NEW ENGLAND

Open Inland Water and Waterways
It may well be impossible to tally up all of New England's rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds. The glaciers transfigured this land, leaving thousands upon thousands of troughs, valleys, basins, and other low spots in their wake. Over the years these depressions filled with water; some of them evolved into major rivers and others into untold numbers of nameless ponds and streams. Waterways and their surrounding bottomlands are tremendously important to the survival of the vast majority of the region's wildlife. These immensely productive systems are critical to fishes, amphibians, certain mammals, such as beavers, muskrats, and otters, and legions of aquatic invertebrates. Their edges provide nesting and feeding grounds for migrating and breeding birds, from Spotted Sandpipers to Great Blue Herons. Perhaps nowhere in the world do Ospreys nest as densely as upon nesting platforms in Massachusetts' Westport River.

Ponds
Shallower and sometimes more ephemeral than lakes, and typically with abundant plant life, ponds are home to a sometimes bewildering array of life, including the handsome Northern Water Snake and the surpassingly beautiful Fragrant Water-lily. A pail of pond water with some bottom sediment is likely to reveal an amazing miniature pondscape, replete with tadpoles, fingernail clams, leeches, snails, water striders, and dragonfly naiads.

Lakes
From sprawling Lake Champlain to the more modest lakes of southern New England to Allagash Lake in the northern Maine wilderness, the region is rich in lakes. It is depth rather than surface area that distinguishes a lake from a pond: a lake is a still body of water deep enough so that at least some part does not receive sunlight on the bottom, making plant growth impossible. Lakes are prime habitat for Common Loons, migrant and nesting waterfowl, and all of the region's large freshwater game fishes.

Streams and Brooks
Ecologists call them first, second, and third order streams, but New Englanders refer to most of them as brooks or creeks. Beloved for trout as well as for spring-flowering Jack-in-the-pulpits, New England brooks offer some of the most splendid settings in the region--trout, as the saying goes, don't live in ugly places. Smaller and shallower than rivers, streams and brooks and creeks provide living quarters for stonefly and mayfly larvae, brook salamanders, crayfishes, and Minks. Speckled Alders may hide a family of Yellow Warblers or a Smooth Green Snake within their thick, sheltering branches.

Rivers
Rivers and their valleys are the region's natural transportation system, used for travel by Native Americans, modern New Englanders, and migrating fishes and birds alike. Elegant willows drape the banks of many New England rivers. New Hampshire's Nashua River Basin is a glowing example of restoration and preservation of the historical and scenic elements of a river ravaged by pollution and neglect.

PHOTO: Ray Packard