Permanent protections for New York horseshoe crabs cleared a major hurdle during the last days of the 2024 state legislative session, passing both the state Senate and Assembly on June 7.
“It’s extremely exciting,” said Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Farmingdale-based Citizens Campaign for the Environment, which advocated for the bill. “The horseshoe crab has ambled around the earth for more than 350 million years — we think they have a right to continue to do so.”
The bill, which still needs the signature of Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) before becoming law, would prevent the taking of horseshoe crabs for commercial or biomedical purposes from state waters. The animals are used as bait for commercial whelk and eel fishing operations, and their blue blood is used to improve vaccine safety and aid in biomedical research, though a synthetic alternative is already in the works for that purpose.
The species has faced a steady decline in the last few decades, which in turn impacts birds like red knots, who feed on horseshoe crab eggs during their migration.
Not everyone is happy with the bill as it is currently written.
“The commercial fishing industry here on Long Island is going to be severely impacted by the passage of this bill,” said Rob Carpenter, director of the Long Island Farm Bureau, which advocates on behalf of commercial fishermen. “Their needs are not addressed in the bill.”
Carpenter, who indicated he hopes for the bill to be amended or vetoed, said horseshoe crab is the only usable bait for commercial fishermen catching whelk.
“If they are not allowed to utilize it, that means the state has just shut down an entire industry of fishing for an entire species,” he said.
The state Senate passed the bill 53-7 and the Assembly sent it through 102-39. Five North Shore legislators voted against the measure, namely Assemblymembers Jake Blumencranz (R-Oyster Bay), Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Smithtown), Jodi Giglio (R-Riverhead) and Fred Thiele (D-Sag Harbor); and state Sen. Anthony Palumbo (R-New Suffolk).
Esposito, who previously said she hoped new protections would incentivize commercial fishing operations to find alternative baits, said she knows from her recent time lobbying for the bill in Albany that the farm bureau and biomedical industry representatives are lobbying against it.
Biomedical companies do not currently harvest from Long Island waters, according to Esposito, though she is concerned stricter rules in neighboring states like Connecticut and Massachusetts could bring New York’s horseshoe crabs to their attention.
“The fact that they are lobbying against this bill is absurd,” she said. “We’re not inhibiting the medical industry — they have alternatives and they’re using alternatives. They’re just crying wolf.”
According to state governmental procedures, since the Legislature is now out of session, the governor will have 30 days to sign the bill once it is delivered to her, but there is no indication of when that delivery will happen. If the bill is not delivered to the governor before the end of the year, or if she does not act within 30 days of delivery, the bill is effectively vetoed.
“Our job’s not done yet,” Esposito said. “Now we’re going to begin our campaign to request the governor sign it.”
A Greater Yellowleg searches for food during low tide. Pixabay photo by Steph McBlack
By John L. Turner
Ifirst heard their piercing, three-parted “tew-tew-tew” calls while sitting on the slatted bench in the northwest corner of the Three Village Garden Club property on a day in early May. I’m looking out over the mudflats revealed during low tide at the southern end of Conscience Bay and on the far bank are eighteen Greater Yellowlegs, a highly migratory species of shore bird feeding on the west bank of the bay.
Living up to their name, the birds have spindly, bright yellow legs that stand out amidst the brown background of the intertidal mud. Their piercing calls have led to a few colorful colloquial names: the telltale and the tattler.
The flock could have begun their northbound journey as far south as southern Argentina in February or March and during the intervening weeksmoved north, soon passing the equator, all the while hopscotching from one fresh or saltwater wetland to another, like the ones at the southern sliver of Conscience Bay. By the next day they had departed to make their way another thousand miles to the north to nesting grounds — a wide swath across the middle of Canada.
The bay was a waystation for these hemispheric globetrotters and I felt blessed to watch them live a tiny sliver of their wild lives and it reinforced an important concept in conservation — the need to preserve wild habitat, not just for resident wildlife like squirrels and box turtles, but also for species that depend upon these critical sites during some part of their annual cycle. As the Yellowlegs illustrate, Long Island’s wild habitats are a type of “migratory motel”for many birds and other mobile species.
Behind me I hear the season’s first Baltimore Oriole, its sweet but piercing whistle emanating from the top of a tall oak and toward the end of his song a newlyarrived Grey Catbird joins in, emitting a low-key series of sweet and jangled notes, as if practicing vocals for the first time.And then, behind me to the left, the bubble-up song of a Parula Warbler. The presence of these birds and scores of other species announce that spring has arrived in the northern hemisphere.
Each species’ wintering range, from which they depart as they begin their spring migration, is unique although many species have similar ranges. For example, both the oriole and catbird have a wintering range that includes the peninsular section of Florida, the Caribbean, and eastern Mexico and Central America, just dropping into South America, although the oriole goes a bit deeper into this southern continent.
You might think that spring and fall migration are mirror images of each other – birds head north in the spring and south in the fall, with each migration season taking about the same amount of time.And while the “north in the spring and south in the fall” aspect of these seasonal migrations is true, they are more like images in a distorted mirror. Many species take different routes in the spring than they do in the fall and in some cases involve a strong east-west component.
Also, spring migration is a more compressed affair beginning in earnest in late February and ending by early June, a period of about 3 ½ months. In contrast, fall migration can last as much as 5 to 6 months. In the spring male birds have an imperative — to gain high quality territories from which to advertise their availability to prospective females. In the fall this mating urge has dissipated and it’s the increasing scarcity of food that propels the birds south.
It is hard to overstate the physiological demands that migration places on birds, particularly those species that traverse great distances without stopping to feed.Many songbirds familiar to us like warblers, vireos, grosbeaks, and thrushes head north through Central America and then, instead of continuing through Mexico, diverge east to the Yucatan peninsula.
