A great number of species make a home in a restored wetland at the former Tidmarsh Farm. Bill Perry USFWS
Brook trout, alewife, warblers and wood ducks dwell where cranberries were once the commodity.
Like any commodity, cranberry production is subject to changes in the markets. Cranberries, a native plant that naturally grows in soggy bogs in the Northeast United States have been commercially farmed on large scale for a century and a half, perhaps longer. But farming the berry is not so economically viable anymore—and that has afforded opportunities to put federal excise taxes paid by fishing tackle manufacturers to work for conservation.
Using funds from National Coastal Wetland Grants derived from the Sport Fish Restoration Act, the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Ecological Restoration, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have engaged in a number of restoration projects in what had been known as the cranberry capital of the world. The group embarked on an endeavor to return a well-used farm into a mosaic of natural wildlife habitat. It’s the largest freshwater ecological restoration project yet to be accomplished in the northeastern United States.
The large Tidmarsh Farm located in Plymouth, Massachusetts, operated since the 1890s. The owners recently dedicated the farm not to development but to conservation, to restore the land to its soggy soils, forests, uplands, and open waters—for fish and wildlife and for people to enjoy.
Some 480 acres of farmland have been converted back to the natural maple-cypress woodlands, lowland bog, and miles of stream. The lands have been reshaped and contoured and revegetated with native trees as well as upland and wetland plants.
Gone are nine dams, dikes, and water control structures that formerly regulated flows and flooded the cranberry marshes on a seasonal basis. Their removal offers unfettered ocean-to-headwater access to upstream spawning habitat for alewife and blueback herring—fishes that spawn in freshwater and live the majority of their lives in salt water. They are a favored fare of striped bass while they too cruise the Atlantic Ocean.
