Century Bog, a 75-acre stretch of fields and woods across Plymouth and Wareham, looks more like a construction site than a former cranberry bog.
Excavators have churned up soil, ripped out pine trees and broken up buried plastic piping. In their place are wide moats of thick, sloppy mud, so dark they’re nearly black.
“It looks like a bomb has gone off right in front of us here,” said Alex Hackman, director of ecological restoration at MassAudobon. “But what’s actually happening here is that it’s being prepared for restoration.”
Hackman is part of a team working to restore Century Bog into the natural wetland that was there before the farm. The farm’s last owner, the A.D. Makepeace Company, sold the land to the state in 2010, fully retiring the bogs a few years later. The land was then protected as part of the Red Brook Wildlife Management Area, but all of the farm infrastructure was left behind…