Nature Notes: A Harsh Winter
We finally broke through to placid spring, but it was a rough one on us and a rough one on nature. Waterfowl and water birds took it on the nose and so did several fish. Greg Boeklin, the bald eagle watcher in Sagaponack, saw several dead fish at the top of Sagg Pond. He couldn’t tell the species; they were decomposing. They may have been alewives. In some years when the water from Jeremy’s Hole comes down in a gush by way of Solomon’s Creek, the alewives make it up to the little water body to reproduce. On Friday such was the case, the water was flowing briskly under the Sagg Road bridge, but there were no alewives, dead or alive. There were, however, the remains of a great blue heron, only feathers and bones, and a cormorant in a similar state of decomposition, one on either side of the bridge.
So I made my way to Long Island’s alewife capital, North Sea. Two ospreys were close to the alewife stream where it runs to the sea under the Noyac Road bridge, but the water side of the outflow was too shallow for alewives. They probably came in that evening when the full moon tide was at its zenith.
Nonetheless, there were at least 10 fairly fresh alewife carcasses strewn about. They were full-size adults, a sign that Big Fresh Pond was in for some action. The osprey and the alewife are like Bluto and Popeye, but in this scenario, Bluto always wins.
A fish kill probably resulting from two and a half months of thick ice cover with no letup was evident in Hilary Knight’s pond in the southwest armpit of Stephen Hand’s Path and Route 114. More than 15 carp and several frogs bit the dust. Hilary lamented that the carp were as old as 20 years. (Recently, it has come to light that some marine fish, especially those in the rockfish family, live to be as old as 165.) These carps were mere adolescents. When there’s a thick coating of ice for more than a month or two, the fish beneath deplete the oxygen. Such fish kills in shallow ponds with a thick ice cover are quite common.
Montauk waterfowl, especially those in and around Lake Montauk, suffered greatly as a result of the cold. Ginnie Frati, the executive director of the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center, said she received at least 40 of these carcasses, which she sent up to the state laboratory for biopsies. Preliminary inspection indicated that the scoters, loons, little auks, et cetera probably died from starvation, as they were very thin. Some were half eaten.
A letter from a friend, Anne Robins, in Connecticut, included a great photo of a red-tailed hawk dragging a gray squirrel by one talon. She said that the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center there reported that the winter was very hard on the raptors because mice and other rodent prey were well under the snow and the snow cover never went away.
On Friday during my alewife reconnoiter I came upon a red-shouldered hawk sitting on a fencepost just 20 feet from me off Major’s Path Road in Southampton. It looked healthy. A few minutes earlier I saw a red-tailed hawk in a tree on the side of Deerfield Road near some new Farrell-built houses. As the fields that had been covered with snow through January and February were now snowless, that raptor was probably not in any trouble.
Ginnie Frati said the center received very few hawks this winter, but as many as 2,000 Canada geese and at least 15 swans that were in bad shape. Canada geese either graze in fields or use their long necks to feed on subaquatic vegetation. The former were covered with snow, the latter by thick ice. Swans are almost totally dependent on the subaquatic plants so they suffered greatly. One wonders if the survivors will be able to regain tiptop shape and procreate this year.
Raccoons are not doing so well either. Ginnie says that the center gets one raccoon a week suffering from distemper. Distemper spreads easily and is almost always fatal, so the raccoons have to be euthanized. The last very big distemper year was 2003 and the center had to put down as many as 300 raccoons. Euthanization is much kinder than the old method used in 1992 during a major epidemic. Then all of the diseased raccoons had to be shot. The center also gets reports of mangy foxes now and then, but nothing like the pandemic red fox mange cases of the past, and none have been brought in for treatment thus far this year.
Before the wildlife rehab center was established in 1997 on Suffolk County park property, the wildlife rehabbers mostly worked from their houses and vehicles. The center now has a paid staff of 11 and 100 or so volunteers, so it is pretty much able to cover the five eastern towns in a timely fashion.
The center works with East End veterinarians and doesn’t refuse any animal in distress. The ex-Beatle Paul McCartney once sent in an injured butterfly from near his Amagansett house. It didn’t make it. The center rescues the occasional snake and frog, too. There isn’t a vertebrate group that doesn’t have fins and gills that isn’t represented there. The only mammals the center can’t take in are bats because of the strong possibility that they might be rabid. It also doesn’t get any injured fish, although dead fish from the Long Island Aquarium and the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation are used as feed.
Ginnie used to keep hurt birds and other animals when she worked for Suffolk County Department of Public Works. Little birds she kept in desk drawers and would tend to their needs during break times and the lunch period. A fellow county employee, Jim Hunter, had a similar interest in helping wildlife and together they left the county after long tenures and started taking care of sick and injured animals in 1995.
Sometimes, as in the case of baby birds fallen from the nest or birds that stun themselves flying into windows, it is better to leave the baby to the parents if they are still around and put the dazed bird in a box with a loose cover until it recovers and is ready to fly away. Ginnie says there have been times when a window-strike bird on its way to the center has come to and started flying around the car.
Keep your eyes peeled to the sky. Adult bald eagles are still in the area. Last Thursday Vicki Bustamante saw one making lazy circles in the sky over Major’s Path where it joins North Sea Road in Southampton Village.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].