In the Town of Shelburne, the LaPlatte River Marsh Area is a 211-acre preserve that was established in 1997 and is owned and managed by the Nature Conservancy. This area encompasses a rich diversity of native species and natural communities such as wetland natural communities, cattail marshes, swamp, and extensive flood plain forests dominated my silver maple. We identified several types of trees and found the majority to be hemlock, pine, oak, ash and several hardwood species.
Upon entering the forest, we noticed that several trees in a concentrated area had been cut down in an effort to eradicate an invasive species.
In this same area, we noticed several trees to have been chewed down as evidence of beavers.
We saw several trees with large holes and significant damage from due to the population of pileated woodpeckers.
Walking further along the trail we approached the silver maple flood plain. All of the silver maples in this area were killed when water flooded too high and removed too much of the bark. When bark is removed entirely from around a tree in one section, the tree will not survive.
The trees were rotting and some were completely hollow.
We found a dead rodent of some sort. We were not able to identify the animal but know that is about the size of a squirrel and had fur.
We saw several white tailed deer tracks along our walk. The tracks had a large print of a buck and smaller prints of what could have possibly been a doe.
These are shells found beside the LaPlatte River which flows into the Shelburne Bay
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