Animals

Lemurs at the Long Island Game Farm.

Volunteer Program, Flea Market, 55th Anniversary for Long Island Game Farm and More

The Foundation for Wildlife Sustainability, Inc. [wildlifesustainability.org] is hitting the ground running in 2024 with new programs and events at Long Island Game Farm planned throughout the year.

The Good Friends Volunteer Corps launches in March, followed by spring programs including the Senior Social Club for the 62+ community and Wild Treasures Market featuring a variety of artisans, and summer programs like the popular Camp Zoo, a family fun day, and fundraising event, which will support the Game Farm as it heads into its 55th year in 2025. All events will take place at Long Island Game Farm, located at 489 Chapman Boulevard, Manorville. Additional details below and at wildlifesustainability.org.

“The Foundation for Wildlife Sustainability is geared up for a successful 2024 to support the work of Long Island Game Farm,” shares foundation executive director Tricia Snyder. “With so many new projects, we are in need of many volunteers! There are meaningful and fun tasks for all looking to get involved. Together, we will bring exciting programs to the community and all lovers of Long Island Game Farm.”

Good Friends Volunteer Corps Orientation – Saturday, March 23

Individuals with a love of nature and animals and a desire to expand their community can get involved, enjoy the outdoors, and meet new like-minded friends. The first volunteer orientation will take place at the Game Farm on Saturday, March 23 at 11 a.m.

Volunteer opportunities include maintenance, gardening, guest services, animal education, story time, and helping at special events. Volunteers must be 16 years of age or older. Advance registration is requested by calling the Game Farm at 631.878.6670 or emailing foundation executive director Tricia Snyder at [email protected].

Senior Social Club – Returns Friday, April 12

Senior citizens ages 62 and older are invited to Long Island Game Farm to visit the animals, explore the grounds, and attend presentations on rescued animals, wonders of wool, birding, nature photography, and more in the newly renovated Woodland Hall. This program will take place on the second and fourth Friday of the month from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. beginning April 12. Seniors enjoy a discounted admission of $10 on Senior Social Club days.

Wild Treasures Market – Begins Sunday, June 9

Beginning June 9, a unique monthly flea market is coming to Long Island Game Farm. The Wild Treasures Market will feature vendors selling their vintage and not-so-vintage antiques, crafts, art, home and garden items, and more. The market will take place on the second Sunday of each month through October. Early bird buyers can visit from 8 to 9 a.m. The general public is invited to visit from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. No admission after 3 p.m.

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Camp Zoo – July and August

Children ages 4 to 13 are introduced and immersed in nature through outdoor exploration, games, crafts, and other educational hands-on activities. Camp sessions including Animal Tales Through Picture Books, Zoolympics, Be a Zookeeper, and Young Explorers. Camp runs in multi-day sessions in July and August.

Family Fun Day – Thursday, August 22 (rain date August 23)

Enjoy a day of fun for the family as you wind down your summer vacation. The Game Farm will have a full array of special activities, shows, and surprises. The event will take place on Thursday, August 22 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Rain date is Friday, August 23. Ticket sales opening on the website soon.

Annual Fundraiser – September

The second annual fundraiser will enable the Foundation for Wildlife Sustainability to support the work of the Game Farm as part of its own missing, deepening the connection and understanding between humans and nature. Date and details to come at wildlifesustainability.org.

55 YEARS in 2025! The Long Island Game Farm will be celebrating 55 years of offering families a natural environment where they can learn about wildlife and animals through education and entertainment in 2025. Many people have visited the Game Farm throughout the course of its long history, and everyone has a story. The Foundation for Wildlife Sustainability is collecting these stories and photos on behalf of the Game Farm, with some selections to be included in a commemorative book. Stories can be submitted online at wildlifesustainability.org.

For more information on the foundation and these events, please visit wildlifesustainability.org.

