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Overcast There's something in the water part IV
A wet and serene ride at the Levy Preserve: Herald editor kayaks the Meadow Brook and Merrick Bay
For part four of our look at Long Island’s waters, There's Something in the Water, Herald Senior Editor Scott Brinton took a kayak tour of Merrick Bay.
For a moment, I stopped paddling and took in Merrick Bay, its virtually still surface glistening in the morning sunlight. In the distance, the Jones Beach water tower and amphitheater stood out amid a light haze. The view was, in a word, breathtaking.
On a recent Wednesday, I did what I’ve wanted to do for years –– take the Town of Hempstead’s kayaking tour, which launches from the ranger’s station at the Norman J. Levy Park and Preserve in Merrick and heads south down the Meadow Brook to Merrick Bay.
To my right was an osprey-nesting station –– a tall wooden pole with a wooden deck, set on a mud-covered island coated in bright-green Spartina marsh grass. Kelly Bremel, my guide on this one-hour excursion, noted that a pair of ospreys lives at the station, which sits at the mouth of the Meadow Brook, where it meets Merrick Bay. I had hoped to spot an osprey, a magnificent black-and-white raptor that feeds mainly on fish, but none was in the nest.
Bremel, a 21-year-old Town of Hempstead summer park ranger from Rockville Centre, who is studying library science at Queens College, paddled toward the 500-foot-long fishing pier that juts from the Levy Preserve into Merrick Bay. Soon we were zipping in and out of the pier’s massive pilings, silhouetted against an azure sky. I could only marvel at the structure, built out of cumaru, or ironwood, from Peru. I was having a ball.
Bremel, who regularly leads kayaking tours, has been a ranger at the Levy Preserve for four years. “It’s a great summer job,” she said. “I really love this job.”
Just as I had lost hope of seeing ospreys, the pair streaked into their nest and roosted. Bremel and I hurried back toward the nesting station. When I got within shouting distance of it, I watched as the ospreys lifted into the air, their fully extended wings stretching six feet across. The pair then flew south over the saltwater marsh and were gone. I was awestruck.
