A Column Promoting a More Earth-Friendly Lifestyle
By John L. Turner
John Turner
As Halloween nears, countless front porches in neighborhoods throughout the North Shore will be adorned with pumpkins of many shapes, sizes and expressions. But soon, following Halloween but perhaps lasting until Thanksgiving, their use as ornaments to frighten, amuse, and delight will end and homeowners are faced with what to do with them. Nationally, this is no small issue, as the United States Department of Agriculture notes about one billion pounds of pumpkins are thrown away each fall.
If you’re looking for a more environmentally beneficial alternative than putting pumpkins in your curbside trash where they can cause methane production problems, you can:
1) Compost your pumpkins (breaking them into smaller pieces accelerates the composting process);
2) If there’s a farm, petting zoo, or a neighbor with chickens, bring them your pumpkins to nourish their animals;
3) Leave the pumpkins in a back corner to feed squirrels and other backyard wildlife through the cold season; or
4) Consume them! Puree the flesh for soup, pie or pumpkin bread and roast and salt the seeds (high in several minerals).
By following one of these practices you’ll conclude your celebration of the fall holiday season in a way that also celebrates the planet!
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.
Stone Bridge Nighthawk Watch 2024. Photo by Rosemary Auld
By John Turner and Patrice Domeischel
The 2024 season of the Stone Bridge Nighthawk Watch, held on the southern bridge in Frank Melville Memorial Park in Setauket, ended on October 6.
The Watch is conducted every year by the Four Harbors Audubon Society, a chapter of the National Audubon Society, and in partnership with the Frank Melville Memorial Foundation. Itruns for 41 evenings — from August 27th through October 6th — from 5:30 p.m. to dusk. This was the eighth year of the Watch.
The purpose is to count the number of nighthawks in an effort to provide a reliable data base which we hope will inform avian conservationists regarding trends in abundance of this fascinating, insect-eating bird.
From the bridge compilers counted each Common Nighthawk passing by as they migrated south, ultimately destined to reach their overwintering grounds in central South America, which ranges from the Amazon River basin south to northern Argentina.
Common Nighthawks aren’t hawks, their closest Long Island relatives being two species of nightjars — Whip-poor-wills and Chuck-Will’s-Widows, both of which breed in the Long Island Pine Barrens.
The results for the 2024 season were disappointing with only 669 common nighthawks tallied, by far the worst year of the eight years of the Watch. We had only one day where we tallied a triple digit count with 103 nighthawks observed on Sept. 12.
Totals for the other seven years are: 2046 nighthawks in 2017, 2018 nighthawks in 2018, 2757 nighthawks in 2019, 2245 nighthawks in 2020, 1819 nighthawks in 2021, 1625 nighthawks in 2022, and 1022 nighthawks in 2023.
We don’t know the cause for this decline but weather is a suspected cause. A low pressure system sat over the North Atlantic for more than a week at the end of the Watch and some conjectured that it created unfavorable winds for migration. Hopefully we’ll have a better tally next year!
We were, though, rewarded with beautiful sunsets, by stunning cloud patterns, and many other interesting bird species including Wood Ducks (talk about eye candy!), several instances of adult Bald Eagles passing directly overhead, Blue Jays flying above us with bills and throats filled with acorns they were on the way to hoard away in hidden spots to ensure an ample winter food supply, a daily back and forth from a raucous pair of Belted Kingfishers, and the nightly antics of erratic flying bats actively feeding on aerial insects, employing their otherworldly echolocation skills to do so.
The Ecology and Evolution Department at Stony Brook University, 100 Nicolls Road, Stony Brook continues its Living World lecture series with “Should the Mill Pond Be Rebuilt? Reconnecting Severed Threads” with guest speaker John F. Turner, Division of Land Management for theTown of Brookhaven, in the Javits Lecture Center, Room 111 on the West Campus on Monday, Oct. 21 at 6 p.m.
