Nature Notes: Good, Bad, and Ugly

It’s fall, and pleasant, but dry. It’s another round of the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good? The white and purple asters in the yard that are flowering at a great rate — white wood aster, smooth aster, stiff aster, panicled aster, calico aster, wavy-leaved aster, and heath aster in the order of flowering — with the white wood asters beginning in mid-August. Some goldenrods are chiming in as well, and the bees are going crazy gathering pollen, but as is the state of things in the past several years, none of them are honeybees.

The bad? No rain, lots of plants in the wild faring poorly, acorn yields are way down. The mugworts from Eurasia are having a field day on the roadsides and in the neglected farm fields. The leaves are turning on the hardwoods, but unless we have some late season rain, it will not be a very colorful above eye level.

The ugly? Chiggers.

Last Thursday I went botanizing in the Montauk moorlands with my favorite woman botanist. She wore boots that were duct-taped just below the knees. I wore slip-on shoes and shorts. We went through thickly vegetated areas looking for a sign of the sandplain gerardia, on the federal list of endangered species, which has almost disappeared from Shadmoor State Park in the last couple of years. We had a good day, found a couple of plant species not yet listed for Montauk, and I came out of the woods, not a tick on me.

During the ride home to Noyac I felt fine, if a little tired from clambering over the rugged terrain and through the dense heathland that southeastern Montauk is famous for. I left my clothes outside and took a hot bath right away. I came out of the bathtub as clean as a whistle and proceeded to do the things I do almost every evening, read the papers, watch the news, and do crossword puzzles.

It didn’t get ugly until four in the morning. I began to itch, just a little tickling, about my feet, ankles, and legs. Soon my extremities were afire with serious and painful itchiness. An hour later I began to scratch. There is a certain pleasure in scratching itchy spots, but it soon gives way to an agony. By morning’s first light I could count the bites — 30 or so below my waist, a few on my arms, and some on my abdomen and gluteus maximus.

I had run into patches of chigger larvae. I can see larval ticks but chigger larvae are microscopic. I feel tick bites soon after they attach to the skin. In this case I didn’t feel the chiggery itch until eight hours after leaving the woods. I tried everything to get a little relief.

A new product called Chigg-Away rubbed on each bite provided some relief, but its palliative effects soon wore off. Then, I resorted to my old method, pricking each red pimple with a very sharp needle after dipping it in rubbing alcohol prior to each piercing.

The pain was excruciating; all those individual chigger bites added up. After each pustule was opened and bled, I applied rubbing alcohol to each. Again, lots of pain, but I knew that I would soon find the relief I sought, having been the target of South Fork chigger larvae annually for 30-odd years now. In about 20 minutes the itching and pain subsided. I got some sleep. End of ugly, back to good!

The past week saw a marvelous display of daytime migrant birds and insects. The numbers of monarchs were up considerably over last year. Terry Sullivan was on the Sagaponack ocean beach when dozens were flying by. That’s not all he witnessed: The tree swallows, mostly young of the year, were flying acrobatically, hawking flying insects as they proceeded slowly to the west.

At the same time in Montauk, Victoria Bustamante was observing more than 1,000 tree swallows migrating through, feeding as they went. Just before dusk another larger species of insect-hawking bird, the nighthawk, appeared over the grasslands east of Lake Montauk. They also feed as they move along in a southwesterly direction, their eyes, as in the other goatsuckers, are adapted to see in very low light. Except for an occasional bat, they have the crepuscular insects all to themselves.

Monarchs stop to feed and overnight during their trip to the magic mountains in Mexico where they overwinter. The ones we see pass here aren’t the ones that arrive at the piney wintering grounds; it’s their offspring, produced along the Atlantic flyway, that eventually make it to the sacred spot.

Another insect, the dragonfly, was migrating, too, during the past two weeks. Terry saw them over Sagaponack Pond, Vicki and I saw them over the Montauk moorlands. A reader and Montauk resident, Evan Harrel, had both monarch butterflies and dragonflies stopping in his yard on Monday.

On chiggery last Thursday, Vicki with binoculars and I were watching hundreds of whirligig beetles doing circles across the surface of a pond on the north side of Cavett’s Cove when Vicki cried out, “ I just spotted a dragonfly catch a fly!” Dragonflies are insectivorous and very, very good at feeding on the wing.

I should include the beautiful along with the good. Cavett’s Cove is one of the best sites on Long Island for observing the day-by-day disappearance of the glacial till and other strata that make up the terminal moraine on the South Fork. Water weeps out of the bluff faces, little islands of plants slowly slide down from top to bottom, hoodoos extend their spiny dorsae to the beach. A cranberry bog that I used to visit in the late 1900s is now a field of goldenrods and blackberries — the water it once contained ran over the bluff decades ago. In the bluff face seaward of the former pond, one can see the clayey-mucky layer a few feet thick that was once responsible for holding the water.

But the most spectacular geologic feature of the day was not the hoodoos, or run-out wetlands, or the garnet-colored sand, or the occasional boulder jutting from the cliff face ready to drop during the next coastal storm. It was the circular “cusps” of smooth rounded rocks that appeared at the ocean edge. They extended a good 200 yards to the west and were all about the same size, 10 feet or so in diameter, 30 feet apart at regular intervals.

Cusps occur on rocky shores throughout the world. Sometimes they are made up of marble-sized stones, sometimes of stones as big as cantaloupes. But wherever they may be found, on the coast of Oregon or Ireland, they are similar in aspect. They are a kind of standing waves that move very, very slowly laterally along the shore and almost always have an inherent periodicity, i.e., the intervals between them are the same for any given area. They are yet to be completely described and understood. The ocean shore east of downtown Montauk is one of the best places in the world to observe them.

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