Current Nature: Winter Exploration On Nantucket
We’ve had quite a warm spell, and Quentin the Quahog may have squirted in favor of an early spring, but there’s a month of winter left before the vernal equinox. There’s still plenty of time to catch the beauty of winter on island, especially with school vacation on the way!
Current Nature: Nantucket's Owls - A Little Hoot Goes A Long Way
Owls have been capturing people’s curiosity for centuries. Their mysterious lifestyle, haunting calls, and captivating round faces with large eyes are hard to dismiss. Most owls are nocturnal, hunting at night. Owls have many adaptations that aid with nighttime hunting. They have special combs on their feathers that help silence their flight allowing them to sneak up on their prey. Their eyes are large to support seeing in low light or darkness. The forward placement of the eyes on owls, like us, allows them to hunt and determine depth perception and distance from their prey. However, owls cannot move their eyeballs as we can; that’s why they have extra vertebrate bones to rotate their head 270 degrees. This rotation and the asymmetrical placement of their ears on their heads also helps them triangulate the sounds of their prey.
Current Nature: Adventure Awaits Outdoors
Sometimes the cold, gray, foggy days of winter make us sad and all we want to do is snuggle up inside under a cozy blanket. Or for those of us who are ecologists, perhaps we envision what it would be like to be a Snapping Turtle and take a long nap under the mud until spring arrives. But if we can shake off that urge to just sit in bed and watch TV, a whole wide world of wonder awaits us outdoors.
Current Nature: Year Of The Rabbit
Happy Lunar New Year Nantucket! Yesterday, January 22nd, 2023 marked the first day of the new lunar year, the Year of the Rabbit. The celebration of the Lunar New Year is culturally important for many countries throughout Asia, particularly in China. Although, we use a solar calendar in the United States, the Wampanoag inhabitants of Nantucket relied on the moon cycles as an indicator for their daily lives, including when to plant, fish, hunt, harvest, and preserve. Still to this day, the moon cycle continues to be present in our island life on Nantucket by fluctuating the tides and being one factor of sea level rise.
Linda Loring Nature Foundation Awarded $75,000 State Wildlife Habitat Management Grant
Nantucket, MA: The Linda Loring Nature Foundation (LLNF) is pleased to announce it has been awarded a grant from the MassWildlife Habitat Management Grant Program to create and improve grassland habitats by removing non-native invasive tree species and restoring natural ecosystem processes. The $75,000 awarded is one of the largest amounts given to any one organization in 2022.
The LLNF grant will be used to fund the removal of invasive, non-native Japanese Black Pine (Pinus thunbergii ) in an effort to restore valuable sandplain grassland habitat. This state funding will allow LLNF to hire skilled contractors to remove both standing dead and live trees.
Seining for Long Pond Creatures
In recent months, we have begun seining in the North Head of Long Pond. Seining is a fishing method that involves two people spreading out a large net (seine) in water and slowly dragging it in to catch the fish. We are not seining for sport, but rather to learn more about the different types of fish, crabs, and other species we might find in the pond.
Smile! You're On Camera
Our intern, Luke Mackay, discusses our summer mystery of figuring out who is disturbing our Snapping Turtle nests. We used trail cameras to catch the perpetrator.
Vultures on the Rise in your Neighborhood? No Need to Move Out!
A seemingly peculiar but increasingly common event has been playing out around the island over the past few months, with large numbers of vultures congregating in trees and on rooftops. Here at the Linda Loring Nature Foundation, we have been asked questions such as, ‘why are these birds on top of my house when they never were before’, ‘why are they being observed in such high numbers’, and ‘are they negatively impacting other species’?