Some landscape features such as the thousands of dams installed in rivers have severed or compromised ecological connections for animal species, especially migratory fishes. Turner will describe the solutions to such problems, including the recent strong rainstorms in this region that broke several dams, giving an opportunity for restorations that restore fish migration routes.
A noted Long Island Naturalist, John Turner is a founder of the Long island Pine Barrens Association, has worked on land restoration in Long Island for decades and is an officer in the Seatuck Environmental Association and the Four Harbors Audubon Society.
The event is free. For more information, call 631-632-8600.
“Forests full of fallen leaves are a gift trees give to themselves.” — Jim Finley
John Turner
Often it is the commonplace things we overlook. We pay little to no mind to trees adorned with the green leaves of summer. But come autumn, leaves with their riotous colors suddenly command our attention, so much so that we sometimes drive long distances to view this annual gift.And, of course, they also command the attention of homeowners once they fall to earth as it’s time for the annual task of raking leaves.
What causes the change in leaf color? Trees are finely attuned to environmental conditions and as summer melds into autumn, the changes in temperature and daylight length are slight — hardly, if at all, noticeable to us. But not so with the trees of Long Island’s forests. They are attuned to incremental changes in environmental conditions and the leaf color change is evidence trees have begun to prepare for the impending winter although it is still several months away.
During the summer leaves are filled with chlorophyll, a vital pigment necessary for plants to photosynthesize. Remarkably, these chlorophyll pigments use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide (the stuff we exhale) to produce the sugars they need to maintain and grow plant tissue while emitting life-giving oxygen for us. Leaves are the food factories of trees.
As summer wears on, trees begin to break down chlorophyll pigments, reabsorbing the vital nitrogen that’s part of the chlorophyll molecule, which as a result reveals the presence of other pigments. The color of the leaf depends on which of these pigments appear — anthocyanin produces red colored leaves, xanthophyll creates yellow, and carotene results in orange and gold.As dedicated leaf peepers have learned over the years, a fall season with cool nights and warm sunny days produces the most intense colors.
There are a dozen or so tree species along the North Shore providing the riot of color that a spectacular autumn burst can bring. Two wetland trees are especially colorful, indeed brilliant — red maple and black tupelo. Their leaves turn an intense orange-red, so colorful it appears if they are illuminated from an internal light source. Tupelo starts turning early, beginning in mid-August. Add to this the butter yellow of the hickories, the lemon-yellow of sassafras, the bright red of scarlet oak (easy to understand how it got its name when you see it in autumn splendor), the similarly colored red oak, the solid tan of beech, the duller orange of black oak, and the solid gold of black birch, and it’s clear that Long Island’s forests can paint an eye-pleasing show!
In writing this article I came to wonder how many leaves drift to the ground each autumn from trees growing in North America. Sure enough, there was an answer on the Internet — according to one article there are 203,257,948,035 trees in North America (that’s over 203 billion trees). Further, each tree has about 200,000 leaves (seems very high to me, but let’s go with it). Do the math and this results in 40,651,600,000,000,000 leaves (more than 40 quadrillion leaves or 4.06 to the 16th power) falling to the ground each fall. Get out the rakes folks!
Once you focus on leaves, the intrigue begins concerning the great diversity in size and especially shape. Leaves on Long Island trees basically come in two forms — simple and divided. A simple leaf is a leaf that has a single surface even if that surface has points or lobes. Oak, birch, cherry, dogwood, or maple leaves are examples of simple leaves. Other trees have divided leaves— hickory, locust, and walnut come to mind — in which the single leaf has several to many smaller leaflets. In this casethedivided leaf with all the leaflets and not the individual leaflets is what falls from the tree.
The sassafras tree, a common constituent in Long Island’s forests, has the distinction of having three different shaped leaves growing on the same tree. These shapes have been likened to a glove, mitten, and fist although the glove shaped leaf looks to me more like a dinosaur footprint or the glove of an alien’s hand!
