Nature Notes: A Glorious Habitat

The Town of East Hampton stretches from the tip of Montauk Point to just west of the town airport, from the bays of the Peconic Estuary on the north to the great Atlantic Ocean on the south. Within those boundaries is a set of habitats, ecotypes, ecotones, and plant associations that set the town apart from the rest of Long Island and make it a unique treasure in terms of the natural world.

Here are just some of the wonderful landscapes and seascapes that make the town what it is: moving dunes, sandy spits, coastal ponds, marine harbors, streams and tidal creeks, pitch pine woods, oak-hickory hardwood forests, white pine woods, oak-holly-beech woods, maritime grasslands, strand vegetation, beach grass-beach plum associations, vernal ponds, sedge islands, heathlands, highlands, lowlands, old fields, savannas, cranberry bogs, blufftop and bluff-face floras, and the like. Every one is different and although none rivals in size any of America’s deserts, prairies, and montane landscapes, they are miniatures of these large biomes and just as interesting ecologically and geologically.

Many of these, such as the oak-holly woods, Montauk Downs, coastal heathlands, and maritime grasslands, are already described in detail in the records and collections of New York State’s Natural Heritage office and State Museum in Albany. These sites and the habitats they contain are owned by various levels of government, including village, town, county, state, and federal entities, and are perpetual open spaces in the eyes of the law. Several others are held by not-for-profit corporations such as the Nature Conservancy, Peconic Land Trust, and property owners associations, while various subdivisions also contribute many set-asides such as reserve areas and scenic and conservation easements.

One could spend a lifetime studying just one acre of these natural upland or surface waters and wetlands and still not discover all the secrets they hold. Not only are they all occupied by diverse animals and plants, they also are standing records of the development of East Hampton as the glaciers that created them retreated to the north. For example, the soft sediments that are as much as 18 feet deep under the wetlands of Accabonac Harbor shores are marked by the unique strata of different periods of development that go back thousands of years in time and can be decoded by palynologists who study biological and geological history at the very micro level.

I love all of East Hampton’s land and seascapes, but one of my favorites has gone unnoticed by many ecologists and naturalists and is not described in the Natural Heritage ecotype files. It is that expanse of Napeague land once crossed by a spur of the Long Island Rail Road to the old fish factory on Hicks Island. It is a dune plain and there are none like it on the rest of Long Island, perhaps in the whole of New England, which shares many natural attributes with East Hampton.

It stretches from a little north of Montauk Highway all the way to Cranberry Hole Road. On the east it melts into the marshes of Napeague Harbor, on the west it extends almost all of the way to the nexus of Cranberry Hole Road, Montauk Highway, and Bluff Road. It’s a plain but not perfectly flat throughout. There are several arrested dunes here and there and a young stand of pitch pines dating back to the hurricane of 1938 dots the landscape, making it all the way across the isthmus to the Walking Dunes and Hither Woods in Montauk.

It is dotted with dune slacks that often contain standing water from Napeague’s shallow water table. These slacks are filled with rare plants, including an orchid that is rare throughout New York State and may, in fact, be unique to East Hampton Town. Almost all of these slacks contain cranberries, one of the staples of the Native Americans who lived here and the early settlers from England and Europe that colonized the area.

This dune plain is a favorite habitat for the eastern hognose snake, or puff adder; it feeds on the many Fowler toads, which grow up from tadpoles hatched from eggs in the wet slacks. Eastern spadefoot toads also are found carving out their underworld niches beneath the heather and bearberry swatches coating the surface where treeless expanses predominate.

Not only do the pitch pines, beach plums, bear oaks, and shads expand between severe coastal storms and retreat after them, the landscape is one of those that is forever changing but looks as if it is always the same. Most observers drive by along Cranberry Road and think it’s same old, same old, but it is always subtly on the move. It has quiet periods and tempestuous ones. Fierce winds frequently sweep through. In the winter they are mostly from the northwest, in the summer, from the southwest. But occasionally gale-force easterly winds sweep from off the ocean or northeasterlies from Gardiner’s Bay. The same winds that shape the walking dunes at the eastern end of the plain and are forever pushing them southeasterly also torment the dune plain.

But in modern times, the dune plain is quiescent compared to what it was like 4,000 or 5,000 years ago. It wasn’t there! Marine waters once flowed between the ocean and bays, and there was very little land above water along the Napeage stretch. Sands from the south and north gradually replaced the water, leaving Napeague Harbor stranded to the south. The average elevation of the dune plain throughout most of its area is less than 10 feet above sea level. If winds and storms stop depositing sand, much of it will be under water by the time the 22nd century rolls around.

When the fish factory was buzzing, the odor from bunker oil kept a lot of people away. Napeague was very slow to develop. When the factory went out of business in the 1960s and was eventually purchased from the Clarks around 1979 to become Napeague State Park, all of the extra land to the south of it was part of the purchase, with the exception of a strip of land on the south side of Cranberry Hole Road. In the 1990s and early 2000s we have watched large second homes go up on many of those lots in that narrow strip. Some of the vacant lots north of the road along the bay were put into perpetual open space, at least two of which are under the control of the Peconic Land Trust.

Dune plain parcels make perfect building lots. There is very little clearing required, the views in both directions are splendiferous to say the least, there is public water in the road right of way, and the smell of menhaden is gone forever. The rest of the vacant parcels are highly desired, as much so as the very few vacant ones left along the oceanfront. They are the best of the lot in terms of their vegetation and dune plain attributes. Wouldn’t it be great if the owners of those remaining unbuilt parcels donated them to East Hampton, or at least sold them to the town at a fair price, to be paid for from the community preservation fund?

Recently, the town acted to buy two such undeveloped parcels from the Rattrays. The family held onto them as long as they were able to in order to keep them from being built on. A while back the Rattrays put two vacant parcels on the north side of the road in safe keeping with the Peconic Land Trust. And now the recent 2.8 acres picked up from them by East Hampton Town will also be preserved forever. Let’s hope the town moves to acquire as many of the other vacant dune plain lots as possible to save this unsung habitat.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].