ABOUT THE FOUNDATION FOR WILDLIFE SUSTAINABILITY

The mission of the Foundation for Wildlife Sustainability, Inc. is to connect people with wildlife and the natural environment through awareness activities and engaging experiences, and to support the work of the Long Island Game Farm. For more information, visit wildlifesustainability.org, or contact executive director Tricia Snyder at [email protected].

MEET JITTERBUG

This week’s shelter pet is Jitterbug, a Female American Staffordshire Terrier Mix up for adoption at the Smithtown Animal Shelter.

Estimated to be between two and three years-old, this little nugget of happiness was initially adopted from Florida. However, she was sadly surrendered to the Animal Shelter due to a penchant for escape. The dedicated team at the Animal Shelter and her trainers confirm that this young lady is the most outgoing, friendly pup who enjoys meeting new friends. To say that Jitterbug is a social butterfly would be an understatement.

This sweet girl has so much love to give, is full of energy and can be adopted to a home with older children, other dogs (preferably her size) and possibly cats. She is an absolute crowd-pleasing delight, who would make a wonderful addition to a household looking for a fun-loving companion.

If you are interested in meeting Jitterbug, please fill out an application  and schedule a date/time to properly interact in a domestic setting, which includes a Meet and Greet Room, the dog runs, and a Dog Walk trail.

The Town of Smithtown Animal & Adoption Shelter is located at 410 Middle Country Road, Smithtown. Visitor hours are Monday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Sundays and Wednesday evenings by appointment only). For more information, call 631-360-7575 or visit www.townofsmithtownanimalshelter.com.

Foster Opportunity:

If you have no other pets or young children at home, and are looking for a way to serve your community, please consider signing up to be a foster. Foster parents provide temporary care for cats, kittens, and dogs in their own homes. Some animals need as little as two weeks of care, while others may need care for extended periods of time.

Download the Foster Application at:

https://www.smithtownny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/4325/Foster-Application

 

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory neuroscientist Arkarup Banerjee is using singing mice, like the one shown here, to understand how our brains control timing and communication. Photo by Christopher Auger-Dominguez

By Daniel Dunaief

Animals don’t have clocks, telling them when and for how long to run on a treadmill, to eat whatever they catch or to call to each other from the tops of trees or the bottom of a forest.

Arkarup Banerjee

The Alston’s singing mouse, which lives in Costa Rica, has a distinctive call that people can hear and that, more importantly, conveys meaning to other members of the species.

Using equipment to monitor neurons when a mouse offers songs of different length, Cold Spring Harbor Assistant Professor Arkarup Banerjee showed that these unusual rodents exhibit a form a temporal scaling that is akin to stretching or relaxing a rubber band. This scaling suggests that their brains are bending their processing of time to produce songs of different lengths.

“People have shown this kind of time stretching phenomenon in monkeys,” said Banerjee. It was unexpected and surprising that the same algorithm was used in the rodent motor cortex to control the flexibility of a motor pattern and action during vocalization.

Using recordings of neuronal activity over many weeks, Banerjee focused on a part of the mouse brain called the orofacial motor cortex (or OMC). He searched for differences in songs with particular durations and tempo.

Banerjee had set up a system in which he played back the recordings of Alston’s singing mice to his test subjects, who then responded to those songs. Mice generally respond with songs that are variable durations compared to when they sing alone.

These mice can adjust duration and tempo of these 10-second long songs while engaged in social communication.

People “do that all the time,” said Banerjee. “We change the volume of how loud we are speaking and we can change the tempo.”

The mice showed some vocal flexibility similar to other animals, including people.

These mice are singing the same song, with varying rhythms over shorter or longer periods of time. It is as if the same person were to sing “Happy Birthday” in 10 seconds or in 15 seconds.

Banerjee would like to know what is it in the mouse’s brain that allows for such flexibility. He had previously shown that the motor cortex is involved in vocal behavior, which meant he knew of at least one region where he could look for clues about how these rodents were controlling the flexibility of their songs.