And then there’s the question of why deciduous and a few coniferous trees shed their leaves before the onset of winter? Given the freezing cold that brings ice and snow with strong winds, if a tree maintained leaves it would increase the chances it topples over as the leaves act as a collective sail. Similarly, the surface area of the leaves gather snow and ice, burdening the tree and branches, likely causing branches to snap. As importantly, if leaves were retained through the winter the tree would attempt to continue to photosynthesize which requires water but water would often not be available in the frozen soil creating great stress on the tree, enough stress to kill it.
Now you’re thinking that’s fine John but what about all those evergreen tree species like pines and spruces since they retain their leaves throughout the winter. How do they survive since they have to cope with the same conditions that led deciduous trees toshed their leaves? First, many evergreens have needles which, based on their shape, don’t hold snow or ice like the broad leaves of deciduous trees and are better at passing wind through their foliage. Further, they also often have a waxy coating that retards water loss (this waxy coating on pitch pine needles is one reason why the Pine Barrens can have intense wildfires). Because of these adaptations evergreens can retain their needles and grow in colder climates than deciduous trees.
Shed leaves play a key role in driving some ecosystems. For example, leaves falling into vernal pools, small seasonal wetlands, form the base of the pool’s food chain. Many invertebrate species shred or decompose the leaves into microscopic pieces which are then fed upon by other animals and bacteria. These species serve as food for predators such as dragonfly and damselfly nymphs as well as many species of frogs and salamanders. Without leaves the vernal pool system would starve and ultimately collapse.
In Robert Frost’s wonderful poem “Gathering Leaves” he talks about the difficulty and perhaps futileness of raking and bagging them:
Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.
I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.
But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.
I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?
Next to nothing for weight,
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.
Next to nothing for use,
But a crop is a crop,
And who’s to say where
The harvest shall stop?
His frustration for the annual ritual can, today, be largely avoided by limiting your raking and bagging of leaves by making layers of leaves in your flower and tree beds. Better yet, leave them in place, if at all possible, to help protect all varieties of insects and other animals that benefit from thick leaf cover. As eco-conscious homeowners have embraced: “Leave the leaves!”
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.
A Column Promoting a More Earth-Friendly Lifestyle
By John L. Turner
John Turner
Recent research has documented that birds are attracted to, but often disoriented by, outdoor lighting. There are many instances of migrating birds flying over suburban and urban areas becoming entrained in these areas, attracted by the glow of countless buildings and street lights. Unfortunately, this often leads to fatal consequences for birds as they collide with the windows that adorn so many modern urban and suburban buildings.
The death of more than one thousand birds flying into the glass facade of McCormick Place in Chicago in October of last year is a stark reminder of the danger that excessive lighting can pose to birds.
What can you do as a home or business owner? Very simple and straightforward — shut off excessive outdoor lighting to reduce your contribution to the upward glow that negatively affects birds. Before you automatically throw on the light switch controlling the outdoor lights give a thought about the birds flying overhead during their winged journeys.
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.
As summer melds into autumn, the changes in temperature and daylight length are hardly, if at all, noticeable to us. But not so with the trees of Long Island’s forests. They are attuned to incremental changes in environmental conditions and have begun to prepare for the impending winter although it is still several months away.
The first and most conspicuous sign of this preparation is the color change in the countless leaves adorning the almost countless trees. During the summer leaves are filled with chlorophyll pigment necessary for plants to photosynthesize. As summer wears on, trees begin to break down chlorophyll pigments, reabsorbing the vital nitrogen and as a result other pigments are revealed. The color of the leaf depends on which pigments appear — anthocyanin produces red colored leaves, xanthophyll creates yellow, and carotene results in orange and gold. A fall season with cool nights and warm sunny days produces the most intense colors.
There are a dozen or so tree species along the North Shore providing the riot of color a that a spectacular autumn burst can bring. Two wetland trees are especially colorful, indeed brilliant — red maple and black tupelo. Their leaves turn an intense orange-red, so colorful it appears if they are illuminated from an internal light source.Tupelo starts turning early — beginning in mid-August.
