Natural Neighbors

The map has filled in, and in half a lifetime, places all over Oak Bluffs are now houses with yards, Tom Chase says. And that’s the story that’s told by every conservationist everywhere on the planet. Of how it used to be.

Tom Chase has a wild idea for your backyard.

Story by Sam Moore

Tom Chase in his Oak Bluffs backyard (pictured below). Backyards all over down-Island could become linked wildlife habitats.

When Tom Chase was growing up in downtown Oak Bluffs he experienced a profusion of wildlife. Bobwhite quail were everywhere, “under everyone’s bird feeder,” and their namesake call was heard all over town. Enormous rhinoceros beetles flitted around the lights of hotel windows, and walks with his childhood friends were an odyssey of field and forest, often just a few streets away.

Not to mention the snakes. “All the kids coming home from school would go by Whiting Milk Co., and flip the sheets of tin down there and catch snakes,” Chase said. “And there used to be little elvers, baby eels, going up the creek and back at Sunset Lake. My life was filled with wildlife everywhere I went.”

“Then there were these places,” Chase said, “that were just so beyond belief, they were so exquisite.” He remembers Fresh Pond, a kettle pond near Sengekontacket, as “this wild, wild

Chase has turned his own yard into a haven for wildlife. His work shows it’s possible to create an oasis of abundance visited by wild birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, and neighbors, even in the heart of Oak Bluffs.

place that had one house on it.”

“And now it’s surrounded by development,” Chase said. The map has filled in, and in half a lifetime, places all over Oak Bluffs are now houses with yards. “And that’s the story that’s told by every conservationist everywhere on the planet,” he reflected. “Of how it used to be.”

But Chase, a longtime ecologist on Martha’s Vineyard, was only waxing nostalgic at my request. He doesn’t see the backyards of Oak Bluffs, Edgartown, or anywhere else as doomed. Instead, he and others on the Island see thousands of acres of potential wildlife habitat.

These acres just need a little work.

Chase’s vision: Convert one in 10 Vineyard backyards into hyperabundant habitat for native animals, sources of life so productive they overpower the mortal devastation of suburbia. By working together for wildlife, he thinks, neighbors can also nurture a local aesthetic that prizes native plants, sandy soils, and all the other idiosyncrasies that define Island biology.

“He has bats in his bat box,” said Luanne Johnson, director of BiodiversityWorks. That may not seem like a nice thing to say, but it’s a big compliment —

Angela Luckey and Luanne Johnson, of Biodiversityworks, inspecting a screech owl box.

especially for Chase’s small backyard. She added, “He’s had river otters show up.”

It’s true. Chase has turned his own yard into a haven for wildlife. His work shows it’s possible to create an oasis of abundance visited by wild birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, and neighbors, even in the heart of Oak Bluffs.

Now, Chase has a plan with BiodiversityWorks to supercharge habitat in yards around the Island. The nonprofit has plenty of experience working with local landowners. “I always say that we’re kind of like ‘wildlife without borders,’” Johnson said. “A lot of people don’t know what the best thing is to do for the wildlife on their property, and a lot of them are looking for input.”

Those people, and their neighbors, are an indispensable part of an Island-wide conservation strategy. “Roughly speaking,” Chase said, “a third of the Island is conserved, a third is developed, and a third is up for grabs.” The remaining

Gus Ben David's yard backs up to Felix Neck in Edgartown, and hosts a diverse population, including this alligator snapping turtle, and the tree swallow, below.

third is much more difficult to set aside for conservation, and the areas already protected are not enough to sustain the Island’s native wildlife.

“There’s some great news, and there’s some misleading news,” Chase told me. The land the Vineyard has already conserved is an incredible achievement, but, “many species, and almost all ecological processes, require large, intact landscapes. Much of the landscape we’ve conserved is in parcels of land that are too small to hold a viable population of a given species.”

Johnson agrees. “What we increasingly find is that the conservation lands that we have set aside just aren’t enough for connectivity, for our animals to be able to maintain their population,” she said.

“A river otter, or northern long-eared bat, or spotted turtle, they don’t look at who owns the property,” she said. While the big parcels like the State Forest, Long Point, or the Land Bank’s many acres of down-Island woods are crucial, they are isolated. In between lies a checkerboard of residential development that forms a gauntlet for wildlife. If enough spaces on the board are improved and connected, Chase and Johnson say, that gauntlet could become an olive branch.