By tracking the firing pattern of neurons in the OMC, he was able to relate neural activity to what the mice were doing in real time.

Neural activity expands or contracts in time, almost as if time is running faster or slower. These animals are experiencing relative time when it comes to producing their songs as they change their songs through a wide range of durations.

Pre-song activity

Even before an animal sings, Banerjee speculates its brain could be preparing for the sounds it’s going to make, much as we think of the words we want to say in a conversation or our response to a question before we move our mouths to reply or type on a keyboard to respond.

Songs also track with intruder status. An animal in a home cage sings a shorter song than an animal brought into a new cage.

Vocalizations may scale with social rank, which might help attract mates or serve other social purposes.

Females in the lab, which presumably reflect similar trends in the wild, tend to prefer the male that produces a longer song with a higher tempo, which could reflect their physical fitness and their position in the social hierarchy, according to research from Steve Phelps, Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Integrative Biology.

Applications

While it’s a long way from the research he’s conducting to any potential human application, Banerjee could envision ways for these studies to shed light on communication processes and disorders.

The motor cortex in humans and primate is a larger region. Problems in these areas, from strokes or injuries, can result in aphasia, or the inability to articulate words properly. Banerjee plans to look at stroke models to see if the Alston’s singing mouse might provide clues about potential diagnostic or therapeutic clues.

“There are ways we can use this particular system to study cognitive deficits that show up” during articulation deficits such as those caused by strokes, said Banerjee.  While he said scientists know the parts list of the brain regions involved in speaking, they don’t yet know how they all interact.

“If we did, we’d have a much better chance of knowing where it fails,” Banerjee  explained. A challenge along this long process is learning how to generalize any finding in mice to humans. While difficult, this is not an impossible extrapolation, he suggested.

An effective model

Banerjee built a model prior to these experiments to connect neural activity with behavior.

“We had an extremely clear hypothesis about what should happen in the neural domain,” he said. “It was pretty gratifying to see that neurons change the way we predicted given the modeling.”

When the paper first came out about eight months ago in the scientific preprint bioRxiv, it received considerable attention from Banerjee’s colleagues working in similar fields. He went to India to give three talks and gave a recent talk at Emory University.

Outside of the lab, Banerjee and his wife Sanchari Ghosh, who live in Mineola, are enjoying watching the growth and development of their son Ahir, who was born a year and a half ago.

“It’s fascinating as a neuroscientist to watch his development and to see how a tiny human being learns about the world,” Banerjee said.

As for his work with this compelling mouse, Banerjee credited Phelps and his post doctoral advisor at New York University, Michael Long for doing important work on this mouse and for encouraging him to pursue research with this species. Long is a co-corresponding author on the paper. “It’s very gratifying to see that the expectation of what we can do with this species is starting to get fulfilled,” said Banerjee. “We can do these interesting and complex experiments and learn something about vocal interactions. I’m excited about the future.”

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SCIENCE ON SCREEN

The Cinema Arts Centre, 423 Park Ave., Huntington continues its Science on Screen series with a mind-expanding exploration of the mysteries of language and communication, featuring a lecture and Q&A with neuroscientist Arkarup Banerjee, of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and a rare big-screen showing of Denis Villeneuve’s profound 2016 drama ARRIVAL on Tuesday, March 26 at 7 p.m..

Dr. Banerjee’s work explores the theme of decoding messages and touches on the fundamental assumptions of reality which are unpacked in the film. Discover how every species and culture’s unique symbols and codes shape our understanding of the world around us, and uncover the intriguing ways in which our brains navigate the limits and possibilities of language.

Tickets are $16, $10 members. To purchase in advance, visit www.cinemaartscentre.org. 

Photo by Michael Boren

STANDING THEIR GROUND

Michael Boren of Setauket spied this flock of wild turkeys ‘lurking’ around his neighborhood on March 4 and got closer to snap a photo. He writes, “They just stood their ground. Not sure if they’re brave or just too lazy to run!”

