Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 25, 1993 TAG: 9306250080
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: D.W. PAGE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: SUFFOLK LENGTH: Long
Byrd didn't join his surveyors. He rode along the edge of the swamp to the other side, where he waited in a tavern for the crew to complete the transit of the swamp.
"It took them nine days to go the 15 miles. The last day they did no surveying. They were out of food and simply pushed on the last day to avoid starvation," said Jerry Levy, a biologist at Old Dominion University.
For 23 years, Levy has wandered the swamp. Now he is on sabbatical writing a book about swamp lore.
"All those years in the swamp opens up your mind to strange and wonderful speculation," he said.
The nearly impenetrable foliage, clouds of mosquitoes and yellow flies, water moccasins, canebrake rattlesnakes, wood ticks and poison ivy make the Great Dismal an inhospitable place for humans.
Beginning with George Washington in the 1760s, developers and speculators have dug ditches in hopes of draining and taming the swamp. There are 150 miles of ditches inside what is now the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. The ditches have not completely drained the swamp, but humans have changed the ecosystem in ways scientists are just beginning to understand.
"We're playing catch-up," said Lloyd Culp Jr., refuge manager. "Our job is to restore and to perpetuate the 107,000 acres that make up the refuge, though complete restoration isn't going to happen."
There were concerns in the 1970s and '80s that the swamp was drying up and its unique ecosystem would be lost.
"The aquifer is so shallow that a borrow pit outside the refuge could start draining the swamp," Culp said.
But the dry cycle seems to have abated and the level of the swamp appears to have stabilized.
The refuge has installed water-control devices on many of the ditches. Beavers have found the new swamp a suitable habitat, implementing their own water-control program along the ditches.
"The beavers and the water-control measures have helped undo some of the damage done by the ditches," said Robert K. Rose, another ODU biologist.
When Byrd's men conducted their survey, the swamp may have covered more than 2 million acres of eastern Virginia and North Carolina and was forested with huge cypress and the Atlantic white cedar.
The swamp still boasts the largest stand of Atlantic white cedar on the East Coast, but the cypress forest was decimated by logging.
Just off the West Ditch Road, one of the few remaining cypress trees rises six stories above the maple and gum forest.
"There were some mighty big trees - some huge trees - that were logged out of here. This cypress must have been around when Christopher Columbus landed," Culp said.
Adding to the inscrutable nature of the swamp is Lake Drummond, a neatly round body of water, 2 1/2 miles across. How and why a lake developed in the middle of the swamp remains a mystery.
Some theorize that it is a meteor crater. Others believe a huge, subterranean peat fire slowly spread until the covering vegetation collapsed into a cavern caused by the fire, creating the lake.
Carbon dating of the swamp and the lake show the lake to be considerably younger than the swamp, just the opposite of what scientists would expect, Levy said.
Levy said there are indications American Indians lived along the edges of the swamp as far back as 9,000 years ago. Later, runaway slaves, fugitives and others sought refuge in the swamp.
The swamp provides food and shelter for countless animals, including threatened species such as the canebrake rattler and the Dismal Swamp shrew.
Black bears roam the swamp and sometimes wander out of it.
"They do like corn, and a lot of our neighboring farmers grow it," Culp said. Bears in the cornfields or even in back yards are not unusual sights for people who live near the swamp.
Levy said bears have always played a big part in swamp lore. One story handed down from the 1600s tells of a talking bear with a chain around its neck. The bear only spoke Latin, he said.
"Closer to reality are the drunken bears that are sometimes spotted. They get drunk from eating fermented gum balls off the gum trees," he said.
Deer also are plentiful in the swamp, with 200 to 300 harvested each year in a permit hunt to keep the population stable.
More than 200 species of birds from the Swainson's warbler to the tundra swan have been identified in the refuge. A walk down any ditch will kick up colorful wood ducks.
Otters, raccoons, mink and gray and red foxes also live there.
Rose has spent years studying the rare Dismal Swamp shrew. He said the shrew is considered a threatened species because the swamp is its only known habitat.
"You'd have to say that the shrews are probably doing OK. There are tens of thousands of them," he said. The danger is that the species could be wiped out by interbreeding with the upland shrew. But as long as the swamp stays wet, it will act as a barrier against the encroachment of the upland shrew, Rose said.
Development in Suffolk and Chesapeake is swallowing up pockets of forested land outside the refuge, which covers about 170 of the swamp's 200 square miles. The pockets are home to animals that breed with animals inside the refuge.
"When we lose these lands outside the refuge, we will have only a small genetic pool trapped in the refuge," Culp said.
by CNB