Add to this the butter yellow of the hickories, the lemon-yellow of sassafras, the bright red of scarlet oak (easy to understand how it got its name when you see it in autumn splendor), the similarly colored red oak, the solid tan of beech, the duller orange of black oak, and the solid gold of black birch, and it’s clear that Long Island’s forests can paint an eye-pleasing show!
Fortunately, there are many parks and preserves along the county’s North Shore where you can see leaf change. Caleb Smith State Park Preserve in Smithtown can be a go-to locale given the amount of red maple and tupelo growing in and along the park’s numerous wetlands. The same goes for the adjacent Blydenburgh County Park. Cordwood Landing County Park in Miller Place, a gem situated on the shore of Long Island Sound, produces a nice palette of color that includes two rarer orange-leaved trees — Hornbeam and Hop Hornbeam.
A walk along the Long Island Greenbelt Trail in Arthur Kunz County Park on the west side of the Nissequogue River, accessed from Landing Avenue in Smithtown, can be good for leaf peeping with an added bonus of beautiful views of the river and its marshland, the grasses of which turn an attractive russet color in the fall.
Makamah County Nature Preserve in Fort Salonga is similar — colorful woodland scenes with peeks out to the adjacent marshland. A less well-known county park, fine for leaf peeping, is Rassapeague County Park located in the Village of Nissequogue along Long Beach Road.
A little further afield, the 100,000 acre Pine Barrens Preserve of central and eastern Suffolk County offers many places to view the leaf change and is especially beautiful in certain areas as the bright red and orange of the red maples and black tupelos blend with the tans, browns and burgundy of various oaks. Adding to the palette here are the medium green colors of Pitch Pine and in some places the darker greens of Atlantic White Cedar.
Good places in the Pine Barrens to see the leaf change are the Quogue Wildlife Refuge, Cranberry Bog County Nature Preserve accessed by County Route 63 in Riverhead, and The Nature Conservancy’s Calverton Pond Preserve in Manorville.
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.
This article originally appeared in TBR News Media’s Harvest Times supplement on Sept. 12.
Children pose for photo-ops at Harbor Day. Photo by Rita J. Egan
State Assemblyman Mike Fitzpatrick (R-St. James) with the Sons of Norway. Photo by Rita J. Egan
The Algo-Rhythms performed during Harbor Day. Photo by Rita J. Egan
The event featured a touch tank. Photo by Rita J. Egan
Head of the Harbor Mayor Michael Utevsky stands with enviornmentalist John Turner, who is awarded the Dr. Larry Swanson Environmental Award. Photo by Rita J. Egan
Peter Scully, former Suffolk County deputy executive, accepts The Friends of Stony Brook Harbor Lifetime Achievement Award. Photo by Rita J. Egan
Peter Scully, former Suffolk County deputy executive, accepts The Friends of Stony Brook Harbor Lifetime Achievement Award. Photo by Rita J. Egan
Children admire a screech owl at the Sweetbriar Nature Center booth. Photo by Rita J. Egan
Mayor Richard Smith speaks at Harbor Day. Photo by Rita J. Egan
Village of Head of the Harbor Deputy Mayor Lisa Davisdon greets Suffolk County Legislator Steve Englebright as Head of the Harbor Mayor Michael Utevsky looks on. Photo by Rita J. Egan
A girl gets her face painted at Harbor Day. Photo by Rita J. Egan
By Rita J. Egan
Hundreds visited Long Beach in Nissequogue on Saturday, Sept. 7, to satisfy their curiosity about Stony Brook Harbor and the waterway’s inhabitants.
The villages of Head of the Harbor and Nissequogue, along with The Friends of Stony Brook Harbor, partnered to host Harbor Day at the Long Beach boat launch with Stony Brook Harbor as its background. Last year, the event returned after a 15-year hiatus.
Nissequogue Mayor Richard Smith presented Peter Scully, Suffolk’s former deputy county executive, with The Friends of Stony Brook Harbor Lifetime Achievement Award. “There is no better candidate,” Smith said.
The mayor congratulated Scully, who resides in Stony Brook and grew up in St. James, on his longtime commitment to improving the health of local waterways, including his work with nitrogen remediation during his tenure with the county.
