Episode 24
Copyright © John Page Williams Jr. All rights reserved.
This is John Page Williams with another reading from Chesapeake Almanac. The month is September, and this chapter is entitled "The Wild Rice Is Ripe."
On Labor Day some years ago, science teacher Suzanne Tolson, her husband Bill, and I were paddling a canoe up Rosier Creek, a Potomac tributary near Colonial Beach, Virginia. We were scouting it for a Chesapeake Bay Foundation field trip that was scheduled for later in the month. The lower portion of Rosier is distinctly brackish, but the upper reaches are fresh. There we found half a dozen blue-winged teal, a noisy host of red-winged blackbirds, and some bobolinks.
With the school year about to begin, it was natural enough to think about fall coming soon, but by their presence these birds told us that it had already begun. They would stay on Rosier Creek for several weeks, but they were definitely headed south.
Long migrations are tough on small birds. They must fatten up considerably to store energy for their journey. On this day, the marsh at the head of Rosier Creek and several hundred others like it around the Chesapeake were ripe with high-energy, seed-bearing plants, especially wild rice.
We usually associate wild rice with the lakes of Minnesota and Wisconsin, where it is harvested commercially, but here on the Chesapeake, our many tidal rivers and creeks offer it excellent habitat. The upper tidal reaches of virtually all the Chesapeake's big rivers give wild rice just what it needs--fertile freshwater marsh soil and plenty of current flow. In a powerful river with a big watershed like the Rappahannock or the Choptank, freshwater flow from the land is strong enough to keep incoming salt water well downstream, resulting in a long stretch of water that is considered "tidal fresh." On a smaller river like the Severn near Annapolis, pocket marshes off the side creeks form small tidal fresh marshes where rainwater flows in from well-wooded ravines with deep forest soils.
In the river environments, much of the fine silt that the current carries accumulates on the insides of curves. The outer margins of these mud banks are always underwater. Here live floating-leaved plants with buoyant stems like yellow pond lily and arrow arum. Wild rice grows behind these plants, somewhat higher in the marshes. Because it can extract the oxygen its root cells need from the water that flows over them, it can live in consistently waterlogged soil.
Wild rice is an annual growing from seed each year, but its growth rate is prodigious. It begins in late April, and by mid-May it is a couple of inches tall, looking like what it is--a grass. In late May, though, its growth rate begins to accelerate. The plant reaches two feet by mid-June, and four feet by late July, when it begins to flower. By late August, when the grains start to ripen, it will be six to nine feet tall, not bad for a four-month growing season.
The grains are highly nutritious, full of protein and complex carbohydrates. They "shatter," or fall from the plant, during the first two weeks of September, though not all the plants in a given stand will be ready at the same time. The red-winged blackbirds descend on the ripe plants aggressively and shake at the seed heads, picking off grains for themselves but also shaking loose any others that are ripe, so that they fall to the marsh floor to be eaten by other birds or sink into the mud to become next year's crop.
The Native Americans of the North Country traditionally employ a similar technique to harvest the wild rice, paddling their canoes up into the marshes and shaking the rice heads over their boats so that the grains fall inside. Then they winnow them by hand to separate out the chaff. I've tried it here on the Bay, but it is a lot of work. If you decide to get out of your boat to investigate a stand of wild rice, test your footing first. The muck that it grows in is very, very soft, and it is easy to get deeply stuck.
By mid-September, nearly all of the grains have shattered, and the plants start to die. The teal, red-wings, and bobolink move on to the marshes of the South Carolina and the coastal Georgia rivers. By the first frost here, our rice marshes, so recently very tall, will look like stubble fields of fallen-over stalks. Other seed-bearing plants like smartweeds will become the dominant foods for the waterfowl that arrive later in the fall.
Early fall is an ideal time for day trips on the Bay's tidal fresh rivers. Canoes, kayaks, 14- to 16-foot aluminum outboard skiffs, and powerboats up to 20 feet are all appropriate for these rivers, if operated prudently. Especially good areas for exploring wild rice marshes are the Chickahominy River, the Mattaponi and Pamunkey rivers, the Rappahannock around Port Royal, the Patuxent around Upper Marlboro, the head of the Chester above Chestertown boing up to Crumpton, the Choptank around Denton and Tuckahoe Creek, its big tributary, and the Nanticoke above Vienna, including its big tributaries, Marshyhope and Broad creeks.
