This has been one of the wintery-est winters that we have had on Long Island for a long time. February’s snowstorm earned a place among the ones we will remember. For a few days, there were echoes of the pandemic as most of us on the East End stayed home waiting for the highway crews to clear the roads enough that we could get out and back to our routines. I think a lot of us enjoyed the time off, a needed break at a time when the world seems especially chaotic, sad even.
Even now, nights below freezing make spring feel a ways off. A fishing rod tucked above a coat rack across from where I often sit to write will not be put into action soon. But the weather is gradually turning. More hours of sunlight have already begun to work magic in the soil, warming it just enough to switch the daffodils on and up in their dependable way.
Ospreys will be back soon enough. I wonder what the pair that nests down the way at Lazy Point will do when they discover that their nest platform at Pond o’ Pines was also among the heavy snow’s casualties. Make do, I suppose, though I hope that the state or whoever is responsible for such things sets the platform right before they come.
I do wonder about how ospreys respond to change. Over the past decade or so, many things have shifted in the bay. The once-dependable bluefish schools have failed to appear some summers, and the striped bass that could be picked off among the rocks off Gardiner’s Island seem to have gone away, too.
Ospreys manage to find enough to live on and feed their young anyway. As opportunistic, far-ranging predators, they have been able to switch from flounder to porgies and menhaden to get by, something more specialized eaters, like the shorebirds that scour the wet sand for horseshoe-crab eggs during their great migrations depend upon.
The New York governor recently signed a bill that will end the harvesting of horse-foots, as a few old-timers still call them. I believe that this was overdue and that protecting their essential place near the bottom of the food chain was wise. Not that I expect horse-foot numbers to grow much, but the law should, at least, slow their decline.