Ausable Marsh: Flora and fauna accompany a short hike

Ausable Marsh offers an environmentally abundant alternative to the busier Ausable Point

Story and photos by Tim Rowland

The 660-acre Ausable Marsh Wildlife Management Area in Peru is a spot I’d visited many times for a dog walk or a low-drama ski. But until this year, I’d never visited in prime time, when the swamps explode with birds and amphibians on a scale that’s difficult to believe.

The activity and excitement mirror that of humans opening their summer camps for the season, the knocking of woodpeckers sounding much like the nailing of siding that has loosened during the winter, and the birdsong like barstool gossip as the new arrivals catch up with old friends.

How to get there

Ausable Marsh is quite easy to find and quite easy to miss. Different from the more popular and more visible Ausable Point, the marsh makes up a secluded niche of wetlands just to the south of the often crowded campground and day-use center.

From the Peru exit off the Northway, take Route 442 east toward Lake Champlain. Where it T’s with Route 9, take a right and then an immediate left on a dirt road marked by a small and not-so-obvious DEC sign indicating you have arrived at the entrance to the preserve.

Drive past a field on your right to a pullout on both sides of the road and park there. You can drive further, but it’s more interesting to walk.

At the bottom of the hill the road turns right and follows the dead-still Little Ausable River, reflecting not blue skies, but the black and green of the heavy wooded canopy overhead. It’s popular with ducks, turtles and anglers who can park right on its bank and scarcely need to leave the driver’s seat or their Pabst to get a line wet.

The local flavor of vehicles driven in by those who have time to fish at 1:30 in the afternoon is certainly noteworthy — maybe it’s the rust, maybe it’s the variety and quantity of stuff crammed into the passenger seats, maybe it’s the way these conveyances blur the lines between transportation and housing — whatever, they are unspeakingly picturesque, no question. To a person, they all look sublimely happy, which is all that matters.

Your route will be surrounded by water in what amounts to a river delta and bathed in a green glow, almost like Louisiana without the humidity. Immediately, your Merlin app will start blowing up, first with the birds that come as standard equipment on any ADK outing — cardinals, chickadees, bluebirds, goldfinches and robins. 

There are woodpeckers and woodpecker adjacent birds (hairy, downey, ficker); warblers (chestnut sided, magnolia, yellow rumped), vireos (red eyed and blue headed) sparrows (song and swamp) and thrush (wood, Swainson’s and veery).

That’s for a start. One of the first creatures I notched was a yellow bellied sapsucker, which I had always known as a punchline in Hanna-Barbera cartoons and never realized was an actual bird. Outside of the first little hill (which you can drive down) this trail is perfectly flat, so if you have mobility issues or feel like swallowing a few hallucinatory mushrooms before your hike, I can’t recommend this outing enough.

At a quarter mile, you will arrive at the entrance of the marsh proper, having been serenaded along the way by eastern wood pewees, great crested flycatchers, redstarts and brown creepers. At the kiosk, the trail breaks out of the forest and proceeds south along a levy for a mile  and a half to the Ausable River.

At this time of year, a non-negotiable piece of equipment is a pair of rubber boots, because — swamp. 

The levee was slightly underwater for a few yards at the kiosk and then more seriously so another quarter-mile in. Immediately, you can’t help but notice, on this day anyway, that the ground is moving. Little green frogs, literally hundreds of them, were sunning themselves on the levee, but made more watery arrangements when they saw me coming.

Along those lines, every so often as you’re walking along the levee you will hear the splash of something diving into the water. Usually it’s a low/moderate intensity splash but a couple of times it was a Very Large Splash that made me just as happy not to have seen what or who made it. The birds are still plentiful, but of a slightly different ilk as you walk along the still water and marsh grasses: red wing blackbirds, of course, along with marsh wrens, pied-billed grebe, swamp sparrows, willow flycatchers and eastern kingbirds. There were ducks and geese and dragonflies and even more frogs in an environment that was exploding with late-May life. Red-twig dogwood was flowering, and yellow water lilies were budding.

While the marsh is viewable and bird-watchable from the more civilized Ausable Campground road, I find this little-used trail, which cleaves the swamp in twain, to be more rewarding and nature-immersive.

Back at the car, and the open meadow I heard one last bird, a grackle — a bird I love for its glossy black feathers and an attitude that closely parallels Jimmy Conners. Ninety minutes is plenty of time to complete the journey, but with all the flora and fauna to revel in, don’t be surprised if, by the time you’re back at the car, three or four hours have gone by.