Lawn is our country’s largest irrigated crop, but it doesn’t nourish much of anything. It’s “a biological desert for most wildlife,” Johnson said. Often, the more money people spend on landscaping, the worse their lawns get for wildlife. One National Science Foundation study found that higher-income households all across the country had less biodiversity on their lawns, likely as a result of more money for weeding and fertilizers.

“People already spend enormous amounts of money and time managing their yard,” said Chase. “We’re just asking [them] to convert the money that they already spend into different things. Spend your money differently, spend your time differently.”

For Chase, this goal is equal parts biology and social movement. In order to improve habitat on an ecologically effective scale, “we need to get beyond the individual backyards to the collective backyards,

" There used to be little elvers, baby eels, going up the creek and back at Sunset Lake. My life was filled with wildlife everywhere I went."

whether those are neighborhoods, or multiple property owners associated through social networks, or communities of faith, or whatever it is,” he said.

The aesthetic of the American lawn is entrenched, well-studied, and part of a long history. Transforming it on a cultural level is a big project. This is where Chase’s vision, of building critical mass using connections between neighbors, offers a foothold. It doesn’t force a change on people who don’t want one — but it suggests a practical course of action for those who do.

During a pilot run of this idea by Chase and his colleague Matt Pelikan at the Nature Conservancy called the Vineyard Habitat Network, this approach seemed to pay off. Chase said, “What we found is, by the time we got to the kitchen table, they were already in! The question was, ‘What do you want me to do?’ That always led to a walk around the backyard.”

“And when you walk around someone’s yard,” Chase said, “you can say, ‘Look, that oak tree right there? Oak trees feed more organisms than any other group of plants in North America. Keep that oak tree.”

“People love to find out what they actually have,” he said. “They didn’t know what it was, or what they should do, but they got so thrilled at knowing that they actually owned something that had history, and had meaning, and had wildlife.”

This brings Chase down to brass tacks: What practical steps can one person take in the backyard? The basics are easy, according to Chase. First, work with what you’ve got. No need to tear everything up, he said, because “the native plants you have are usually there for a good reason.”

Second, water. “Everything needs it, and many species of wildlife orient towards it,” says Chase. His own homemade pond is a key resource for many species, even if a few of those species are known to eat his goldfish.

Third, cover. This is in the eye and the size of its beholder. Snakes, which on the Island are harmless to people and help keep prey populations in check, like simple boards or corrugated tin to hide under, while other species prefer dense shrubs of the kind rarely found in the suburbs.

Last, and with the most potential for eager gardeners, is to seek and encourage native plants. “Some native plants, like oaks, are the breadbasket for so many invertebrates and the vertebrates that feed on them, as birds do on caterpillars,” Chase said. “Other plants are good at absorbing toxins, or act as host plants for pollinators.”

There are so many ways to approach each of these steps, and such variation based on the qualities of the land itself, that Chase recommends whichever measures you have the time and the resources to pursue. Small inroads are still helpful ones.

Matt Pelikan, another Island biologist who keeps a close eye on his back 40, has noticed a surge of native insect life since he began his own regimen. What’s the regimen? “To be honest, my wildlife landscaping involves a lot of doing nothing,” he told me. “I knew I wanted to support wildlife, and I knew I wanted to cut back on yardwork. So I stopped mowing, stopped tending the beds and borders, and just kind of let stuff happen.” The dividends were clear.

Of course, many national organizations offer similar advice — food, cover, water, native plants. But this can be daunting unless you are a botanist or wildlife biologist. “What most people want to know, says Chase, “is, ‘What is the wildlife that is relevant in my neighborhood? What can I do in my yard?’”

“If someone lives in the sandplains, they’re not going to be able to grow the kind of trees that grow out of the moraine, because it’s really crappy soil, and the wind is howling, and there’s salt spray everywhere,” said Chase. “So where you live does constrain some things that you can produce. Understanding where you live also tells you where you have the greatest opportunities: which species of butterflies, which species of snakes, which species of shrubs.”

That’s where the biologists come in — in particular, a botanist named Angela Luckey, who just got an MV Vision Fellowship to work with BiodiversityWorks to help Islanders improve their backyards. Mentored by Chase, she will help landowners identify what’s in their yard now, and what could be there with a little help from the neighborhood.

In Chase’s yard, several new plants showed up on their own, like Venus’ looking-glass, a delicate purple wildflower that rivals some ornamentals. Once the ecological processes in a yard start rolling, all sorts of latent potential gets unlocked, from dormant seeds hidden in the soil to curious creatures who soon encounter the fresh new digs.