Upon accepting the award, Scully, dubbed Suffolk’s “water czar” when he was deputy county executive, said he didn’t consider himself a water champion but someone who had been in the right place at the right time on many occasions “working with a lot of outstanding elected officials.”
Environmentalist John Turner, of Setauket and the Four Harbors Audubon Society, accepted the Dr. Larry Swanson Environmental Award from Head of the Harbor Mayor Michael Utvesky.
“Name any endangered part of nature on Long Island, and John L. Turner will be there to help preserve it,” Utevsky said.
Turner said he was honored to accept the same recognition as the 2023 recipient, Suffolk County Legislator Steven Englebright (D-Setauket), and the award that bears Swanson’s name.
“I knew Larry and had a great deal of respect for him,” Turner said.
In addition to the awards ceremony, attendees enjoyed various activities including live music, a talk by historian Vivian Nicholson-Mueller about harbor life in the 1860s and a dunk tank. Representatives from Four Harbors Audubon Society, Sweetbriar Nature Center, Turtle Rescue of the Hamptons and more were on hand with educational activities and to answer questions about Stony Brook Harbor and its aquatic animals.
On a warm morning in early August, my wife Georgia and I climbed aboard a pontoon boat stationed along a canal in Freeport between two seafood restaurants, joining two dozen kindred spirits excited to explore the marsh islands dotting Middle Bay. While there were several purposes for the trip — getting to know other individuals committed to conservation through involvement in numerous downstate Audubon chapters being a prime one — once the boat began moving birds became the central focus. We were all interested in seeing what birds might be around as “fall” migration gets under way for a variety of coastal bird species.
The first highlight was several Black-crowned Night-herons perched on large wooden pilings followed by a family of Killdeer standing around on some earthen mounds in a forgotten lot at the corner of the canal and bay. Killdeer derive their name from their ringing call which sounds like their name — kill-deer! kill-deer! killdeer! Killdeer are a species of shorebirds but typically aren’t found along the shore. Rather they are birds of open places like athletic fields and large gravel patches, vulnerable places that sometimes get them and their chicks in trouble.
Speaking of shorebirds, this was the group I was most hoping to see. Even though we’re on a boat in mid-summer, many species of shorebirds have embarked on their southbound “fall” sojourns, some heading south from breeding grounds situated north of the Arctic Circle. And where might they be heading? Well, some species like Red Knots eventually make their way to Tierra Del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. Many others select other latitudes in South America and Central America while still others choose the southeastern United States or islands in the Caribbean.
As all these migratory journeys illustrate, shore bird species —plovers, sandpipers and the larger ones like godwits — are indeed globetrotters of the Western Hemisphere.Nearly two dozen shorebird species are known to undertake non-stop flights of 3,000 miles or more — that’s roughly the distance from New York to Seattle. The fuel? Subcutaneous fat stored under the skin. Take that you ultramarathoners out there! Long Island is one of the many “migratory motels” these highly mobile species depend upon during migration, a key stage in completing their annual life cycles.
We soon saw a small flock of shorebirds sitting amidst a few common terns along a small pond in the marsh — a single Whimbrel and half a dozen Black-bellied Plovers. In full breeding plumage the latter species is one of the most striking birds in North America — jet black on the breast, belly, lower flanks and cheeks with a white cap on its head and upper neck (please don’t hesitate to pause your reading of this article to check out the image on the Internet). The back is speckled in a salt-and-pepper pattern.
In comparison, the Whimbrel (once called the Hudsonian curlew), is a modest, understated bird with a back that contains flecking that’s medium brown in color, a lighter brown neck and a handsome crown with two prominent brown crown stripes and two more brown stripes running through the eyes. More prominent still is the long decurved bill, perfectly suited from pulling fiddler crabs from their burrows. The decurved bill gives rise to the generic part of its scientific name (Numenius phaeopus). Numenius means “of the new moon” a reference of the similarity to the crescent shaped bill to the crescent moon that forms right after the new moon.
