Sedge Island for Youngsters--Excellent Adventure

NJ Fish & Wildlife 

NJ Fish & Wildlife (Two links to separate dates)

Every year, I post about the Sedge Island experience for youngsters grades 7 through 12. On an island in Barnegat Bay behind Island Beach, they stay in rooms in a research facility. Click on the links to get an idea of the deep educational value New Jersey Fish & Wildlife offers students. 

When my son did Sedge Island two consecutive years, the program began with kids who had finished 6th grade. I guess that's what they mean by 7th grade. (After 8th grade, Matt went on a Boy Scout sailing adventure in the Florida Keys.) For Matt and the others with him from throughout the state who did Sedge Island, it wasn't all science and research. They fished blues, and I believe fluke and some other species. They ocean kayaked. They treaded clams, and judging from what he told me, the clamming was pretty good. 

Currently, youngsters from grade 7 to 9 get to explore, in addition to the biological life of the bay, Barnegat Bay history, and that's interesting to me. I read The Bayman by Merce Ridgeway, which goes into Barnegat Bay history in depth. Ridgeway was a clam raker, coming from a family long in the tradition. Treaders are the new wave--or were. I haven't heard of anyone treading NJ bays commercially since 1993, but I have heard that the clams are coming back.

I think of the hard clam as the bellwether for the decline of the ecological health of a bay. Someone on Facebook pointed out to me recently, however, that the clams were never lost altogether in Great Bay, because the volume of transfer between inshore and marine brine flowing through Great Egg Inlet is so much the greater than in the bays behind Long Beach Island. Behind the island, most or all of the eel grass was lost to excess nitrogen and phosphorus leached into the water. Clams depend on eel grass, because once they hatch from eggs, they swim freely before attaching themselves to that grass until they mature enough to fall off and take hold on bay bottom. 

Let's hope the best for the bays, and for the youngsters who get to experience Barnegat Bay firsthand. It's truly an excellent adventure for them.

When We Shelled It Out