Brooklyn’s least-known restored wetland, surrounded by hundreds of shipwrecks—and a submarine
July 18, 2021 — Calvert Vaux park — Turtle in a Tempest/Mourning Dove’s Ruffled Feathers/Rats on the Run
Yesterday, the thunderstorm that had been forecast to arrive for the last three days finally arrived in New York. I was sitting in a grove in Calvert Vaux (pronounced “Vox”) park when the first winds came in over the water, gentle but building, cumulus clouds billowing up but still white and sun-lit and not so ominous. I emerged from the grove and thought I might walk to the end of the park, but I stopped when I saw two banks of clouds converge on each other and turn the sky a dull grey. I turned around and walked back down the path toward where my Jeep was parked on the gravel road.
When I emerged onto the open grass field in front of the kayak landing, I spotted a dome on the lawn that looked too uniform to be a rock. Staring a moment longer, I realized it was a turtle. It looked surprisingly large — about the size of a small dinner plate, and was moving rather quickly across the grass. I moved closer to the animal and it noticed me in its periphery and immediately retreated into its shell. I felt bad that I’d scared the little reptile, but it was also the first time I’d seen a turtle in this park, so I was too excited to walk away.
Closer inspection revealed a greenish shell with concentric white rings on each of the pentagonal scutes (the paneled scales of a turtle shell). Its body was the color and pattern of chia seed pudding — a blue-grey white with black polka dots, and its head had a few black stripes. The first gentle rains had given its shell and skin a near-polished look. As best as I can tell from my field guide, a diamondback terrapin.
As I stood in front of the frightened amphibian, I found myself reflecting on the strange confluence of strength and vulnerability inherent to a turtle’s being. On land, it’s a slow-moving and immediately recognizable source of protein, but its exo-skeletal defense system narrows down the number of potential predators, especially within an urban park, where the disappearance of most apex predators leaves the modest turtle somewhere near the top of the food chain. Beyond a large raptor, a dog or a human, there aren’t likely to be any other threats, which might explain why the turtle was out in the middle of a fresh-cut lawn in the first place — though maybe it was just warming itself in the sun. Regardless, even with few potential hazards, the fact is that this is an animal that is too slow to run, and therefore has no recourse but to retreat into its shell and hope that whatever has instigated the retreat isn’t big enough to snap the carapace between its jaws or toss the whole animal into a pot of boiling water. It’s a passive defense system, and that vulnerability was certainly on display when I looked at the turtle’s little face retracted beneath the rim of the shell, into its own body. It was entirely up to me to decide whether or not I would be invasive or cruel. I was the predator.
I took a couple of photos before stepping back to a distance where it would feel comfortable emerging from its shell and proceeding on its walk back into the marsh and out of danger.
Moments after the turtle made it into the bush, the storm clouds burst and the once distant murmur of thunder was suddenly exploding around the park. I retreated into my Jeep — my own hardened carapace — and watched from the driver’s seat as three picnickers fought in defiance of the storm to erect a blue tarp and carry on with their barbecue as if nothing had changed. Just a few more vulnerable vertebrates seeking shelter from the storm.
I couldn’t talk about today without talking about yesterday. I came back hoping to see the turtle again. I arrived around ten in the morning, and the sky was overcast and drizzly, suggesting a dreary follow-up to the storm. I drove off the paved road and onto the uneven and pot-holed gravel, planning to thoroughly search the lawn for the diamondback. But as I began my search, I noticed that the tide was about twice as low as I had ever seen it.
With every new phase of the tide, I’d encountered some new inhabitant of the park, or some new behavior. The horseshoe crabs scour the shoreline at the high tide. Swans nest in the sand when the tide begins to retreat. When Coney Island Creek is little more than a mud-bed, the herons and egrets tip-toe through the muck, training their sights below the shallow waters, waiting to pierce the surface with their beaks and exhume an ill-fated worm, crab or guppie.
I walked out into the muck, trying to remain sure-footed on the bed of slick kelp, slowing with each step as it became clear that the mud was growing more saturated the further I ventured out until eventually one of my Timbs sank down to the ankle. But for all that, I didn’t encounter anything immediately recognizable as something new. So I retreated, back to the relatively dry bank, and walked further up toward the narrow mouth of the creek, watching the fiddler crabs scatter and hide as I approached, and reconvene as I passed.
If there was anything new worth noting on the walk back, it was that it seemed like the fiddler crabs looked less mature the further into the creek-bed I wandered. Their single massive claws — useless for anything but courtship and demonstrative rituals — were much smaller than the dominant claws of the crabs on the drier land.
As I walked, I saw what seemed like an unusually large group of mature fiddler crabs synchronizing the raising and lowering of their claws, and in the middle of the group I noticed a dented tall can of Modelo. With the sun finally burning through the fog, the beer can shimmered brilliantly amid the crustaceans. I don’t exactly know why, but I couldn’t help but stare at the can. I’d been trying to get a good video of a colony of fiddler crabs for the last few weeks, and this just struck me as an interesting opportunity. It’s always nice to have some reference object for scale, and to pretend that this marsh isn’t shot through with human refuse is to deny both the fragility and the resilience of this ecosystem. So, lacking a tripod, I nestled my binoculars in the sediment and leaned my phone against them. Then I stepped back and waited.
If you’ve never thought about fiddler crabs before, please follow me down this rabbit-hole. Although, to be fair, we could rightfully call it a fiddler crab-hole. These little half-mcnugget sized creatures dig burrows in the sand pretty much exactly as round as their bodies, leaving a pile of sand pellets near the entrance. You might think that they’d use their one enormous claw to dig, but it’s simply too big to be of any practical use to them. Their second much more proportional claw is used to both dig their burrows as well as for feeding. The crabs claw up sand and shovel it into their mouths, swashing it around for the bacteria and nutrients on the sediment’s surface before spitting it back out.
