File:Coast watch (1979) (20659161305).jpg

Title: Coast watch
Identifier: coastwatch00uncs_7 (find matches)
Year: 1979 (1970s)
Authors: UNC Sea Grant College Program
Subjects: Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology
Publisher: (Raleigh, N. C. : UNC Sea Grant College Program)
Contributing Library: State Library of North Carolina
Digitizing Sponsor: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
granddaddy A.A. died several years before I was born near the floodplains of the Black River. Yet he left me a gift that could only have been more precious had I taken it from his hands. A month before his death, he bought 210 acres of Sampson County farmland between the old North Carolina railroad towns of Kerr Station and Ivanhoe. It was there in the shadow of the Black's cypress, gum, live oak and loblolly pine that I spent my childhood in awe of his legacy. family lived a half- mile from the banks of this blackwater river in a two-story antebellum house cluttered with antiques. Window screens were our air-conditioning; the songs of owls and whippoorwills in the swamp, our vespers. The river was ever present in our lives. At our berth on the Black — Jackie Landing — local fishermen would net the bounty from the spring runs of herring, frying the bony fish to a crisp in cast-iron cookers and scrambling the roe with eggs. These evenings were dark and smoky and deli- cious. In the swamp, I was an honorary Boy Scout, playing Capture the Flag, building rope bridges and going on fruitless "snipe hunts" with my brothers. My stewardship efforts along the Black began early with a concern for bear, deer, bobcat and other animals. At 9,1 nailed to a tree a piece of cardboard on which I wrote in magic marker: "Wildlife Pre- serve: No Hunting. No Loud Talking." The soggy sign was my dec- laration to the world that this was a hallowed place. Now, almost 20 years later, the world is awakening to this slow-winding tributary of the Cape Fear River. I expanded my own appreciation of the Black River on a canoe trip in January, gorging on a sensory feast and rekindling my love for a river that has flowed through my life. Formed by the confluence of Great Coharie and Six Runs creeks in the belly of Sampson County, this 66-mile stream siphons the South River, then winds through Bladen and Pender counties before spilling into the Cape Fear about 16 miles above Wilmington.
Text Appearing After Image:
Cypress knees Though the watershed drains such larger towns as Clinton and Dunn, the Black River skirts mostly sleepy com- munities such as Harrells, Atkinson and Currie. Its centuries-old cypresses have landed the Black in the pages of The New York Times and Audubon maga- zine and rooted the river in the public consciousness. In the early 1980s, the state's Natural Heritage Program alerted an Arkansas researcher to an area of old-growth bald cypress along a 9-mile section near the river's midpoint. The scientist, who studies the history of world climate change by coring old trees, expected to find specimens a couple of hundred years old. What he found were trees that most likely shared the earth with Jesus Christ. "It's my firm belief that there are many 2,000-year- old trees at Black River," says David Stahle, a dendrochronologist at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. "The oldest one we've found is 1,700 years old. But many of the super-old trees get heartrot, and we've only cored a small fraction of the ancient trees still present on the Black. It's reasonable to conclude that some of the old Black River cypress have been there for over two millenia. "These are the oldest trees that we know of in east- ern North America and some of the oldest in the world," says Stahle, who is using his tree-ring data to reach centu- ries into the past to reconstruct drought patterns and possibly predict climate variation in the future. Stahle has also cored long-dead trees preserved in the water to further extend the chronology. The ancient cypresses may be the river's biggest celebrities, but pristine water quality, unusual plants and ani- mals and undisturbed scenic beauty also distinguish this coastal plain tributary. Two rare fish, the Cape Fear chub Continued COASTWATCH 3

Note About Images