casionally eagles can be sighted. An average count of twenty thousand raptors can be seen during the migration season. Thousands of songbirds migrate through Lighthouse Point during the fall also. Again the wetlands provide a place for them to rest and take advantage of the abundant food source before moving on.
Lighthouse Point has a variety of coastal communities that we can explore and learn about. These would include salt wetlands, rocky shoreline, and sandy beaches, all of which contain an intertidal zone, the area between the high-and low-tide lines. Tides and wave action are two of the most important factors which shape our coast. These two factors can also change a habitat dramatically every day. The tide rises and falls twice a day and during these times animals and plants who live within the intertidal zones need to withstand changes in temperature, moisture levels, and sometimes even salinity changes. Marine animals and plants have adapted in ways so as to survive these daily changes in their habitats.
Along the rocky shore we find animals and plants we would not see living at the sandy beach or the salt marsh. These marine organisms have found their own way of surviving the harsh action of waves against rocks and the rise and fall of the water. Animals and plant material either are anchored onto the rocks themselves such as barnacles, mussels, or seaweeds, or they hide in cracks such as crabs or seastars, or they bend with the waves as seaweeds do while floating on the waters surface while anchored to rocks. As the tide goes out, many animals, to avoid drying out, will pull their bodies into their shells and become inactive like the periwinkle. Others like crabs will lay under the protective moist layering of seaweed. As the tide goes out there are also left behind small pools of water in depressions and crevices in rocks. Many different animals and plants inhabit these pools during low tide including algae, anemones, hermit crabs, sea stars, and even tiny fish. They wait for the water level to rise again with the tide.
Life at the beach is very different. The beach proves to be a harsher habitat to live in for animals and plants. That is because what makes up a beach is always shifting and moving with the waves and the wind. Animals which live in this area cope with the conditions by usually burrowing into the sand, these would include clams, worms, sand dollars, and crabs. Much of what we find on top of the sand is material that has been washed ashore, seaweed which has become adrift and empty shells of animals which have been eaten.
Lighthouse Point contains areas of wetland or salt marsh which, like the wetland of the Mill River, provides nursery grounds for many animals and a home to crustaceans, fish, birds, reptiles and mammals. Salt marshes also provide a filtering system for pollutants and contaminants. They also trap nutrients and sediment which are slowly released into the water through decayed vegetation. Salt marshes are usually intersected by salt water creeks or tidal creeks which rise and fall with the tides. Lighthouse Point is intersected by Morris Creek. There was once a large expanse of wetlands in the Morris Creek area along the shoreline to East Haven. Through development this wetland has been broken up and reduced. Morris Creek has been rerouted many times due to the expansion of Tweed-New Haven Airport. These smaller marshes are not as effective as filtering and drainage systems. Sediment and nutrient rich silt brought through a marsh by creeks and rivers build up in the salt marsh and give marsh plants an ideal place to sprout and grow undisturbed. The most common plants in the salt marsh are grasses. The toughest, most productive grass is the spartina grasses. These grasses provide an abundant food source for the animals which make the marsh their home. The many plants we find in the salt marsh are dependent on the presence of salt water above the ground level at least some of the time. Salt marsh cordgrass which we find along tidal creeks and along the harbor edge is frequently floo