Nature Notes: The Natives Are Restless
We are well into summer. It’s been warm, almost hot. The worst is yet to come. We’ve had just enough rain to make the oaks, hickories, maples, sassafras, and the rest of our native trees as lush as lush can be. I’ve been giving them all a 10 as I drive past and through them, which is unprecedented, but I may becoming dotty or too sentimental.
The South Fork of Long Island has just about every kind of ecological assemblage found in all the rest of the Mid-Atlantic States, but in miniaturized form. Then, too, it has a bunch of new-ish novel ecotypes, mixtures of native and alien species, the latter often outnumbering the former. My yard in Noyac is a good example of this.
I used to weed out the foreign flora, but they came back faster than I could remove them. Now I try to relate to them in a warmer way. Many of them, such as the dense ground cover vinca, are toxic and the deer don’t eat them. With each passing year one or two new ones pop up. Thus far, this year it’s mullein, Verbascum thapsus, with soft furry gray-green leaves and yellow flowers. Where they come from is a mystery; there are none around for hundreds of yards.
The natives are not as accommodating as one might think. The pitch pine-oak forest that mantles the moraine in Southampton and covers much of Wainscott, Northwest Woods, and Napeague in East Hampton Town keeps most of the aliens on the periphery, say, along the edges of roads, but out of the interior. Stephen Hand’s Path in East Hampton is a good example. When you motor past you will see a lot of honeysuckle, bittersweet, and other alien vines, but they rarely penetrate in more than 50 feet, where there is too little light for them to prosper.
The road shoulders of Springs, Bridgehampton, Sagaponack, Tuckahoe, and Amagansett are home to garlic mustard and mugwort, but step inside the woods, and you will find very few of these and usually a nice cover of the natives like lowbush blueberry, huckleberry, and maleberry preempting that territory. Where the deciduous trees have been attacked by gypsy moths and other insects, you will often find the ground beneath them covered with short Pennsylvania sedge and tall pilewort, or fireweed.
Hither Woods in Montauk is almost all deciduous with the exception of the evergreen stands of mountain laurel in Rod’s Valley. Just about every hardwood tree species native to eastern Long Island can be found there.
After the great conflagration of 1986 when so much of it burned over, it has come back in fine form and is almost standing as tall as it was in the early 1980s. It remained almost tick-free for decades after the fire. Before 1900 it was still mostly grassland, pastureland. As such, as it had been cleared and lumbered during the late 1600s and 1700s to accommodate livestock. But, when grazing ended, the woods returned in original form. A few areas, such as Ram Level, are still in the throes of transition from grassland to woodland, but it won’t be long, barring another fire, before Hither Woods will be 100 percent trees and shrubs.
The Point Woods in Montauk just west of the Lighthouse and Camp Hero and north of the ocean bluffs is another case in point. It is a little richer than Hither Woods in tree species and has some wet spots with aquatic plants, shrubs, and trees, to boot. You will find some unusual native trees here: southern red oak, alternate-leaved dogwood, and basswood among them. It also has more hollies than any other South Fork wood and is reasonably absent of interlopers.
The grasslands north of the Point Woods and east of Lake Montauk were once Long Island’s second largest prairie, second only to the Hempstead Plains in Nassau County. That prairie has been reduced to less than 20 acres by ongoing development, while the Montauk maritime grasslands are growing up into a collage of this and that. Billy Schultz, a fisherman, used to be a Montauk cowboy looking after the cattle grazing there and remembers a time in the early ’50s when he and his partners would purposely drop lighted matches to set the area afire to keep the grasses from being overrun with woods, just as the Montauketts were wont to do 300 years and more earlier.
The Nature Conservancy tried to reintroduce controlled burns in the 1990s, but finally gave up. Maybe the historic method was the best method and we should consider returning the land to the Montauketts so they return it to the way it was prior to settling by white man. Victoria Bustamante lives on the edge of this area and watches it grow up, first into a shrubby savannah with lots of weedy plants, and then into the early stages of becoming a young forest. The other day she heard a bobwhite uttering its song repeatedly. No one I’ve queried during the past five years has heard one; it could be a good sign, or a bad omen.