Moving south into the bay we slowly worked along the edge of an island and were rewarded by other shorebird species — some ‘peeps’ like Semipalmated and Least Sandpipers and a few Sanderlings. A pair of Greater Yellowlegs, living up to their name with long, bright yellow legs, stood nearby and in the marsh a few Willets were feeding, a larger shorebird species that nests on Long Island. They were soon joined by a few American Oystercatchers, highly distinctive and large shorebirds with long bright red bills that are also local nesting birds.
We continued on and two more species were soon tallied — Semipalmated Plovers and the harlequin looking Ruddy Turnstone (another fine time to pause to look up the species on the Internet). This turnstone species, another shorebird with some populations breeding above the Arctic Circle, has a ruddy-colored back and tail with black barring, a white belly, bright orange legs, and a distinctive black and white facial pattern with two white spots between the eyes and the base of the bill. While this bold pattern makes the bird stand out while sitting on a rock, dock, or on the sand at a marsh’s edge, it helps the bird blend in while sitting on eggs in its vegetated tundra habitat in the Far North. Ruddy Turnstones get their name from the aforementioned ruddy back and their habit of flicking over shells and stones while foraging for food on the beach. This unique foraging behavior allows them to find food items other shorebirds cannot find.
Semipalmated Plovers are a handsome shorebird species. A uniform chocolate brown back and top of head with a clean white belly and throat separated by a bold black bar, adults in breeding plumage have an orange and black bill and orange legs. Their name is derived from the fact their feet are partially webbed but not entirely webbed like the foot of a duck. They’re similar in appearance and shape to Piping Plovers, a small shorebird that nests on beaches around Long Island. In fact, one birder has noted that a Semipalmated Plover looks like a sandy colored Piping Plover after being submerged in water and its plumage darkens.
Along the East Coast shorebirds were once actively hunted for sport and to a lesser extent for food and such was the case on Long Island. There are many written accounts of hunting trips to mud- and sand flats, marshes and the outer beach to gun for shorebirds, often using wooden decoys to draw them in. (There were a number of famous decoy makers on Long Island and some of their decoys can be purchased online). The hunting pressure was so intense and relentless and so many birds killed that many shorebird species declined precipitously.
One species, the Eskimo Curlew, closely related to the Whimbrel, is feared to be extinct from persistent hunting for the table, as the bird was considered quite delectable, containing lots of fat, a fact that led to their colloquial name of ‘doughbirds’. The last known flock of Eskimo Curlews was seen in Barbados in 1963. It was a common shorebird that passed through Long Island during fall migration. Today, almost all shorebird species are legally protected from hunting. One exception is the most ‘unshorebirdlike’ of all shorebirds — the American Woodcock, a forest dwelling shorebird that is still actively hunted.
Today, shorebirds face threats of a different nature. Habitat loss, as shorelines are hardened or developed, reduces the availability of feeding habitat, compromising the quality of their ‘motel’ experience, and climate disruption adds a huge layer of concern that is hard to measure in how it might affect the welfare of these iconic species. But there are many individuals and organizations working to safeguard shorebirds — from ending shorebird hunting in the Caribbean to artisanal salt farmers in Honduras working to protect habitat for black-necked stilts (we get a few that pass through Long Island every year) to the creation of the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network (WHSRN) that identifies and protects sites critical as stopover habitat for shorebirds.
For most of us, shorebirds’ lives are invisible, their existence dependent on remote and wild landscapes often in places so very distant from us that our paths rarely cross. When they do it’s a momentary gift — maybe it’s a scurrying flock of sanderlings retreating from the foam of a crashing ocean wave or the piercing tew! tew! tew! of a greater yellowlegs you’ve flushed from a shore edge while kayaking or watching the broken wing act of an adult piping plover trying to distract you away from its nest or young. As the boat experience illustrates, we are in the season of gift giving.
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.
A Column Promoting a More Earth-Friendly Lifestyle
By John L. Turner
John Turner
If you search “wildlife entanglement — six-pack rings” and then choose images you’ll see many animals that have become entangled in those blasted plastic rings — sea turtles, waterfowl, seagulls, and many other species, sometimes with fatal consequences.
