Guest Commentary To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues.

This fall has been one of the wettest in my memory — and yet, we haven’t had much significant rainfall, or a single hurricane or tropical storm make landfall. Still, the water lingers.

King tides have been washing over docks, creeping across yards, and flooding roads that once stayed dry except in the worst storms. For those of us living Down East in Carteret County, it’s a clear sign that something deeper is changing.

I’ve lived in Atlantic for six decades. I’ve never seen the roads hold water like this. The fields don’t dry out anymore. The ditches stay full — they just don’t drain.

When ditches stop working

For generations, Down East communities-built ditches moved water off the land and into nearby creeks or sounds. Those systems were based on one simple principle: gravity. Water flows downhill, and as long as the outlet of a ditch was lower than the land it drained — and the tide stayed low enough — water could flow freely.

But that balance has been shifting. The “hydrologic head,” or the difference in elevation that drives water to move from land to sea, has been shrinking as sea level rises. When the sea surface and ditch outlet are nearly the same height, there’s no longer enough downward pressure to push the water out. Even small rises in tide height or groundwater level can stop drainage altogether.

Today, many ditches are effectively at or just above mean high tide. That means during normal tides, water from the creeks seeps inland through the ditches, instead of the other way around. Even when a ditch still looks dry at low tide, the groundwater beneath it is now closer to the surface, leaving the soil perpetually saturated. Digging the ditch deeper doesn’t help — it only invites more saltwater in and raises the groundwater table even higher.

In short, the plumbing that once kept the land dry is backing up.

Ghost forests: symptom of a deeper change

Drive Down East in Carteret County, and the change is plain to see. Along North River, Core Sound, and the backroads of Cedar Island and Atlantic, stands of gray, lifeless trees rise like skeletons from the marsh — the ghost forests of a drowning coast.

Where there were once loblolly pines, red maples, and black gums, saltwater now seeps through the soil, killing the trees from the roots up. These ghost forests are not isolated patches — they are expanding corridors of dead timber that trace the slow inland march of the tides. They are, quite literally, the frontline of sea level rise.

The loss of these forests shows that this isn’t just a surface flooding problem. It’s the entire groundwater system responding to rising seas — a shift in the coastal hydrology that’s transforming once-productive working lands into wetlands and marsh.

What the future holds

If sea level continues to rise at its current pace — or faster, as most scientists expect — the next two or three decades will bring dramatic change to Down East Carteret County.

• Farming will become progressively more difficult, as fields stay too wet or too salty for crops or equipment.
• Roads will flood more often and for longer periods, isolating communities during high tides.
• Septic systems will fail, as the groundwater table rises to meet the drainfields.
• Homes and businesses built on low ground will face chronic flooding, declining property values, and higher insurance costs.

And yet, all this is happening without a single hurricane this year. The water is simply no longer leaving.

Working with water, not against it

The North Carolina Coastal Federation and many partners are working to restore natural hydrology on thousands of acres of previously ditched farmland and forestland. By filling or plugging ditches and re-establishing wetland systems, these projects allow the land to store and slowly release water — the way nature intended.

Restored wetlands act like natural sponges and filters, reducing flooding, improving water quality, and providing habitat for fish and wildlife. More importantly, they show that living with water is possible — but only if we plan for it, rather than trying to drain it away.

Facing reality

The ghost forests now lining our creeks are not just dying trees; they’re a warning. They tell us that the old ways of managing water — cutting deeper ditches, pumping harder, pushing it away — will not work in a world where the sea itself is rising.

Down East has always lived close to the water and thrived because of it. But if we want our communities to endure, we’ll need to give the land room to breathe again — to let it hold water where it must and adapt to what’s coming.

Because the water isn’t waiting.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review.

As you near Wilmington for your beach vacation, you take in the classic coastal Carolina scenery — tall longleaf pines, grassy marshes, and the wide Cape Fear River. But then something strange catches your eye: a forest of bare white tree trunks rising from the swamp like a field of bones. The eeriness of this ghost forest — a place where living woods have turned to watery graveyards — leaves you wondering, “What killed all the trees?”

The answer researchers with the University of North Carolina Wilmington found in the boneyard may surprise you.

For centuries, bald cypress trees thrived on the banks of the Cape Fear River and its tributaries. Bald cypress trees — ancient survivors — are not fragile. These giants can live for thousands of years, stretching to 120 feet tall and standing strong through hurricanes thanks to buttressed roots that prevent the tree from toppling in high winds. An hour away, cypress trees on the Black River are some of the oldest trees in the world with some in Three Sisters Swamp found to be aged at over 2,600 years using tree-ring dating in a 2019 study. But here along the Cape Fear River — like much of the East Coast — many of them are dying and leaving behind ghost forests.

The cost of ghosts

Ghost forests aren’t just spooky. They’re a warning sign. Remote sensing photos from a 2020 paper by Jessica Lynn Magolan and Joanne Nancie Halls show Smith Creek’s freshwater wetlands giving way to salt marsh. Old-growth freshwater swamps are engines of life. They shelter birds, fish and reptiles. They store vast amounts of carbon. Their roots absorb floodwaters, buffering nearby communities when hurricanes roar ashore.

Ghost forests, by contrast, provide little protection. They are markers of loss — loss of biodiversity, of resilience, of time.

And they’re spreading.

Digging into the past

On a warm morning standing in the mud near Smith Creek, graduate student researcher Kendra Devereux of the University of North Carolina Wilmington holds a cylinder of tree core to the light. Each ring tells a story of a year in the tree’s life: how much it grew, whether it was stressed, whether conditions were good or bad.

Devereux and her team are piecing together a mystery. Along with her research advisers, Dr. Monica Rother and Dr. Andrea Hawkes, and a team of other collaborators and students, she’s collected tree cores and sediment samples from two sites on Smith Creek, looking for clues hidden in growth rings and in the microscopic remains of creatures. Tiny, fossilized organisms buried in the layers of river mud act like timekeepers, revealing how salty the water was at different points in history. By studying them, the team can reconstruct how salty the water was when they lived.

And the evidence revealed in their report points to what may be a surprising culprit.

A river made deeper

The cypress deaths weren’t just caused by globally rising seas or regular tides. It appears that the trees were undone, in large part, by ongoing dredging.

Over the last century, the Cape Fear River was repeatedly deepened to allow bigger ships to reach Wilmington’s port. Each time the channel grew, for example, in 1912, 1930, 1946, 1950, 1970, and from 2000 until 2005, more ocean water pushed upstream, according to a 2011 UNCW study for the Army Corps of Engineers that monitored how deepening the Wilmington Harbor would affect tidal range. Combined with rising sea levels, that extra saltwater slowly crept farther upriver and into tributaries like Smith Creek. Even tiny increases in salt can stress or kill bald cypress trees. For people, it was invisible. For trees, it was deadly.

