A favorite activity for my wife and I is canoeing on the Vineyard’s bays and great ponds. Our canoe is a lumbering brute, heavy, flat-bottomed, and broad-beamed, an old boat already when we bought it a quarter-century ago. But Lori and I are generally not in a hurry, and the boat’s beam and flat bottom, which make the canoe a bit cantankerous on open-water crossings, also make it possible for us to slide into places we couldn’t get to any other way.
On Saturday, August 3, encouraged by a positive MV Cyano report, we dragged the Blue Barge into choppy water at the Sepiessa Point boat landing. Paddling stern, I pointed her directly into a stiff southwest wind for one of our favorite paddles: across the Tisbury Great Pond, up Crab Creek, under the Quansoo Beach footbridge, and into Black Point Pond.
With the usual headwind going out, the trip can be a real schlepp for a paddle craft. And shoal water at the mouth of Crab Creek, even when the pond is high, poses a challenge for any boat drawing much more water than the Barge, which floats in three or four inches. So the effort is generally rewarded by a delightfully uncrowded experience on Black Point Pond.
And that pond is also a fine one for a naturalist to visit. True, it’s largely ringed with the invasive strain of Phragmites reeds, reducing the floral diversity on much of the shoreline. But even that plant is redeemed somewhat by its role as the caterpillar food plant for broad-winged skipper, a small, orange-and-black butterfly that was much in evidence as we paddled up Crab Creek.
The real draw for me is the narrow margin of exposed mud on the seaward side of Black Point Pond, where steep dunes covered with beach grass slope down almost to the water’s edge. Used by gulls as a crab abattoir and by Canada geese as a latrine, that narrow strip of habitat can be a bit…aromatic. But it features a nice mix of seaside plants and insects, and over the years, our visits there have yielded a gratifying list of specialized, salt-tolerant species.
Leaving Lori basking on a patch of clean sand by the Barge, I ambled along the shore with an eye out, especially for tiger beetles. These predatory, ground-dwelling beetles are among my favorite insects, and the Vineyard is blessed with several species that prefer or turn up in saline coastal environments.
Having left my camera at home (I always paddle prepared for full immersion, just in case), I was armed only with my smartphone camera. With their short focal lengths, phone cameras require a very close approach to bug-sized subjects in order to get decent photos. And tiger beetles, which are wary hunters with prodigious eyesight, are difficult to stalk, especially in the open habitats they prefer, making them really tough targets.
But persistence, I’ve found, carries the day with insect photography: If you can only succeed in getting within range of one out of 30 tiger beetles, well, just plan on stalking 30 of them!
In this case, my tenth attempt, or thereabouts, paid off with workable photos of Cicindela repanda, the most common and expected tiger beetle on the back side of a Vineyard barrier beach. And I soon added photos of Cicindela punctulata, a common species in dry uplands but a bit unusual in a wet, saline setting.
As I was congratulating myself on documenting the latter species, I was startled to note the distinctively pointed wingtips, greenish color, and mottled markings of an even more interesting species: Ellipsoptera marginata, the margined tiger beetle, a species confined to mudflats, saltmarsh edges, and similar saline habitats. Not really rare, it’s more a species that’s hard to get to, and hard to document once you find it. There are very few Vineyard records supported by any tangible evidence.
I’ve glimpsed the species on the inside of Norton Point and looked for it without success on the shoreline of Sengekontacket and the saltmarsh at Farm Pond (it’s surely present at both places; I just missed it). And I got bad photos of C. marginata on Nantucket. But the absence of a decent photo of the species has been an annoying void in my photo archive.
Letting my intended subject sit undisturbed for a few moments so it settled down, I began my approach, kneeling and finally crawling across muddy sediment. Astonishingly, the beetle sat tight as I closed in, taking photos as I drew nearer and finally getting my phone within just a few inches of the half-inch-long insect. These were my only good photos of the day — but I picked the right species to succeed with.
With insect photography, you often make your own luck. A long, hard, upwind paddle and a crawl across mud speckled with goose turds: the photography gods reward those who are willing to suffer. It was an excellent trip.
