Sound Update: The Islands

Organizational newsletters are rarely interesting but one exception is the Sound Update newsletter that’s available now.

It’s a production of the Long Island Sound Study and is edited by Larissa Graham of New York Sea Grant. The issue -- the summer 2011 issue -- is about the Sound’s islands, or some of them: Great Gull and Plum, which are part of the same glacial moraine that forms the north shore of Long Island, and Hart Island, the Thimble Islands, the islands of the McKinney National Wildlife Refuge (including Falkner, Chimon and Cockenoe), and Davids Island, all of which are along the Bronx-Westchester-Connecticut shore.

I wrote the Davids Island piece and it’s not bad but there are others that are better, in particular the piece about Great Gull and its truly awesome tern rookery. I visited Great Gull for an unforgettable weekend in 1987 and wrote a chapter about it for my book but then decided it didn’t really fit so I left it out. I was glad to learn what’s been going on lately (namely, more of the same, which is good).

Here’s a link to the issue.

New York City's Island of the Dead

It’s one of the quirks of topography that all the islands in Long Island Sound – and there are a lot of them, six or seven dozen, I think I read once – are off the north shore, that is, the Bronx, Westchester or Connecticut. None are off Long Island (Plum and Great Gull and Little Gull are essentially extensions of the moraine that formed the north shore of Long Island).

One of the more curious of these many islands is Hart Island. You can get to it only by taking a tiny ferry from City Island and, because Hart Island is New York City’s potters field, generally the only reason you go there is that you’re dead. One of the Times blogs has an interesting account of a filmmaker who has been studying Hart Island for years and has finally succeeded in persuading the city government to make a list of people buried there public. Here is more.