The Urban Pantheist

If you visit a Mass Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary at certain times of year, you are likely to encounter these small exclosures.


If you are lucky, you might encounter a small group of naturalists carefully digging out, marking, and relocating turtle eggs. They mark the eggs to make sure they are relocated in precisely the same orientation they were in previously.


If you are remarkably fortunate, you will encounter a diamondback terrapin in the act of laying her eggs in a hole she dug in the sand. This species is listed as Threatened in Massachusetts, in part because of their very particular habitat needs. They are neither pond nor sea turtles, rather they require the brackish water of our relatively scarce salt marshes.


A hundred years ago this species was nearly wiped out due to being collected as a food animal. Every nest counts toward bringing it back to a stable population.

Who's that in the hole in the mud of the salt marsh in Wellfleet Mass?


And who's that in the shallow pool at low tide?


Who's congregating in the muddy water by the hundred?


Why it's the Atlantic salt marsh fiddler crab! (Scientific name: Uca pugnax) These adorable little scavengers were very abundant when my dad and I went walking by the shore on our recent visit to Cape Cod. Sexual selection by the female crabs has driven the evolution of one oversized claw on the males.

Last weekend I went to the Cape to visit the seashore and hang out with friends. This is when I first got there and couldn't find anyone but I liked the random green things growing on the beach.
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