Peatland Restoration TNC in NC completed 7,500 acres of peatland restoration work at Angola Bay Game Land. © Travis Dove
It’s 5:45 a.m. in late June at TNC’s Green Swamp Preserve trailhead. It’s already 80 degrees; the thick air and pines are aglow with first light. Photographer Travis Dove arrives, bleary-eyed but in good spirits with two cameras slung shoulder to hip. Alex Parker, coastal game lands biologist with the NC Wildlife Resources Commission (WRC) pulls in and completes our roving trio.
Between us, we’ve brought five different types of boots and waders needed during a two-day marathon tour of three unique peatland landscapes and the work TNC and WRC are doing to protect and restore their rare, vital ecosystems.
We hardly make it a few hundred yards into the preserve before we pause to revel in the blooming Venus flytraps and abundant bog cheetos, butterworts and grass pink orchids. We stop at clusters of ripe, dew-covered blueberries and huckleberries.
What are peatlands?
Peatlands are a type of wetland whose soils contain a high proportion of partially decayed organic matter, and they retain an incredible amount of carbon.
Our unhurried pace, allowing us to study each bear track and deliberate on the finer points of navigating thick pocosin, is abruptly interrupted: TNC’s Wilmington team sends word they are on the move to begin a controlled burn just a little south of us in the preserve. With just enough time to slip on protective clothing, we attend their fire briefing and, moments later, are amidst the crew carrying drip torches along the pocosin peatland edge.
We watch in awe as an ignition drone drops fire balls into the forest before we leave the plume of smoke behind and the habitat benefits that will follow. This special peatland-dominated area, virtually unimpacted by manmade ditches, is exceedingly rare in the state. Most of what remains are the ditched and drained peatlands that we are working to restore, and that is where we head next.
Travis puts his drone in the air to get a bird’s-eye view of 7,500 acres of completed peatland restoration area within the Angola Bay Game Land. The drone swoops low over several of the 37 water control structures that dam up the site’s 140 miles of ditches. These new structures are the backbone of the project. Alex and I treat them with a certain reverence, cleaning debris from their upstream bays and ensuring the wooden boards set within them are holding tight. They allow the peat soil across this higher elevation headwater area to once again absorb rainwater that was freely running off the site down ditches toward low-lying communities for the last four decades.
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We traverse the site’s former pine plantation now planted with nearly 250,000 native Atlantic white cedar, cypress and buttonbush as part of the restoration work. The bright green seedlings are easy to spot in the dark brown muck. I brew our trio some tailgate coffee of similar color and, with all this talk of peat and muck, it only feels right to get a “deeper” look. A groundwater monitoring well in need of repairs offers a chance to collect an auger of soil and probe its depths. I have measured peat more than six feet in this area. We want this peat, and the carbon within it, to stay here and continue to grow deeper.
Early the next morning we find ourselves surrounded by egrets, lily pads and even secretive alligators as we paddle across a vast pond that was created by peat lost to wildfire within the Ashe’s Creek headwaters of nearby Holly Shelter Game Land. When the Juniper Road Fire burned up feet of its flammable soil and impacted critical roads in 2011, WRC managers knew they had work to do to help prevent the next one.
Alex began his career with WRC right here, in the wake of that fire. As we float above “ground zero” of that catastrophic wildfire, we study maps of the engineered design that will guide our team’s next steps in restoration. We cross a hunter foot bridge to check on one of the 15 rotating acoustic monitoring sites that, after a few seasons of recording the sounds of nature, will help us better understand the changes to biodiversity that accompany peatland restoration.
Angola Bay Game Lands
We end our tour by letting some dust fly behind the truck as we hustle to the Onslow Bight/Cape Fear Arch Joint Conservation Partnership meeting. There, we clean up as best we can and change into our fifth and final set of boots of this trek. Alex and I present to an audience of peers about both ongoing peatland restoration projects.
As I listen to the other speakers and participants working across this landscape, it is hard to ignore that so many of the special places on our coast are knit together by these ancient and fragile peat deposits. The innovation of those managing them must match the challenges ahead, whose impacts ripple out far beyond the peat’s edge.
More About Our Work
Saving North Carolina’s Peatlands
The Nature Conservancy is restoring the hydrology of peatlands in coastal North Carolina to combat climate change.
Climate Action
Addressing air and water pollution, rising temperatures and extreme flooding events across North Carolina.
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