Our town in Western Massachusetts is a place of great natural beauty. The hills, forests, rivers, and changing skies are all in plain sight for us to enjoy. One of Hawley’s landmarks, hidden from our routine lives, is unique and even exotic, and that is the Hawley Bog.

Just off East Hawley Road, the parking area for the bog and the Old Town Common—another hidden gem—is well-marked, thanks to the placement of a kiosk, picnic table, and bike rack by the historical society, Sons and Daughters of Hawley, with the support of the bog owner-manager The Nature Conservancy and grants from MassHumanities. The kiosk displays maps of the trails for the bog and the Old Town Common. Walk left to the bog and you will arrive at a second kiosk and the visitors’ log, managed by the Five College Consortium (Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and UMass/Amherst), which co-owns the bog and uses it as an outdoor classroom and research center.

The narrow passage through to the open expanse of the Hawley Bog is an assembly of largely unfamiliar plant life and a summer riot of green, pink, white, and yellow, turning red-gold and purple in autumn. Follow the 700-foot boardwalk built by The Nature Conservancy and town volunteers into the open area to see the tops of white pines sunk into the bog, and red maple saplings, flaming scarlet in October. The stunted pines and maple forever saplings have adapted to the bog’s highly specialized environment, as have the unfamiliar plants popping through the mossy mat that moves under your feet. What is the bog environment exactly, how did it form, and when?

Thousands of years ago, the glacier that covered the Northeast in the last ice age receded, as Earth’s orbit, tilt, and rotational axis orientation changed (Milankovitch cycles describe the varying of orbiting, tilt, and rotational axis orientation of the Earth every 41,000 years). The Pocumtuc people (ancestors of the Abenaki) followed the receding glacier 9,000 -12,000 years ago to the confluence of three rivers—the Green, the Deerfield, and the Quinnitikut (modern spelling: Connecticut)—to settle where fish and game were abundant. About twenty miles west and up a steep hill, that same receding glacier left a kettle-shaped depression and eventual lake that evolved into the Hawley Bog.

With no stream running through it to add nutrients or wash vegetation away, decaying matter accumulated and the lake became acidic and nutritionally vacant—the lake became a bog. Rain and snow provided the only nutrients, creating an environment where specially adapted plants grew. The primary bog plant, sphagnum (peat) moss, is adapted to living in acidic water with little or no flow. New growth remains at the surface and older portions continually sink and die, releasing the tannins and enhancing the acids that give the water a brownish color and further slow decay. The dead material accumulated and, at the margins, the Hawley Bog sphagnum mat is over 30 feet thick. But, as you walk out on the boardwalk toward the open expanse, the mat thins and moves under your feet.  Rain and snow continue to provide the only sources of potassium and phosphorous. Nitrogen is introduced by the ammonia in urine and feces of birds, insects, mammals, and also by combustion engine exhaust. Some plants adapted by becoming carnivorous in order to increase their access to essential nutrients.

Specialized plants growing on the sphagnum moss surface, such as pitcher plants and sundews, are able to photosynthesize for energy, but can only thrive in the low level of essential nutrition and highly acidic environment because of their carnivorous habits. They have evolved ways to use Hawley’s hordes of black flies and mosquitos. Pitchers drown them, sundews trap them on sticky tendrils, then roll them up in the leaves. Bladderwort, living in the dark water, display trigger hairs on trap-like bladders. All have evolved to digest insects with special enzymes.

Non-carnivorous plants grow to their best ability in and around the bog where conditions allow: rhododendron, leatherleaf, laurels, bog rosemary, Labrador tea, high-bush blueberry, low-growing large cranberry, and other stunted trees like tamarack and black spruce. Purple wild iris, the tiny orchid rose pogonia, delicate grass pinks shaped like upside-down orchids, and other orchids and flowering plants also grow in and among the hummocks of the mat.

Winged and terrestrial creatures visit and inhabit the bog: flycatchers, red-winged blackbirds, white-throated sparrows, moose, deer, bears, small mammals, dragonflies, and bees all make use of the bog fauna and flora.

The low-oxygen, acidic, and low-nutrient conditions do not support fish, reptiles, or amphibians. In fact, those conditions are preservative rather than supportive of life generally, hence the discovery of humans who entered the Northern European bogs in the Bronze and Iron Ages by ancient winter ritual or accident, and now grace museum cases in remarkably well-preserved states (see Tollund Man, et al.).

Isolation over millennia, followed by local respect for the natural world, has left the Hawley Bog largely unaffected by humans, except in an inescapable global manner. Pitcher plants, which can live 50 years, serve as measures of air pollution. As the nitrogen from combustion engine exhaust increases in the bog, pitcher plants are growing larger leaves and smaller pitchers, their reliance on catching insects less important for essential nutrients.

So, whether a local or a visitor to the many gems in this area, drive up and enjoy this gem in our midst; or make it a destination and return during different seasons. It doesn’t take long to enjoy the Hawley Bog and you’ll be glad you stopped (please note and respect the posted rules, and note that the boardwalk—the only means of entering the bog—is not highly accessible, nor are dogs allowed).

Before you get back in the car though, head toward the kiosk and then enter the self-guided tour of the Old Town Common and its cellar holes. Start at the plaque on the rock marking the site of the first church built in 1793, and you’ll soon be lost in the history of our town, as you follow the researched text and drawings on the placards (note: the cellar holes are not highly accessible either—basically a walk in the woods—but dogs are welcome).