The Yucatan is the launching point for the birds that populate eastern North America and they face the daunting task of flying across the 550 or so miles of the Gulf of Mexico as “trans-Gulf” migrants.If they benefit from good weather containing a tail wind, these birds may make it to the coast of Texas or Louisiana in 16 to 20 hours. During this trip their heart will have beat more than half a million times and the bird will have flapped its wings nearly 200,000 times. For birds that fly greater distances like Red Knots which launch from northeastern Brazil and make landfall on the beaches of Long Island’s south shore in one flight, the heart beats and wing flaps are counted in the millions.
Physical stress is not the only hazard migrating birds face. Avian predators, like bird-eating hawks, are omnipresent and the lack of such predators at night is one reason why so many songbirds are nocturnal migrants. Another reason is the atmosphere is generally calmer allowing for efficient flight and birds can use the circumpolar star constellations to navigate.
But birds now migrate in an increasingly human-dominated world and the lit glare of urban centers can disorient and/or attract them. They’re drawn to this glow and come morning they can face a hostile environment of countless buildings clad with glass exteriors, which reflect surrounding landscapes.
Birds, of course, often cannot distinguish between a row of trees reflected in a large window from the real thing — with fatal consequences. Birds dying from flying into windows is the second leading cause of avian mortality, with as many as one billion birds dying annually in North America alone. Shutting off your outdoor lights and applying window stickers can help you become part of the bird conservation solution.
Remarkably, for a few millennia scientists didn’t believe or understand that birds migrated at all. They were thought either to hibernate out of sight only to reemerge in warmer weather, transform from a migratory species into a resident species, or perhaps most astoundingly, a belief birds went to the moon, returning when the spring came around.
This last concept, which seems so strange to us now, made sense hundreds of years ago — after all scientists at the time had no understanding of the vacuum in space that is fatal to life and they regularly noticed and documented birds flying in front of themoon when full or near so. Many of these stories and more — such as the first efforts of banding birds and later the use of radio transmitters to track the migratory movements of birds — is documented un Rebecca Heisman’s wonderful new book, Flight Paths — How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration.
A relatively new and very useful Internet tool for gaining a sense of bird migration is Birdcast. The website provides remarkably specific information on real-time migration both on a continent wide and local scale.For example, the data shows that on the morning of April 26, 2024 at 12:50 a.m. an estimated 336.2 million birds were winging it north through the United States on spring migration. And for the Setauket area on the night of Memorial Day an estimated 3,000-6,000 birds passed overhead.
What Birdcast cannot do is tell you specifically where you’ll see Greater Yellowlegs, Baltimore Orioles, Parula Warblers, or Catbirds. For that you’ll have to head out and explore Long Island’s parks and preserves.
A resident of Setauket, author John L. 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.
Horseshoe crabs spawn at West Meadow Beach. Photo by Toby Stime
By Mallie Jane Kim
New York’s horseshoe crabs may see new and permanent protections, if a bill in Albany is successful — something local environmental groups are rooting for.
“Horseshoe crabs were once abundant in our local harbors and lined the shores of Port Jefferson and Setauket Harbors during the May breeding season,” said George Hoffman, co-founder of the Setauket Harbor Task Force. “They are a big deal with harbor lovers.”
Horseshoe crabs, which are more closely related to arachnids like spiders and scorpions than crustaceans, are considered “living fossils” because they’ve existed, unchanged, for an estimated 450 million years, surviving through multiple mass extinctions.
But the species has faced a steady decline in the past few decades due to harvesting and habitat loss, which in turn affects species of birds that rely on horseshoe crab eggs as mid-migration sustenance. The crabs are commercially harvested for use as bait by eel and conch fishing operations, and their blue blood is used in biomedical research and for improving vaccine safety.
The new bill, introduced by Assemblymember Deborah Glick (D-Manhattan), would amend state law to prohibit the taking of horseshoe crabs for commercial or biomedical purposes from state waters, but would allow for approved scientific or educational uses, like for zoos or aquariums.
The Assembly’s Committee on Environmental Conservation approved the bill on May 14, and it now sits with the codes committee. If the bill passes there, it would face a vote by the whole Assembly.
On May 21, state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal (D-Manhattan) introduced a “same as” bill in the state Senate, and because it counts as a revamped version of a previous horseshoe crab bill that already passed through relevant committees, this bill is ready for a floor vote.
Adrienne Esposito, executive director of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment, warned that because Connecticut and Massachusetts recently enacted stronger protections for horseshoe crabs and neighboring states are also eying changes, New York’s population could be at greater risk.
“We’re very concerned that’s going to draw more eyes on New York’s horseshoe crab population,” she said.
According to New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, a permit holder can currently harvest up to 200 horseshoe crabs per day in New York. The state has an annual harvest limit of 150,000 each year.
A report by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission indicated coastwide harvesting of horseshoe crabs for bait peaked in the 1990s at about 2.75 million crabs, but was down to about half a million in 2022, partly due to more efficient equipment that allows fishermen to use much less bait.
Still, Esposito said harvesting horseshoe crabs to chop them up as bait is “archaic,” and said commercial fishing enterprises have been talking about finding alternative bait sources for decades. “This will incentivize finding alternative baits for fishermen to use to successfully catch conch and eel,” she said.
For Hoffman, stopping the “rapacious takings” that have lowered horseshoe crab populations is essential.
“We must do all we can to save them,” Hoffman said. “We can’t let them be hunted to extinction.”
A river otter caught on a trail camera in Bellport.
Image courtesy of Luke Ormand
By John L. Turner
John Turner
I slung on the backpack, shut the car door and walked off quickly, fueled by excitement and expectation. Aftera brisk walk on a shady forest path, bordered by a few small fields hinting at the property’s past farm use, I reached my destination — a wooden observation platform providing sweeping views of a freshwater pond situated within the North Fork’s Arshamomaque Preserve. I immediately began a binocular scan of the water and the far shore for any sign of movement revealing their presence. Nothing. Scanned for a few more minutes and nothing. I soon fall into a pattern of picking up the binoculars and looking first along the water surface and then the vegetated far shore. This goes on for an hour. Still no action.