And the problem may only be exacerbated if the Wilmington Harbor channel is deepened from a depth of 42 feet to 47 feet.

Earlier this month, the Corps released a draft environmental study on the proposed multimillion project, which would permit larger ships to cruise from the mouth of the Cape Fear more than 20 miles up river to the North Carolina Port of Wilmington.

Salt: silent killer

Freshwater has almost no salt. Ocean water is about 3% salt, or about 35 parts per thousand. Bald cypress trees start struggling when there’s just a trace more salt than they’re used to. To put it in kitchen terms, just over a pinch per gallon is enough to start killing them. Older trees, despite their size, seem more vulnerable. Along the saltier stretch of Smith Creek, untold numbers of older trees have died, leaving only snags — the standing skeletons of once-living giants.

Upstream, where the water is fresher, cypresses are still thriving, with at least one more than 800 years old. But closer to the Cape Fear, trees that have managed to survive amidst the ghost forests show signs of years of stress, with observable ring patterns that coincide with the dates of major dredging projects. In the 1970s, cypress growth was suppressed in the area with high salt. By 2000, whole stretches of trees had died, leaving behind today’s ghost forest.

A warning rising with the tide

As Wilmington faces sea level rise and continued dredging, Rother, Devereux and the other authors found, the salty tide will keep pushing inland. That means more ghost forests, fewer living cypress trees, and greater risk of flooding for the people who call this coast home.

The white skeletons along Smith Creek are more than strange landmarks. They are warnings etched into the landscape, reminders of how human choices and a changing climate can reshape even the hardiest of forests. As Rother explains, “Climate change and sea-level rise will form more ghost forests across the Atlantic and Gulf coasts,” leaving communities with less natural protection from flooding. And with continuing dredging of the Cape Fear River bottom, hurricane-prone Wilmington could face even greater risks.

Next time you cross that bridge, look again. The ghost forest isn’t just haunting the swamp, it’s a warning carved into bone-white silence.

Guest Commentary

To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues. 

Life along the North Carolina coast is steeped in saltwater – but the future seems to be drowning in it. With 1 meter of sea level rise expected by 2100, rising waters are already encroaching on low-lying coastal communities. Chronic flooding and intense storm damage have become the new normal. Stands of ghost forests, stressed to death by saltwater in the soil, announce a clear message: Move, adapt, or drown.

Folks who live here are figuring out how to trade resistance for resilience. Coexistence with the sea could become a bridge to the future. Bulkheads attempt to enforce a static line on a dynamic shore. The ocean continues to defy this hard boundary. The soft boundary of a living shoreline ensures connection doesn’t transform into fear, cooperation doesn’t sink into combativeness. Where do we start to build a future that works with the shorelines of North Carolina?

A rising crisis 

The issue of sea level rise is urgent and unavoidable on NC coasts. Where roads keep flooding from higher tides and ditches don’t drain anymore, “you’re seeing it. This is sea level rise,” says Christine Voss, retired research associate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences based in Morehead City. Even if they don’t use the phrase “sea level rise,” she says “people are noticing changes.”

Voss likens the situation to the health of a patient: “Sea level rise, that might be like your allergies… and then comes a hurricane. And because you may have been worn down by your allergies, when the cold or the pneumonia or the flu comes by, you’re actually more susceptible.”

She says that it’s easier for us to notice the big events like hurricanes, but really what we’re seeing with sea level rise is a cumulative effect of both hurricanes and a higher water table. Higher groundwater levels decrease soil’s ability to absorb floodwaters. The constant stress of waterlogged existence makes the coastal ecosystem immunocompromised. 

For properties that border the ocean, a range of options exist to “hold the line.” Traditional gray infrastructure manages the coastline with solely hard materials. This includes concrete seawalls and fiberglass bulkheads that act as armor against constant wave action. Fully natural, or green shorelines, include sandy beaches and salt marshes that fluctuate with the tides. There are also shoreline management strategies that combine gray and green elements, such as sills with planted vegetation or oyster reef breakwaters. 

Walling ourselves off

When threats loom, we resort to division, installing walls to armor ourselves against a fight with the waves. “We’re still pretending like we can hold it all in place for forever, everywhere…from Maine all the way around to Padre Island, Texas,” says Rob Young, geologist and director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University. Fighting the ocean is a losing battle.

“Seawalls don’t stop the shoreline from moving,” he says. “It just sort of draws a line in the sand. Eventually the beach disappears in front of the seawall, because the seawall isn’t halting erosion.” 

This combative approach against the sea is destructive to the very ecosystems that would protect us. The erosion of beaches amplified by seawalls is paralleled by the undoing of marsh by estuarine bulkheads. North Carolina has restricted the building of new seawalls since 2003 to protect beaches, but bulkheads against estuarine waters are ubiquitous, and the salt marshes they neighbor are in danger. 

When a bulkhead is built, “the marsh is going to drown in front of it over time,” says Young. The waves bounce off the bulkhead and “tear up that marsh.” The impulse to protect our properties threatens the protection of our collective future.

Waves deflected by a bulkhead eat away at the land beside it, prompting another bulkhead to be constructed. Alyson Flynn, environmental economist at the North Carolina Coastal Federation, describes this hardening cascade: “it got to the point where people had no choice, because their neighbors’ property was causing their property to erode so much faster, because they had a seawall up, that they felt like the only way to protect their property was to also put up a seawall. And so then it had this barricading effect across the whole shoreline.” 

A wall necessitates more walls until we’ve replaced the breathing border of marsh. Eight percent of NC’s coastline is hardened through bulkheads, groins, and jetties. A survey in North Carolina found that waterfront homeowners perceived bulkheads as the most effective shoreline protection, even though properties with bulkheads reported twice the cost of repairing hurricane damage as properties with natural shorelines. Yet permitting processes and homeowners still favor hardened infrastructure in pursuit of shoreline preservation.

“There’s this tendency to think that a seawall is easier and less expensive, and that’s not the case,” says Flynn. “Especially when it comes to some of the maintenance costs with living shorelines, it can actually be quite a bit cheaper, especially after storm events.” 

Adding life to the line

Living shorelines, which replace the hard line of a bulkhead with opportunities for vegetation and wave attenuation, are a step in the right direction.

When Havelock homeowner Vernon Kelly looked out at the bulkhead on his property, worn down by years of storms, he had a decision to make: “Do I just replace it back with another and better bulkhead, or do I really look at creating another alternative?” 

