The WFSU Ecology Blog
  • Home
    • About
    • EcoAdventures
      • Kayak and Canoe Adventures
      • Hiking
      • Wildlife Watching
    • Observations From the Field
      • White Pelicans Visit Dr. Charles L. Evans Pond in Tallahassee
      • An April Walk at Ochlockonee River WMA
      • Nesting Raptors at Honeymoon Island State Park
    • WFSU Public Media Home
  • Documentaries
    • In Their Words: Black Legacy Communities in North Florida
    • EcoCitizen Show | Seasons in South Tallahassee
    • Red Wolf Family Celebrates First Year at the Tallahassee Museum
    • Roaming the Red Hills
    • Oyster Doctors
    • Testing the Ecology of Fear
    • EcoShakespeare
    • Stories from the Apalachicola
    • Classic WFSU Ecology Documentaries
  • Habitats
    • Estuaries
      • Oyster Reef
        • The Effects of Predators and Fear on Oyster Reefs
        • Apalachicola Oyster Research
        • Animal Species in a North Florida Intertidal Oyster Reef
        • Oyster Reef Ecology | On the Reef
      • Salt Marsh
        • In the Grass- Salt Marsh Biodiversity Study
        • Plants and Animals of a North Florida Salt Marsh
        • Salt Marsh Ecology | In the Grass
      • Seagrass Bed
        • Predatory Snails, and Prey, of the Bay Mouth Bar Seagrass Beds
      • In the Grass, On the Reef Glossary
    • Waterways Big and Small
      • Aucilla/ Wacissa Watershed
      • Apalachicola Basin
        • Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines | Virtual Field Trip
        • The Age of Nature Screening & Discussion | The Future of the Apalachicola
        • Apalachicola River and Bay
        • Apalachicola RiverTrek | Kayaking, Camping, & Hiking the River Basin
    • Longleaf Pine & Fire Ecology
  • Backyard Habitat
    • Backyard Blog
      • My Year in Bugs: the 2022 Backyard Blog
      • Backyard Ecology Blog | 2021
      • Backyard Blog November/ December 2020
      • Backyard Blog September/ October 2020
      • July and August 2020 Backyard Blog
      • Backyard Blog June 2020
      • Backyard Blog May 2020
      • Backyard Blog April 2020
      • Backyard Blog February and March 2020
      • Backyard Blog January 2020
      • Backyard Blog October through December 2019
      • Backyard Blog September 2019
      • Backyard Blog August 2019
      • Backyard Blog July 2019
      • Backyard Blog June 2019
      • Backyard Blog May 2019
      • Backyard Blog April 2019
      • Backyard Blog March 2019
      • Backyard Blog February 2019
      • Backyard Blog January 2019
      • The Backyard Bug Blog 2018
    • Backyard Flora and Fauna
      • Bees of North Florida and South Georgia
      • The Seasonality of Bees (and Bee Plants) in North Florida
      • Woody Vines of North Florida
      • Flies of North Florida are More Diverse than You’d Think
      • The Case for Weeds, Our Unsung Florida Native Plants
      • Devil’s Walkingstick: Your New Favorite Thorny Pollinator Plant?
      • Florida Native Milkweed | Tips for Growing Your Monarch Friendly Garden
      • Mistletoe | A Parasite for the Holidays (But Maybe We Like it Anyway?)
    • Florida Friendly Seasonal Planting Guide
    • Pollinator and Gardening Posts
    • Gardening Web Resources
Kayak and Canoe Adventures
RiverTrek 2021: Five Days on the Apalachicola River
Lower Lake Lafayette: Kayak Tallahassee’s Hidden Swamp
Chipola River Paddling Trail | The Ovens and...
Kayaking Bald Point | Adventure on a Living...
Wacissa Springs Adventure | Kayaking a Wild Florida...
A Geologist’s View of the Apalachicola River |...
Upper Chipola River Kayak Adventure | Ghosts &...
Tate’s Hell & the Apalachicola River Delta |...
Kayak Scouting Mission on the Ochlockonee Water Trail
Merritt’s Mill Pond | Kayaking and Spring Caves

