Picture a beautiful beach day at Fire Island National Seashore. The sun is shining, the waves rolling, and beachgoers rest upon the sand. Now imagine that you are working, not vacationing, at the beach. Every August, while everyone else is jumping into the ocean, National Park Service (NPS) staff spend hours walking in hot, soft sand, in search of a very special plant: seabeach amaranth.
If you love observing the natural world, once in a while you receive a gift. Maybe it’s a special moment of excitement such as with an osprey hitting the water with talons flaring and, with labored flight, lifting off the surface with a writhing fish firmly ensconced. Perhaps it’s a moment of intimacy provided by a doe nuzzling her fawn or a mother cottontail rabbit licking her newborn young.
As they continue their journey from that Sargasso Sea and move more fully into freshwater, juvenile American eels start to gain pigmentation and turn from translucent “glass eels” into “elvers.” Dams remain a significantly obstacle, greatly reducing their ability to reach freshwater habitat.
Imagine spending the winter months stark naked in a damp, frozen woodland environment. It’s a chilling prospect, is it not? One that dwarfs any self-described Polar Bear Club’s seconds-long winter swim. But there is a creature, native to Long Island, which does just that. This species is no 100+ pound, hairy mass of endothermic (warm-blooded) protoplasm dressed in a Speedo, but rather, an ectothermic (cold-blooded) critter weighing in at less than a quarter ounce, that endures this wintry imprisonment unclad and unconscious. It spends the winter barely protected, perhaps under a log or burrowed beneath the leaf litter.
Diadromous fish (Greek for “running through”) are those unique species that migrate between fresh and salt water. There are two general types: anadromous fish (“running up”) and catadromous fish (“running down”). The former spend most of their lives in saltwater, but migrate into freshwater to spawn; the later do the opposite.
A few weekends ago Georgia and I decided to explore McAllister County Park in the Village of Belle Terre with the goal of seeing some winter birds, and secretly hoping to spy a Snowy Owl, a winter visitor occasionally seen here. This not-well-known county park is on the east side of Port Jefferson Harbor and consists of a mined out section of the Harbor Hill Terminal Moraine and a sand spit that extends west to the jetty connecting the harbor with Long Island Sound.