Send your Photo of the Week to [email protected]

Missy

Welcome to the 27th edition of TBR News Media’s Paw Prints, a monthly column for animal lovers dedicated to helping shelter pets find their furever home.

Missy

Meet Missy

A proponent of sensible glamour with a dash of “drama queen,” meet Missy, a ten year old Papillon mix at Little Shelter in Huntington. A breed known to be spirited, sociable, and possess sparkling personalities, this little lady certainly fits the bill! Playful and fun loving, she enjoys soft toys and has amassed quite a collection, thanks to the cooperative staff. Full of affection, she’ll happily curl up in your lap, listening attentively while you tell her secrets. Missy would be a great companion if you’re looking for someone with an inquisitive mind and an open heart…stop by to meet her today! 631-368-8770, ext. 2

Zuko

Meet Zuko

Top of the mornin’ to you from Zuko, currently up for adoption at the Brookhaven Animal Shelter.Approximately 2 to 3 years old, Zuko has come a long way since his days as a stray. Despite a rough start with little hair and irritated skin, he’s undergone the necessary veterinary care, including neutering, and is now thriving. This absolute sweetheart adores people but prefers a home without other dogs and with older children. Zuko is ready to embark on a new chapter and is searching for his forever family. If you believe Zuko could be your perfect match, please take the first step by visiting https://www.brookhavenny.gov/152/Animal-Shelter and fill out a Matchmaker Application. Let’s give Zuko the loving home he truly deserves. 631-451-6950

Romeo

Meet Romeo

Are you ready to meet a sweet and sensitive boy? Romeo is here to melt your heart and fill your home with love and joy. Waiting for you at the Brookhaven Animal Shelter, Romeo is a gentle and sensitive soul who may take a little time to show his true colors, but trust us, it’s worth the wait. He’s a bit shy at first, but once he feels comfortable, his loving nature shines through. Romeo is approximately 3 years old. Having come in as a stray, Romeo’s past is a bit of a mystery, but what’s clear is that he’s ready to leave his past behind and start a new chapter with a loving family. Fill out a Matchmaker application (see website on left) to arrange a meet and greet. 631-451-6950

Wendy

Meet Wendy

Hi, I’m Wendy, a little tabby at Little Shelter in Huntington who thinks I’m a dog.  Call my name or rustle a bag and I come a-running and of course it helps if you have a treat. Come and in and see for yourself. 631-368-8770, ext. 36

Poppy

Meet Poppy

Poppy the puppy and her sister Patricia are available for adoption at Kent Animal Shelter in Calverton. Come meet them today! 631-727-5731, ext. 1

Bunny

Meet Bunny

Full of character and just plain goodness, meet Bunny, a two year old Pit mix currently at Little Shelter in Huntington. This active, energetic girl will circle you with enthusiasm, drawing you into the middle of the fun! Suspected to have some hearing loss, she is nevertheless able to make strong connections, attentive and attuned to your every move. Smart as a whip and sweet as pie, she’s hoping to find her ideal family and forever home, then burrow directly into your heart (and bed!).  If Bunny sounds like the perfect fit for you, hop on over to Little Shelter today! 631-368-8770, ext. 21

Rescue is a lifestyle. Adopt, don’t shop.

Check out the next Paw Prints in the issue of April 4.

Paw Prints is generously sponsored by Mark T. Freeley, Esq.

 

Flaco spotted in Central Park over the summer. Photo by by Gil Yang

By Patrice Domeischel

It was inevitable. Life for any bird is fraught with perils. That Flaco, the Eurasian Eagle-Owl illegally released over one year ago from the confines of his lifetime home in the Central Park Zoo would survive despite having no life experience outside his enclosure, would be nothing short of a miracle. 