The WFSU Ecology Blog

  • Home
    • About
    • EcoAdventures
      • Kayak and Canoe Adventures
      • Hiking
      • Wildlife Watching
    • Observations From the Field
      • White Pelicans Visit Dr. Charles L. Evans Pond in Tallahassee
      • An April Walk at Ochlockonee River WMA
      • Nesting Raptors at Honeymoon Island State Park
    • WFSU Public Media Home
  • Documentaries
    • In Their Words: Black Legacy Communities in North Florida
    • EcoCitizen Show | Seasons in South Tallahassee
    • Red Wolf Family Celebrates First Year at the Tallahassee Museum
    • Roaming the Red Hills
    • Oyster Doctors
    • Testing the Ecology of Fear
    • EcoShakespeare
    • Stories from the Apalachicola
    • Classic WFSU Ecology Documentaries
  • Habitats
    • Estuaries
      • Oyster Reef
        • The Effects of Predators and Fear on Oyster Reefs
        • Apalachicola Oyster Research
        • Animal Species in a North Florida Intertidal Oyster Reef
        • Oyster Reef Ecology | On the Reef
      • Salt Marsh
        • In the Grass- Salt Marsh Biodiversity Study
        • Plants and Animals of a North Florida Salt Marsh
        • Salt Marsh Ecology | In the Grass
      • Seagrass Bed
        • Predatory Snails, and Prey, of the Bay Mouth Bar Seagrass Beds
      • In the Grass, On the Reef Glossary
    • Waterways Big and Small
      • Aucilla/ Wacissa Watershed
      • Apalachicola Basin
        • Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines | Virtual Field Trip
        • The Age of Nature Screening & Discussion | The Future of the Apalachicola
        • Apalachicola River and Bay
        • Apalachicola RiverTrek | Kayaking, Camping, & Hiking the River Basin
    • Longleaf Pine & Fire Ecology
  • Backyard Habitat
    • Backyard Blog
      • My Year in Bugs: the 2022 Backyard Blog
      • Backyard Ecology Blog | 2021
      • Backyard Blog November/ December 2020
      • Backyard Blog September/ October 2020
      • July and August 2020 Backyard Blog
      • Backyard Blog June 2020
      • Backyard Blog May 2020
      • Backyard Blog April 2020
      • Backyard Blog February and March 2020
      • Backyard Blog January 2020
      • Backyard Blog October through December 2019
      • Backyard Blog September 2019
      • Backyard Blog August 2019
      • Backyard Blog July 2019
      • Backyard Blog June 2019
      • Backyard Blog May 2019
      • Backyard Blog April 2019
      • Backyard Blog March 2019
      • Backyard Blog February 2019
      • Backyard Blog January 2019
      • The Backyard Bug Blog 2018
    • Backyard Flora and Fauna
      • Bees of North Florida and South Georgia
      • The Seasonality of Bees (and Bee Plants) in North Florida
      • Woody Vines of North Florida
      • Flies of North Florida are More Diverse than You’d Think
      • The Case for Weeds, Our Unsung Florida Native Plants
      • Devil’s Walkingstick: Your New Favorite Thorny Pollinator Plant?
      • Florida Native Milkweed | Tips for Growing Your Monarch Friendly Garden
      • Mistletoe | A Parasite for the Holidays (But Maybe We Like it Anyway?)
    • Florida Friendly Seasonal Planting Guide
    • Pollinator and Gardening Posts
    • Gardening Web Resources
Salt Marsh Ecology | In the Grass

From Bay to Bowl: Making New England Quahog Chowder

by Rob Diaz de Villegas July 13, 2011
by Rob Diaz de Villegas July 13, 2011 2 comments
Rob Diaz de Villegas WFSU-TV

Mouth of the Back RiverIGOR chip- human appreciation 150

With the In the Grass, On the Reef documentary done, me, my wife Amy, and our son Maximus took a vacation to visit Amy’s family in Duxbury Beach, Massachusetts.  We were picked up at the airport by her cousin, Jim Kennedy.  On the ride down, we got to talking about what our respective plans were for the week.  One thing he was wanting to do grabbed my attention.  He was going to go clamming for quahogs in the marsh by the family’s vacation home and make a chowder.  That sounded so cool to me.  Go into a marsh without having to lug around a camera, and round up some tasty critters?  I told him I wanted to go (I did go into the marsh with a camera last year, which is where the marsh pics you see originated).  It’s a strange side effect of working on this project that I now enjoy going into hot, muddy places surrounded by sharp grass.

