The Wild Horses of Assateague Island, Maryland

    When the European settlers built their farms on the mainland, 300 years ago, their horses tended to get into the gardens and fields and eat everything the settlers tried to grow. So the British governor taxed livestock. The tax was heavy so the settlers, to avoid the taxes, grazed their horses on nearby Assateague Island. Over time these horses, being isolated from the mainland, developed their own characteristics to survive on a barrier island. They now have short legs and stocky bodies. They’re small, as horses go. They grow a heavy coat in winter and shed it in summer. They look bloated and they are. Why? Because the plants on a barrier island are surrounded by salt water. They take salt water in through their roots, and expel the salt through their foliage. So the horses are eating salty food. There are fresh water ponds on the island and these wild horses drink twice the amount of other breeds of horse. The salt makes them retain the water, so they look bloated.

            Assateague lies in two states: Maryland, to the north, and Virginia, to the south. The National Park Service (NPS) manages most of the Maryland part. The Virginia part is managed by US Fish and Wildlife as the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. The NPS manages the Maryland horses. There’s another herd of horses in the Virginia part of the island and they belong to the local volunteer fire fighters. Yes, really!

            Every year the fire fighters and volunteers round up their horses and swim them to nearby Fox Island. Then they auction off the foals to qualified bidders and use the money to fund the fire department. They must keep their herd down to a number that is sustainable for the wildlife refuge.

            The NPS, on the other hand, likes to take as much of a hands off approach as is practical. They want to keep the horses as wild as possible. They don’t intervene with food or veterinary care for the herd, except rarely. The horses live and die on their own. But what about overpopulation? The Maryland part of the island can comfortably sustain 80 to 100 horses and they have no predators.

            So the NPS introduced birth control! Each mare is injected every year. And it’s quite a chore. The horses recognize the NPS uniform and they know how close the rangers have to get to dart them, so they try to stay just out of range. Once the ranger gets a horse darted, the ranger has to find the dart and check to make sure it injected the mare.

            When a mare gets to be three or four years old, she’s allowed to have a foal because it increases the health of the mare and replenishes the herd. Then she’s darted for the rest of her breeding life.  Why dart the mares and not the stallions? If you miss one mare, you could get one foal, maybe two. If you miss one stallion, you could get one or two foals for each mare in his harem, if he has one.

            By they way, the herd is led by the top mare. The stallion’s job is to protect his harem from other males. He starts by moving his harem away from a rival stallion. That’s the only time he, and not the lead mare decides where and when the herd goes. If that doesn’t rid him of his rival then the posturing starts. If that doesn’t work it’s teeth and hooves. Few stallions are free of battle scars.

            Somewhere along the way, someone invented a more glamorous story of how these feral horses got to be here. They say a Spanish galleon sunk of the coast and the horses swam to the island. Romantic, but they just made it up for the tourists.

           

The Web Of Life

        We visited another, much larger nature preserve today. And they, too, have an incredible interpretive center. This one is built into the cliffs overlooking the estuary. When we were on the top of the cliff we were actually standing on the roof of the nature center. The front of the center is all glass which gives it a great view of the estuary and beyond.

            Much of the building was made from recycled materials. For example, all the tiles are  different. They were collected from remodeled buildings, left overs from new building and old samples. The tile layers at the center pull them all together in a wonderfully attractive way. The guy showing us around took both of us into the men’s room so we could see the artistic job they did. It’s very impressive.

            Part of the building is Teak wood and it, too, was recovered from other buildings that were remodeled or torn down. Even the rebar in the construction was made from recycled guns, knives and other weapons confiscated by the sheriff’s department and melted down.

                                               

            In the photo of the building, the semicircle on the patio in the lower left quadrant is a compass. People get confused here because the ocean isn’t to the west, it’s to the south.

            The vast marshy area in the other picture was going to be drained and filled with roads, condos and strip malls. You can see the cliffs above the marsh are built to the max. Thankfully it was saved, as it’s a critical stop-over habitat for a number of migrating bird species, some of them endangered. The center successfully reintroduced the cactus wren who’s numbers are declining due to destruction if it’s coastal sage scrub habitat.

                                                    

            Most species of migrating birds have left by this time, but the area is still filled with life. They have bobcats, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, a number of rodents, resident birds, reptiles, amphibians and insects. The food chain is fully intact here. This might be the last thing one would expect to find in Newport Beach and we applaud the citizens of Orange County for protecting this island of nature.

Art & Roxanne 

Welcome to our adventures! First up, Exploring Newport Beach.

A few years back, well several years.. well ok.. a decade or so ago, we decided that we would forsake the beaten path, retire and just discover America.  And what discoveries we found!

We have taken numerous journeys, but almost never on the beaten path.  It seems our dream in life is to find the undiscovered and unusual things about our beautiful land.

This is our first post, but I am going to venture back in time to one of our old adventures at Newport Beach.  And here we go!!!!

Exploring Newport Beach

            Newport Beach is home to the worlds largest Mercedes Benz dealership. We drove by there today and it’s huge. The building is three times as large as any dealership we’ve ever seen. Not far away are dealerships for Porcshe, Audi and Ferrari. The Ferrari dealership is next to the McDonalds. You could buy a Ferrari, then drive through and get a Big Mac. More than a quarter of the households in the area have an income of $200,000, and the median home is valued at more than a million dollars.

          But nature can be found here amid the cosmopolitan hustle and bustle. We visited the Environmental Nature Center, or ENC as it’s known around here. They’re a small island of nature on the edge of a larger preserve called Back Bay. The ENC has an impressive building which is the first LEED platinum building in Orange County. LEED is the acronym for  Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. It’s the standard by which “green” buildings are judged. The first level is LEED certified, then it goes to LEED silver, gold and platinum. To get the platinum rating, the building pretty much has to be built green from the ground up. For example, the ENC used recycled denim blue jeans for insulation. There’s even a little window where you can see the shredded denim inside the walls. And they re-used material from other buildings in the construction of this new one. With clever placement of the orientation of the building and windows, they eliminated the need for air conditioning.

                                                                           

            If one isn’t from Southern California, lack of air conditioning seems inconceivable. But, being on a coast, a coast with an arctic current at it’s door, Newport rarely gets warm. The hottest month here is August. And when we say “hottest” we use the term loosely. The average high in August is 75 and the average low is 66. Unlike some places we’ve visited where the average is meaningless, here, the temperature usually doesn’t fluctuate that violently. There are always exceptions, of course.

                                                                    

            We chatted with some of the people in the center, then took one of the trails. As this is a small area, unlike the preserve we’ll be visiting later, one is never far from man-made sounds. One hears traffic sounds, baseball games, construction trucks beeping and home air conditioners running. Only when we stopped by one of the little waterfalls did we drown out the sounds of the city. But the walk was great anyway. We saw lots of lizards, up close, and the cacti are in bloom! The blooms are red, orange and pink on the prickly pear and Cholla. We stopped to smell the wild roses which, unlike their domestic cousins, haven’t had the aroma bred out of them. And some of the California Poppy plants were still in bloom, greeting us as the state flower.

                                                                             

Hope you enjoyed our adventure!  More to come!

Art and Roxanne