Carolina Environmental Diversity Explorations
A blackwater river from sea to source · By Dirk Frankenberg
Pocosin wetland community
Figure 17. Pocosin wetland: source of the White Oak, thirty miles inland (Photograph by the author. More about the photograph)
Figure 17 is a view of a pocosin wetland community like those that comprise the source of the White Oak in Hoffman State Forest about thirty miles inland of Bogue Inlet. Pocosin is a Native American word reputed to mean “swamp on a hill.” These habitats truly are swamps on hills because they grow on interstream divides, the high land between the streams. The organic matter from generations of trees builds up on the soils of the interstream divides to make them even higher than the surrounding land.
As a result, water flows away from them into streams and rivers and takes most of the nutrients from the leaves and trees with it. This makes for a soil that is rich in organic matter but poor in nutrients. That, in turn, leads to the stunted, low, and slow-growing vegetation you see here. The one feature these communities have going for them is that they are a great source of water. Unfortunately for them, their high elevation makes them surpassingly easy to drain. All you have to do is dig a ditch and the water flows off to lower elevations, leaving the pocosin wetlands free to be converted to something more useful to humans. That has happened over large areas of both Croatan National Forest and Hoffman State Forest.