Kelly recognizes the value of nature that he witnessed as a state land surveyor. “I was out in the coasts, in the swamp…everywhere from Jacksonville to Down East,” he says.

He has seen his North Carolina change, witnessed the bulkheads of his neighbors fail to block the oncoming ocean. With assistance from the Coastal Federation, he installed a living shoreline and has since seen “a world of a difference.” 

The nature Kelly treasures has become part of his backyard, complete with new saltwater neighbors. “Minnows seem to have figured out, ‘Hey, we’ve got a sort of a haven here.’ I’ve seen an increase of blue crabs in that sill area. And I actually had one oyster starting to grow,” he says.

The living shoreline didn’t just protect as a bulkhead would, it created space for life on that section of shore.

“What we’ve done, it’ll save it for my lifetime, maybe my kids,” says Kelly. “But if Mother Nature really decides she wants to do something, we can’t stop her.” 

Not a solution, but a start

Living shorelines can’t stop the ocean from rising, can’t stop seawater from creeping inwards from the shore and raising the water table from below. Development on the precarious line between land and sea is built on the assumption that the line can be held with stronger armor. The coastline is not a property line to be guarded but a continually negotiated convergence of ocean and land. 

The sea has sustained community here since the Coree fished the Core Banks and the Neusiok harvested along the Neuse River. Yet these life-giving waters are now described using language of wars and monsters. Framing storms and floods as opponents sinks us deeper into a combative mindset. We can’t hold the battleline if the ground itself is transforming beneath our feet. The coasts as we know them will not be the coasts of our future. 

Embracing change might be the only way to navigate the changes we fear. “People are adaptable,” says Voss. “Enough people have to decide that things have to change.”

The salt marsh has a lesson to teach about handling change. Many shoots rooted in the soil, united in density and scope, can diffuse the force of oncoming waves. As the saltwater rises, the marsh travels. 

Marshes migrate landwards, racing against sea level rise toward safety. Responding to change allows for a chance of survival. Marshes might not keep up with dire projections of sea level rise, but hardened shores don’t even give them a chance in the race.

When a migrating marsh hits a bulkhead, a line that refuses to budge until a storm forces collapse, the marsh is made static. Trapped between wall and rising water, the marsh suffers from “coastal squeeze” until it drowns. Confronting an inundated future, those on the coasts can choose to heed the lesson of the moving marsh or drown with the walls.

Living shorelines are not the answer to save the coasts but they are a potential action toward reimagining future coastal resilience. Relinquishing the ideal of a manicured waterfront is the start of embracing an alliance with the ecosystems we inhabit. Starting in backyards like Kelly’s, there is an opportunity to recognize the value of wetlands and begin to dissolve the walls, physical and philosophical, built between humans and the sea. 

Note from Kocher: This article was reported, photographed, and written in partnership with the Pulitzer Center and the science journalism course at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort.

Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or our publisher, the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

HARKERS ISLAND – About a quarter-mile along the Soundside Loop Trail behind Cape Lookout National Seashore’s visitor center is a two-board wooden fence, indicating that hikers need to make a sharp left turn to stay on the path.

In addition to guiding foot traffic on the 0.8-mile-long trail through maritime forest, the fence at the bend is where a new public science project called “Chronolog” was recently installed. The online tool helps track changes in the environment. In this case, the ghost forest on that side of the island.

When hikers walk by, they can place their smartphone in the gray bracket attached to the top of the fence post to align their photo, take the shot, then email it to Chronolog. Once received, the photo will be added to that location’s time-lapse almost immediately.

Chronolog houses crowd-sourced time-lapses of parks, nature centers, wildlife organizations, schools and museums. Currently, there are more than 500 Chronolog stations in 45 states. The Cape Lookout station is the 18^th on the coast and there have been 10 submissions so far in the month since it was installed.

On a breezy morning in late June at the visitor center, Nate Toering, Cape Lookout’s chief of interpretation and education, explained that the Chronolog allows them to make informed decisions for managing that area of the park and provides “a better understanding of what’s going on in the environment around us.”

This Chronolog is part of a bigger project with the National Park Service, North Carolina State University and Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center. Four NC State undergraduate students worked with three mentors at the university on a ghost forest communication strategy for a senior-level course. The students wrote and designed a brochure as well as a “glideshow” that’s similar to a slideshow, called “Ghost Forests: The Dead Trees Down East.” Down East is a group of more than a dozen rural communities east of Beaufort. 

Ghost forests occur when healthy coastal forests are repeatedly exposed to saltwater through high winds, tides or storms, making the plants, or trees, with low salt tolerance die off, eventually being replaced by salt marsh habitat.

From the Chronolog photo station down the trail, Toering pointed out the gradual transition of the dead trees that are rotting and breaking, but farther inland, there are super healthy trees.

He said that they’re finding at the National Seashore more salt-tolerant species in areas that didn’t have salt-tolerant species before, and are interested in observing the growth of the ghost forest and potential erosion in that area.

Jutting past the ghost forest, several yards away from the existing station, are the jagged remnants of a walkway across a salt marsh that had been destroyed by Hurricane Florence in 2018.

Toering said there are plans to rebuild the walkway, hopefully by the end of the year. When that build is complete, there will be a second Chronolog installed looking toward the ghost forest in the direction of the existing Chronolog, to provide a panoramic view.

Long term, especially after the second Chronolog is installed, there will be a more site-specific assessment of the growth of the ghost forest, such as how fast an area that used to be a forest is transitioning into salt marsh, he explained.

Toering said that as a ranger, he provides frontline messaging on ghost forests and encourages visitors to participate in this public science project. Adding, he’s trying to get people engaged, more knowledgeable about their environment and more caring about what’s going on around them. “Because one way or another, it impacts all of us.”

Part of that frontline messaging is providing to visitors the brochure, “Ghost Forests: What are they and how can you spot one?” that the NC State students designed for their senior course, called a capstone project.

Dr. Erin Seekamp, distinguished professor of resilience and sustainability and director of the Coastal Resilience and Sustainability Initiative at NC State, coordinated the project.

Seekamp has been working with the Down East community since 2015 on adaptation planning for Cape Lookout’s historic districts, and had discussed with Core Sound Museum and Heritage Center Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher that ghost forests are a good indicator of the vulnerabilities in these communities. 

When Seekamp was approached by a colleague to design a capstone project for the interdisciplinary degree, environmental sciences, she said she immediately connected the two. 

Serving as community liaison, Seekamp brought in as a ghost forest expert for the project Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources associate professor Dr. Marcelo Ardón, who has been behind installing Chronologs on the coast, and science communicator Michelle Jewell with the Department of Applied Ecology and president of the Science Communicators of North Carolina.

