Nature Notes: Nature Is Doing Well
Summer presses on, hot and humid with an occasional bout of rain. The beaches fill up on the weekend, the traffic is crazy mad on the South Fork’s main thoroughfares, County Road 39, Montauk Highway, Noyac Road, the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, Route 114, and the Scuttlehole-Head of Ponds-7 Ponds-Mecox Roads, which wind through the fields of Bridgehampton and Water Mill and meet North Sea Road north of Southampton Village.
Notwithstanding the blue-green algae quagmires of Mill Pond in Water Mill, Lake Agawam at the foot of Southampton Village, and Georgica Pond in Wainscott, the rest of nature is doing well. Local songbirds have been able to produce two litters of nestlings, deer and turkeys have plenty to eat, fish crows and common crows are at it in Sag Harbor and its outskirts, the osprey are having a heyday. In the Long Beach-Sag Harbor neighborhood there are at least two new nests, six altogether, all with young. The new nest on a Scuttlehole Road utility pole was still active as of Monday, and the older nest in the horse pasture on Deerfield Road has not only ospreys nesting in it but house sparrows as well.
The bunker stocks, which help the osprey feed their young and which serve as feeding targets for the fledglings when they leave the nest and practice diving for the first time, are making their appearance. Fiddler crabs of two species — porcelain and black — are up and at ’em as soon as the tide begins to ebb. There are lots of egrets, herons, and other fish eaters at the edge of the salt marshes.
Jean Held had two monarch butterflies in her west Sag Harbor yard on Sunday, there has never been a bigger crop of blooming milkweeds — orange and common — along roadsides and in fallow fields, inviting whatever few monarchs that straggle by to land and reproduce. It is a great year for fireflies, and my grandson Kevin from firefly-less California can hardly believe his eyes when he looks out our living room picture window around 8 each evening.
Shorebirds are already returning and stopping by in goodly numbers from the tundra where they bred in May and June. Our own local breeders among waterfowl and waterbirds, the piping plovers, least terns, oystercatchers, and willets are winding up productive breeding seasons. The yearling geese, swans, and mallards are almost as big as their parents.
There are always downsides in nature to go along with the upsides. Mammal roadkills are beginning to mount up. I can’t drive a mile without seeing a gray squirrel roadkill or two. On Saturday, two large white-tailed does were left dead, intact, on the side of Sagg and Scuttlehole Roads. On Monday night while driving through Water Mill on Mecox Road, two adult does ran south from the north shoulder, one just getting by me to the other side, the other, braking as I braked, doing an almost instantaneous 180, and then disappearing in a field to the north. Fortunately I was only traveling at about 30 miles an hour and as usual my eyes were trained on both sides of the road.
On the same night I heard my first katydid singing off Merchants Path in the Sagaponack area. I’ve seen several mature snowy tree crickets around. Any day now the males will burst into a chorus, which will last most of the night as each rubs one sandpapery wing surface against another, equally gritty.
This has been the year of the gray tree frog. A few were still out trilling Monday evening; it was the only frog or toad song I heard. Gray tree frogs and spring peepers are great mosquito eaters, so let’s all cheer them on.
Chris Chapin, who used to lifeguard at Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett, told me an interesting story about another common local amphibian, the hoppy toad, and a not so common reptile, the puffing adder snake. It seems that the restroom at that town beach used to drip water. Toads would enter it to stay moist and shortly after, a hognose snake, or puff adder, would sneak in to snag a toad or two, their favorite and mainstay food item in the wild.
Another reptile, the box turtle, which can live to be 100 years old like its much larger cousin in the Galapagos Islands, is making a late but prolific showing this July. Let’s hope that it is the start of a big comeback. Dai Dayton of the Southampton Trails Preservation Society has been putting up pretty box turtle signs on the sides of the road. Please don’t take them; they serve an important purpose. After all, the box turtle’s only natural enemy in these parts is the four-wheeled motor vehicle.
Long Island is known for its fish and fishing. East Hampton Village is known for its waterfowl and muskrats. Now, a new denizen has popped into the picture — a freshwater catfish, complete with barbells around the mouth. Ken Keyser was there when one swam upstream under the bridge. Catfish are great objects of freshwater aquaculture. They are farmed in catfish ponds, especially in the South. They enjoy being fed as much as mallards and geese do. This one must have come up from Hook Pond, as we don’t have any catfish farmers on Long Island.
Meanwhile, in the woods the highbush blueberries are ripening, the black raspberries will be along shortly, along with the wine berries, beach plums, and wild black cherries later, and, finally, a little before Thanksgiving, cranberries will be ripe.
And what about those all blue indigo buntings breeding in the big treeless field that adjoins the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton? That may be a first for Long Island. But watch out, the tropics are heating up, and it may be time for another big hurricane, or maybe even a big, big one.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].