News
Lagoon Pond is in trouble. Island residents heard a familiar story on Wednesday from representatives of the Massachusetts Estuaries Project about another degraded coastal pond on the Island, but town officials say that they are determined to find a solution.
Editor’s note: Alex Baynes, a class of 2000 graduate of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, recently arrived in Yokosuka, Japan, near Tokyo, where he is serving as a Naval officer. The Gazette asked Mr. Baynes for an account of his experiences of last Friday’s devastating earthquake, and the impact of the tsunami and the nuclear facility concerns that followed.
The pinkletinks have reported their survival of another winter. The feat’s miraculousness does not wane with repetition, converting, as they must, their blood into antifreeze each winter through ramped-up glucose production, reaching something like a state of suspended animation. With each peep they hear, Islanders are reminded that they too have survived another winter, if only barely, and without the aid of antifreeze blood.
Plans are under way to raise 50,000 juvenile winter flounder in Vineyard waters next year. The work on the two-year $308,000 National Sea Grant project has already begun but the biggest hurdle won’t happen for another year.
Beldan Radcliffe alerted the Gazette last Friday that she heard pinkletinks at Pilot Hill Farm on March 10, followed by Karen Huff, who heard peepers, her “favorite sound,” around Farm Pond on March 11. Welcome, harbingers of spring!
Kerry Alley of Oak Bluffs sees a parallel between some of the hardships being experienced by Brazilians on the Vineyard these days, and those of a century ago when the Portuguese arrived on the Vineyard. “There were a lot of them,” Mr. Alley said of the earlier immigrants. “They did all the work nobody else would do.
“They faced some of the same prejudices.”