Nature Notes: They’re on the Move

It’s getting warm. We need some rain. The small rainwater ponds are drying up, the peepers are barely peeping, but the shads are blooming nicely and the dogwoods are out at the same time.

I was working in the yard all day Monday and listening to the birds as I went. Funny, there are almost as many birds that moved up here from the south following World War II, as those that have been around for a couple hundred years or more. These “new” birds haven’t been new for a long time now, they continue to occupy more and more territories with each passing year.

The common residential birds that I grew up with in Mattituck in the depression and war years were the catbird, blue jay, grackle, towhee, starling, house sparrow, robin, house wren, red-winged blackbird, song sparrow, chickadee, downy woodpecker, Baltimore oriole, common crow, great crested flycatcher, wood thrush, brown thrasher, chimney swift, barn swallow, whippoorwill, and flicker, to name several.

Today around my house catbirds, robins, red-winged blackbirds, Baltimore orioles, and crested flycatchers were singing their territorial songs, but they were almost out-sung by the likes of cardinals, tufted titmice, Carolina wrens, red-bellied woodpeckers, and fish crows, all of which were lacking or extremely rare prior to 1955. The breeding notes of song sparrows, house wrens, wood thrush, and flicker were not part of the chorus.

Birds and flying insects are the most common colonizers. For a few years now the southern pine beetle has been ravishing our native pitch pines. Bats fly but there have been no new species from other parts of the United States settling here. The parrots that make their home in New York City and San Francisco parks didn’t come from the equatorial zone, they came from pet stores, as did the interloper house finch.

Birds carry ticks almost to the degree that mammals do. There is no doubt in my mind that they were responsible for moving southern lone star ticks to northern climes. Birds are also carried here and about by weather systems, cyclones, and such, but not to the degree that tiny flying insects are.

It takes several generations to measure dramatic changes in a locale’s flora and fauna. Today a few coyotes roam Long Island habitats; two generations from now they could become as common as raccoons and opossums are today.

Southern plants are moving north as well. Since plants are sessile, they don’t perambulate like mammals and other vertebrates do, they move in quietly with hardly a whisper. That is how the southern red oak reached Montauk and how others are most likely sneaking in but have yet to be recognized.

Before there was global warming, there was continental drift, natural dispersion, and a host of other dispersal mechanisms, many of which were passive, that moved species from one place to another as immigrants. But, notwithstanding those natural dispersion routes which have been with us since time immemorial, humans are responsible for the most species transplants. In less than 400 years humans have transformed almost every natural pre-existing habitat into a pigsty of sorts, particularly so where plants and insects are concerned.

A good near-at-hand example of this popped up during a field trip to the northern edge of Montauk Point with a group of Montauk School kids on May 6. What did those industrious students find that I had heard of but never seen? The Japanese shore crab no bigger than the last joint of your middle finger. How did such a little critter get all the way from the western Pacific shores of Honshu to Montauk Point? You tell me. It’s a jungle out there.

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