We had all waited, expecting the worst. Would he make it?  The tentative answer appeared to be “Yes”. And it did seem that he just might have bucked the odds as instinct kicked in, and he mastered the unfamiliar, urban environment.

Flaco spotted in Central Park over the summer. Photo by by Gil Yang

Birders, photographers, city residents, tourists, all wanted a glimpse of the famous escapee owl. He delighted all who viewed him as he perched at some of his regular Central Park haunts, and later in the Upper West Side neighborhoods of Manhattan. Flaco had become a symbol of freedom, surprising and eluding those who sought to bring him back to the zoo’s safe confines. To New Yorkers and out-of-towners alike, some whom had never seen any owl, Flaco was an avian celebrity.  

Then our greatest fears were realized.  Flaco became one of up to one-billion birds EACH year that die in the United States alone after flying into windows, his death determined to have been caused by “traumatic impact.” And although a necropsy report indicated Flaco’s good condition, his weight only slightly less than when last taken at the zoo, he may also have been exposed to infectious diseases like West Nile Virus or Avian Influenza, and/or toxins including rodenticides that would have weakened him, contributing to the strike.

Now Flaco has become another painful window-collision statistic. His passing shines a harsh light on this serious issue. Window strikes can occur at any time of year, but take place most often during spring and fall migration when billions of birds travel to and from breeding and wintering grounds. Strike incidents occur with great regularity when birds collide with the highly reflective glass used in building construction. Birds see the reflections in these panes as a continuation of the natural landscape and attempt to fly through them. Most collisions occur with the windows of one-and-two story buildings; many are residential homes.

Flaco the owl in his Central Park Zoo enclosure. Photo by Mary Lor

But there may be a silver lining to this tragedy. The urgent need to protect birds from death caused by window strikes has already resulted in legislation in New York City that requires the use of bird-friendly materials in new construction.  The City also has a lights-out requirement for city-owned and city-managed buildings. In Albany also, a bill is now on the table that requires the incorporation of bird-friendly designs into new or altered-state buildings in New York State. Maybe Flaco’s needless end will help to propel the bill to completion and law.

What can you do? We all have the power to make a difference. We can prevent window-strike collisions at our own homes and in the community. Simply affixing decals that reflect ultraviolet sunlight, or that create visual interference, on problem windows can dramatically cut strike numbers. Birds detect the stickers, recognize something to avoid, and fly elsewhere.

Flaco will be remembered always in the hearts of New Yorkers; we mourn his loss.  But his name will live on in the meaningful and important legislation now on the table in Albany, a bill renamed the FLACO ACT: “Feathered Lives Also Count,” after this iconic and charismatic raptor.  

Note: Do you know of a building prone to window strikes? Let us know at: [email protected].

Learn more at these and other websites:

American Bird Conservancy

Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP)

windowalert.com

featherfriendly.com

theaudubonshop.com

Author Patrice Domeischel is a board member of the Four Harbors Audubon Society.

Mohawk

This week’s featured shelter pet is Mohawk, the shy kitten with big love to share! 

Currently up for adoption at the Smithtown Animal Shelter, this 8-month-old tuxedo and his littermates were found as part of the shelter’s TNR program. Mohawk took a long time to trust people. Now he’s shy with newcomers but beyond affectionate with his caretakers. He would do best in a quiet home with people that will give hime time to trust. 

If you are interested in meeting Mohawk, please call ahead to schedule an hour to properly interact with him in a domestic setting.

The Town of Smithtown Animal & Adoption Shelter is located at 410 Middle Country Road, Smithtown. Visitor hours are Monday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Sundays and Wednesday evenings by appointment only). For more information, call 631-360-7575 or visit www.townofsmithtownanimalshelter.com.

From left, Patricia Snyder and Melinda Novak. Photo courtesy of LI Game Farm

The Foundation for Wildlife Sustainability, Inc. has announced their launch in partnership with the Long Island Game Farm to engage, educate, and encourage the public to foster an understanding and respect for wildlife, and inspire action to protect wildlife for a healthy ecosystem. 