In the end, it’s about shifting our relationship to land from one of style to one of substance. “Land is here to support life. Human and wildlife,” Chase emphasized. “The popular myth is that it’s mostly a cosmetic, maybe a recreational kind of amenity for the Vineyard. But if you want clean water, if you don’t want to smell chlorine when you turn on the tap, if you want your garden pollinated, if you don’t want so many deer, if you don’t like getting bitten by ticks, if you don’t want Lyme disease” — well, you better get to work.

Want to find out more? Email info@biodiversityworksmv.org.

Wholesome MV, a community-based yoga and healthy cooking initiative. We are renovating and adding to the existing garage and guesthouse to make a year-round home for Casey and Jason.

SMCo architect Matt Coffey worked with the family to set goals for the new project. The long-established patterns of craft, care, and progressive environmental measures were extended to this new iteration. A more contemporary addition blends the old with the new — both will meet the energy, comfort, health, and durability standards of the best high-performance new buildings.

Always ahead of their time, the Mazars challenged us to push beyond net-zero energy to address the embodied carbon of the building assemblies. This new frontier in environmental building requires the reduction of carbon content that is embedded and/or expended in the mining, manufacturing, and transportation of materials from their raw state to the job site. Plant-based and responsibly sourced materials offset the effects of less benign materials. Ultimately, carbon-positive buildings sequester more carbon dioxide than they emit. Locking carbon into the built environment is a critical strategy, and an immense opportunity to move beyond buildings that do less harm to buildings that have a net positive impact.

Toward this goal, the deep-energy retrofit to the existing structure included wrapping the shell with wood fiberboard

Continued from page 32 insulation, leaving the exposed timber frame intact. The new 700-square-foot addition combined this strategy with additional cellulose insulation. Timbers from a decommissioned airplane factory, reclaimed chestnut floors, and river-bottom cypress millwork add to the low-carbon material palette while adding a layer of history and patina. The solid sawn lumber floor frame and slabless crawl space helped push us closer to carbon neutrality, our ultimate goal. The project is currently nearing completion. South Mountain’s relationship with the Mazar property and family has been a multigenerational journey. We are proud to be, along with The Nature Conservatory, their partners and friends. Brian and Anne, due to their commitment to craft, carbon neutrality, land protection, and restoration, have pushed our practice forward, created a family destination for the ages, and made dramatic contributions to the ecological health of the Vineyard. They said recently, “We are glad this property found us. We never wanted to own a second home, but the combination of protecting a rare habitat, living on a beautiful site overlooking the Edgartown Great Pond, and finding TNC and SMCo was too good to pass up. Sharing this special place with our friends, family, and other conservation-minded people has been a blessing.” Not just any old summer house, is it? Kinda different from a golf course, too.

BDL • CONTRIBUTORS

Continued from page 8

Sam Moore (“Natural Neighbors,” page 49) is a writer and photographer who often works in conservation. “I try to get around by bicycle whenever possible, and in the process have sustained many injuries.”

Laura D. Roosevelt (“My Mother

the Pinchpenny,” page 33) is a journalist and poet who lives in West Tisbury, and is currently at work on a memoir. “When it comes to kindling, my current favorite fire starter is the dried stalks from last year’s garlic harvest.”

Kyra Steck (“Local: Ollie Becker,” page 10; “Favorite Things: Green Tech,” page 14; “Keep This Handbook,” page 59) is a journalism student at Northwestern University who lives with her family in Chilmark. “To help combat the effects of fast fashion while still staying up with the latest trends, I upcycle clothing, and thrift many of my outfits.”

Lucas Thors (“Local Heroes,” page 64) is a reporter at The MV Times, covering climate change. “About a quarter of my wardrobe is from a company called tentree — for each product you buy, they plant 10 trees and include a little token with a digital code on it. You enter the code and can see where your trees have been planted.”

Elissa Turnbell (“Dear Dot” illustration, page 18) lives on Martha’s Vineyard with her two daughters. “I get a lot of satisfaction from using all my scraps in my compost, so that I can use it later on in my own garden.”

Catherine Walthers (“Microgreens,” page 42) is a freelance writer and author of four cookbooks. “Now that I’ve learned to grow my own microgreens, my goal for 2021 is not to buy another plastic laundry or dish detergent container, thanks in part to my discovery of GoGo Refill in Portland, Maine.”