P1000595Low tide was set for 11 AM on the day we chose to go, so we set out between 9:30 and 10 while the tide was still going out.  The marsh is at the mouth of the Back River, and when the tide drops, the grass stands a few feet above the bottom of the river bed.  Below the cordgrass, the sides of the elevated marsh are pockmarked by fiddler crab burrows.  We entered the sand/ mud flats at the head of the river from Gurnet Road, armed with our permit, a rake, and a 12-quart bucket.  The quahogs would be buried just below the mucky surface. Here on the Forgotten Coast, we have quahogs as well- ours are the southern quahogs, the more famous New England quahogs are known as the northern quahog:

quahog- north and south

There were a lot of people out there harvesting the clams.  Most of them used a short rake meant specifically for clamming.  Jim went to several stores to look for one but couldn’t find it, so we used a garden rake.  At the end of the day, though, the best tools we had were our own feet.  A mature, legal sized quahog (3-4 years old) is big enough that we could feel them under our feet as we walked up the river bed.  Then, with the rake or with our hands, we would dig them out.  Around every legal sized clam we found there were usually several smaller ones.  I thought back to what David said in the show about what he looked for in an oyster reef.  The best ones had several mature oysters as well as several smaller ones to eventually replace them.

P1000594

Green crab (Carcinus maenas)?

I couldn’t help but note the differences and commonalities between our local marshes and sand flats and this New England marsh.  I didn’t see many large predatory snails in or around the marsh, a stark contrast to sand flats in St. Joseph Bay or at Bay Mouth Bar.

Blue crabs are of course common on Florida coasts, but their historic range ends just to the south of here, on the outer coasts of Cape Cod.  I believe this mud covered crab is an invasive green crab, and I have seen Atlantic rock crabs on the nearby beach.  There were razor clams (Ensis directus) and steamers (soft shell clams, Mya arenaria), each of which are harvested at other times of the year.  We also saw the occasional small shrimp, and oysters that had flaked off of reefs deeper out in the bay.

We caught the legal limit and returned, muddied, to prepare the chowder.

IMG_6442

Jim Kennedy (left) and WFSU-TV producer Rob Diaz de Villegas (right) shuck and clean quahogs.

IMG_6441A little on how you prepare quahogs for chowder:

You scrub the mud off of the closed shells.  Open shells buried in the mud are dead animals and are unsafe for consumption.

After scrubbing them, you boil them until they open.  Then you shuck them and remove the contents of their stomachs.  In the photo at the lower left of this paragraph, that green stuff is phytoplankton- microscopic plants floating with the other sediment in the water.  Good food for clams- and their filtering it is a great way to keep the water clean- but not anything we were interested in eating.

I got to try my hand shucking and cleaning the clams.  Jim’s mom, Pam, cut potatoes and onions while Jim cooked the quahogs and fried some bacon.  The bacon smell helped with the boiling clam smell.  The ingredients would come together in a large pot with milk, cream, and flour.  The making of the chowder in the cottage brought out some nostalgia.

Pam recalled that her grandmother’s chowder didn’t contain dairy.  When Bertha and Archer MacFarland would camp on Duxbury Beach, they didn’t have refrigeration and so milk and cream weren’t really an option.

Archer MacFarland“When Max is old enough,” My father-in-law, Chris MacFarland, said to me, “you need to teach him how to go quahogging to keep the tradition going.”  Maximus is five months old, so I have a bit of time until I take him out there.  When he does go, he’ll represent the fifth generation of the MacFarland family to harvest quahogs from Duxbury Bay.

Duxbury Beach and Duxbury Bay are separated by Gurnet Point, a thin cape down which Gurnet Road runs.  The road runs to the town of Saquish at the horn of the cape. Driving there, the beach is on your left, and the bay is to the right.  A large marsh is at the North of the bay.

Archer and Bertha started camping on Duxbury Beach around 1920.  After some years of camping there, they bought plots of land and built a cottage by the marsh.  When their son Robert was sixteen, he built another house nearby.  Then, when he was nineteen, he sold his car for $200 to buy a plot.  There he built the house where his children, and their children and grandchildren, vacation every summer.

Robert MacFarlandRobert took his children looking for quahogs when they were young.  They used the “treading” method to find their clams, much like we did, except that they were barefoot.  Jim and I wore shoes to keep our feet safe from broken shells hidden in soft mud that was deep in places.  It was deeper as we walked up the riverbed- I sank almost up to my waist at one point.  I imagine that they didn’t walk that far up.

Robert also fixed up an old pram, on which he used to take his sons Chris and Doug on fishing trips off of the beach.  As Chris (who was 7) and Doug (who was 5) recalled, one of them would row, the other would bail water.  They caught cod, threw back pollock and perch, and used mackerel for bait.  Of course, North Atlantic cod is not nearly as common as it once was.  Nor is flounder as common off of Saquish.  Jim remembers going out with his family and spotting them at the edge of seagrass beds from the family’s Boston Whaler.  For about ten years now, those haven’t been seen much either.  As David points out in the program, the animals in the lower trophic levels see less change over time, and so there are still plenty of clams in Duxbury Bay.

