Northwest Harbor

Dolphin Rescue Over, Now It Seems Beavers are Moving In

By Dan Rattiner

Things haven’t been this busy up in Northwest Harbor since before it was the place was abandoned two hundred years ago. First, it was a school of dolphins feeding in the harbor — a phenomenon that had never before been seen — followed by a helping hand to get as many of them out of the harbor as possible, since they seemed to have lost their way in there (8 got out, 12 died).

Now it is beavers. There are no beavers on Long Island. But at Scoy Pond, which sits at the other end of the abandoned old town across from Northwest Harbor, somebody has been gnawing down trees in the familiar beaver pattern, building dams made out of twigs across the pond and building a beaver lodge, also out of twigs, half above water and half underwater, with the traditional beaver entrance on the bottom. So either this is the most biologically accurate hoax ever perpetrated, or, well, we have beavers.

Most experts think we have beavers.

“We don’t have beavers,” said environmentalist Larry Penny, who examined the site. “Beavers are native to Connecticut. Perhaps a few of them got flushed out the Connecticut River and swam across to Long Island. It could happen.”

He described a route that a group of strong swimming beavers would have to take. They’d swim across Long Island Sound to Plum Island or the North Fork. Then make their way to Shelter Island (I’m imagining them scampering across the narrow peninsula at Truman Beach at night), and then swim through the narrow channel leading into Northwest Harbor from Gardiner’s Bay and upriver the few hundred yards to Scoy Pond.

The reason beavers are not native to Long Island is because we have very few hardwood trees here and Beavers love hardwood because it lasts the longest. On the other hand, during the hundred years that the Village of Northwest Harbor existed as a port, all sorts of things got brought in, including numerous hardwood trees, some of which got planted and now have been replaced by their descendants. And these are the very trees that have been gnawed through, with some of them hauled off and some of them left there, either because the beavers could not lift them out or because they are saving them for some future project. They are, after all, beavers. Busy beavers.

The Village of Northwest Harbor, inhabited by humans, existed from about 1690 to 1790 and today consists only of the foundations of some of the former buildings there — a school, a meeting house, a corn grinding mill, a couple of homes. When a better harbor was found at Sag Harbor, everybody gave up on Northwest Harbor. The East Hampton Historical Society sometimes gives tours of these ruins. Read the coming events section of Dan’s Papers.

Another theory about the beavers, and I know this is a little far-fetched, or even a great deal far-fetched, but considering everything else going on in the world today, how about that the beavers rode on the backs of the dolphins into Northwest Harbor and then, as the dolphins realized it was a small harbor and there was nowhere else to go except to swim around in circles, they looked over and saw one another and noticed all these beavers that had been riding on their backs and so they startled the beavers, who jumped off and made a run for it up the shallow river into Scoy Pond? Just an idea I had.

In any case, all of this reminds me of my very favorite East Hampton Town police blotter story. An amazing tale that took place right up here near Scoy Pond and the abandoned village.

It was 1989, and the old Soviet Union was collapsing and a Dr. Franklin Wilkerson, who had a practice in New York City and a summer house in the woods near Northwest Harbor, had gone to Moscow for a medical convention of ophthalmologists.

While there, because he spoke some Russian, he befriended another ophthalmologist, a physician who had a practice in Moscow and who was also attending this convention.

“You ought to come visit me in the United States,” Wilkerson said.

“I’d love to,” Dr. Ivanov replied. “Just pick a date.”

It was very difficult to get a ticket on Aeroflot out of the Soviet Union in those days. But by bribing various agents repeatedly at every step of the way, it could be done. And so Dr. Ivanov had gotten two flights, one going over and one coming back. And the dates of them were pretty much set in stone.

Three days before Ivanov was to fly over, Dr. Wilkerson was called away to a difficult surgery case in Atlanta. Ivanov would be coming to JFK, but nobody would be there to meet him.

The two talked about it by phone. And they worked it out so Ivanov could figure out how to take a Hampton Jitney to downtown East Hampton, then a taxicab out to the summer house. Dr. Wilkerson said he’d stock the place with lots and lots of food and drink. He could stay there a week. Bring lots to read, he told Ivanov.

On the fourth day of Ivanov’s visit, Dr. Wilkerson, still in Atlanta, got a call from the East Hampton police that Dr. Ivanov was in jail. He spoke no English. But he kept saying Wilkerson, Wilkerson, and he had been found on Wilkerson’s property, so Wilkerson should come home as soon as he could.

Here is what had happened. Out here in Northwest, Dr. Ivanov would go out every morning on his constitutional. On the second day out, he came across road kill. He thought it might be a beaver, because they have beavers outside of Moscow in the woods and perhaps here in America they just came a bit smaller.

In Moscow, when you came across a dead beaver, you took it home. The fur skins of beavers are made into beautiful hats in Russia. And with the economy collapsing, there were shortages. You rarely came upon a beaver hat anymore, and when you did, it was worth a small fortune. So people would take beavers home and make hats themselves.

What else did Dr. Ivanov have to do? That first day, he took the “beaver” home to Dr. Wilkerson’s house, skinned it with a kitchen knife, hung the pelt in the yard and felt pretty proud of himself.

On the next day, on two different occasions, motorists called the police to say they had seen this strange looking man come darting out of the woods and into the street, grab the road kill and run off. They thought this was odd behavior. So did the police.

And so the police set a trap. Finding road kill, they hid in the woods. And then, sure enough, along came this man who ran out, got the dead squirrel, for that is what it was, and ran off. They followed him to Dr. Wilkerson’s house. And there, finding seven squirrel pelts drying on a clothesline, they arrested him.

Well, as you might imagine, all this got straightened out and Dr. Ivanov got released into Dr. Wilkerson’s custody, and all was forgiven, though there was now an understanding that Dr. Ivanov would leave the road kill alone.

So what’s next for the abandoned village of Northwest Harbor? Well, how about sea otters? Last week it was reported that sea otters have apparently crossed Long Island Sound to take up residence in North Sea, Southampton. Again, there are no sea otters on Long Island. But while working with an infrared camera that had been set up to a webcam to study fish migrations in a Southampton stream, several environmentalists in Southampton saw what is, without a doubt, a sea otter swimming by.

It’s another animal indigenous to Connecticut showing up here. It’s being blamed on overdevelopment up in Connecticut.

They’ll be in Northwest Harbor before you know it.