Dan's Papers - May 9, 2008 - Sabertooth Plover

Every afternoon this time of year, I hop in my four-wheel drive and head from my office down to Sagg Main Beach for a few hours. If I drive through the parking lot there, a sand trustee road that cuts through the dunes puts me out onto the broad expanse of what is surely the most magnificent stretch of beach in this country.

My routine is always the same. I emerge through the cut, and then turn right to drive slowly at 5 miles per hour along the ocean for a minute or two until I get to the cut. This is where Sagg Pond meets the Atlantic Ocean. When the cut is fresh, which it is every three months when the pond gets too high and has to spill out with a little help from the Town Highway Department, the water rushes out into the sea in a great river, so you can't go any further, certainly can't drive any further in a car anyway. For much of the rest of the time, however, the cut is closed and the sandbar stretches out across where the river was. And you can drive, if you want to, as far as Mecox, which is a few miles down.

It's about a quarter of a mile between the trustee road and where the sometimes river is. And at the river, there is such a magnificent view. To the north, the pond stretches out about three miles to its headwaters near Sagaponack Road. To the east and west, the beach stretches out as far as the eye can see. To the south is the ocean. I must say, late in the day, this is a most beautiful spot to be when the sun sets over the far shore of the pond as it does this time of year.

This day, April 22, I went down the sand road and came out onto the beach to discover that the whole back half of the beach was fenced off, stretching the full quarter mile way out to the sometimes river. You could still walk or drive along on the south side of the fence. So it wasn't too bad.

The fence was simply a wire with some red rags attached to it, stretching to metal posts about 20 feet apart. You could drive through and into the protected area, but you wouldn't. This was a piping plover nesting area. And it said so on white signs with the red letters. WARNING. IT IS AGAINST THE LAW TO TRESPASS NEAR A PIPING PLOVER NEST. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

Now, I have seen piping plover nesting areas fenced off before, even down here at Sagg Main Beach. The piping plovers come up from Florida in March and they land here on the beaches of the Hamptons and set up their little nests. The usual fence extending around the nest and protecting it is usually about 40-feet long and 20-feet wide. It's not that big a deal. And I expect that this year, like every year, we will see perhaps 50 such arrangements between Westhampton and Montauk. The nests remain fenced off until the little ones hatch and learn how to skitter or fly or whatever it is they do, usually toward the middle of August.

Why our government has chosen to protect this particular bird and no other is a mystery to me. There must be hundreds and hundreds of other endangered creatures that lurk about on the beach and dunes in these parts. Protecting the plovers is at best symbolic. At worst, maybe it had something to do with bribery or corruption or something by the plover lobby.

It certainly does protect the plovers. They are now a recovering species. In the next decade or two, the bureaucrats might elevate them to the next category up - "troubled" or "concerned species" or something.

In any case, I have never before seen a fenced off piping plover area of such great size in all the years I have lived in the Hamptons.

As I drove along this quarter mile stretch, I did look for the little bitty piping plovers in there, but I didn't see any. The fencing ended at the foot of the dune at the back of the beach. Perhaps the plover nest was on the other side of the dunes that defined the back end of the protected area. Well, things being what they are, I will never know. I think they shoot you on the spot if you go in there.

I think there are two possibilities about why this enormous piping plover area is here.

One is that over the winter, the bureaucrats have revisited the situation and decided that 40 feet by 20 feet really just isn't enough. What with the dogs barking and Frisbee and volleyball playing, we really ought to make a new rule that you can't go closer than say 1,000 feet to a piping plover nest. And then of course, we can enforce that with the bigger fences.

The truth is, however, that I have seen other piping plover protected areas this spring, and all of them are just the regular 20-by-40 areas. There is nothing new. There has got to be something special about the Sagaponack plovers.

And so, what I think we have here in Sagaponack, probably now setting up a giant nest behind the dune, is much larger than just a plain old piping plover couple. I think that what has landed here at Sagg Main is a bird even more rare than the piping plover. It is the giant 300-pound sabertooth plover, the nasty, mean tempered big brother of the little piping fellas. And his mate, Griselda.

And now that I am out here at the cut looking back at it, I just heard one of them roar. It was quite earthshaking. This kind of roar is part of the courting ritual I have now learned - I'm researching them on Google - although it sure is rather frightening to humans.

I think I'm going to sit out here for a while. Uh oh. There's more. I'm going to put up the windows and lock the doors. If I'm not back in an hour, call the police.