I learned a long time ago that nature is not a zoo and the comings and goings of animals are never done to please us humans, but always in response to their needs. So I will see them, if I see them at all, on their schedule. I continue to patiently sit, soaking in the beauty of the warm sunshine, bolstered by a large cup of strong coffee and a cinnamon-raisin bagel.
I was also enjoying the many marsh mallow shrubs blooming in profusion amidst the abundance of cattails ringing the pond. The flowers of this species border on the spectacular — three to five inches across, deep but bright pink petals with a red throat or base, and a prominent tower containing both the stamens and the stigmata. This species is related to the plant whose roots were once the source of that delicious confectioneries used to make s’mores — marshmallows.
Suddenly, there was rippled movement along the far shore. It took me a moment to process what I was looking at but it was a family offour river otters (Lontra canadensis) — two adults and two pups — weaving in and out of the wetland plants.I enjoyed them for about 15 seconds until they all broke back into cover of the cattails at the eastern edge of the pond. A minute or two later they reappeared this time swimming along the wooded shoreline before doubling back to the cattails.
What I was witnessing is a small part of a welcome recovery of the species taking place over several decades now, as an increasing number of otters are colonizing suitable wetland habitat on Long Island, after decades of their dearth. According to Paul Connor’s definitive Mammals of Long Island published by the New York State Museum in 1971, otters were thought to be extirpated from Long Island in the latter part of the 19th century. He states that Daniel Denton in his 1670 description of Long Island mammals noted the presence of otters, but goes on to mention that more than 170 years later J.E. DeKay declared the species extirpated from Long Island.
Through the 20th century otters were occasionally seen or reported but there was no sense of a sustained recovery of the species on Long Island. Connor reports no sightings in all the field work (conducted over several field seasons in the late 1960’s) that formed the basis for his monograph. This began to change in the first few years of the 21st century when sightings of otters became more commonplace. One of the first sightingswas near the well-known Shu Swamp sanctuary in Mill Neck, Nassau County.
Mike Bottini, a well-known Long Island naturalist and founder of the Long Island River Otter Project, has studied this recovery as well as other aspects of otter ecology and biology and published an informative published paper investigating the status of river otter in 2008. He states: “This survey estimates that there are at least eight river otters inhabiting Long Island: four on the north shore of Nassau County, one in the Nissequogue River watershed, one in the west end of the Peconic Estuary, one on the south shore, and one in the Southold-Shelter Island-East Hampton area.” Remarkably, a mere decade later otter signs were found in 26 watersheds; the recovery was well underway.
Three years later, in 2021, Mike noted: “otter home ranges included all the watersheds on the north shore from Oyster Bay east to Orient, the Peconic River watershed and a significant portion of the Peconic Estuary, and two watersheds on the south shore.”Painting a rosy picture, Mike concludes: “Much excellent otter habitat on Long Island remains unoccupied, especially on the south shore.
In addition to the obvious confirmation formed by actual sightings or finding their tracks in mud or snow, the use of latrines or “otter bathrooms” by this highly aquatic mammal is one of the ways researchers use to gain a better sense of their distribution on Long Island. For reasons that are not entirely clear, otters often defecate (known as scat) in upland areas adjacent to the waterways, these latrine sites thought to be used to communicate information.
I have found their latrines in a few places, the closest being at Frank Melville Memorial Park in Setauket on both sides of the northern pond. Their scat often contains the remains of scales and bones of the fish they prey on, and such was the case by a recent inspection of the latrines at the park — scales and delicate fish bones were prevalent in the sushi meals the otter was consuming. While otters favor fish, they are opportunistic and will eat frogs, turtles, crayfish (yes, we do have crayfish species on Long Island), and freshwater clams and mussels.
Otters are carnivores and are members of the weasel family whose other Long Island members include, according to Connor, Mink, Long-tailed weasel, and perhaps Short-tailed weasel. Further afield in the North American continent we have badgers, the federally endangered Black-footed ferret, and the famous and remarkable wolverine. Thirteen otter species occur around the globe.
As evidenced by my North Fork experience and several other accounts, otters are reproducing on Long Island with their pups presumably helping to fuel the resurgence.As their young (typically between 2-5 pups are born) are quite helpless at birth, being hairless and blind, they grow and develop in dens which provide some degree of protection from the elements. The dens are in close proximity to the water and may, in some cases, be connected to it. As of this writing I don’t know of anyone who has conclusively discovered an otter den here.
The use of remote cameras installed in the field at sites likely to be utilized by otters have proven instrumental in learning some new streams and creeks otters are frequenting. Luke Ormand, a staff member in the Town of Brookhaven’s Division of Land Management, has placed several cameras in numerous locations in Brookhaven Town that have been successful in recording otters. With these cameras, otters have been confirmed in the Carmans River watershed and the Motts Creek drainage system in Bellport.
A significant damper on the continued recolonization and expansion of river otters on Long Island are motor vehicles, as otters are sometimes struck and killed. An otter was recently struck on Jericho Turnpike near the famous bull statue in Smithtown and the total number of road killed otters recorded for Long Island stands at 29 animals.
Bottini notes that the peak time is between March and May both when males are searching for females in estrus (ready to mate) and yearling individuals are striking out on their own. The likelihood of being hit by a vehicle is especially high in places where otters are forced to cross a road that spans a stream containing too narrow a culvert or a dam where the dam is under the bridge; the dam face prevents downstream or upstream access, forcing the otter to climb up the banks and lope across the dangerous roadway.Solutions involvethe placement of stacked cinder blocks to form a ramp or aluminum ramps which otters can negotiate.
I had the pleasure of working with the aforementioned Mike and Luke one day a few years ago in constructing a cinder block ramp along a dam face on the Little Seatuck Creek in East Moriches. Camera footage soon showed otter use of the ramp although the two otters in the area illustrated different personalities; one otter immediately took to using it while the other was quite hesitant.
Mike notes that otters are “ambassadors of wetlands” and given their broad appeal and popularity this is true. Who doesn’t remember wildlife films on Disney and other shows depicting otters tobogganing in the snow, frolicking about in what appears to be joyous play? Perhaps this iconic and charismatic species can help to generate public support on Long Island in better protecting our waterways — important habitats — which sustain so many species.