Seekamp said that this project helps students recognize how applied science is important, and integrating that with community engagement. Engaging students in the process of observation opens the door to being more aware of your environment and watching change, as well as using science to understand the changes that are occurring.

The idea is to grow the project in future semesters. “We really want to embed the next phases to include integration of schools and that intergenerational learning component,” with parents and grade-school students, and have further conversations about the future and adaptation, Seekamp said.

Amspacher said Core Sound is dedicated to learning and sharing more about the changing environment along the coast and especially Down East.  

“Partnering with NC State and other universities has opened doors for us to be involved with the important research taking place around us. We are very thankful to bring the community into this conversation. We look forward to working with local students to use this Chronolog project as a way to increase their — and their families’ — understanding of how saltwater is already impacting our landscape.”

Students on the project were Rachel DeChicio, Andrew Barfield, Jordan Strickland and Arden Lumpkin, who each graduated this year with a bachelor’s in environmental sciences.

DeChicio told Coastal Review that one of her biggest takeaways from this project is how important it is to focus on a community’s culture and values when communicating about climate change topics such as saltwater intrusion and ghost forests. 

“Harkers Island has an amazing community that loves their home and has deep ties to the land, so it is important to create educational materials on climate change that inspire curiosity and not fear,” DeChicio said. “I hope people who visit the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center are able to learn a little bit about saltwater intrusion and ghost forests from our products, and are then able to identify why their coastal forests are dying. I hope seeing the formation of ghost forests on Harkers Island and having the knowledge to name that occurrence empowers people to learn more about combating climate change.”

Barfield added that he learned through this project how ghost forests are a very visible aspect of our changing climate. 

“It is my hope that ghost forests can be used as a tool to further educate the public on the many ways that our world around us is changing. The more involvement that we get from local communities, then the better chance we have of adapting to these changes moving forward,” Barfield said.

Strickland said in an email that the two main things he learned while working on this project are the technicalities of designing and developing science communication products and ghost forests in general. 

“One of the main reasons why I chose this project as my top pick when we were deciding teams, was because I never heard of the term ‘ghost forests’ before,” he said. “Of course, I knew they were not referring to an actual haunted forest, so it intrigued me.”

After learning what ghost forests are, and how they have begun to spread on the coast of Harkers Island, he said he wanted to help provide the community with information about what ghost forests indicate.

“I knew if me, as an environmental science major, didn’t know much about ghost forests, then that means most of the general public doesn’t as well. Ghost forests are not only an indication of climate change and sea level rise, but also foreshadow how our coastal forests could end up as these two factors continue to impact the NC coast in the coming years,” Strickland added.

Lumpkin said the project taught her the importance of properly communicating climate science through the lens of who it impacts. The ghost forests that are popping up and growing quickly along the coast of these Down East communities are a tangible example of the effects of sea level rise and saltwater intrusion. Viewing this issue through the eyes of a community member gives you a wider perspective on the best way to communicate it. 

“The Down East community has a rich, generational history and connection with their land and have persevered in the face of many challenges,” she said. “My biggest hope with our project is that it will spark curiosity and conversation about climate change among the community. The Core Sound Waterfowl Museum is such an important place visited frequently by residents and I hope that our project can, at the least, be the start of a conversation about climate change impacts.”

Jewell explained to Coastal Review that this type of class project works all the way around: “The community’s needs are heard and answered, the students receive training and experience in co-creation and science communication, and the researchers will get more data from this changing landscape. Truly encapsulating the N.C. State mission of research, teaching, and extension.”

Science communication is an iterative process, and the hope is that this piece is the first of many touchpoints, Jewell said. “Our aim is to create a space for community members to engage with the changes happening around them. And that engagement can come in many forms,” from submitting photos at the Chronolog site, to being able to identify and understand ghost forests. 

The Chronolog station on Harkers Island is one of the nearly 20 that Ardón with NC State has either installed or helped coordinate the installation along the coast.

He said in an interview that the idea to have the public help monitor ghost forests dates back a few years and was asking the public to submit photos through an online platform before discovering Chronolog while on vacation on Bald Head Island.

Chronolog’s process appealed to Ardón. Rather than photos being submitted from all over, have the public take photos of the same location to make tracking the changes easier to observe.

He explained that these forests and marshes change on the scales of decades to centuries, but they’re probably changing a lot faster, on the scales of years to decades, “but that’s still pretty slow for us to see on a regular basis. I think the idea was if we have these photographs, then maybe it’ll become a little bit easier to see the change of these ecosystems.”

Ardón said in addition to looking at change over time, he wants to use the photos to study how the seasons change the landscape. 

With a grant through the National Science Foundation, Ardon began in 2021 installing Chronolog stations at Goose Creek State Park, Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, E. Merle Waterfowl Impoundment, and Swan Quarter National Wildlife Refuge.  

After installing the first round, he said N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources officials liked the project and decided to fund 11 more stations. He worked with the site managers to determine the best location for each Chronolog, depending on what they wanted to document, such as a marsh or a living shoreline.

“For the ghost forests, I’m really interested in looking at how long the snags, the standing dead trees, actually last, because there’s been some studies of those snags but there’s not a lot of good fine-scaled information of: How often do they fall over? Is it just after big storms? Is it small storms? Is it just after time that eventually they fall over? So those are the kinds of questions that I want to answer with these stations,” he said. 

Full-time graduate students attending colleges and universities in the state have until Aug. 11 to apply for funding to support ghost forest research.

North Carolina Sea Grant and North Carolina Space Grant are offering the joint funding opportunity of $10,000. For details on the required proposal elements and submission process, visit go.ncsu.edu/ghost-forest-research.

North Carolina Sea Grant Deputy Director John Fear said that regional research on ghost forests, including a variety of remote sensing tools and mapping technology, is especially timely because the state is vulnerable to the impacts of sea level rise.

“One of these impacts is conversion of coastal forests to wetlands and eventually open water,” Fear said in a statement. “This process proceeds through a ‘ghost forest’ stage. Tracking the loss of forests and its effects is a sentinel tool in understanding and responding to how our coastal habitats are changing.”

Graduate students encouraged to apply are those attending historically black colleges and universities, and minority serving institutions; from traditionally underserved and underrepresented communities; and who can demonstrate how their work and related outreach will benefit underserved and underrepresented communities, coordinators said.

Jobi Cook, associate director of North Carolina Space Grant, explained that ghost forest research will highlight tools from National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and provide opportunities for regional collaboration.

