Discovering Fire Island

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Excerpt from Discovering Fire Island: The Young Naturalist's Guide to the World of the Barrier BeachAs the horseshoe-crab swims away, your thoughts wander back in time - for you have just had a brush with the world of 200 million years ago, when such marine monsters as Ichthyosaurus ruled the seas, long before the great predatory dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus, appeared on land. This horseshoe-shaped animal with out a backbone but with a tanklike outside armor has lived in Earth's seas virtually unchanged since that era. No wonder it is called a living fossil!On the narrow beach you discover that the tide, reced ing while you foraged in the bay, has deposited a wealth of beachcomber's treasure on the sand. Here's an assortment of flotsam, jetsam and beach wrack that could occupy you for hours. Besides a few dead horse shoe-crabs and many shed exoskeletons, there are scallop shells, seaweeds of various shades of brown and red, assorted driftwood, various items discarded from boats, and an abundance of plastic bottles and other ugly reminders that civilization is close by.More interesting to you right now is a set of hoofprints running along the high-tide line. A deer has chosen the easy travel route, passage down the middle of this long, narrow, roadless island is made difficult by dense thickets of trees and shrubs. You decide to follow the deer tracks to see if they'll lead to an island crossing.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.