Nature Notes: Busting Out All Over
When the peepers start singing two things come to mind. There’s water in the vernal ponds and it’s warming up.
As of Monday the alewives are slow in coming but, nonetheless, many of the ospreys are back and ready to catch them as soon as they appear. On Sunday afternoon the spring peepers were peeping away in Big Reed Pond in Montauk. Evidently, they had just come up from hiding after a very long, cold, and snow-covered winter. Once they are up, they don’t retreat. They are mandated to sing and reproduce.
Sunday was the weekly meeting of three East Hampton High School seniors — Makenzie Scheerer, Travis Santiago, and Madison Aldrich — who intern with the Third House Nature Center of Montauk, courtesy of the Garden Club of East Hampton. They were there with Matt Stedman and Vicki Bustamante identifying and GPS-ing trees for an ongoing study of Big Reed Pond and its surroundings.
Matt spotted an eastern ribbon snake also freshly up from its winter sleep and Makenzie photographed it. The ribbon snake is a smaller and much narrower version of a garter snake, but unlike the latter is equally adept on land or in water. The spring peeper is one of the ribbon snake’s main menu items and you can bet that when the peepers get chanting, the ribbon snake rolls over and says to itself, “It’s time to get up and get going. Breakfast awaits.”
Killdeers continue to return. Terry Sullivan came upon nine of them working a field in Sagaponack on Saturday and photographed them. Killdeers, grassy fields, and March go together. When they fly, these plovers utter a string of loud “killdeers,” stressing the last syllable and raising it in pitch.
One of the homecoming ospreys was seen last Thursday on its pole platform nest in a farm field on the west side of Deerfield Road in Water Mill. It must have been a little chagrined at returning, because instead of open vistas on all sides, there were four new monstrous houses to greet its return. The osprey was standing on its old nest and surveying the countryside. “Am I in the right place?” it was thinking. Not only is the South Fork being “Farrellized” with large new spec houses, but the ospreys might be undergoing that mind-bending process as well.
Today when I peered out my bedroom window at the leafy backyard almost completely devoid of snow, I caught the quick jerky movements of something small and brownish against the leafy ground cover. It wasn’t a sparrow or a bird. Oh no, I thought, the rat is back. But when I looked closely, it was indeed a rodent, but this one had two long white stripes bordered with black down its back. It was a chipmunk, fresh up from its winter quarters. Peepers, ribbon snakes, killdeers, ospreys, robins, grackles, and red-winged blackbirds. I thought to myself, it really must be spring.
On Monday evening I drove around Noyac, Sag Harbor, Northwest Woods, and Wainscott listening for spring peepers. Some ponds were completely quiet, but Chatfield’s Hole in Northwest and the pond southeast of the cemetery across from Otter Pond in Sag Harbor was jumping. The largish swamp on the southwest side of Noyac Road also produced several night sounds, but not from peepers. These were coming from black ducks and green frogs.
Noyac Bay was completely free of ice come Sunday, but a few small piles of snow and ice were still strewn along the roadsides during my nighttime peeper quest. In a week or two we should see the first white blossoms of the shads and the crimson flowers of the red maples. There’s no turning back. “Spring is busting out all over,” as the song goes. Look for the vegetated shoulders of the roads and byways to color up in the next weeks. We are about to become completely cloaked in a shroud of green.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].