Let me end by stating the obvious: you “otter” take time out of your busy schedule to look for these furry, very attractive ambassadors. But please drive slowly to your intended destination, all the while keeping an eye out for a sleek, rich brown animal loping across the road.
A resident of Setauket, author John L. 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.
Oh those lighter-than-air balloons! As the helium gas inside seeps away, causing them to lose their buoyancy, they come back to earth and their deflated outlines appear everywhere —in natural places such as fields, forests, and the island’s wave-lapped shorelines — and human constructed landscapes like dangling from utility lines, even the support wires of traffic lights. Sometimes they’re single balloons tethered with nylon string, other times they’re in bunches — a half dozen or more tied together. Some find their way to the ground while more entangle themselves amidst tree branches.
While most have generic messages, like the “Happy Birthday Princess” balloon I recently found in a hike in the Pine Barrens with 30 6th grade students, if they have a message at all, in a few cases I’ve been able to tell the original purpose of the balloon purchase: a Happy 40th Birthday to Beth! exclaimed one mylar balloon, dangling from a young understory oak tree while another mylar balloon announced “Todd’s 3rd Birthday” with a triangular cake wedge adorned with three candles. As these examples illustrate, buoyant balloons have become a common, unwelcome, andunfortunate, presence in the environment.
Photo by John Turner
The ubiquitous presence of balloons in the environment has real consequences beyond forming unsightly litter, and these effects are felt most acutely by marine animals — sea turtles, cetaceans (whales and dolphins), and a wide variety of seabirds. Websites, both governmental ones such as the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and conservation organizations like Ocean Conservancy, contain countless photos of dead sea turtles and stranded whales and dolphins, all having perished from ingestingballoons, mistaking them for food.
This deceit is especially telling for leatherback sea turtles for which jellyfish comprise a significant part of their diet. Compare photos of a deflated balloon floating on the ocean’s surface with a jellyfish and it’s easy to see why a sea turtle might easily mistake a balloon for an easy-to-capture meal. Well, mistake them they all too often do, with fatal results, when the balloon lodges in their digestive tract. The same results often occur with larger mammals.
With marine birds entanglement, not ingestion, is the main cause of death. Tassels of longstring which ties balloons together are often made of nylon or other material which isslow to degrade, easily wrapping around a seabird’s wings, neck, feet, or bill as it floats on the water.
Photo by John Turner
There are two basic types of lighter-than-air balloons — latex and mylar. Both pose risks to wildlife: in the case of latex, a threat for many years, and for mylar many decades. Not surprisingly, balloon manufacturers have long claimed that balloon releases pose no risk to wildlife and the environment, and that latex balloons, especially, are biodegradable. This is a fact not borne out both by objective experiments and numerous observations. In fact, the biodegradable claims are largely an example of greenwashing (when a company presents a more environmentally favorable view of its activities than is warranted).
A 1989 balloon industry study contended that most balloons pose no risk since they rise in the atmosphere to the point they burst due to low air pressure, creating “harmless” pieces of rubber, and those that don’t burst are so few as to be dispersed in a density of about one balloon per every 15 square miles (about a four mile square). From my anecdotal experience hiking and traveling around Long Island, the density of balloon landings is significantly greater than that, more like several balloons per square mile, an observational density borne out by coastal clean-ups.
For example, according to a press account in a local paper, “the Eastern LongIsland Chapter of the Surfrider Organization collected 774 balloons on 38 beaches from June 2017 to December 2018.” Further, a New York Sea Grant newsletter indicated that in 2016 coastal clean-ups in the mid-Atlantic states produced 8,400 balloons and balloon fragments.
Photo by John Turner
According to NOAA’s website: “In 2014, 236 volunteers found over 900 balloons in the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia in a three-hour period. Recent surveys of remote islands on Virginia’s Eastern Shore documented up to 40 balloons per mile of beach.” Closer to home, a 2018 clean-up involving 33 volunteers at Jones Beach alone picked up 308 balloons or pieces of balloons.
A colleague, Pete Osswald, to whom I was recently chatting with about the problem balloons pose to wildlife, sent me a comment which is especially illustrative of the problem: “I have been navigating the waters around Long Island both inshore and offshore for over 50 years as a fisherman and Seatown boat captain. I have seen many things both wondrous and appalling. One of the intolerable sights that bothers me the most is the abundance of balloons I see floating in the water on a daily basis. I had hopes for the problem being remedied a few decades back when there was an apparent push for educating the public about the dangers to marine life from releasing balloons. Unfortunately the defiling has become worse There are slick calm days out on the ocean where I see scores of downed launched balloons floating like foreboding headstones of the unwitting turtles and marine mammals that consume them.”
All these observations and findings suggest a density a bit greater than one balloon every four square miles, don’t you think?
Lawmakers have responded to the issue. Many municipalities throughout the country have enacted bans on the intentional release of balloons as have several Long Island municipalities. To its credit, the Suffolk County Legislature in September 2019 passed a law sponsored by then Legislator Sarah Anker banning the release of lighter-than-air balloons and requiring businesses which sell these items to post a statement indicating that intentional release of balloons is prohibited in the County; the County Executive soon signed it into law and it became a revised Chapter 310 of the Suffolk County Code.
Several states have enacted release bans with Florida poised to become the next. Legislation has been introduced in New York State over the past several sessions but, to date, there’s been no action on the bills.
Another problem with lighter-than-air balloons, especially mylar balloons which have a metallic coating, is contact with high voltage power lines. Contact can cause an explosion often shorting out electrical power. If you type in “Balloons Exploding on Powerlines” in the search box of the YouTube website you can see videos of such events.
Some organizations think “release bans” don’t go far enough as it is impossible to monitor such behavior; rather supporting a prohibition on the sale of lighter-than-air balloons, understandably believing a ban on purchase is a much more effective strategy than banning their release.