Founded in February 2023, FWS gained nonprofit status this past October. Helmed by executive director Patricia Snyder, the organization is formally launching cultural, educational, and wellness programming this month, with much more planned for the year, ensuring the longevity of the Manorville game farm.

“The Long Island Game Farm has benefitted so many people and animals over its nearly 55-year history, it’s important to ensure its future,” said Snyder. 

“The mission of the Foundation for Wildlife Sustainability is to connect people with wildlife and the natural environment through awareness activities and engaging experiences that support and complement the work of the game farm. We have programs scheduled for learners of all ages, summer camps, art classes, music classes, and more, as well as the return of the popular Senior Social Club. Volunteer and fundraising opportunities will also be a priority to advance our mission,” she said.

The foundation’s education team includes education coordinator Shannon Swanson, a learning specialist at Peconic Community School, educator James Carey, who has also worked at the game farm since 2021, and educator Jenna Culbertson, a music facilitator at Peconic Community School. Swanson will also serve as director of Camp Zoo, a summer program that introduces and immerses children ages 5 to10 in nature through outdoor exploration, games, crafts, and other educational hands-on activities.

To date, the foundation has coordinated a number of initiatives at the game farm, including the dedication of Woodland Hall in memory of late Sergeant Paul Ferrara, a memorial bench program, volunteer corps program, and an inaugural yearly fundraiser. The foundation also worked with the game farm to secure critical funding through Suffolk County’s JumpSMART Small Business Downtown Investment Program to renovate the game farm amphitheater and create a universal access woodland trail.

“2024 is going to be an exciting year,” said game farm president Melinda Novak. “Having a supporting non-profit is an important step in keeping the game farm sustainable. I’m so happy to see this long-held idea come to fruition.”

The foundation is also preparing to celebrate the Long Island Game Farm’s 55th anniversary in 2025. More information on how the community can get involved will become available in the coming weeks. Learn more at the foundation’s new website at wildlifesustainability.org.

MEET ROSEMARY!

This week’s featured shelter pet is Rosemary, a two-year-old female brown tabby cat who arrived at the Smithtown Animal Shelter on Jan. 23. 

Little Rosemary was found as a stray begging for food. She can be a little shy/hesitant at first, but loves to have her head and face petted. She chirps at you for food and is learning to trust more people. She would do best in a quiet home with a little patience. Rosemary will reward that patience with love. 

If you are interested in meeting Rosemary, please call ahead to schedule an hour to properly interact with her in a domestic setting.

The Town of Smithtown Animal & Adoption Shelter is located at 410 Middle Country Road, Smithtown. Visitor hours are Monday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Sundays and Wednesday evenings by appointment only). For more information, call 631-360-7575 or visit www.townofsmithtownanimalshelter.com.

The banning of DDT in the United States in 1972 helped the bald eagle population rebound. Photo by John Dielman

By John L. Turner

John Turner

If ecologists have revealed anything from the thousands of studies of nature and its countless components, relationships, and interactions, it is the extent to which life is interconnected, with the fate of so many living things interwoven with the fate of others. Many of these studies have shown how species are tied together in many unforeseen ways, built on complex webs and relationships. 

John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, knew this truism when he wrote about the “intricate tapestry of the natural world” and perhaps best reflected by his famous comment “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” 

Aldo Leopold, perhaps the most impactful conservationist this country has produced, understood this too, expressing it in a slightly different way: “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” Leopold recognized that adversely affecting one species in a natural community can trigger a set of undesirable ecological actions that  ripples throughout the community. 

There are many straightforward examples illustrating the ecological “ties that bind.” 

One basic concept involves food chains, constructs that help us to understand the connection of one species with another in “eat and be eaten” relationships and the pesticide DDT, banned long-ago, illustrates how species along a food chain can be connected.  DDT was once widely used throughout the United States (and still is used in other parts of the world) and commonly applied on Long Island in the 1950’s and 60’s in an effort to control mosquitoes, especially salt marsh species. 