West of the Point Woods are the Montauk moorlands. They are populated mostly by shrubby species — hollies, arrowwoods, highbush blueberries, chokeberries, elderberries, and Bebb’s willow — along with a few trees, but rarely do any of the trees exceed 20 feet in height. They house a variety of ephemeral wetlands where you can find some rare species such as Christmas fern, Virginia chain fern, Massachusetts fern, and the Arethusa and ragged-fringed orchids. The moorlands and their look-alikes, the shrubby downs, or savanna, between Fort Pond and Lake Montauk were once covered with sandplain gerardias come August. This species, still found here and there in Montauk, has become so rare that it is now on a federal endangered list.
West of Montauk is the Napeague isthmus, which has one of the most interesting plant assemblages on Long Island. First of all it has an orchid species, Platanthera pallidum, which apparently is found only in East Hampton, and another rare species, the curlygrass fern. One hundred years ago it was all dunes, cranberry bogs, and dune slacks, where both cranberries and three species of insectivorous plants grew, as well as two more orchid species. It has been slowly growing up into pitch pines extending themselves from the Amagansett end of the terminal moraine, but also with introduced Japanese black pines, foreign olive shrub species, and the usual weeds, including one of the worst weeds of all, common reed, Phragmites communis, an Old World species that has taken over much of the United States, including Long Island.
Napeague is also famous for its beach plums, beach heather, and bearberry, what the locals called “deer feed.” They cover most of the dune plain and back dunes. The salt marshes are extensive and the lady slipper orchids not only occupy the piney woods, but also march out onto the dunes, which is unheard of elsewhere in lady-slipper lands. Interestingly, common reed has had a tough time trying to take over the marshes here, perhaps because the Napeague tides keep it at bay.
Napeague also has piping plovers, ospreys, oyster catchers, and willets, and may be the last bastion for a rapidly retreating bird, the whippoorwill. Diane Ryan who lives in Promised Land, part of Napeague, writes that she hears many of them night after night. It’s the kind of habitat they would like, especially because half of Napeague, the old fish factory and a flat dune plain that is unique to New York State, is open. Whippoorwills and their close cousins, the onomatopoeic Chuck-will’s-widows, like to hunt over such lands in the twilight and nest on the ground in brushy spots. The East Hampton and Montauk mainlands have become very noisy at night, while Napeague is relatively quiet and presents little competition to these two night-singing goatsuckers.
Napeague is also home to three unique herptiles, the puffing adder, the Fowler’s toad, and the spotted turtle. The first is known for playing dead after feigning a cobra-like attack. The second lives underground for an entire year without emerging until a torrential rain falls and creates its breeding ponds. The last, becoming rarer and rarer, looks like a painted turtle with its black carapace, but has yellow spots on its scales.
West of Napeague are the morainal woodlands of Amagansett and the double dunes of Amagansett and East Hampton Village. Bluff Road demarcates the seaward edge of the land thousand of years ago. The double dunes are a collection of several waves of dune building that first took over the tops of the old bluff line and then proceeded southward storm after storm into the Atlantic Ocean. Now there are as many as four separate dune ridges north to south, but they have lost their parallel orientation over the years as the wind has scurried them around. Half of them have been built on, thus the community known as Beach Hampton on the east and the Maidstone Club and golf course community on the west. But half of them are still unoccupied and mostly squirreled away as open lands forever thanks to the Nature Conservancy and East Hampton Town and Village.
Downtown Wainscott is not a sight to behold, but to the south and north of Montauk Highway the woods are pitch pine-oak and used to be home to breeding hermit thrushes, whippoorwills, roughed grouse, bobwhites, and a variety of smaller birds. Now they are overrun with wild turkeys, but not disparagingly.
North of Wainscott is Northwest Woods, which is home to the only native white pine forest on Long Island. It is said that white pine boles from this forest used to be the number-one pick for forming the main masts of British ships during colonial times. Apparently, this forest will be here for years to come, as the majority of saplings are also white pines. Gypsy moths prefer oaks, so, in a way, the caterpillars from these little beasties are protecting the white pines. Indeed, they have taken over much of the Grace Estate and are extending easterly, where they have almost reached the shores Three Mile Harbor.
But beware! The same southern pine beetle that is ravaging the pitch pines in western Southampton Town and elsewhere on Long Island is trying to make inroads east of the Shinnecock Canal. The white pines could be wiped out in a decade once this little monster gets a hold of them. Enjoy them while you can.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].