tidal wetlands in a receding sea of pollution and blight; the salt marsh remains home to a large number and variety of marine life quite unexpected in Brooklyn.
“This is the estuary -- a sort of nursery -- of our seas,” Barry Sullivan, superintendent of Gateway National Recreation Area, said in a radio interview. “All the fish, the crabs, the clams, all of the species that we as humans are dependent upon need these protective estuaries to breathe. Without them, without marshes like this to help stabilize these estuaries we would be losing those species and that’s why its protection is so critical.”
Created from glacial till left behind during the last ice age and shaped by erosion and wave action, the open water and wetlands portion of Jamaica Bay is about eight miles long, four miles wide and covers 26,645 acres. Most of Marine Park’s 798 acres consist of salt marshes and uplands into the Gerritsen Creek, the westernmost inlet of Jamaica Bay. Enclosed by the Rockaway Peninsula and protected from the Atlantic Ocean, the region currently hosts some 325 species of birds, 50 species of butterflies, and 100 species of finfish. A favorite stop for migratory waterfowl, the area is an integral part of the larger, regional ecosystem.
Reports compiled by the Gateway National Recreation Area detail that nearly 20 percent of North America’s species of birds visit the bay every year as they follow the Eastern Flyway migration route to their breeding grounds further north. Saltwater marshes serve as nursery, feeding, and spawning sites and a refuge from predators for finfish and shellfish. The edges of the marshes are used by transient and resident fish and crustaceans, while the interior portions provide an important food sources for adult fish.
Endangered and threatened species such as peregrine falcons, piping plovers, and the Atlantic Ridley sea turtle live in or visit the bay, along with more than 325 kinds of waterfowl and shorebirds. The Northern Harrier, marsh hen and other birds also are common. Tall, leggy herons and the white snowy egrets wait patiently along the tidal creeks for small fish to swim by to become their lunch. Even the majestic bald eagle has become much more common in recent years and can often be seen perched at the marsh's edge, or dining on a fish. From June through August, clapper rails can be heard calling throughout the marsh. In winter, freshwater and marine waterfowl find shelter in the creek. Winter visitors include scaup (a species of diving ducks), ruddy duck, mute swan, Canada geese, and common loon.
Broad expanses of fertile salt marsh, meadows adorned with wildflowers, sandy dunes held in place by beach plants, and jungle-like thickets of shrubs and vines dominate the landscape of the Marine Park marshland. Myrtle warblers, grasshopper sparrows, cotton-tailed rabbits, ring-necked pheasants, horseshoe crabs, and oyster toadfish are a small sampling of the animals that inhabit these plant communities and live in or around Gerritsen Creek.
The marsh doesn’t only provide health and home for marine and fowl species, it offers protection to the neighboring human inhabitants as well. Jamaica Bay’s wetlands mitigate flooding and provide shoreline erosion control for homes and businesses. The neighborhoods surrounding Jamaica Bay are home to more than a half-million New Yorkers, and the marshes serve as coastline buffers from waves, tides, winds, and floods, and can help reduce coastline erosion and property damage from storms. They are the ecosystem’s kidneys, filtering out pollutants in the water, capable of transforming large quantities of organic pollutants, suspended solids, and metals from runoff and wastewater effluent into organic matter.
More than simply providing a respite from urban life, the wetlands preserve and protect this place we call home.
