The Animals of Peaks Island

Twenty-eight years ago, a moose swam to Peaks Island, where I live, two miles off the coast of Maine. It shook itself off and meandered down the beach feeding on beach pea and rockweed as a growing crowd of islanders followed behind snapping photos. As our family sat down for dinner, the moose passed our house, before wading back into the bay. At least that’s what I’m told. We never looked up from our plates.

Animals living on Peaks Island wander in by water, air, or garbage truck (more on this later). And you never know what will show up. In the case of skunks, it’s claimed they arrived by lobster boat, in the middle of the night, payback between feuding Long Island and Peaks Island lobstermen. In less than 6 months, the population exploded. That was a royal mess. A group of dedicated Peaks Islanders managed to live-trap every last skunk and released them on the mainland. Did you know that a skunk in a Havaheart trap can’t spray if it can’t lift its tale? But don’t count on it.

Some unusual birds are temporary visitors. A few years ago, a brown pelican — presumably blown up the coast by a hurricane, appeared one afternoon scavenging for scraps behind Rick Callow’s scallop boat. In 2013 an irruption of Snowy Owls brought the birds south from the Arctic. My daughter, Kate, spied one perched on a sign. Until it swiveled its head, the motionless bird looked like a Harry Potter prop. Turkey, notoriously poor flyers, perhaps arrived here as eggs purchased from a catalogue. On a walk around the island, you may spy a flock of fifteen or twenty near the ice-pond.

Ospreys and eagles, formerly rare, are now commonly seen. A bald eagle cruises down our beach most mornings. Our cat, Flint, loved to follow my son-in-law, Dan, down to the beach, until one day he noticed Flint was flatter than a pancake, his paws stretched out in front and behind. Then he spied an eagle quietly swooping in for breakfast. Not this time.

We are not always adding animals. Our island plumber, Paul Eriko, can recall as a teenager, taking his BB gun with his friend Chuckie Boyce, and plinking chipmunks and rabbits in the island’s wooded interior. When we moved here in 1985, my wife Sandra noticed that rabbits and chipmunks were strangely absent. Only in the last several years have we noticed the reappearance of chipmunks. Rabbits, except for an occasional domestic escapee which rarely survive the winter, exist on Peaks Island only in rabbit hutches.

Deer? We’ve had our share. The deer population exploded on Peaks in the 1990’s. Deer, like moose, swim for no apparent reason. Some years back, a local fishing boat reported a buck serenely paddling in the Gulf of Maine 7 miles out to sea — -heading directly for France. There were so many deer on Peaks Island, they stripped gardens and flowerbeds bare. I moved my garden into the hull of an abandoned wooden-hulled fishing boat in hopes of raising potatoes. The hull was twelve feet high and I cut a hole in the hull near the bow and lugged in the wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of soil. It worked. Other gardens, even with ten-foot fences were cleaned out.

How tame were our deer? At Halloween, my friend Phil placed a prized pumpkin in a toy wagon and pulled it to a neighbor’s house. He knocked on the neighbor’s door to show off the pumpkin. When Phil looked back, a deer was eating the pumpkin, with a lit candle burning brightly inside.

Things came to a head in 2003. The understory of our interior forest was barren, people were frustrated and scared, cases of Lyme disease were on the rise at our Island Health Center. That winter, a state sharpshooter killed more than 200 in a controlled hunt. The deer left the island in body-bags, the meat donated to Hunters for the Hungry. We still have a few. Deer do swim here from other islands.

The next year I swore I saw a beaver noodling along the shoreline. No one believed me since there was no beaver on Peaks Island at the time. The following spring, a beaver dam, and lodge appeared on the ocean-side of the island. In the space of a few years, the beavers multiplied like, well, rabbits. Pileated woodpeckers, North America’s largest woodpecker, somehow located our island and feasted on the decaying trees sticking up from the beaver-flooded marshes.

Mink appeared out of nowhere ten years ago. One of them, I think, nearly killed our cat. Some believe that the mink (and raccoons) hitched a ride on the garbage trucks which used to move back and forth between the mainland and our town dump on Peaks. The garbage truck theory explains a lot, but I don’t think a moose or deer can hide inside one.

Some animals come here to die. A large sturgeon washed up on our shore one winter recently. That was a prehistoric sight. Some years before that, a dead Minke whale carcass appeared. A.J., in the public works department, picked the animal up with a large backhoe and brought it to the gravel pit in the interior of the island. There, he scraped away the topsoil over the burial site of Smoky, an island horse, and lay the Minke on top. Future archeologists will have a field-day explaining that one.

What’s next? We have no coyotes, but I have no doubt that’s temporary. Why? A coyote was reportedly seen on Cushing Island, a half-mile south of Peaks Island. Coyotes are smart. Given enough time, if they want to migrate, they’ll find a way; everyone else has.

Thanks for reading!

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