Many environmentally benign alternatives exist to replace balloons during special events. The “Balloon Blows” website lists the following options: streamers, kites, pinwheels, garden spinners, flags, ribbon dancers, bubble blowers, and inflatable, weighed-down characters.
There is an old Greek adage, paraphrased here: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” While there are no shortage of malevolent acts intended to kill wildlife — the sickening, still legal use of leghold traps for trapping foxes, muskrats, skunks, and weasels on Long Island, comes to mind — the “stupidity” involved, to soften it a bit, is more often the purview of ignorance or thoughtlessness.
The logical inference of this is if people knew the consequence of their thoughtless acts would be to cause animal suffering and death, they would not have acted this way in the first place.This perspective gives great credence to the phrase as it relates to lighter-than-air balloons —“Say no to letting it go.” Better yet, in recognition of the countless wildlife species that make up the living fabric of our oceans, let’s commit on this Earth Day, to not buying lighter-than-air balloons.
A resident of Setauket, author John L. 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.
Further destruction of terracing and plantings on the East Beach bluff after recent rainstorms. Photo by Lynn Hallarman
Recent setbacks in East Beach bluff stabilization project have officials and residents on edge
By Lynn Hallarman
East Beach is a village-owned strip of sandy shoreline situated between the northern front of the Long Island Sound and the base — or toe — of a steeply set bluff, roughly 100 feet high.
A jetty opens into Mount Sinai Harbor eastward of the bluff. To the west, the shore stretches past a series of private properties, then past the village of Belle Terre, and finally curves inward, reconfiguring as Port Jefferson Harbor.
For decades, the village-owned Port Jefferson Country Club, perched near the crest of the bluff, was invisible to beachgoers below, shielded by a thick tangle of greenery clinging to the bluff’s north front.
But in recent years, a series of intense rainstorms, combined with sea rise and pressures from human-made alterations in the landscape above the bluff, have set in motion deforestation and scouring, denuding the bluff of vegetation and accelerating erosion in the direction of the country club’s foundation. The club has become precariously close to the bluff’s edge. Without a plan, there was no doubt it would slide down the bluff onto the shoreline below within a few years.
To make matters worse, the bluff stabilization project, whose aim is to stabilize the position of the club, has been beset with complications in the wake of a series of recent storms unraveling costly work completed just last summer as part of Phase I of the project.
As communities across Long Island are confronting relentless coastal erosion, TBR News Media focuses on the obstacles facing the bluff stabilization project at East Beach, exploring the complexities, costs and alternative solutions to rescuing the country club.
The big picture
Bluffs change naturally over time, feeding sand to the beach and replenishing the shoreline. They respond to the force of winds, waves and tides, creating new states of equilibrium with the beach below and the landscapes above. The Long Island shoreline has been reshaping for thousands of years, sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes in dramatic fits of landslip — that is, chunks of shoreline abruptly falling into the sea.
East Beach and its bluff are inseparable from the adjacent coastline — they move as the coastline moves. When humans make changes in the shorelines by adding bulkheads, jetties and other rigid structures, the effects resonate laterally, affecting the movement of sand and ocean from beach to beach along the shoreline.
“Port Jefferson’s experience with bluff restoration is a microcosm of what has been happening all over Long Island,” said Chuck Hamilton, a marine biologist and former regional natural resource supervisor for the state Department of Environmental Conservation for some 33 years.
“For a long time, farmers on Long Island had their farms right on top of the bluff, and shoreline erosion happened naturally,” he said. But now those same areas are being subdivided and developed, adding weight and impermeable surfaces abutting the shoreline. “And guess what? Now we need to stabilize.”
For decades, Port Jefferson Country Club was invisible to the beachgoers, shielded by a thick tangle of greenery clinging to the bluff. Undated photo courtesy Port Jeff historian Chris Ryon
The project
When Port Jefferson’s mayor, Lauren Sheprow, took office in July 2023, the bluff stabilization project was already in motion. Sheprow, a former public relations professional, had campaigned on a platform of two core values: financial transparency and safeguarding of village assets. However, the realities of rescuing the country club — purchased in 1978 when her father, Harold Sheprow, was village mayor — while keeping project costs under control have proven to be complex and demanding.
Most of Phase I of the project happened before the current mayor took office. This work included the installation of a 454-foot rigid wall at the base, terracing and native grass plantings on the bluff face. With Phase II now under her purview, Sheprow believes it is her responsibility to see the project to completion: the installation of a wall system along the bluff’s crest, directly seaward of the imperiled country club.
“I swore to protect and preserve the property owned by the Village of Port Jefferson, and therefore the residents. Preserving and protecting is not ignoring an erosion issue,” the mayor said.
Phase I, costing approximately $5 million, relied on local taxpayer dollars financed through a bond repayable over time. Phase II, estimated at $4.8 million, will be financed mostly by federal taxpayer dollars by a FEMA grant of $3.75 million.
Financing the endeavor has been rife with holdups and stymied by a six-year-long permitting process. It has been almost a year since Phase I was completed. Final signoffs related to the FEMA funding for Phase II are still pending, preventing the village from seeking bids for construction of the upper wall. However, the village treasurer, Stephen Gaffga, said he hopes to see the signoffs come through this month.
By many accounts, questions about the project’s funding have rankled residents for years. The prevailing sentiment is that the village pushed through a $10 million bond for the stabilization project (phases I and II combined) without a community vote through a bond resolution.
“When I am asked about my position about the bluff restoration, I never saw the arguments on all sides of the project flushed out,” said Ana Hozyainova, president of Port Jefferson Civic Association. “Village officials took the position from the beginning that the building must be saved, no matter what. That imperative has limited the discussions about options.”
Complications
The uncertainty surrounding the cost and timing of needed repairs because of winter storm damage to the bluff faces further complications in Phase II. “Negotiations are ongoing” between the village and the contractor about who is responsible for absorbing these additional expenses, Gaffga said.
