Dare County Bombing Range

Neat site. I'll add some SC places too if that's of interest.

I worked all over the Dare County Bombing Range (inland from Stumpy Point) one summer in the late 1970s. Most travel was by low flying helicopter but with a lot of work on the ground, so we got to examine the area from two different and wonderfully complementary perspectives. Unfortunately it is not too open to the public, but some of the more interesting parts are accessible by dirt road and by arranged field trip (Air Force and Navy operate different parts of the range, which is used as much for aircraft gunnery as bombing. The bombs are practice bombs, not high explosive). I saw the eastern part again about ten years later on a peatland geology fieldtrip.

Tall hardwood peatland forest grades generally eastward into marshes. The peat beneath the marshes is highly woody and it was not clear what had forced the succession. In places in SC (Snuggedy Swamp) this succession is by rising sealevel, but a coastal marsh mud overlies the peat there. At Dare County perhaps it was fire stress (but why more marsh nearer the coastline?).

The marshes are what really fascinated me. I saw acre-size patches of pitcher plants, conspicuous and beautiful even from the air. In places the marshes were not marshes in the herbaceous sense, they were stunted knee-high gallberry or a sparser growth of similar woody plants. There were even some bush clumps a bit reminiscent of small Everglades tree-islands. Were these relicts from the forest or new successions in the marsh? Much to my amazement there were "marshes" of cranberry, which until then I did not realize ventured into such warm climes.

Forest-prairie and swamp-marsh sorting has always interested me. What are the controls? Always several possibilities, of course. The peatland forest had interesting open patches in it too, into which we too-dangerously squeezed the helicopter too many times. What caused these openings?

Working by helicopter on an active bombing range with F-4 pilots fixated on their targets rather than us lent a degree of excitement to the whole venture as well.

Anyone who gets the chance to see this place should take the opportunity. Active bases have many wild places, protected in a very effective way. It certainly has great potential for ecological research. For instance, the vast open area f or the targets was simply smashed down decades ago by a giant forest-smashing machine (left abandoned in the woods by the edge). Why is it not forest again?