To your left is the Great Salt Pond, the jewel of Block Island.

The Great Salt Pond is the healthiest and most productive coastal pond in Rhode Island, and its waters and shoreline provide important habitat for fish, shellfish, lobsters and crabs, marine mammals, and shorebirds. Great egrets can be seen fishing in marshy pools or in shallow waters along the pond’s edge, standing almost immobile until small fish pass by and then striking with their long bills. On the northeastern edge of the pond, Andy’s Way is a publicly accessible beach and salt marsh where birds, crabs, and fish can be seen, and where many plants and animals depend on respect and care to survive. Among the pond’s notable creatures is the horseshoe crab, which lives in shallow marine waters on soft sandy or muddy bottom and comes ashore only to lay its eggs on beaches like the one at Andy’s Way; horseshoe crabs have lived on Earth for over 300 million years and are known as living fossils. By approximately 2,000 years ago, woody shrubs on Block Island had been shaded out by larger trees and a mature forest covered the island, and at that time the Manissean Indians, or the People of the Little God, began living in several villages around the island as accomplished seafarers and agriculturalists who fished, hunted seals, and grew corn in fields.

New Shoreham, Rhode Island · United States