Nature Notes: All for Montauk
It’s the new year and the East End is looking good. The days get longer by a minute or two every 24 hours. As Shelley wrote, when winter comes, spring can’t be far behind.
In my mind, Montauk is the biggest jewel in the South Fork’s tiara. It has more open space per capita than any other hamlet or village on Long Island. It has a variety of habitats and floral associations, including both southern and northern elements. It has more waterfowl than you can shake a stick at, and they all preoccupy locals and tourists who observe and study them.
Environmentalism and nature lovers are rampant. Montauk has always been a place of wonder, even before the first colonists settled there. There is hardly a soul among the populace who doesn’t love the Atlantic Ocean and its miles of bluffs, doesn’t love the dunes, doesn’t love the Point, with its historic Lighthouse, doesn’t love Hither Woods, Block Island Sound, the Montauk Moorlands, doesn’t love Block Island Sound, Fort Pond Bay, and all of the ponds and streams.
One of the reasons Montauk’s natural riches are so well cared for are the many governmental workers and volunteer groups and their members who diligently look after it. Chief among them is one of the oldest groups, the Concerned Citizens of Montauk, but that group is not alone. The state and county park managers and personnel take very good care of their domain; East Hampton Town does likewise. The Nature Conservancy, the Group of the East End, the Peconic Baykeeper organization, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Brownies, as well as fishermen groups all look out for the birds and the bees, the seals, the whales, and the porpoises. When something goes wrong, a silent alarm rings and someone or some group is out to right the ship.
One of the newest groups, and perhaps the least known outside of Montauk, is one of the of the most active. Its focus is Montauk’s lands and waters, its flora and fauna. It goes by the name Third House Nature Center, owing to its original focus on the Suffolk County parklands where the historic Third House still stands. It was started by a longstanding member of C.C.O.M., the late Carol Morrison, with help from Jay Schneiderman, our county legislator, and Stephanie Krusa, in 1992. Carol was president until she died halfway through the first decade of the new millennium. Stephanie has been active throughout, and for the last several years has been the group’s secretary.
The group’s mission from the very beginning has been environmental education practiced in the field and in meeting rooms, much of it hands-on and constructive, such as putting up birdhouses, keeping an eye on water quality, and studying and elucidating the progression of the seasons from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31 each year.
In 2003 the group moved into the Fort Pond House, purchased by the town, and began offering workshops, classes, and lectures from a fixed base. Since 2001, it has maintained a busy spring and fall schedule of field trips and outdoor classes for Montauk School students in grade three and up. After Carol passed on, Ed Johann, one of the many young naturalists to spring from Art Cooley’s Bellport High School classroom, who had settled in Montauk, joined the group and eventually became its president. Vicki Bustamante is the board’s vice president.
Third House Nature Center was firmly ensconced in the Fort Pond House, sailing along and carrying out its mandate in a very professional way, when all of a sudden it was hit with a major stumbling block. In 2010, shortly after the new town supervisor, Bill Wilkinson, was sworn in, he had the house inspected and it was declared unsafe, the center was asked to vacate, i.e., was kicked out, and shortly afterward the house and parcel were put up for sale along with several other town properties.
The group’s board members and several Montauk citizens, as well as C.C.O.M., were dumbfounded! But they did exactly the right thing; rather than give in and disband, the group, together with C.C.O.M., hired an attorney and sued the supervisor. The suit carried on for Mr. Wilkinson’s four years in office and before he left, in 2013, the suit was dropped. The town kept the Fort Pond House and began fixing it up. Soon the Third House Nature Center and other groups will be able to use it in the interest of Montauk.
They could have folded, but while fighting the town, those at the nature center kept going, and not only that, they expanded their outdoor programs. In 2012 they took on supervising the internships for East Hampton High School seniors, which had been sponsored for the past 15 years by the East Hampton Garden Club. The interns at first were under the aegis of East Hampton’s Natural Resources Department, but upon the termination of its director were shuttled over to the Third House group. In 2012 there were two interns in the Montauk program, in 2013 three, and this past year the number had climbed to four. The interns keep to regular schedules and, if they finish successfully, are given a hefty grant by the Garden Club toward the cost of their college education.
Each year the interns focus on a particular aspect of Montauk’s environment. Throughout the fall of 2014, the interns and their Third House teachers have been working collaboratively on understanding the ecology of Big Reed Pond, situated east of Lake Montauk in the county park. They have been studying the water quality and pond height, its bottom, the flora in and around the pond, and its fish and invertebrates, as well as following changes in populations over the course of September, October, November, and December, based on information gathered in the spring by the previous year’s interns.
One of those, Serena Mattiauda, began to study the plants used by the Montauketts when they occupied the land — plants that were used not only for food, but also for healing and treating other life functions. She became so interested in Native American plants and their uses that she is considering changing her major in college to focus on that area, which often goes by the name “ethnobotany.”
Larry Penny can be reached at [email protected].