The State, acting through the fish and game commission, has under consideration the purchase of the 600-acre farm of Antone Andrews, located on the Martha’s Vineyard plain, near Little Pond some th
Bluefin tuna — the center of a highly lucrative commercial fishery and heated controversy about overfishing — will not be listed as an endangered species, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced last week.
“NOAA is formally designating both the western Atlantic and eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean stocks of bluefin tuna as species of concern under the Endangered Species Act,” a press release that accompanied the decision said.
The red pine plantations of the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest have been described as recently as 1998 by this paper as a “pine cathedral,” with evenly spaced rows of the northern evergreen towering above a forest floor nearly barren except for a carpet of needles. Now that cathedral has been all but sacked by fungal barbarians known as diplodia pinea which infect the trees from the shoots and rot them to the core.
Due to a combination of climate change creating warmer water conditions and continued pressure from fishing, lobster stocks in southern New England have been badly depleted, and a five-year moratorium is needed for recovery.
This is the recommendation of a technical panel for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission in a report discussed last week.
“Overwhelming environmental and biological changes coupled with continued fishing greatly reduce the likelihood of southern New England stock rebuilding,” the report said.
It is by far the Island’s largest conservation property, more than five thousand acres spread across the Vineyard’s ample middle, spanning the towns of Oak Bluffs, West Tisbury and Edgartown. But as conservation properties go, the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest is also largely unsung. It’s that vast swath of trees you drive by on the north side of the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road. It’s the corner near the airport where Smoky the Bear reminds all who pass what the level of fire alert is today.
Lloyd Raleigh is bent double , trying to negotiate his way through a dense thicket of catbriar in the moist wetands of Brookside Farm. As thorns entangle his jacket, a soup of leaf mold and sphagnum moss sucks his boots deeper into the mud.
“I kind of like this spot,” he says. “It tells us a lot about the land.”
The local chapter of Ducks Unlimited, a conservation nonprofit dedicated to preserving habitat, hosted its 34th annual dinner last Saturday at the Harbor View Hotel in Edgartown. And though turnout may have been the smallest in the organization’s long Island history, the group felt good about the evening, according to chairman Cliff Meehan.
