Life Along The Inner Coast

For decades, marine scientists Robert and Alice Jane Lippson have traveled the rivers, backwaters, sounds, bays, lagoons, and inlets stretching from the Chesapeake Bay to the Florida Keys aboard their trawler, Odyssey. The culmination of their leisurely journeys, Life along the Inner Coast is a guide to the plants, animals, and habitats found in one of the most biologically diverse regions on the planet. It is a valuable resource for naturalists, students, and anyone who lives or vacations along the Atlantic inner coast. Southern Gateways Guide is a registered trademark of the University of North Carolina Press

For decades, marine scientists Robert and Alice Jane Lippson have traveled the inner coast--the rivers, backwaters, sounds, bays, lagoons, and inlets stretching from the Chesapeake Bay to the Florida Keys--aboard their trawler, Odyssey. The culmination of their leisurely journeys, Life along the Inner Coast is a guidebook to the plants, animals, and habitats found in one of the most biologically diverse regions on the planet. This dense system of waterways contains an incredible range of salinity levels, from fresh to brackish to oceanic, and is host to flora and fauna that have adapted to both specific and broad ranges of ecological habitats. The Lippsons explore each habitat, from wooded wetlands, broad marshes, and sandy beaches, to the hundreds of piers and pilings thrusting into the waters, to the vast shallow waters rich in populations of fish, crabs, mollusks, and myriad other marine creatures. They describe more than 800 species that are beautifully illustrated with meticulous ink drawings and photographs and organized according to habitat type and geographic region. Ranging from the busy commercial harbor at Norfolk through vast expanses of marshlands of the mid-Atlantic to the tropical mangrove islands of Florida, Life along the Inner Coast offers readers a rich understanding of the relationships between organisms and where they live. It is a valuable resource for naturalists, students, and anyone who lives or vacations along the Atlantic inner coast.

Prize-winning essays on our changing place in the natural world by the best-selling author of Moby-Duck. Writing in the grand American tradition of Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, Donovan Hohn is an “adventurous, inquisitive, and brightly illuminating writer” (New York Times). Since the publication of Moby-Duck a decade ago, Hohn has been widely hailed for his prize-winning essays on the borderlands between the natural and the human. The Inner Coast collects ten of his best, many of them originally published in such magazines as the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, which feature his physical, historical, and emotional journeys through the American landscape. By turns meditative and comic, adventurous and metaphysical, Hohn writes about the appeal of old tools, the dance between ecology and engineering, the lost art of ice canoeing, and Americans’ complicated love/hate relationship with Thoreau. The Inner Coast marks the return of one of our finest young writers and a stylish exploration of what Guy Davenport called “the geography of the imagination.”

Investigations of skeletal remains from key archaeological sites reveal new data and offer insights on prehistoric life and health in the Southeast. The shift from foraging to farming had important health consequences for prehistoric peoples, but variations in health existed within communities that had made this transition. This new collection draws on the rich bioarchaeological record of the Southeastern United States to explore variability in health and behavior within the age of agriculture. It offers new perspectives on human adaptation to various geographic and cultural landscapes across the entire Southeast, from Texas to Virginia, and presents new data from both classic and little-known sites. The contributors question the reliance on simple cause-and-effect relationships in human health and behavior by addressing such key bioarchaeological issues as disease history and epidemiology, dietary composition and sufficiency, workload stress, patterns of violence, mortuary practices, and biological consequences of European contact. They also advance our understanding of agriculture by showing that uses of maize were more varied than has been previously supposed. Representing some of the best work being done today by physical anthropologists, this volume provides new insights into human adaptation for both archaeologists and osteologists. It attests to the heterogeneous character of Southeastern societies during the late prehistoric and early historic periods while effectively detailing the many factors that have shaped biocultural evolution.

A beautifully illustrated field guide to the Mid-Atlantic region, from the Jersey Shore to Cape Hatteras The Outer Banks of North Carolina and the beaches of the Mid-Atlantic Coast are among the most popular tourist destinations in the United States. This book is a richly illustrated field guide that surveys the geology, environmental history, natural history, and human history of a region that spans the eastern seaboard from Sandy Hook in New Jersey south to Cape Hatteras on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It is organized around environments, not particular locations. Included are the geology of beaches and barrier islands, the environmental history of the region, as well as detailed looks at the natural history of beaches, dunes, maritime forests, coastal marshes, and estuaries. Also covered are issues involving human activity and climate change, which have become dominant forces shaping geophysical and biological environments. This guide will enable users to walk into a salt marsh or onto a beach and identify much of what they see.

A richly illustrated full-color guide to the unique plants, wildlife, and environments of Cape Cod and the other nearby "Outer Lands" that face the Atlantic Ocean This essential guidebook presents the most abundantly illustrated and fascinating account of the natural history of Cape Cod, its nearby islands, Block Island, the western coast of Rhode Island, and southeastern Long Island ever published. Exploring the ecology and most common plants and animals of the various regional environments--beaches, dunes, salt marshes, heathlands, and coastal forests--the book also encompasses marine mammals, sea turtles, and fish offshore. For nature-loving local residents and visitors alike, this essential book will be a treasured resource.

“The best-written and best-illustrated guide ever about a North American tidal estuary. It is the model for all future coastal nature guides.” —Whole Earth Review Life in the Chesapeake Bay is the most important book ever published on America’s largest estuary. Since publication of the first edition in 1984, tens of thousands of naturalists, boaters, fishermen, and conservationists have relied on the book’s descriptions of the Bay’s plants, animals, and diverse habitats. Superbly illustrated and clearly written, this acclaimed guide describes hundreds of plants and animals and their habitats, from diamondback terrapins to blue crabs to hornshell snails. Now in its third edition, the book has been updated with a new gallery of thirty-nine color photographs and dozens of new species descriptions and illustrations. The new edition retains the charm of an engaging classic while adding a decade of new research. This classic guide to the plants and animals of the Chesapeake Bay will appeal to a variety of readers—year-round residents and summer vacationers, professional biologists and amateur scientists, conservationists and sportsmen. “Handsome, generously illustrated . . . All of the Bay’s richness is catalogued here.” —The Washington Post Book World “A story book, a field guide and a reference work, and anyone interested in fishing, ecology, or our bay should own it.” —The Baltimore Sun “The region’s quintessential field and reference guide.” —Chesapeake Life Magazine “One of the most popular, well written, and useful guides to the Chesapeake.” —Northeastern Naturalist

Blending history, oral history, autobiography, and travel narrative, Bland Simpson explores the islands that lie in the sounds, rivers, and swamps of North Carolina's inner coast. In each of the fifteen chapters in the book, Simpson covers a single island or group of islands, many of which, were it not for the buffering Outer Banks, would be lost to the ebbs and flows of the Atlantic. Instead they are home to unique plant and animal species and well-established hardwood forests, and many retain vestiges of an earlier human history.