While it’s worth buying beverage packs that are packaged without rings whenever possible, and more and more companies are making other types of attachments that don’t pose the problems that the six-pack rings pose (there’s even one company that makes rings edible to marine life), if you find that your desired beverage pack comes connected with the six-pack rings it’s easy to ensure they don’t ever become a menace once you’ve tossed the rings in the trash. Simply take ten seconds to cut each of the rings!
To reduce the chance at making smaller plastic pieces that could become a problem, cut each ring just once. Also be sure to cut the smaller middle holes once as they could cause entanglement too. The key is to have no holes that could become a problem to a wild animal.
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 at Cedar Beach in Mount Sinai. Photo by John Turner
By John L. Turner
John Turner
Spending the first five years of my life in Flushing situated in central Queens, I knew nothing of horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus). My first encounter, after moving to Smithtown, was at the age of six during a visit to Cordwood Beach at the southern edge of Stony Brook Harbor. As I waded in the water these strange domed creatures were around us, moving slowly in the sand, animals so otherworldly different in appearance than any other thing I had seen in my young life.
I don’t know when he learned this but my friend Tommy, a several year veteran of the beach scene, yelled loudly to watch out for their tails because they sting and I’d get hurt! Unfortunately, Tommy was perpetuating a false and unfortunate myth, one that has caused far too many crabs to be hurt and killed, as this remarkable and novel species is utterly harmless. In reality, as the passing decades have illustrated all too well, horseshoe crabs have considerably more reason to fear humans than we do them.
This fear is borne out by numbers, numbers as alarming as they are staggering. Over the past quarter century more than four million horseshoe crabs have been killed in New York alone for use as bait in the American eel and whelk fisheries. As of now, the NYSDEC allows for 150,000 crabs to be “harvested” annually, as it has for each year of the past decade,although to the agency’s credit, they could allow more than twice that amount based on the annual allotment of the 13-state Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) which sets crab quotas for the thirteen east coast states that are members of the Commission.
This will change if Governor Kathy Hochul signs into law a bill (Assembly bill 10140/Senate bill 3185-A) the New York State legislature passed earlier this year which bans commercial crab harvest. It also bans the harvest of crabs for medical reasons but more about that later.
Horseshoe crabs, which are not crabs at all but most closely related to scorpions and spiders, are often referred to as living fossils due to how far back they appear in the fossil record. Crabs reminiscent of the four existing species date back 450 million years ago to the Silurian Period of the Paleozoic Era and, remarkably, horseshoe crab fossils from the Mesozoic Era some 245 million years ago appear almost identical to modern-day species, a span many hundreds of times longer than humans have been on Earth. Now that’s an effective body design!
Talking about the crab’s body, it consists of three basic parts: the horseshoe-shaped main body known as the prosoma to which is hinged a middle section, this part distinctive as each side contains half a dozen backward pointing spines. The middle is connected to the crab’s tail or telson, reportedly used by native Americans and early colonists as spear tips used for impaling eels and other fish. The telson is not used for stinging or stabbing (the horseshoe crab can’t do these things) but is used to right a crab overturned in a strong shoreline surf typically during mating.
If you turn a horseshoe crab upside down, cradling its prosoma in your hand, you’ll see other key body parts protected by the shell. Immediately jumping into view are the six pairs of legs, probably moving around wildly as you hold the animal in a position it finds disturbing.
The first two smaller leg pairs are used to place food in the crab’s mouth which is situated in the middle of the legs, surrounded by them, and the other five pairs are used to help the crab walk, especially the legs closest to the tail. The first of these five pairs of legs, the ones next to the legs used for feeding, are different between males and females and are diagnostic in determining sex. With males, the ends of these legs contain claspers which look like tiny boxing gloves, making them distinctive from the other legs the male crab has; in females these legs look the same as all the others. Males use these claspers, well, to clasp the shell edge of the female with whom he is mating.
