To the Beach and Back

We're down at Fort Morgan beach near the mouth of Mobile Bay. Fort Morgan is a masonry fort built between 1819 and 1833. Standing guard where the Mobile Bay meets the Gulf of Mexico, the fort played a significant role in the Battle of Mobile Bay in August 1864 when Farragut said, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead". The Fort is the site of the fall bird banding. Last spring we were across the bay on Dauphin Island for the bird banding. North of the bay is the Tensaw Delta where birds feed before the long flight over the gulf. We stay on the lovely white sand beach on the border of the Bon Secour refuge with miles of undeveloped beach.

The reason the bird bandings happen here is largely due to the large delta system above the bay where birds can feed before flying across the Gulf. E. O. Wilson called the delta system America's Amazon

(55 min)
America’s Amazon is an award-winning documentary that offers a visually powerful and intimate portrait of the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta — often called “America’s Amazon” because of its remarkable biodiversity. The film highlights the delta’s complex ecosystem, showcasing wildlife, waterways, and its ecological importance while inspiring greater appreciation and conservation awareness. Provided to the FSTC Online Archives by Mary Riser, Producer.
The documentary presents the delta as one of the most biologically rich places in the United States, often compared to the Amazon for its diversity of species and distinct natural beauty. It’s a cinematic exploration of the watery world of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta — its plants, animals, and landscapes — emphasizing both its wonders and the threats it faces from environmental pressures.

Here's a shorter 12 minute tour.

Most of the state drains through this delta system.

The flush of fresh water through the bay makes the area an excellent fishery (Remember Bubba Gump's Shrimp boat?) Mobile Bay is shallow only averaging 10 feet deep. They dredge a 500 foot wide channel for large ships. Since my last visit a few years ago, there are so many new natural gas wells... the the bay seems crowded with them. There a reason the bay area is dotted with natural gas wells. There's ancient deltas buried miles off the coast. These old swamps have become the valuable resource...mainly methane (swamp gas). At least it is cleaner than oil rigs, although methane leaks are greenhouse gases.

Why does Alabama have a coast at all? Doesn't it always come back to empires?

(3 min) Why does Alabama have a little chunk of coastal land?

Coastlines have always been in a state of flux as Ocean levels rise and fall with the coming and going of ice ages. Nature is both constant and ever changing. Once the bay was far out into today's Gulf.

Off the coast is a 60,000 year old forest...remnants of an ancient ice age.

(27 min) The Underwater Forest, a new documentary by Ben Raines produced by This is Alabama, details the discovery and exploration of an ancient cypress forest found sixty feet underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, due south of Gulf Shores, Alabama. The forest dates to an ice age more than 60,000 years ago, when sea levels were about 400 feet lower than they are today.
(7 min news story about the 27 min film)

We are attracted to the shore. Some say it hearkens back to the womb...our mother's heartbeat and sounds of amniotic fluid. One thing is for sure. We are loving our beaches to death...at least here on the Gulf Coast. Here's Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Alabama.

People curse the endangered species act, but thankfully that is what has saved a 5 mile stretch of natural beach where we prefer going. The Alabama Beach Mouse is responsible for the creation of Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge. A last vestige of the natural ecosystem in a an ever expanding recreational development and resource extraction.

Take this 3 min walk through the maritime forest, across the pine scrub, past the brackish lake, through the dunes, and on to the beach across one of the last natural stretches of beach in Alabama

A better quality 3 min video with random shots.

5 min drone footage

Natural beach ecosystems are rare but there's one on the redneck riviera
Complete with a dune system...

Waves erode beaches and dunes along one area of the shoreline and the longshore current sweeps along the shore, depositing the sand elsewhere. The size and form of dunes found along the Atlantic Coast are highly variable and dependent upon many factors: strength and direction of prevailing winds, vegetation cover, nature of the backshore environment, and the rate at which sand is removed from the beach.

Plants hold the beach. Sand collects around plants, creating the characteristic patchwork of hillocks and swales. Beaches with wide, flat intertidal zones expose a large sand source for building dunes.

A dune system can be divided into three zones: (1) strandline and embryo dune zone, (2) primary dunes (also called foredunes or yellow dunes), and (3) secondary dunes (also called hind-dunes or grey dunes).