“Our programs have partnered with our sister organizations in Louisiana to jointly promote this opportunity,” Cook said in a statement. “Louisiana Sea Grant and Space Grant will fund a student to study the ghost forest phenomenon in their state. Their student and ours will collaborate, consider broader implications for their work, and have access to unique professional development opportunities.”

Guest commentary

The Cape Fear River is a historic and important body of water in North Carolina, flowing through the communities of Wilmington, Leland, Belville all the way to Southport and beyond. This river is our primary source of drinking water. For centuries, eons for that matter, it has been home to valuable wetlands and floodplains, diverse wildlife, and fish, and more recently a history steeped in our unique heritage and culture. Unfortunately, due to development and population growth, many of these historically important and scarce resources are rapidly being lost or adversely altered forever.

On my occasional trips to and from Wilmington along the U.S. route 74/76/17 causeway to the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, I have often wondered what the Ghost Tree stands on Eagles Island would say to us about this history they have seen. These trees were once part of a healthy and flourishing 1,700-year-old cedar forest ecosystem that spread throughout the region … but is now dead or dying.  

I wonder what stories could these trees tell us if they could speak? Would they warn us about the loss of our valuable wetlands and floodplains, rapid sea level rise, degraded water quality, and the future impacts of flooding in and around our lowlands? Would they speak on their opposition to the past and future development in our floodplains, the plowing under of our culture and history, or the future damage to our Lower Cape Fear ecosystem?

Somehow I feel that long ago when these trees were healthy they were witness to horrific tragedies of the enslaved West Africans, the Gullah Geechee, who toiled and died in the hot sun to grow Carolina Gold … the rice that helped to make plantation owners wealthy and Wilmington one of the richest seaports along the Atlantic Coast in the 1700s and 1800s. Were these trees witnesses who silently watched those who were enslaved, struggle for their freedom, and be robbed of their right to define their own identity?

For me, these trees serve as an ever-present reminder of our past, as they stand quietly along the banks of our river. They have witnessed hundreds of years of history that have unfolded since long before our area was developed. In our present rush to find economic prosperity, they are also a constant reminder of the dramatic alterations we have caused to our ecosystems. Changes made with the belief that humans could out engineer mother nature.

While it is true that the ghost trees hold a certain enigmatic charm to some of us, it is also true that they are a powerful reminder of the human and environmental cost that the river has borne. They serve as a testament and a bellwether, if you will, not only to the human violence of our past but a forewarning of future natural calamities coming to our shores.

I believe that at the intersection of preserving and protecting our environment and cultural history resides the universal language for all of us to tell our stories; it is the ultimate storyteller on a personal and public level. It truly defines who we are as individuals and as a community. It is the hallowed ground of what defines our society’s fundamental values and can serve as the “tree stump” upon which we can sit and tell this story to our children, grandchildren, and generations beyond.

We should be encouraged by the great and tireless work currently underway by many of our citizens and nonprofits, like the Beatty brothers of Navassa, to preserve, protect and celebrate the history and culture of our area. The stories of the enslaved Gullah Geechee are certainly ones of hardship and tragedy and yet it is the message of their resilience and determination that deserves far more than just a passing reference in our history books.

We have much to celebrate here in our area of eastern North Carolina: the dedicated efforts of the Cape Fear River Watch, the Southern Environmental Law Center and a host of dedicated volunteers who keep watch over our environment; the Coastal Land Trust and others restoring Reaves Chapel in Navassa; the annual Rice Festival in Leland; the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission; the Cameron Art Museum; and the Eagles Island Nature Park Task Force to name but just a few … each committed to preserving, protecting, and celebrating our collective history and offering great platforms for all of us to get to know the importance of our connection to the Lower Cape Fear River. I hope that future generations see and act upon the message of the ghost trees. We need to listen and heed their warning. 

Finally, let me summarize by sharing a poem that I have been working on for a very long time.

Ghost Trees of the Cape Fear River

As I gaze out o’er the Cape Fear River,
Where ghost trees seem to have eyes.
Enchanted sights from a haunted giver,
Spirits of old come alive.

Hear the whispers through the trees,
Of stories told within their rings.
Silted waters brown meandering,
Within this ancient course it brings.

Rice harvested in the heat of day,
Trees – their stories tell.
Relentless work, no time to play,
Ironic transition from heaven to hell.

Songs of fields, songs from souls,
Fade with twilight, just memories now.
As Cape Fear ghosts roam the shoals,
Like kindred spirits that never bow.

Watered with blood, watered with sweat,
Here is where gold was grown.  
With ancient hands cold and wet,  
Shadows dim of those unknown,

Darken sky, an evening’s chill,
As the veil of dusk descends.
Night brings fear and mystery,
Ghost trees’ presence lends.

Murmured messages of the old,
For all the moons they have seen.
Miseries’ waters that flooded their souls,
Speaks truth to what has been.

Silhouettes take root along the shore,
Revealing this, a solemn sight.
A languorous vision of ghosts before,
Frail branches of the night.

Listen to the whispers of ghost trees,
For they know this story well.
Through the ebb and flow of time,
They stand as the last farewell.

To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues. See our guidelines for submitting guest columns. Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

Encountering a ghost forest is a decidedly eerie experience. Tall, stripped tree skeletons remain standing long after they have died on the inside. The other deeply visceral part of the image is the sheer expanse of the ghost forests along the North Carolina coast, says Dr. Emily Ury, an ecologist at Duke University who studies ecosystem responses to rapid environmental change.

“Not just one or two dead trees, but hundreds of dead trees in one area,” Ury said. “You know just by looking at it that it’s not normal.”

Ury is the lead author of a study published this month in the journal Ecological Applications called “Rapid Deforestation of a Coastal Landscape Driven By Sea Level Rise and Extreme Events.” The purpose of the study was to map rates of vegetation change in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on the Outer Banks using remote sensing techniques. Ury and her team analyzed data to measure the change in these coastal forests over a period of 35 years. They found that more and more coastal forestland is transitioning away from freshwater forest cover –and it is doing so quickly.

“The rate at which this is happening is fast, even for me, someone who studies climate change and ecological change,” Ury said.

“The rate at which this is happening is fast, even for me, someone who studies climate change and ecological change.”

Emily Ury, study author

Ury and her team found that 32% of the refuge had changed land cover classification over the last 35 years, whether that be through land loss, forest loss or shrubland expansion. This is happening despite the study area’s protected status as a National Wildlife Refuge.

About 19,300 hectares, or nearly 47,000 acres, was converted to marsh or shrubland, while 1,151 hectares was lost to the sea completely. What’s more, approximately 11% of forest cover transitioned into what has commonly become known as a “ghost forest.”