Drainage issues at the bluff’s crest are also hampering progress, and likely contributed to the recent collapse of the newly-installed terracing along the western part of the bluff, below the tennis courts. “There are huge puddles sitting at the crest, after heavy [recent] rainstorms,” Sheprow said. The strategy and cost related to addressing the drainage issues have not yet been determined, she added.
Although the project was divided into two phases because of funding constraints, “its ultimate success,” according to Laura Schwanof, senior ecologist at GEI Consultants of Huntington Station, “hinges on both walls working together to curtail erosion and prevent the club slipping down the slope.”
GEI has been involved with village erosion mitigation projects since 2009. The two-wall system for the bluff stabilization was their design. “The problem with this project is protection number two — the upper wall — has not been installed,” Schwanof said. When asked how long the wall system might hold up, she couldn’t say.
“What does happen, and has been seen across the Northeast, is that as we get more frequent storms, higher wave energy, higher rainfall events, rigid wall structures may work in the short term. But if you look 50 years down the road, they may not be as effective,” she said.
“Hard erosion protection structures such as revetments or bulkheads can be costly, only partially effective over time and may even deflect wave energy onto adjacent properties.” Jeff Wernick, a DEC representative, wrote in an email.The DEC, he said, permitted the East Beach project based solely on “the immediate threat to significant infrastructure.”
Completion of Phase I in spring 2023, before winter storms unravel work on the bluff face. Photo from the PJ Village website
Retreat?
When Steve Englebright, 5th District county legislator (D-Setauket) and geologist, was asked about the stabilization project, he started with a lesson about glacial formations dating back 17,000 years. Englebright scrutinized photographs of the bluff during an interview with TBR News conducted after the recent storms.
“When the bluff, which is partially made of clay, is overweighted it behaves like squeezed toothpaste,” he said. “You can see toothpaste-like extrusions on the beach.”
Missing from the conversation, according to Englebright, is a reckoning of what is happening along the entire Long Island coast. “People don’t understand the overall dynamics,” he said. “That’s why I’m trying to give you the big picture — that the entire North Shore is unstable.”
“Trying to defend a single property is human folly,” he added. “You can buy some time, but how much are we paying? I don’t believe it’s realistic because you can’t stop the overall dynamic. The village should celebrate the fact that they have the ability to retreat and use that ability. Right? The bind is if you don’t have land, but they have the land. Strategically retreat, rebuild the building.”
Stan Loucks, a village trustee and a former country club liaison, was asked to put together a retreat plan by former Mayor Margot Garant — confirmed by her to TBR News. “I did a plan A — proceed with the restoration project — or plan B, retreat —about three years ago,” Loucks said. “I got prices for the demolition of the country club, moving the tennis courts and an architectural rendering of a new club further inland.”
“The drawings had a huge deck on this side overlooking the Sound, and the huge deck on this side overlooking the golf course. I would have loved to take that plan to the end,” he added.
Loucks’s retreat plan was never vetted publicly. Sheprow told TBR she never saw a retreat plan.
Loucks remembers when tennis court No. 5 went in a landslide a few years ago. “It was massive and happened overnight,” he said. “And the slide took the gazebo, too.”
It’s late morning on a deeply overcast day in early February and a uniform sky of pewter grey threatens rain but, so far, it’s held out. So, wanting to get away from yet another day of news as gloomy as the weather, I decide to do something that always works to pull me out of melancholy — a hike in nature’s realm — knowing that at some point I’ll connect with something seeing or feeling, something that ushers in elation.
Given the season, I won’t gain this expected happiness from seeing colorful things — nature’s color palette this time of year is too subdued, basically a mosaic of brown, black, and grey. Instead, my mind latches on to the concepts of textures and patterns and I’m quickly rewarded by focusing on the skin of trees, many of which possess bark patterns distinctive enough to identify to species. From decades of hiking the Island’s forests they are like familiar friends.
The heavily wooded preserve doesn’t disappoint as I immediately pass several black or sweet birch trees of varying age. Black birch is widespread in the richer soils of Long Island’s north shore. When young, black birch has generally smooth reddish-grey bark with distinctive horizontally parallel rows that are slightly elevated. These rows are known as lenticels and are thought to help the tree “breathe” by allowing gas exchange through the bark. In older specimens the bark becomes more three dimensional with cracks and fissures that look as if a black bear (or mythical dragon) ran its sharp claws down the trunk.
A few of the larger trees are afflicted with the Nectria fungus, or black birch canker, a disfiguring condition that can damage the tree and kill it in severe cases.When growing on the main trunk and larger branches it can cause hollows — while hiking the Tiffany Creek Preserve in northern Nassau County several decades ago, I spied a screech owl sitting in just such a canker-created hollow. The tree’s loss was the bird’s gain.
Another well-known aspect of black birch is that it was once a critical source for a tasty flavoring — oil of wintergreen. Indigenous people used the oil to treat muscle aches and to “purge the body,” while its oil was used in a wider variety of foods and medicines. If you come across a black birch and break off a twig and begin to chew on it, you’ll immediately taste the refreshing flavor of wintergreen.
Moving further along the trail I pass by four of the ten or so oak species native to Long Island— white, black, scarlet, and red oaks. White oak, as its name suggests, has pleasant light-colored bark consisting of thin vertical plates. As the tree ages the bark gets a bit thicker (true for almost all trees) and more “sloughier” with the top and bottom of the bark plates curling a bit.
The other three are a tougher group to identify to species absent their leaves, especially distinguishing the bark of black oak from scarlet oak. Red oak can be distinguished from the other two by its longitudinal “ridges and valleys”; as one botanist has insightfully noted, the surface of red oak bark is reminiscent of what a ski course looks like from the air, the valleys serving as the ski courses while the ridges are the forests left intact in between.
Continuing the amble, I come to another medium sized tree standing alone although surrounded by oaks a little distance removed. I can tell from its somewhat smooth and attractive light grey bark with shallow fissures that I’ve not come across another oak but rather a pignut hickory, one of several hickories found on Long Island.The ridges diverge and blend in a random way creating an intriguing pattern that is fun to look at. This is the group of trees of barbeque fame, their wood imparting a distinctive smokiness to backyard barbeque fare.
