Long Wharf Nature Preserve ​“Signs” Up

Did you know that a horseshoe crab’s blood is blue? And that’s because it contains hemocyanin, a copper-based moleclue that clots around bacteria?

Or that these crawling blue bloods are used to test that vaccine you might have just received?

Or that if you time-traveled back to 1949 and were standing at Long Wharf Drive, right by the entry to the Long Wharf Nature Preserve, where horseshoe crabs still thrive,you’d likely be swimming with the crabs for shore because you’d be in the middle of what was then still harbor?

Those informative and appreciation-inspiring facts are now at your fingertips thanks to a series of six colorful new signs that have been erected along the trail looping through the eight-acre Long Wharf Nature Preserve.

New Haven Land Trust (NHLT) Executive Director Justin Elicker, along with a crew of two dozen donors, helpers, and the organization’s friends, celebrated the unveiling of the signs Thursday afternoon.

It was a picture-perfect moment to reveal the photo-centric signage as the sun set on the sparkling blue waters of the harbor, the beach, mudflats, salt marsh and upland habitats or ecosystems that comprise the preserve and are explained in the new graffiti-resistant sigs.

The new signs replace dilapidated and in some instances inaccurate signs from about 15 years ago, said Elicker.

With color photography, large type, and suggestions for activities — for example, the ​“Upland” sign describes and pictures staghorn sumac, eastern cottonwood and other plants nearby and asks a reader to go find them — the signs are ​“interactive and family friendly,” in Elicker’s words.

The merry company walked the trail pulling off green bunting of each of the signs and reading some of the signs’ stories.

The first was a history of the preserve, which was created entirely from landfill tossed up from the harbor as the I‑95 highway and subsequent improvements evolved through about 1976.

Elicker said he continues to be astonished to realize that all the green growth in the preserve is self-created by nature, just seeds planting themselves through wind, water, and insects and creating the wildness of the naturally occurring preserve.

The second sign focuses on the ​“Upland” or woodland section of the preserve closest to the highway, and full of the sumac, cottonwood, blackberry and similar plants.

The third sign’s theme, wildlife, reminds viewers of the presence of egrets, mollusks, monarch butterflies, and the delicate terns that perform their swooping acrobatics across the shoreline and the sky.

The fourth sign calls attention to the oyster industry that flourished for a century in New Haven.

Its heart was at nearby City Point, Elicker reminded his peripatetic listeners.

He said that the NHLT happens to be the owner and steward of a non-land-based stretch of property. Namely, an oyster bed. He said the trust has already begun talks both with the state’s Bureau of Aquaculture and with the area’s venerable oyster business,the Norwalk-based Norm Bloom and Son, about activating the bed.

“We’re slowly trying to take over the sea,” Elicker joked.

At the fifth sign, the theme of which is ​“Shorefront,” David McCarthy (pictured) pointed out the marshes, mudflats, and beach sections of the preserve.

McCarthy, a graduate student at Yale’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, is also the photographer of the images on the sign — a complex amalgam of 33 distinct shots that he stitched together to tell the ecological story of the preserve.

The sixth and final sign features the horseshoe crab, a ​“living fossil,” as old if not older than cockroaches, namely about 445 million years young.

The unveiling of the signage celebrated not only the completion of the specific project but also a re-energized NHLT under Elicker’s leadership.

“We’re here to celebrate this organization — 45 community gardens, 100 raised beds, educational programs, this preserve, at the Morris Creek Preserve,” and our other programs, Elicker said.

While preservation of natural open spaces is clearly a central aim of the group, ​“what’s even more important in an urban center is to make our places walkable,” educational, and safe, he added.

Other new developments to look forward to include a bike rack and bike repair station that Elicker expects the city to install within the next several months at the entryway to the Long Wharf Nature Preserve.

He said that a re-do of the signage and a rebuilding of the entryway to the Quinnipiac Meadows Preserve are next up on the NHLT’s busy agenda.