Long Island Mammals That Have Come And Gone

Caucasians have been living on Long Island since the early 1600s. American Indians have been here much longer. Some Native Americans may have reached here just after the very start of the retreat of the last glacier, between 9,000 and 10,000 years ago.

In the early precolonial days, when the new white settlers began dealing with the Native Americans on an everyday basis, there were several references to the wolves kept by Indians as dogs, some of these interactions led to the passage of laws holding Native Americans responsible for the behavior of their wolf dogs.

In Mattituck, across the bay, there is even a small pond that, rumor has it, was named after one of these domesticated wolves, “Wolf Pit.” The story goes that a wolf was “buried” in it.

But did native wolves or coyotes live in the wilds of Long Island? According to Paul F. Connor, author of a 1971 Bulletin from the State Museum in Albany, “The Mammals of Long Island, New York,” the answer is a big yes.

According to the same Mr. Connor, referring to the 1842 work of DeKay, the bobcat caused such a ruckus in the early 1700s such that the New York General Assembly twice passed an act to encourage the removal of all bobcats in Suffolk County.

Southold Town had beavers, bears, wolves and bobcats in the 1600s and 1700s, according to the Orient naturalist Roy Latham. Additionally, when Long Island Indian middens were examined in detail, parts of elk and bison were found. These, items, however, were very likely brought to Long Island by Indian traders.

Nonetheless, none of these early mammals has survived here!

Some modern taxonomists and systematic zoologists now list the coyote as a wolf subspecies. Wolf or not, it is the newest Long Island mammal, starting to show up in a few places, including a field in Water Mill in 2013.

Coyotes — think of “Wile E.” — are very smart, as are all members of the dog family, Canidae. Coyotes stay hidden for the most part, even in the Midwest and Far West. Yet, each year there are more and more sightings and signs of them on Long Island. Coyotes are surely here to stay.

While there are no more native bobcats or bears on Long Island, there are several other carnivores, including two native foxes, gray and red. Gray foxes used to be the common fox, and while there are still a few around, in Montauk and a few other “wild” spots, red foxes, augmented by import for fox hunting, have become the dominant Long Island fox species.

Their numbers come and go depending upon whether they become infested by a mite that burrows into their flesh to lay eggs. As a result, they are said to have the “mange”: They lose their body hair and are susceptible to inclement weather and other factors, which frequently leads to their death.

The raccoon is in a strange family, which includes two strange foreign species, the ringtail cat and the red panda. It can be a formidable pest, because it is as smart as most humans. The opossum is not as large as the raccoon but can hang from a limb by its prehensile tail and spends a good deal of its time in trees. Otherwise, it lives in a hole on the ground. Both like to hang around houses and other buildings.

The latter is one of the few marsupials in the new world and the only one in the United States. Marsupials, you may remember, are rife in Australia; they carry their young in marsupia, abdominal pouches.

We have several mustelids, or different members of the weasel family. The largest of these is the otter. Think of Otter Pond of Sag Harbor, named such early on, and you get an idea of how the otter population has shrunk down to less than a few hundred pairs.

Otters have been seen in recent years in Long Pond in Bridgehampton, Fresh Pond in Hither Woods, in Montauk and Greenport, and elsewhere on the East End, as documented by Michael Bottini. Now all we’d need is for a pair of them to show up in Otter Pond, and we can say, resoundingly, “They’re back!”

According to Mr. Connor, we have three other mustelids: the long- and short-tailed weasels, and the mink. I have seen mink tracks in the sand on Gardiners Island, but no live mink. Whenever the subject “Are there mink on Long Island?” comes up, I think of an animal trapper friend, the late Pierson Topping, who trapped a mink in Long Pond, Bridgehampton.

I was a trapper in high school, when I lived in Mattituck on the North Fork. There were mink around, but I never caught one. All I caught were muskrats, which, after skinning and flattening, were sold to the Tailor Fur company for $3.50 each.

As the common name implies, the muskrat is a member of the largest family of mammals, not only on Long Island but throughout the world: the rodents. There are 2,050 living rodent species, almost half of the extant mammals. Of those inhabiting Long Island, the largest, and our only true hibernator, is the woodchuck, or groundhog.

“How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” was known among us early grade schoolers long before any of us had seen a woodchuck or knew what one was.

I was 6 when I saw my first one on my grandfather’s chicken farm in Mattituck. Apparently, it was as curious as I was, as it didn’t run away when I approached it.

Eleven years later, I saw my second one as it ran under a big pile of downed branches on the Ralph Tuthill Farm in Mattituck while I was on my way to peruse my muskrat traps a couple of hundred yards away along the salt marsh creek banks.

There are several living just north of the Cornell University experimental farm in north Riverhead, off Sound Avenue, County Road 48. Woodchuck live in burrows, which can be very deep and are often interconnected. Among New York State rodents, only beavers are larger.

Long Island used to have beavers hundreds of years ago, but none now. Except, perhaps, for the one that showed up in Montauk at Fresh Pond in Hither Woods, and one that built a lodge in Northwest’s Scoy Pond, where it destroyed several trees in the mid-2000s. After a year, it moved to Fresh Pond in Hither Woods, then disappeared from that site as well.

The gray squirrel is the next-largest Long Island rodent. It is our only squirrel species; fox and red squirrels were never here, apparently. It builds dreys, squirrel houses, out of leaves and sticks to get through the winter months.

The flying squirrel is next in size. Then come two immigrants from Europe, the Norway rat, with scientific names Rattus norvegicus and Rattus rattus, two of the easiest scientific names of all to remember.

Woodchucks and flying squirrels were the last of Long Island’s mammals to reach the South Fork, then Montauk. Flying squirrels started becoming a problem here in the early 2000s; woodchucks arrived a little later.

The animal trapper who moved away last fall, Dell Cullum, responded to his first woodchuck call in Sagaponack in 1982. Now, at least two of these groundhogs have become established in the Montauk yard of Marcy and Chris Waterman and were up from hibernation by April 1.

Oh, yes, I left out bats, mice, shrews, moles, whales and seals. Sorry!