The DDT in water was assimilated into algae and other phytoplankton, that were fed upon by zooplankton, and many species of zooplankton were, in turn, eaten by small fish who were consumed by larger fish. The larger fish were consumed by fish-eating birds like ospreys, bald eagles, pelicans, and cormorants. 

DDT is fat soluble and not easily excreted so it increased in concentration in the animals higher on the food chain, to the point that in birds it interfered with their ability to lay viable eggs. A loss of viable eggs meant declines in the abundance of these species.  DDT served as an unfortunate illustration of how food chains and webs worked, connecting phytoplankton and zooplankton (species lower on a food chain) to fish and ultimately to birds (higher on the food chain). 

In reality, the world is a much more complicated place and an ecosystem can have numerous food chains that interconnect in a larger and more comprehensive food web, resulting in “cause and effect” relationships that might not be apparent at first. 

As an example, let’s take Yellowstone National Park. For much of the twentieth century the National Park Service had a wrongheaded and myopic  policy of eradicating timber wolves within park boundaries, resulting in burgeoning populations of elk and deer that, in turn, increased browsing and grazing of the Park’s small trees, shrubs and grasses.  

The reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone Park restored the park’s ecosystem. Photo from Pixabay

Wolves were reintroduced into the Park in 1995 and almost immediately created a cascade of effects that rippled throughout Yellowstone. Wolves disrupted elk herds, their primary prey, allowing for their preferred habitat — riverbanks of willows and aspens — to recover. This new growth provided breeding habitat for a variety of songbirds and the shade the trees created helped fish populations. Beaver increased (there was but one beaver colony when the wolves were brought back; now there are nine) responding to the new, fresh tree growth. Their constructed dams created impoundments for aquatic invertebrates and fish and freshwater marshes where moose and mink occurred. 

Coyotes declined due to wolf predation which allowed for foxes to increase and wolf introduction also benefited grizzly bears who had more berries to eat due to lessened browsing by elk. Prey carcasses also sustained a number of other species like lynx, wolverines, eagles, raven and magpies, grizzly bears just emerging from hibernation, and even beetle species. Ecologists have documented changes down to the diversity of microbes in the soil as a result of wolves reestablishment!   

Closer to home we have the case of the diamondback terrapin. A beautiful reptile with strongholds in the bays and harbors of Long Island’s north shore, it plays an important role in maintaining the health of salt marsh environments in which it lives. With very strong jaws, hard food objects are fair game and terrapins routinely eat several snail species, helping to keep them in check. A good thing because some of the snails feed on marsh grass (Spartina) and if their populations were not controlled it could result in the loss of marshes and the numerous attendant benefits salt marshes provide in the form of food production, attenuating coastal flooding, softening the impacts of coastal storms, and providing habitat for so many plant and animal species.  

A last example underscores how a species can help knit together two distant places with ramifications on human health — in this case India and East Africa. There’s a dragonfly known as the wandering glider and remarkably millions migrate across the Indian Ocean each year, leaving the rice patties and other wetlands where they were born and overwintering in East Africa. Here, they are voracious predators of mosquitoes, many of which carry malaria, an affliction which can be fatal if untreated. Scientists noted an increase in malaria cases in East Africa and tied it back to a reduction in dragonflies caused by pesticide use in Indian wetland pools.   

As these examples illustrate the natural world is an exceptionally complex interwoven tapestry of life with many unforeseen connections. You can understand why Frank Edwin Egler, an American botanist, observed “Nature is not more complicated than you think, it is more complicated than you CAN think.” 

A resident of Setauket, author John Turner is conservation chair of the Four Harbors Audubon Society, author of “Exploring the Other Island: A Seasonal Nature Guide to Long Island” and president of Alula Birding & Natural History Tours.