The dominant claw is often more than twice the size of the crab’s entire body. If the fiddler crab were Fred Flintstone’s car, this claw would be the rack of dinosaur ribs that tips the car over. Naturally, the crab gets its name from the fact that not only does the dominant claw look like a fiddle, but as it is raised and lowered, it gives the impression of a violinist playing his instrument. Different species of fiddler crabs aren’t just different colors — they have different “dances” they perform with their claws in an effort to attract mates. At the same time, these claws are the largest weapons in proportion to body size of any animal on the planet, and the strength of its grip has been demonstrated in a laboratory to be more than enough to crush the body of another fiddler crab. But despite this claw’s size and strength, you will rarely see them fight, though it does occasionally happen when two males are competing for the same mate. Most of the time, the mere raising of a claw into the air to demonstrate its size is enough to deter a less sufficiently-armed rival. In other words, this species maintains its survival through an evolutionary policy of deterrence.
In short, it’s something special to see these colonies of disproportionate crabs commune and court each other on the muddy banks of a Brooklyn creek.
It only took about fifteen seconds after I hit record for the fiddler crabs to re-emerge from their burrows, but none of them seemed to be where I hoped they would be. I watched, frustrated, as it seemed from a distance that not one single crab had wandered within shot. As I crouched uncomfortably in the muck, so still that the crabs in my immediate my vicinity were comfortable enough to emerge, I wondered if these things knew that the camera was there. Of course they’d never know it was a camera, but with its bright red case and the hot battery inside, maybe there was some light frequency visible to these animals that kept them on edge and eager to remain out of reach of the strange object. It was as I contemplated this possibility that I heard the flutter of wings to my right. I turned my head and saw a mourning dove pecking at the ground near a tall patch of spartina. It soon became apparent that the mourning dove was meandering toward the Modelo can.
I figured it would fly away or wander somewhere else, but I also couldn’t help but feel irrationally excited. This, I thought, must be what David Attenborough feels like when some rare Amazonian bird just so happens to land right in his cameraman’s line of site. And, I mean, I know that a mourning dove isn’t some rare macaw, but it was just the feeling of setting out to see something, and then feeling like nature was going to reward you with something else of its own devising. It was the magic of the serendipitous. Suddenly, I felt that nerdish joy that probably infects the heart of anyone who calls themselves a bird watcher.
As if it knew what I was thinking, the bird wandered toward and then just behind the can, walking perfectly into the left side of the frame, from one end of the can to the other. But then it stopped, and for a moment, I was both elated and disappointed, because it seemed like I’d got what I wanted and it wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be. But no sooner had the dove stopped than did it suddenly shiver and ruffle its feathers, as if the presence of the can was an affront to his sensibilities. Then it strolled right back out of frame and I picked up my camera.
I actually laughed, full of joy. Oddly fulfilled by this random bird’s inconsequential gesture of displeasure.
The presence of the can, along with the innumerable artifacts of human waste littering the park and its waters, is still not enough to negate the special beauty of Calvert Vaux Park. The vast majority of this park is literally the product of human waste. During the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the sediment and rubble trawled from the sea floor and excavated from Brooklyn and Staten Island were brought to this location and used to create a new little peninsula sheltered from the Atlantic by Coney Island. Beyond that, the more than two-hundred-and-sixty shipwrecks and one sunken home-made submarine surrounding the park have formed an artificial reef of sorts for the marshlands to take hold, contributing to the much-needed efforts to revitalize New York’s wetlands.
It would take too long to get into all of that history at this point, but I mention it here to highlight a strange dichotomy: that the beer cans and syringes I walked around this morning are as much a tragic reminder of the anthropological force behind global environmental degradation as the turtles, fiddler crabs, egrets, seagulls, terns, herons mourning doves, horseshoe crabs and marsh grasses shooting up out of those sunken vessels are a reminder of the environment’s resilience.
I continued along the marsh, up toward the sea-facing point at the end of the park, taking pictures and videos of the ribbed muscles and shipwrecks, until I finally stopped at a point on the shore just off from a small island of refuse topped with more foliage. A barren tree stood alone on the east bank of the island, and each of its branches was lined with small black birds. I attempted to photograph them for a while until I looked to my right and nearly dropped my phone in the water.
Two full-grown born-and-raised-in-NYC rats came scurrying from out of the rocks.
Forget the syringes and beer cans. Nothing will remind you that you are still in New York City faster than the sight of a rat galloping in your direction. I turned to run the other way, but I’d been standing there taking pictures for so long that I hadn’t realized how far the tide had come up. When I looked back down the path I’d taken earlier, it was all under water.
I felt like that diamondback terrapin from the day before, with no recourse but to be thankful for the thickness of my boots, and hope that the rats weren’t interested in me. I wondered whether or not I would have to use one of those Timbs to punt a rat across the marsh. I can’t pretend that I was above that kind of cruelty. But the rats did ultimately shift course, and I watched them wade into the water and doggy-paddle their little rat haunches out to the island, leaving miniscule v-shaped wakes behind them.
I trudged from rock to rock through the water back the way I came, fearful that more rodents would emerge from the marsh grasses. But finally I made it back out of the marsh to where my car was parked, and then I unlocked the door and got back into my shell.
Nature has a way of letting you know when you’ve overstayed your welcome.
