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Visit Parkers Creek to see the watershed that was
Clean water advocates could hit mother lode with mine ruling
Meander through habitats lost in time along Parkers Creek
Talk swamp these days with anyone under the age of 12 and the conversation will likely lead to Shrek country, where the happy green ogre of movie fame keeps house smack in the heart of his beloved swamp. While an ogre sighting is unlikely, real world swamps still offer plenty of curiosities for explorers of all ages. Battle Creek Cypress Swamp, a remnant of ancient swampland in Calvert County, MD, is no exception.
The Battle Creek Cypress Swamp Sanctuary is owned by the Nature Conservancy and managed by the Calvert County Division of Natural Resources. A member of the Chesapeake Bay Gateways Network, the sanctuary protects one of the northernmost stands of bald cypress in the United States, and one of the last sites where bald cypress grows naturally in Maryland.
A raised boardwalk carries visitors through the public section of the 100-acre tract where they can experience the prehistoric trees and other swamp life without sloshing through the muck. One can walk the quarter-mile trail in about 15 minutes—but shouldn’t. The vegetation and wildlife reveal themselves best when one slows down and put eyes and ears to work.
The first thing visitors see at the sanctuary is bald cypress, and plenty of it as it is the most abundant tree in the swamp.
“Battle Creek has a lot of bald cypress in close proximity, and that’s unusual,” explained Andy Brown, senior naturalist with the Calvert County Division of Natural Resources. “The Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia has about 11 percent of its growth in cypress. At Battle Creek, we’ve got about 93 percent.”
The clustering helps to amplify the trees’ unique character. The bald cypress is not about to blend in with the crowd. It is a conifer, which means it bears needles. But these feathery clusters are massed at the crown, topping a relatively bare trunk that streams 100-feet skyward in an unwavering line.
Unlike most of its needled cousins, the bald cypress does not stay green in winter. Instead, the needles warm to a rich red hue and drop to the ground. The swamp sports this colorful carpet in the fall, while the treetops remain bare—or bald—until spring.
The trunk flares out at the bottom, with a base shaped in vertical ripples like the folds of a long curtain. This shape offers extra stability in the soft, wet ground.
And then, there are the “knees.” Everywhere. These odd protrusions poke up from the mud and water at the base of the tree, sent upward from the root system below. They pepper the swamp floor at Battle Creek, from small, flesh-colored knobs just beginning to surface, to narrow, cone-shaped towers stretching a few feet toward the sky. And what, exactly, is their purpose?
“That’s the mystery,” Brown said. “No one knows for sure. Some people think the knees provide extra stability, or bring air to the root system. We recently learned that their starch content is very high, so it’s possible they serve as some kind of food source.”
Whatever the reason, the bald cypress goes about multiplying these oddities with great enthusiasm. The knees are hollow and elliptical, and position themselves perpendicular to the water flow. There is no pattern to their placement, although the spread of the knees falls within the perimeter of the tree crown.
As for the number and size of the knees, it’s all about the water. The more standing water at the tree’s base, the more knees the tree will produce. The high water line of the swamp determines their height: the higher the water, the taller the knees. A bald cypress in a dry location does not produce knees.
“The maximum water depth for bald cypress is about 41ž2 feet,” Brown said. “At those depths, the knees have grown between 6 and 10 feet tall.”
Bald cypress trees have existed for millions of years. They were once widespread in the Chesapeake region, but now exist in only a few locations on both sides of the Bay.
Overharvesting has been the primary culprit. Cypress wood is light and durable, especially in wet conditions, and its popularity for roofing, siding, and other products was inevitable.
In Calvert County, cypress was used for building tobacco barns, ships, doors, porches and other exterior building trim. Much of this wood originated in the Battle Creek swamp. The stand was cut repeatedly, beginning in colonial times, until the sanctuary was established in 1957.
Nevertheless, the cypress there today are descendants of ancient ancestors that once took root in the same swamp. Core samples from the creek bed contain cypress pollen grains dating from 25,000 years ago, and clay beds have revealed 10-foot stumps dating from 100,000 years ago.
Cypress can live to be thousands of years old. While the majority of the Battle Creek cypress are 75 to 100 years old, the oldest is between 500 and 600 years old, with a trunk diameter of 6 feet.
“It’s an enormous tree, but it has a fork in the trunk,” Brown explains. “That’s probably why it survived the logging days—the fork reduced its timber value.”
Shortly after the turn of the century, harvesting at Battle Creek slowed down and area farmers allowed cattle to graze in the swamp.
“Ironically, that grazing probably helped save the cypress,” Brown said. “Cypress grows slowly and other species can usually outcompete it. But there’s tannic acid in cypress, which doesn’t taste so good to animals. So the cows ate the other saplings and allowed the cypress to return.”
While the bald cypress is the main attraction, Battle Creek Swamp has other stories to share.
The wetland environment promotes a wide range of vegetation and wildlife. Spring offers an especially good display of wildflowers, such as Jack-in-the-pulpit, mayapple, spring beauty and lady’s slipper orchid.
Birding opportunities abound. Many species, including the Kentucky, worm-eating, prothonotary, parula, and hooded warblers, migrate to the swamp each spring to breed. Owls, woodpeckers and wood ducks populate the swamp, as do salamanders, frogs, turtles and crayfish. The crayfish build small chimneys of stacked-up mud pellets that mark the entrance to their burrows that can be seen throughout the swamp’s floor.
Other swamp dwellers include deer, muskrat, mink, raccoon, skunk and opossum.
Battle Creek threads through the center of the swamp, flowing south into the Patuxent River. Because the ground is saturated most of the year, rainfall swells the creek and floods the swamp periodically.
Capt. John Smith mapped the area in 1608, marking the location of several Native American villages along the Patuxent. “Pawtuxunt,” a chieftain’s village, appears to be on Battle Creek a few miles south of the sanctuary. Shell middens found in the swamp and along the creek give testimony to an active native population.
Robert Brooke, an early colonial settler, settled at the mouth of the creek and dubbed it “Battle Creek,” after his wife’s home in Battle, England. The first county seat was located at the mouth of the creek from 1654 to 1729.
One hundred years ago, Battle Creek was still deep enough to navigate. Boats journeyed upstream to load tobacco and other goods from a “rolling road” that cut through the swamp. Water from Battle Creek also powered sawmills and gristmills that supported local farms and logging operations.
The sanctuary’s visitor center details the many dimensions of the Battle Creek swamp, from the natural world to the human one.
Included in this mosaic is the legacy of the Gray and Keim families, who owned much of the Battle Creek swampland in the 20th century and helped to transfer it to the Nature Conservancy. Their voices replay at exhibits where visitors listen to memories and stories about ice skating in the swamp, trapping adventures, secret meetings, fugitive slaves and hidden stills.
The land these families helped to preserve is an invaluable gift and a tribute to Maryland’s ecological diversity.
Through the protection of the sanctuary, Battle Creek’s bald cypress have been allowed to thrive and mature. And, because these trees can live for thousands of years, the wonders of Battle Creek Cypress Swamp are just beginning to unfold.