Between the legs and the tail are the animal’s gills. Known as book gills because the gills are laid out like the pages in a book, the 150-200 “pages” per each of the five gills provide an amazing surface area the crab uses to absorb dissolved oxygen from the water — about 30 square feet of surface area! This is a major reason why crabs can survive in areas with lower oxygen levels. The crab also uses the gills to move through the water as it fans the gill covers synchronously.
Another distinctive aspect of horseshoe crab are their eyes — all ten of them! The two lateral eyes on each side of the body are, by far, the most noticeable and were closely studied for several decades, helping scientists to learn some basic aspects of animal vision. These are compound eyes with each one containing up to one thousand photoreceptors; these photoreceptors allow for the crab to see to each side, up and down, and forward and backward. They are about 100 times as large as the photoreceptors — rods and cones — situated in our eyes.
And internally, there’s some pretty fascinating stuff going on. Take their blood. We humans bleed red, having blood that is iron based. Not so with horseshoe crabs. Their blood is turquoise colored because it is copper based. It is also extremely sensitive to bacterial endotoxins with the blood clotting in their presence. This clotting agent, known as Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL), is used on materials and medicines placed or injected in the human body such as vaccines or the fabricated joints used in knee and hip replacements to make sure they’re bacteria free.If you’ve had an operation you can thank horseshoe crabs for ensuring your safety!
Unfortunately, there is a downside to LAL — it is collected by bleeding horseshoe crabs via a needle inserted at the base of the tail — and approximately 15% die in the process and all survivors released back into the water are compromised at least temporarily. The good news is a synthetically manufactured alternative to LAL known as rFC has been developed which harms no crabs. rFC is widely used in Europe and is very likely to be approved for use in the United States later this summer, as well as in Asian countries.
If you spend time along the shore you’ve probably seen the shells of horseshoe crabs. If they’re dark brown (and stinky!) you’ve come across a deceased crab. You might also find crabs that are tan-colored. These aren’t dead crabs but rather the “unstinky” molts of crabs that were very much alive when they shed their outgrown exoskeleton. If you pick up one of these fragile structures and pinch the sides you might see a crack along the edge of the shell where the top and bottom meet. It is through this seam from which the molting crab emerges, casting off its old skin, so to speak. Horseshoe crabs molt as many as eighteen times during their 25-year lives (assuming they’re not caught for bait) as they grow from tiny crabs to dinner-plate size animals.
Drawn by the full (especially) and new moons in May and June, (actually the attraction is the higher than usual tides caused by these moons rather than the moon phases themselves) horseshoe crabs come to the water’s edge to spawn. You might find several smaller males swarming around a large female with one male attached by the aforementioned claspers. She lays the eggs in the well oxygenated sand at the interface of land and water. A healthy large female can lay upwards of 90,000 tiny green colored eggs per season. These eggs are vital food for a number of other animals.At least one dozen species of shorebirds feed upon these tiny but protein rich little packets, including Ruddy Turnstones, Semipalmated Sandpipers, andthe federally threatened Red Knot. Many fish eat them too such as bluefish and weakfish. Loggerhead turtles, a federally endangered species, prey on the adults.
We have a complex and ever evolving relationship with horseshoe crabs. We’ve harvested them by the truckload to be cut up into quarter pieces for bait, yet we spend time walking beaches to return stranded crabs to the water or flip right-side up crabs on their back in order to save their lives. We have ground them up for fertilizer but also lead moonlit “horseshoe crab appreciation” hikes highlighting their fascinating life histories.
We still retain unfounded fears they sting, stab, or bite but delight in watching them during their annual mating rituals as they spawn billions of eggs, some of which provide sustenance to shorebirds traveling between hemispheres. But with the advancement of rFC and its promise to eliminate crab mortality from bleeding and the legislation to stop the commercial harvest awaiting the Governor’s action, we have a chance to write a new, much more positive chapter in the horseshoe crab-human relationship, one that no longer views crabs as only a commodity to be used and abused.
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.
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.
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