The hind dune is covered with salt pruned vegetation

The highest active dune system in the eastern United States is Jockey's Ridge, located near Nags Head on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This highly mobile dune, which changes in elevation as it moves, measures up to 33 m in height. Other large dunes on the Outer Banks reach 20 m in height (e.g., Jones Hill and Penny's Hill). Mount Ararat, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is about 30 m in height, whereas the highest dune elevations on Cumberland Island, Georgia, are 12 m.

Behind the dunes are forests (first Pines then Live Oak) and wetlands.

Behind the dunes are often fresh and brackish water wetlands.

Piney woods grade into the dune system too. And at last behind the dune system are the lovely maritime forests of Live Oak draped in Spanish moss

Thursday it's time to head back home....
We traveled south on the Alabama River system. Let's return home in the 1500's with Tristan de Luna who is given credit for establishing the oldest established European multi-year settlement in the United States in the heart of Pensacola.

Tristán de Luna is ordered to establish a Spanish settlement on the Gulf Coast and an overland trade route to what is now South Carolina. After his Pensacola landing, they were hit by a storm before they could unload the vessels. On the night of September 19, 1559, a hurricane (with storm surge) swept through and destroyed most of the ships and cargo: five ships, a galleon and a barkm, pushing one caravel and its cargo into a grove inland. With the colony in serious danger, most of the men traveled inland to the Alabama River to the village of Nanipacana which they had found abandoned

Historians believe that a series of epidemics nearly wiped out southeastern tribes in only decades. One of them—possibly a combination of pneumonic and bubonic plagues, or typhus— killed millions of Mesoamericans from 1545 to 1548. Colonists also transmitted the influenza virus to Native peoples. The virus became epidemic in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica in 1559, following its sweep across Europe two years earlier.

They headed up the Coosa River, which meanders through northeast Alabama and northwest Georgia, but when the Spanish entradas of Hernando de Soto, Tristan de Luna, and Juan Pardo first set foot in the region between 1539 and 1568, Coosa had a very different connotation. First, Coosa referred to the town of Coosa, which moved to several different locations over its existence. Secondly, the Chiefdom of Coosa was limited to the Coosawattee River Valley, which extended from southern Tennessee, through northwest Georgia, finally ending in northeast Alabama. When Spanish expeditions trampled through the region, they commonly referred to it as the Province of Coosa - an alliance of several chiefdoms from central Alabama to eastern Tennessee, all under the leadership of the Coosa cacique. The Coosa people possibly created the largest complex paramount chiefdom in sixteenth-century southeastern North America.

The structural makeup of a Mississippian chiefdom and its governing body in the 1540s was more advanced than the Spanish gave credit. A chiefdom normally had anywhere from 100-1500 permanent residents living within its borders. The typical chiefdom had a town that served as the capitol, while several smaller, outlying towns paid tribute to a central cacique. At least one archaeological model illustrates that less complex chiefdom's consisted of a cluster of towns with a large capitol town normally containing several mounds. The cacique used his food surplus for supporting part-time artisans that made special goods for those who could afford them and for supporting the chiefdom's warriors. Coosa began as a simple chiefdom, incorporating a minority of towns and clans with minimum overall development and limited ranking caciques. By the time Hernando de Soto's expedition entered Coosa, it was definitely a complex paramount chiefdom, incorporating numerous social and kin groups that found their ways into the "political hegemony of a powerful paramount chief" as the results of military conquests. These "low-ranking" tributary chiefdoms and towns established political alliances to the paramount cacique through marriage and the placement of his relatives in authoritative positions over the conquered towns.

Towns in Mississippian culture serving as boundaries to the chiefdom were often fortified with palisade walls, defensive towers, and defensive ditches. The capitol town contained the cacique's house, a temple or temples, and other important public buildings. Natives built most of these public buildings atop pyramid shaped, flat-topped, earthen mounds that took several years to construct. Primarily, these mounds elevated the elite class above the commoners and asserted the cacique's power over his surrounding chiefdom. Normally, a plaza, neighbored by or enclosed by the capitol's public buildings and residents' homes, supported recreational activities. According to the Soto reports, the elite inhabitants lived near the caciques dwelling on the edge of the plaza, while the lower classes dwelt near the outskirts of town.
He expects to find villages of the powerful Coosa people, which Hernando de Soto described 20 years earlier. Instead, he finds villages almost abandoned. An ailing slave left behind by de Soto had spread an epidemic that swept through Coosa towns.

So I'm following the River system home... headed upstream along the interstate highways following de Luna's journey. He was searching for food and survival, I'm content. Getting out of our routine helps us to view the world with different eyes.