Bog to the future
Think cranberry bog, and you probably picture farmers waist deep in water, corralling herds of floating crimson berries destined to adorn a Thanksgiving turkey or tofurkey somewhere.
But when cranberry farmers decide to hang up their waders for good, the picture of a bog starts to change. Fields engineered for seasonal flooding turn into shrubby wetlands. Rare bladderworts and bog asphodel appear among the cranberry plants. Pine Barrens tree frogs breed in pools of water once dotted with floating berries.
For land managers, the new picture looks like a conservation opportunity.
“By taking advantage of leftovers from the cranberry industry to retain open wetlands, we can support a greater diversity of plants of animals,” said Emile DeVito, Manager of Science and Stewardship for the New Jersey Conservation Foundation. “If you do nothing, these old bogs turn into a mixed hardwood swamp, mostly red maple and gum,” he explained. “There’s nothing wrong with red maple swamps, but we have a lot of them already.”
That’s why in 2018 the New Jersey Conservation Foundation jumped at the opportunity to purchase an old cranberry bog that had been owned by the same family since the Civil War, but had been out of production since 2004.
The 442-acre bog in Burlington County, New Jersey, encompasses 5.5 miles of streams, including the pristine Burrs Mill Brook, a tributary of the Rancocas Creek, which flows into the Delaware River. This ecological gem provides added value as part of a network of high-quality habitat in the region. The property is less than a mile away from the 1,227-acre Michael Huber Prairie Warbler Preserve, also managed by the Foundation, and lies within the New Jersey Pinelands, a stepping stone for wildlife between the tidal Rancocas and the Atlantic Coast.
But the Foundation’s Director of Stewardship Tim Morris explained that to preserve rare habitat in an engineered environment, you need to act strategically.
“If the structures aren’t maintained” — meaning, the water-control structures the farmers used to flood the bogs seasonally — “they will eventually fail, and we will lose the dikes, the hydrology, and the native flora and fauna that have moved in.”
This fall, the Foundation was awarded a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund to figure out how to keep that from happening. The first step will be to collect baseline population data on flora and fauna, and then to conduct a hydrologic study to determine where and how to intervene to keep the wetlands open and healthy.
Ultimately, success will mean getting to the point where intervention is no longer necessary.
“Previously, it was set up so farmer could control water in the bog — they would dry it out drastically during the summer, and then flood it deep during harvest and in winter,” DeVito said. “We want to create a passive system that can fluctuate naturally and self regulate without requiring constant intervention.”
Hydrology aside, there’s already one initiative underway to protect the watershed: stopping illegal off-road vehicle use in the area.
When the Foundation acquired the property, there was already established illegal use by dirt bike and all-terrain vehicle users, driving on the dikes and farm lanes, but also through the wetland. Morris said they are starting to address the issue by working with law enforcement, and developing relationships with their neighbors, including a hunting club upstream that owns 1,000 acres and has long been plagued by the same problem.
But for the Foundation, promoting legal use will be an important part of the long-term solution.
“One of the things that seems to be a universal truth: the more you can establish good uses of an area, the less you will see bad ones,” Morris said. “So providing public access through trails and nature walks is something we plan to do down the line.”
He thinks it will be an easy sell. “That’s another benefit of this project: these habitat types, open shrub wetlands, are not only unique, but they are also really interesting,” Morris said. “People like to walk around water bodies, and by maintaining the dikes, we can connect to public access on the other side of the stream corridor.”
That’s what the descendants of those who farmed the land for more than a century had in mind when they pictured the future of their cranberry bog. That’s why they called the New Jersey Conservation Foundation when they were ready to sell.
“They felt good that it would be managed locally as part of larger preserve,” said Stephanie Monahan, the Foundation’s Assistant Director for South Jersey. “They were glad that it would be a place the public could visit — that it would still be providing something to the community.”
This story is part of an ongoing series highlighting projects supported by the Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund that together show, when it comes to creating a sustainable future for wildlife and people, the whole is great than the sum of its parts.
