The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1937-01-21

lTE A g UE ISLAND
those were made of mud and land silt
and not the bright water-washed sand
of the clean ocean. And when this
happened the centuries of time were
approaching the centuries of the pres
ent though there was still much to be
done.
Up to this time the mud bars had
been the home of scallops and CLANS,
of crabs that had come in from the
ocean, and of the countless myriads
of creatures that make mud bars their
dwelling place. But as the bars ap-
peared above the surface there stole
out, even as one can see stealing today,
little green algae and water grasses,
cattails and the tall stems of wild rice.
These things spread their roots
abroad and anchored the bars, made a
dense mating of INTERVENING fibers
that held the soil together. At times
the storms came in and tore at the
grass roots, pulling them loose and
casting them on the waters, but this
was only at the edges, for the roots
were too strong to be torn completely
apart.
Thus the bars became grass islands,
spotting the lagoon in profusion, and
thus the lagoons existed when the
Indians first appeared out of the I'M
known, and thus they have remained
to the present, and thus they will re-
main until our children's children are
gone. For the lagoons change but
slowly.
With the coming of the reeds and the
reed islands there came host of
creatures that had not been there be-
fore because until the reeds grew there
was no shelter or food. On the wings
of the north wind came hordes of
ducks that fairly blackened the sky
and so Uttered the waters between the
islands that the channels were scarcely
visible. There came grebes and rails
that made the marshes ring with their
clacking, herons and all those things
common to marshes and lagoons.
Most interesting of all there came
the black-backed, white-breasted skim
mers which were expressly designed by
a scheming nature for these same la
goons with their INTERVIEWING chan
nels. Swimmers possess a bill made
for scoopiing up tiny organisms in the
runways of water between the grass
islands and they would find it diff
cult to exc an existence elsewhere.
In these birds the lower bill is longer
than the upper and is so formed that
when these birds are feeding they can
"skim" lightly over the surface of the
water, thrusting into the water only
the lower portion of the bill which
acts as a scoop for the small mater
ials floating at the waters surface. No
place in the world is so perfectly ad-
justed for Swimming and scooping" as
these same lagoons Of Sinepuxent and
Chincoteague Bays.
| #**
What is to be the ultimate fate of
these bays? Will they fill up and be-
come solid land or will they remain
as at present? Who can say? But if
we may place any credence in the
record of geology and in the history of
similar places, they will fill up with
sediment of the eroding mainland and
with the sand blowing off the dunes.
How long this will take we cannot
say, in any case it will not be in our
time. Much depends on the inlets
that the ocean breaks open and main
tains. And here is an interesting
thing. We would think that the waters
Of the bay, added to by the rain and
the DRAWINGS of the land, would rise
and burst through the dunes. But
this is not the case. Invariably when
new inlet is formed it is formed by
the action of the ocean breaking thru
from the outside. The ocean is the
dominant force.
And here is another interesting
thing. These inlets are not found in
any old place, so to speak, but are gen.
orally located at a point where the
coast makes a bend, and occur more
commonly the farther the barrier bar
is from its place of beginning.
Look at a map and see if it isn'e so.
Thus we have the lower end of Chinco-
league Bay dotted with inlets and the
upper end closed with an almost solid
bar. And here is a paradoxical thing.