Ghost forests are not a random phenomenon. Most scientists accept the assumption that they are caused by increased exposure to salinity. Too much salt can cause widespread tree death, ultimately changing the ecosystem entirely. This results in habitat loss for wildlife and is capable of wiping out entire coastal forests.

Rising sea levels are one cause of the infiltration of salinated water into coastal forests. Data compiled by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science show that the sea level has been rising every year along the North Carolina coast for decades. While sea level follows a linear curve, Ury’s study shows that ghost forests aren’t following quite the same pattern. Instead, ghost forests seem to expand largely after extreme weather events. For example, the refuge saw 4,500 — plus or minus 990 — hectares of ghost forest form between  2011 and 2012. Ury attributes this high point in conversion to be caused by the end of a five-year drought and the impact of Hurricane Irene that hit the coast in late August 2011.

But either way, said Ury, both the rising tide and extreme weather events are climate change-related things. What’s more, ghost forests are also an indicator of other environmental consequences.

Coastal forests are known for sequestering carbon in high rates in both their soil and in their plant life, particularly trees. When these areas begin to convert, some of that carbon is released into the atmosphere.

Dr. Lindsey Smart of North Carolina State University published a study in 2020 about ghost forest mapping across the Carolina coast. Her study focused specifically on aboveground carbon loss as habitats convert. According to Smart, Ury’s study supports what she and her team of interdisciplinary scientists also found.

“The Duke study identified the potential role of severe storms and droughts in the proliferation of ghost forests, which gives us a better understanding of why these ghost forests can appear in a much shorter timeframe than previously anticipated or expected,” Smart said.

Ury’s study was the first mapping effort to use completely remote sensing data, like NASA’s 430-mile-high Landsat satellite images. Smart’s work also used this technology in part. According to Smart, the technological abilities to make these measurements have expanded exponentially in the last decade, as has access to that technology.

“With the increase in the availability of remote sensing technologies and access to big data, like this volunteer geographic info and drone imagery, we’re really able to piece together the stories of the landscape in time and space more completely,” Smart said.

This evolving technology will allow for additional research to take place in order to more fully understand why ghost forests appear and what they mean for coastal communities. In addition, Smart said some research is needed to determine how people along the coast perceive ghost forests and what steps they are willing to take in order to adapt to them. The coast is a mix of public and private land, and any further conversations about ghost forests should account for the communities affected by them.

“Different landowners have different values for their landscapes,” Smart said. “And it just shows how critical it is to bring landowners into the conversation.”

This information would allow for a fuller picture of the issue and its consequences, as well as help scientists like Ury and Smart piece together the stories of these coastal forests more completely.

EAST LAKE—The signs are written on the trees.

Dead trees.

Groups of what scientists call “ghost forests” bear witness to climate change, a reality that can be observed by driving U.S. 64 or U.S. 264 through the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.

Stark light trunks and barren branches sharply contrast with remaining green trees. The dead trees line ditches and canals throughout the refuge, pointing to a swiftly changing landscape.

“It’s dramatic,” said Scott Lanier, manager of the Alligator River and Pea Island wildlife refuges.

Lanier was one of three original Alligator River personnel when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began staffing the refuge in 1985 following its acquisition in 1984. Lanier stayed at the Alligator River and Pea Island refuges until 1991, then returned in 2006. He’s noticed a loss of refuge land from climate change.

“More land has become inundated,” Lanier said. Certain places where he once was able to walk are now underwater. The Alligator River refuge “is at a low elevation to begin with, so it displays the effects of sea level rise and saltwater intrusion pretty readily.”

As global warming has led to sea level rise, saltwater has increasingly come farther into the refuge and stayed longer than in the past.

The habitat changes are the most noticeable, Lanier said. Some marshy places have become open water; areas that were previously “shrub/scrub habitat” are transitioning to marsh; and some forests adjacent to water bodies have started turning into shrub/scrub habitat as trees die from prolonged exposure to saltwater.

“You get these wholesale changes, and it’s happening at a rapid pace,” Lanier said. “You can notice those differences in 30 years.”

The pond pines found in the refuge can tolerate wetter ground than the more familiar loblolly pines, but even pond pines can’t handle too much saltwater, he said. Older pond pines have died off along with members of other tree species, contributing to the ghost forests.

Saltwater intrusion, drier land and forest fires

The Alligator River refuge covers about 160,000 acres on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula in mainland Dare and Hyde counties. The refuge is bordered by the Albemarle Sound to the north, the Croatan Sound to the east and the Pamlico Sound to the south. The Alligator River — for which the refuge is named — cuts deeply into the western part of the land.

Emily Bernhardt, a Duke University professor, is leading a team of students who are studying the exact amount of land loss that sea level rise is causing and the habitat changes saltwater intrusion has prompted, Lanier said.

Bernhardt and two scientists from North Carolina State University spoke in a 10-minute video titled, “The Seeds of Ghost Forests,” which was published in May at sciencefriday.com.

Bernhardt explained that commercial farmers wanted to keep the land dry enough to grow corn, soybeans and other crops, so from the 1960s through the ’80s, they drained large swaths of forested wetlands with man-made canals and ditches. “Even though they were made to drain water off, they can do opposite,” she stated. “You can have storms that can push saltwater deep into the interior.”

Climate change causes more extreme weather patterns, such as stronger storms and more intense droughts. When droughts occur, the sounds get saltier, “in part because they’re evaporating and in part because they’re not getting fresh water off the landscape,” Bernhardt said in the video. This, like sea level rise, intensifies saltwater intrusion.

“The thing that’s actually happening is that salt is getting into a landscape and killing individual organisms, be they trees or microbes — so it’s actually happening at a very granular scale,” she said.

“The thing that’s actually happening is that salt is getting into a landscape and killing individual organisms, be they trees or microbes—so it’s actually happening at a very granular scale.”

Emily Bernhardt, Duke University

Drier land also contributes to the potential for raging forest fires.

These are different than the prescribed burning the Fish and Wildlife Service does about once a year on the Alligator River and Pea Island refuges. “Fire is a part of the life history of these pocosin forests,” Lanier said, and the habitats in the refuge need fires at different intervals.

But when people drain the forests, “fires can be catastrophic then.”

This has been seen already.

In 2011, the Pains Bay wildfire burned more than 45,000 acres, partly on southeastern refuge land and partly on the East Coast’s most active bombing range, which is located in the middle of the refuge, Lanier said. The fire shut down all operations on the bombing range, which the U.S. Air Force owns and the U.S. Navy also uses.