While I don’t see any on my walk through this Setauket forest, a cousin to the pignut hickory has among the most distinctive bark of any you’ll see on Long Island — that of the shagbark hickory. If you see the tree you’ll immediately know why it got its name with large patches of shaggy bark curling away from the trunk. It is uncommon on Long Island. A more common hickory which I didn’t see on the hike is mockernut hickory, so named because the very small nut “mocks” the person making the effort to harvest it.
A bit further on and from some light tan leaves fluttering lightly in the understory I knew I had yet another tree species — an American Beech. The bark of beech is light grey and is smooth, making it often an unfortunate target of etched initialed inscriptions. It’s hard to look at the bark and trunk of a large beech and not think of an elephant leg, especially if the wood beneath the bark has a little wrinkle as it often does. The elephant leg analogy is even stronger at the base where the roots flare, looking like elephant toes. Over the past few years many beech trees have been afflicted with beech leaf disease which can be fatal; fortunately this tree shows no signs of the affliction.
One of the main purposes of bark is, of course, to protect the living tissues just underneath from pathogens such as numerous fungal species. But it can also help to protect it from another force — wildfire. And nowhere can you see a better example of this than the bark of pitch pine, the dominant pine of the Long Island Pine Barrens. Pitch pine has very thick bark which provides an insulating layer to protect the living cambium tissue.
Near the end of the loop walk I hit a bunch of medium sizedtrees of another oak species — chestnut oak, including one multi-trunked specimen sending five, foot-thick trunks skyward. It’s the largest tree in the preserve. Chestnut oak, common in rocky soils found on the Ronkonkoma Moraine, gets its name from the similarity of the leaves to those of the American chestnut, except in the oak the marginal lobes are rounded rather than having little bristles. Its bark is dark grey and deeply furrowed.
At the end of this grouping is another smaller chestnut oak, or so I thought at first. Deeply furrowed bark with inch high ridges, it looks like chestnut oak but I realize the identification is wrong when I look up into the finer branches in the canopy and notice a few of them have smooth green bark (yet another function of bark is, in some trees, to photosynthesize). Suddenly it dawns on me I’m not looking at an oak but rather a mature Sassafras tree, a common species throughout Long Island.I realized I had been barking up the wrong tree …
A resident of Setauket, author John L. 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.
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 thatripples 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 myopicpolicy 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.
White-throated Sparrow. Photo courtesy of Unsplash
Dark-eyed Junco. Photo courtesy of Unsplash
By John L. Turner
John Turner
Walking along the edge of an uneven row of withered goldenrods, adorned with countless fuzzy heads brimming with seeds, I noticed some bird movement in the lower branches of the shrubs interspersed among the flowers. Lots of movement in all directions as the small earth-toned birds flitted up and down, toward and away from me. I was in the presence of a flock of fourteen white-throated sparrows actively feeding on the ubiquitous goldenrod seed. Their presence was a nice welcome to my morning.
The white-throated sparrow is a most handsome bird, possessing, as its name makes clear, a distinctive white throat patch (its Latin name is Zonotrichia albicollis with albicollis meaning “white-necked”). Even more prominent in this species are the five bold longitudinal black and white head stripes (three white and two black) with a pretty splash of yellow just behind the bill in a place known as the lores on the two lateral white stripes.
There’s an interesting story about these light-colored head stripes that underscores how the natural world is much more complex than it may, at first, appear.These stripes come in two distinct colors: white and tan, so a sparrow may be a tan-striped white-throated sparrow or a white-striped white-throated sparrow. This color difference is genetically based, apparently due to a single chromosome part inverting while going through mitosis — remember genetics from high school biology class? In a case of mistaken identity John James Audubon thought white-striped individuals were male while tan-striped birds female, a reasonable assumption given the fact more colorful birds are typically male. You can see this mistake in his illustration of the species in his famous “Birds of America.”
Birds of the same species that display different plumages are referred to as “morphs” or “forms.” The Eastern Screech Owl is another local example of a bird species that exhibits morphs, having two colorful forms — grey and rufous birds. The Parasitic Jaeger, a gull-like bird occasionally seen in the ocean off the island’s south shore has three color morphs — light, intermediate, and dark.
White-throated sparrow
And you might reasonably think that white-striped males would always select a white-striped female as a mate and the same with tan-striped individuals, but it’s actually just the opposite. White-striped males overwhelmingly prefer tan-striped females (and vice versa) while tan striped males select white-striped females (also vice versa), a concept ecologists fancily refer to as “negative assortative mating.” Researchers have determined the morphs behave differently with white-striped birds being more aggressive but with less adept parenting abilities than tan-striped birds.These two traits seem to balance out as the two morphs are about equally represented in the species overall.
White-throated sparrows don’t breed on Long Island (with very few noted records) but are common winter visitors and one of the more common species to visit bird feeding stations, often feeding on the millet and other grain that spills to the ground.If white-throated sparrows come to your feeders try to distinguish the two color morphs and note any difference in behaviors. As mentioned above, research suggests the white-striped forms are more aggressive and tend to dominate tan-striped individuals. Have you observed this?
As winter melds into spring you might hear the distinctive song of this sparrow. One of the bird’s colloquial names — Old Sam Peabody — comes from its song that seems like it’s saying that fella’s name with a few extra Peabody’s thrown in at the end. Others liken it to My Sweet Canada, Canada, Canada. I think the second description is a wee bit more accurate both because it sounds closer to the bird’s song and because the species breeds across a broad swath of forest in our country neighbor to the North.
Another common winter visitor to bird feeders is a sparrow that doesn’t much look likeone, as it doesn’t have the earth-tone browns and tans typical of most sparrow species.It’s the Slate-colored or Dark-eyed Junco or as the famous New York naturalist John Burroughs called them“snowbirds” since they often appear in New York around the time of the season’s first snowfall.
