Miniature Ecology on Fire Island

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been working like mad on my day job, clocking 80 hours a week. As such, I've been rather negligent on my blog postings. In any case, 3 weeks back, Marisa and I journeyed to Fire Island, a far-flung strip of land near the southern coast of Long Island. We wanted to see the impacts of an ecology in relative isolation, and Fire Island presented the most accessible case study. Upon first glance, the Island seems almost utopian. There seems to be no crime, no industry, and almost no automobiles in sight. All the people are either walking or riding bicycles. Even the roads are narrow things meant for a "human" sized world.

The island itself is over 30 miles long but only about 1 mile wide. There seems to be a dense concentration of vacation cottages all over the entire island, though it would appear that most of these cottages are only inhabited for a couple of months out of the year. After walking around for several miles, we realized that the vegetation of the island seems to be in the midst of a significant transformation. The island used to be home to mostly shrubs, grasses, and native pine trees. Now, exotic trees and Bamboo shoots seems to be taking over the entire interior of the island. Upon further inquiry, it appears that these exotic were intentionally planted decades ago by the vacation cottage owners for ornamental purposes but has since then spread beyond their control. As we walked around the island, we noticed bamboo "forests" growing 15, sometimes 20 feet high all around us.

And as our journey continued, we noticed that the island was infested with deer. The Deer herds can be found everywhere, in people's backyards, in groves of trees, wandering the beaches. They were walking along roads, blocking pedestrians, even begging children for food scraps! After hours of walking, we met up with William, a fellow New Yorker temporarily vacationing on the island. We went to his cottage and had several hours of splendid conversation and wonderful pastries! :) During that conversation, we learned of how the deer problem came about. Apparently, the deer themselves were released onto the island by game keepers during the 70s. Lacking any natural predators, the deer population exploded during the subsequent decades.

When the authorities finally talked about culling the deer populations to control the spread of diseases, the local property owners balked at the suggested animal cruelty and passed laws to prevent the killing of any deer on the island. As such the deer population surpassed their natural holding capacity and either had to be fed by people or die from starvation. On our journey, we noticed a deer with it's leg broken and horribly infected. It was surviving on a bowl of food scraps that a little boy placed along the road. This experience was disturbing and yet strangely touching at the same time.