“It actually took Hurricane Irene to finally put it out,” Lanier recalled. “We ran into a period of drought and the peat soils were drained, water tables were low … we had a lightning strike and away (the fire) went.”

Contrast that with a fire prior to 2011, when a lightning strike set off a blaze in the refuge that burned out naturally after consuming 300 acres at most, Lanier said. “It behaved the way a pocosin fire should behave in a natural area.”

That’s because it was in the refuge’s most natural area, meaning it wasn’t ever ditched or drained, he said, noting the importance of restoring the refuge’s hydrology.

Pocosin is an Algonquin word for “swamp on a hill,” Lanier said. The pocosin forests have deep peat deposits — soils made of thick, decomposed plant matter built up over thousands of years that store huge amounts of carbon.

“Carbon contributes to global warming,” Debbie Crane, communications director for The Nature Conservancy, said in an email. “Peat soil is about 50 percent carbon.”

When the soil is dry, it emits carbon into the atmosphere, she explained. Rewetting the soil to restore the natural water patterns not only prevents that, but also prevents large-scale, damaging wildfires, which emit even more carbon.

A recent fire in the refuge, sparked by a lightning strike on July 3, sent a thick smoke cloud over much of Dare County and even the southern end of Currituck County.

The fire burned 160 acres until it was officially put out on July 10, according to Lanier. “It is normal for the refuge to experience natural-caused fires such as this when we go through dry periods,” he said. “All of the weather indices that we monitor were pointing to a high probability of a fire.”

Planning ahead

The Nature Conservancy was instrumental in helping the Fish and Wildlife Service acquire the refuge initially and remains a consistent partner.

“We know as the sea continues rising, that place out there is not only going to change, but we can potentially lose a good part of it.”

Scott Lanier, Manager, Alligator River and Pea Island National Wildlife Refuges.

The service, The Nature Conservancy and other conservationists are working with state agencies and any individuals interested in preserving wildlife to acquire lands located immediately west, and then farther west of the current refuge.

“We know as the sea continues rising, that place out there is not only going to change, but we can potentially lose a good part of it,” Lanier said. “We want to create corridors to link together, so as the sea rises, wildlife has a place to go.”

The refuge is home to a vast array of animals, including American alligators, neotropical migrant bird species, the endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers and red wolves, “one of the most endangered mammals in the world,” Lanier noted.

It’s also home to one of the largest American black bear populations in the eastern U.S. “We probably have one bear per about 4 square miles,” Lanier said. Four square miles is 2,560 acres, so that’s more than 60 bears.

In the meantime, The Nature Conservancy helped design and install six water control structures and four ditch plugs in recent years. The water control structures allow water to drain off the refuge at a more natural rate and also prevent saltwater intrusion from taking place on “wind tides,” when a strong, steady wind pushes the sound up into the refuge. “When you have a hurricane, all bets are off,” Lanier noted.

Also, to help minimize the effects of wind tides and erosion caused from higher sound water levels, The Nature Conservancy built 1,400 feet of oyster reef on the refuge around Point Peter Road. That project began in 2010 and wrapped up earlier this year, Crane said.

The conservancy and refuge also partnered to help restore hydrology in the 40,000-acre bombing range. The Air Force uses the range for target practice, and although the bombs pilots drop are inert, “because of the kinetic energy when dropping them, it can still cause fires,” Lanier said.

He and other refuge employees hope that by experiencing the beauty of the refuge, people will realize its importance and want to help preserve it. Canoe tours are offered several days a week during the summer at a cost.

Dani Canning, a refuge summer intern, led a tour on July 18. She gave a brief overview of the refuge’s wildlife and explained how the refuge was typically the northernmost range for alligators, but with warming temperatures, they’ve recently been seen closer to the Virginia line.

Jasmine Paesmans participated in the tour with her husband Patrick Randour and their three daughters. They’re from Belgium, so she enjoyed the different scenery and was excited to spot a small green snake in the water while paddling.

“We don’t have this kind of park in Belgium; it’s too small,” Paesmans said. Their family and friends, also from Belgium, planned to hike a trail in the refuge immediately after the canoe tour.

“These pocosin wetlands offer incredible ecosystem services,” Lanier said. “They help with being a buffer with large storms like hurricanes, serve as filters for water and preserve water quality.”

Mornings like this find themselves permanently etched into our memories, teetering on the edge of reality and dreamscape. Though it seemed as if I might drown in humidity, the stillness of the atmosphere was arresting. And the result? Sea and sky were one as heaven and earth joined at the horizon in perfect mirrored reflection. Clouds above, clouds below.

I was plying the shallows around a place called Middle Marsh, a tangle of spartina and oysters and mud and periwinkle snails with a small egret rookery thrown in for good measure. This wetland sits at the mouth of the North River between Beaufort and Harkers Island, and from the air it looks like some sort of cubist painting by Pablo Picasso that has begun to wash away. Strange lines, angles and patterns make up this salt marsh. The whole thing is laced with various tidal creeks and a proper dusting of duck blinds. The tide was high and the place thoroughly flooded thanks to the new moon that day. I was looking for tailing redfish, but what I found was something altogether very different.

Sunning itself in the lime green cordgrass that so dominates these salt marshes, was a dinosaur – otherwise known as an alligator. With my outboard raised high on its hydraulic jack plate, I eased my way in for a closer look. This wasn’t my first Carolina crocodilian. I have spent countless hours kayaking and photographing these ancient creatures along the blackwater recesses of our inner banks and knew they showed up in our estuaries from time to time, even occasionally being spotted on the beach. But this was my first chance encounter with one in the salt. Bottlenose dolphins worked their trade in the channel just beyond this marsh and I had stirred up a green sea turtle with tell-tale sunburst pattern on its shell as I first began to ease across the flats. Now here I was, leaning over the side of my skiff peering into the prehistoric eyes of an alligator where oyster beds and stingrays should be.

This could be considered a chance encounter, a fluke if you will. Up and down the Southeast coast, whenever an alligator shows up on the saltier side of things, we generally assume they were flushed out of rivers by heavy rains or the ebb of king tides. We have a century’s worth of biology to go by, which has told us this is not where alligators are supposed to be.

But we humans are a funny lot, big-brained and all tangled up in the stories we tell ourselves. We try to catalogue and classifying everything under the sun and pass off our understanding of the world to posterity. Wading through this collective knowledge, we scrutinize the past and craft euphemisms like “change is the only constant.” But knowledge and belief are two very different things. And so we become resolute in our assumptions, believing deep down that everything has always been, and always will be, exactly like it is right now.

In the realm of the life sciences, we have come to call this “shifting baseline syndrome.” Sound scary? You should probably be afraid. It’s contagious, life threatening and reached pandemic levels a long time ago.

