Turn south on Maryland 611 shortly after leaving Ocean City, and in ten miles you’ll cross Sinepuxent Bay and enter Assateague Island.
THE ISLAND
Assateague is 37 miles long, north to south, divided between Maryland and Virginia. The northern part of the island — the Assateague Island National Seashore — is in Maryland, while the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge at the southern end is in Virginia.
Assateague is a barrier island, a formation of sand dunes lying between the ocean and land. Such islands change and move due to weather and tides. Big storms can reshape them, and in 1933 a hurricane drove a channel between Assateague Island and Ocean City.
The Ocean City government saw the new passage’s potential for navigation and built jetties to make it permanent. Today the channel remains, and Assateague, in its character as a barrier island, has moved. It is now west of Ocean City, which can easily be seen in the satellite view of an Internet map.
THE PONIES
Assateague is home to wild ponies. They are feral, which means they are the descendants of once-domesticated ponies that have returned to the wild. Romantics among us prefer to believe that the ponies’ ancestors survived a shipwreck and swam to safety, but they probably were brought to the island from the mainland by their owners, to avoid taxes.
Why are they called ponies, and not horses? The distinction depends in part on their height. Ponies are generally regarded as having a genetic makeup that results in them being less than 14.2 hands in height. This requires some explanation.
The “hand” is a unit used to measure horses in the United States and a few other countries. Over time it has been standardized at four inches, so fourteen hands means four times fourteen, or 56 inches, in height.
But wait — isn’t there a decimal in 14.2? Actually, no. It’s a number that represents quarters of a hand, so “.2” is two quarters of a hand, or two quarters of four inches, or two inches. Therefore, a pony is a horse-like animal standing less than 14 hands plus two inches, or 58 inches, or four feet ten inches, tall.
There’s more. Horse and pony heights are measured, not to the top of the head, but to the “withers,” which is a point between the animal’s shoulder blades. Why? Because a horse’s head moves up and down, but the withers (a singular, not plural, noun) is a constant distance from the ground.
And there’s yet more, but here I’ll just quote a relevant Wikipedia article: “Miniature horses, but not miniature ponies, are measured at the base of the last true hairs of the mane rather than at the withers.” Hmmm. Let’s leave it at that.
PONY POPULATION CONTROL
South of the Maryland-Virginia state line, ponies living on Assateague Island are called Chincoteague ponies. Fencing at the border of the Chincoteague National Wildline Refuge keeps the ponies in two separate populations.
Because Assateague is a barrier island of limited size, the number of ponies living on the island is an issue, and population control is necessary. The northern Assateague ponies live under a contraception regime, but on the Chincoteague side, keeping the population at 150 ponies resulted in the most famous pony activity going.
Each year since 1925, the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Department, which administers the Chincoteague refuge, conducts an annual event called pony penning. And the book Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry, published in 1947, has brought this activity to the attention of generations of children. As recounted there, the Chincoteague ponies are rounded up by “saltwater cowboys” and encouraged to swim across a channel to the town of Chincoteague, where some of them are auctioned off.
Is this a cruel thing to do to wild ponies? Apparently not. The ponies are actually feral, not wild, and many years of experience have shown that they re-domesticate quickly.
FLYING CREATURES
Assateague also hosts populations that are not so easily managed. For example, over the course of a year a dedicated birder on the island might observe some 320 bird species. The casual summer visitor, though, is more likely to notice the astounding number of mosquitoes. Be sure to carry lots of genuinely effective mosquito repellent when you visit, or you may have an experience such as mine.
One summer, after setting off down a trail from the parking lot, I happened to look down at my legs. I was wearing shorts, but I couldn’t see the skin of my legs, because mosquitoes covered almost all of it. I fled back to my car, swatting madly. Such occasions have caused the website Wikivoyage to call Assateague the “biting insect hell hole of the Mid-Atlantic.”
So, Assateague Island: Ponies. And insect repellent.
The image at the top of the page is from the Assateague Island National Seashore. It is in the public domain and may be used without a copyright release from the National Park Service.