Hopefully that means chowder at the cottage for many more summers.

When the chowder was done, it was served with oyster crackers and crumbled bacon (the bacon Jim made earlier- the grease was used in the chowder).

I’m guessing there are stories like this across the Forgotten Coast: generations of families bonding while they made use of the fish and shellfish swimming outside their back doors.  Do you have a story like this?  Share it here, in the comments section.  We might want to visit some of you and feature your stories in one of our videos.

Photos taken by: Rob Diaz de Villegas, Chris MacFarland, James Kennedy, and Amy Diaz de Villegas.  Archival photos provided by Chris MacFarland.

Facebook Comments
appreciationclamclammingDuxbury Beachgreen crabmarine ecologyMassachusettsquahogsalt marsh
2 comments
0
FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
Rob Diaz de Villegas

Rob Diaz de Villegas is a senior producer for WFSU-TV, covering outdoors and ecology. After years of producing the music program OutLoud, Rob found himself in a salt marsh with a camera, and found a new professional calling as well. That project, the National Science Foundation funded "In the Grass, On the Reef," spawned the award winning WFSU Ecology Blog. Now he spends time exploring north Florida's forests, coasts, waterways, and the endlessly fascinating ecosystem that is the backyard garden. Rob is married with two young sons, who make a pretty fantastic adventure squad.

previous post
Full “In the Grass, On the Reef” documentary online now!
next post
The End of an Era

Related Posts

SciGirls at the FSU Coastal & Marine Lab

July 21, 2011

Black Mangroves: Strangers in a St. Joe Bay...

August 8, 2013

A walk “in the grass”

September 21, 2010

Gulf Specimen Marine Lab Recovers After Hurricane Michael

October 14, 2018

The new Atlas of Florida’s Natural Heritage

September 26, 2011

Grasses in Classes: Kids Learn to Build a...

July 2, 2013

Florida Wild Mammal Association on dimensions

August 15, 2011

How Can We Prevent Salt Marsh Die-Off?

June 26, 2013

The Many Personalities of Salt Marsh Cordgrass

July 17, 2013

What are those new images that are popping...

April 5, 2011

2 comments

Buck Oven July 14, 2011 - 4:31 pm

Finding clams with your feet reminds me of finding scallops with my feet on the bay mouth bar, on the Turkey Point Flats, off St James, FL and in StJoe Bayin years past.

Rob August 16, 2011 - 6:06 pm

It’s interesting that you mention St. Joe Bay, when I was out there I was thinking about how it is out there during scallop season. I guess I’ll think about it a little more when I walk over hard bumps in the sand out there, and what I might be stepping on.

Comments are closed.

Search

Subscribe

Subscribe to receive more outdoor adventures, and an in depth look at our local forests and waterways by Email.

If you do not receive a verification e-mail, check your spam folder.

Category

WFSU-FM Environmental Stories

  • Tallahassee’s latest urban reforestation effort brings new trees to Governor’s Park
  • Hurricane Ian’s estimated damage to Florida agriculture tops $1B
  • America’s largest underground springs gets even bigger with the discovery of another cave connection
  • DeSantis outlines second-term environmental plans
  • Deep freeze breaks pipes, creates water crisis across South

Twitter

Tweets by wfsuIGOR

iNaturalist

iNaturalist became a part of the WFSU Ecology Blog during the EcoCitizen Project in 2019.  Since then, we’ve used it to help identify the many plants and animals we see on our shoots.  And on the Backyard Blog, we show how it can be used to identify weeds and garden insects, to help figure out what’s beneficial or a possible pest.  Below is the iNaturalist profile belonging to WFSU Ecology producer Rob Diaz de Villegas.

iNaturalist


View robdv’s observations »

Most Recent

  • The Wakulla Springs Wildlife Survey- a decades long look
  • Welcome Liesel Hamilton to the WFSU Ecology Blog!
  • My Year in Bugs: the 2022 Backyard Blog
  • Timberlane Ravine: learn to love dead trees (and trillium!)
  • The strange and dangerous love lives of zebra longwing butterflies

Archives

July 2011
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031
« Jun   Aug »

WFSU Ecology YouTube

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Flickr
  • Youtube

@2017 - PenciDesign. All Right Reserved. Designed and Developed by PenciDesign