A hundred years ago, we had the world of American crocodilians neatly organized. Alligators belonged in freshwater swamps, while only the American crocodile could be found in the saltwater – though confined to the Gulf Coast of south Florida. This makes sense. It’s where they were found at the time, albeit after 300 years’ worth of persecution. We also thought they were both just dumb reptiles that were better off exterminated to make way for the new top dog in town.

At that time, nobody knew that alligators could drink from a lens of freshwater that can be found floating atop of saltwater. Nor did we know that both alligators and crocodiles collect sticks on their noses to lure in wading birds who are searching for nesting material – a little behavior we like to call tool use. And it wasn’t until the late 1960s that Robert Paine discovered the concept of keystone species through his work with sea stars on the coast of Washington, right when alligators were being placed on the Endangered Species List.

Today, we talk of concepts like shifting baselines syndrome in regards to our perception of what is and what is not normal. The whole idea was first put forth by the fish biologist Daniel Pauly and was in reference to the state of fisheries. Granddad’s stories of the good old days of fishing were just that: stories, nothing more. Hauls were never that big. Fish, never that numerous. At least that is what we believe – based on our own personal experience. And thus, we fail to grasp what the population of fish once were before our generation’s turn at catching them and especially before commercial fisheries developed.

The world that we are born into is what we accept as reality and assume that on some fundamental level reflects the way things have always been. And so, in Massachusetts for instance, Nantucket natives and the old salts of Cape Cod argue that the presence of 30,000-plus grey seals is unnatural, that great whites shouldn’t be in those waters and the whole ecosystem and that all their fisheries are going to fall apart because of it. Yet, we know from historical records that this is exactly what the place looked like when European fishermen first arrived and could fill a boat with cod by simply dipping baskets into the water – when fishing was at its all-time best. We now know that abundance begets abundance.

What is to say that when science first began to level its gaze at alligators in the early part of the 20^th century, that those biologists themselves weren’t already suffering from shifting baseline syndrome? By that point, Europeans and their descendants had spent about 300 years working on the wholesale destruction of all things predator. Long before such things as wildlife biologists and ecologists ever existed, our civilization had been hard at work remaking the world to its liking.

Brian Silliman, a marine science and conservation professor at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, argues in a new paper published in the journal Current Biology (download pdf), that this may be exactly what happened. As we enter this new era of conservation success, a time when we are finally beginning to witness real results from such legislation as the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act, a lot of those rebounding animals aren’t exactly doing what they are supposed to.

Today, we are watching as alligators become a regular fixture in salt laden estuaries from Texas to North Carolina. Studies are revealing that species like sharks and rays are regularly making up the diets of these reptiles presumed to be strictly freshwater in nature. Seals, once thought to be a denizen of the far north, are showing up with clocklike regularity on the Outer Banks and the subtropical waters of the Crystal Coast. Sea otters in California, a species associated with Pacific kelp forests, are also beginning to populate salt marshes – a habitat they were ever known to occupy. It’s like Nature Gone Wild out there.

Silliman refers to these species as the ghosts of nature’s past. His argument is not that alligators are really a saltwater species, of course. Crocodiles have specialized glands for expelling salt, whereas alligators do not. Instead, he argues that maybe, just maybe, what we are seeing is not accidental at all, but could very well be a matter of species re-inhabiting old haunts that they were driven from long before we started paying attention.

Studies dating back to the late 1970s reveal that gators were readily found in our state’s salt marshes at a time when their population was at its lowest. Down south, around Cape Canaveral, research shows that gators are found in dense numbers across seagrass beds and in mangroves – places that we once assumed to be the exclusive domain of sharks, sea turtles and American crocodiles. Other studies have identified alligators inhabiting full-blown marine ecosystems for up to a week straight before returning to the slightly less-salty waters of estuaries.

But here’s the thing: When it comes to alligators and saltwater, there is a solid correlation with protected habitats. Back in the early 1980s, here in North Carolina, salty gators were three times more common in the protected salt marshes of our national seashores than elsewhere. Alligators living in the Florida Keys do so only in those mangroves and creeks that fall within National Park lands. And all those seagrass beds at Cape Canaveral that alligators are making their living around, have been protected by the Kennedy Space Center. Simply put, it would appear that alligators are only beginning to occupy saltwater environments where people do not. Even my saltwater alligator falls into this category as Middle Marsh is a part of the Rachel Carson Estuarine Reserve.

All this begs a question about North Carolina then. When we find alligators hanging out in Middle Marsh, or on the beaches of Brunswick County, should we continue to assume that it’s all accidental? The official story is that they were probably just flushed down river by heavy rains. But what if that is not the case at all? What if we are beginning to witness the return to old estuarine haunts?

All of this could have very real consequences for the continued success of species that are beginning to make a comeback. If legislation is written to protect habitat for endangered species, then what does it mean when their habitat extends well beyond the boundaries we once presumed they functioned within?

The idea of conservation success is new to us. Since the 19^th century, when Americans first began to wake up to the impact that we had on the ecosystem and neighboring species, the story of doom and gloom has remained the same. More habitat loss. Populations continuing to dwindle. Another species pressed over the edge of oblivion. Though all is not yet right in the world, hard work is beginning to bear fruit. And this is something that nobody is ready for. We don’t even know what success really looks like. Is it 30-50,000 gray seals and a thriving population of great white sharks? Alligators lounging around on National Seashore beaches? This has not been part of the national conversation.

What does it truly mean for a species to be recovered? Is it when a population reaches a magic number pulled out of a geneticist’s hat and fits nicely into the sterility of legislation? Or is it when a species has re-occupied its home range and has resumed the ecological role it once played there? What if we don’t even know what that home range really was? And, given the fact that each and every one of us alive today suffer the delusional fevers of shifting baseline syndrome, should our assumption of what “recovery” looks like automatically trigger a hunting season?

So many questions yet to be answered.

I never did catch any fish. So taken by my discovery of that alligator laying up in the salt marsh, I lost track of time. As anyone with much experience in tidal creeks knows, you are always working on borrowed time in there. Everything is planned according the ebb and flow of tides – when you can enter, when you should leave. As both time and tide slipped by under the hull of my boat, I found myself overtaken with that sickening feeling that occurs when you suddenly and unexpectedly feel the sharp jolt of solid ground beneath your boat. Hopping into what water that was left, I grabbed my bow line and took my boat for a walk on its leash back to deeper water. Glancing over my shoulder, I watched 6 feet of alligator slip out into the gin-clear waters of the shallow channel and disappear into an estuary where it is probably supposed to be, but we are not yet ready to admit.