A widespread breeder across North America (but not Long Island as it breeds further north) this species consists of 15 subspecies many of which look different, giving rise to distinctive names such as the white-winged, pink-sided, red-backed, and gray-headed juncos. Given their distinctive morphological differences, which is thought to have occurred a few thousand years ago, this species appears to be on its way to evolving into several other species. If we can hang around for a few thousand more years we might find out the answer.
The junco (it’s Latin name is hyemalis meaning “of the winter”) is a handsome bird with “our” subspecies being dark grey on top with white on the belly and under the tail.Females are tinged with brown on top. Both sexes have triangular pink bills, the color of bubble gum, which they use to capture insects, collect seeds and berries, and/or the food you put out in your feeders.
Dark-eyed Junco
Speaking of feeders, according to Project FeederWatch, run by the Cornell University’s Project Laboratory of Ornithology, the Dark-eyed Junco is recorded at more feeders in North America than any other bird.
Another plumage trait all juncos share are outer tail feathers that range from partially to fully white. These bright white “banner marks” are examples of deflective coloration and are a feature commonplace in birds. It’s hypothesized their function is to confuse predators or deflect their attack to a non-lethal part of a bird’s body but this purpose has not been proven experimentally beyond a reasonable doubt so the purpose remainsconjectural. The Eastern Meadowlark and American Robin are other examples of birds exhibiting banner marks.
Another interesting aspect of junco life is that not all birds overwinter in the same area. Generally male juncos, both adult and young, overwinter in more northern locales while females migrate further south. The reason for this seems to be the desire for male birds to be closer to prime breeding territories, the adults to reclaim them and younger males in an effort to quickly find an available territory. Females have no such worries and can benefit from more moderate climates to the south.
So, what at first appears to be two nice uncomplicated winter visitors visiting your feeding station actually reveal, like when the layers of an onion are peeled back, a reality with complexity and depth possessed by all living creatures that share our world.
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
Walking out to get the morning paper the other day I noticed a small flock of robins land in a large American Holly growing in a corner of the front yard. They had landed to get their breakfast — an abundance of bright red holly berries scattered in bunches throughout the tree that will fuel them through part of the 40 degree day.
American Holly (Ilex opaca) is the most well-known member of the holly family on Long Island and one of our more distinctive native trees. Its leaves are unique, rigid with spines (to prevent browsing), and their dark green color gives rise to the Latin species name of opaca. Their flowers are whitish-green and are as inconspicuous as the berries are conspicuous. The attractive, tannish smooth-skin bark has distinctive “eyes,” locations where branches once grew. This is the tree — with its attractive contrasting colors of red and green — that’s seasonally associated with our holiday season.
If you pay closer attention, you’ll soon realize that not all American Hollies display bright red berries. Some trees have an abundance of berries while many others have none at all. The former are female trees and the latter male trees. All hollies are dioecious, meaning they have either male or female flowers but not both on the same tree.
This trait is fairly uncommon in the plant world (your garden asparagus is another example); more common are monoecious trees of which oaks, hickories, and maples are a few examples, in which a tree possesses both female and male flowers. And to complicate things a bit further: among plant species such as in the Rose family you have what are known as “perfect” flowers in which male parts (stamens) and female parts (pistils and ovaries) not only occur on the same plant but on the same flower.
American Holly is widely distributed on Long Island and you can see scattered trees in many forest tracts but two places standout if you want to see a forest dominated by hollies: the maritime holly forest situated in the Sunken Forest at Fire Island National Seashore and the forests on the north side of the road in Montauk State Park (quite viewable along the trail that takes you out to the viewing blind overlooking the popular seal haul-out site located in the northwestern corner of the park). In the Sunken Forest, the unique forest that grows between the holly co-dominates the forest with shadbush and sassafras. It is a very rare type of forest known from very few locations, being ranked by the New York Natural Heritage Program as both an S1 and G1 community, in the state and world, respectively. Another fine example of a maritime holly forest is a two hour ride from western Long Island: the holly forests at Sandy Hook, New Jersey.
American Holly has long been prized for its berries and foliage and there are accounts in older botanical books rueing the wanton cutting of holly foliage during the holiday season. One author remarks he was glad that the holly wasn’t often cut down, although its wood is hard and can be easily stained or shellacked, “since the depredations of the Christmas-green pickers take toll enough.”
Inkberry (Ilex glabra), an attractive shrub that grows throughout Long Island, is a member of the holly family; it is especially abundant in low-lying areas in the Pine Barrens such as long streams and pond edges. An extensive stand of Inkberry is found along the Paumanok Path as it passes just north of Owl Pond in the Birch Creek/Owl Pond section of the Pine Barrens located in Southampton.
Inkberry is a classic “coastal plain” species and, not surprisingly, its distribution in New York State is restricted to Long Island.Inkberry prefers sand soils where the water table is shallow, i.e., not far below the surface. It is not typically found growing in standing water but right alongside wet areas where the roots can easily access moisture. The species name refers to the glabrous or very smooth nature of the attractive green foliage of the plant — hairy it is not! The common name refers, of course, to the dark blue berries that stain your fingers an inky-purple if you crush them.
The winterberries from the third group of holly members on Long Island and unlike the prior two groups are not evergreen, dropping their leaves each autumn. But they are holly members, nevertheless, as can be seen by a glance at their bright red berries. Smooth Winterberry (Ilex laevigata) and Common Winterberry (Ilex verticillata) are the two more common species; Mountain Holly (Ilex mucronata) and Mountain Winterberry (Ilex montana) also occur here.
Back to the robins on a late November day: as their feeding demonstrated, while not edible to humans (in fact, they are poisonous to humans and their pets), birds, including the beautiful cedar waxwing, readily eat the brightly advertised holly fruits, especially later in the winter season when other more highly-preferred berries (read: higher fat content) have disappeared. Thus, hollies play a helpful role in keeping nature’s cafeteria open through the tough stretch of late winter through early spring, helping to sustain songbird flocks overwintering on Long Island.
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.
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