The week started with an audible sign that perhaps spring has actually arrived: The beloved pinkletinks, our local name for spring peepers, were heard through their signature chorus of high-pitched shrill chirping sounds that sound roughly like a “peep” or “pweet.”
These tiny, quarter-sized brown frogs (specifically, Pseudacris crucifer) are renowned for their ability to make massive, piercing noises that can be heard up to a mile away from the source of a chorus. A mating call for the males of this species of frog, the wonderful racket is like a chorus of thousands of tiny whistles.
We want to thank Gail Barmakian, Oak Bluffs resident and former select board chair in the town, who called The Times on Monday afternoon to report that she heard the signature peeps near Farm Pond on Monday afternoon. These amphibians typically live near shrub swamps and around brushy pond edges, and the cry of the pinkletink is something Islanders look forward to each year. Barmakian said she’d been paying close attention, since the persistent cold weather and snowstorms that hit the Island made her worried about how the small frogs fared.
I think it is fair to say we have all been worried about each other, not just these beloved frogs, and how we’ve fared this long, hard season. This has indeed been an unusually harsh winter, because of weather as well as the devastating loss of so many beloved Islanders. The list of those who passed away through tragedy seemed unusually long and was felt across the Island. The list included fishing boat captain Roy Scheffer and Patricia Bergeron, his beloved partner who headed up the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital emergency room for decades and served as a pillar of the Portuguese-American community. They were both killed on Jan. 1 when their scalloping boat capsized in frigid waters during a sudden squall off Cow Bay in Edgartown. And there was Nathaniel (Natty) Schneider, who died on Dec. 26 after being buried in an avalanche while backcountry skiing on Teton Pass in Wyoming. He was the son of Paul Schneider, a writer and the longtime editor of Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, and Nina Bramhall, a photographer and tennis coach. Natty hailed from the Island’s Bramhall family, who have had a long-standing passion for the outdoors through several generations, and Natty’s death devastated many corners of the Island where he grew up and was well-known. John Forté suddenly died in January. He was a Grammy-nominated musician who came of age in Brooklyn and moved in 2010 to the Vineyard, where he produced music in his Chilmark studio and became a fixture on the Island music scene with Carly Simon and Ben Taylor, both of whom he regarded as family. He is survived by his former wife Lara Fuller, a photographer, and their two young children, Wren Zazie and Haile. Last Friday, there was a memorial at the Agricultural Hall for John that celebrated his life and brought together an extraordinary array of friends and family from all corners of his life. He was 50 years old. The community also grieves the tremendous loss of musician Mark Grandfield of West Tisbury, who died suddenly March 1 in New York City.
And there is an even longer list of those who died further on in their lives. In this edition of the paper, as one example, we’ve published a piece on Warren Doty, a beloved local leader in Chilmark and an active member of the fishing industry in Menemsha. He died on Tuesday, March 3, and is survived by his wife, Nan, and children, Alexander Morgan Doty and Laura Doty Indigo. He was 82.
We try our best to mark every life on the Island, and the loss is always profound for families and loved ones, but this year it seems we have had quite a series of losses that brought us all together in shock and in mourning. The yearning for spring and the renewal it promises feel somehow more prominent this year.
The pinkletinks are the sound of that promise of renewal. They’re an annual sign for the Island that we’re leaving winter behind and entering spring. They signal a hope for warmer days moving forward, and also herald a goodbye to a time that has brought a great deal of distress — including over the violence most recently expressed in the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, which has cast a shadow of uncertainty over the Middle East. The war lands amid an ongoing rise in energy costs that were tangibly felt during this frigid winter of 2026. And now with war in the Strait of Hormuz, the price of heating oil and gasoline has spiked, and there are fears of a global energy crisis. The welcome sound of the chorus of chirping is also coming just on the heels of the historic blizzard last month that dropped up to two feet of snow on the Island. Now, the piles of melting snow are finally evaporating, and runoff is funneling into the Island’s small ponds that nourish the wetlands and thick underbrush where the pinkletinks thrive and celebrate with their shrill calls.
Barmakian, who helped us first hear the welcome sounds, observed, “They’re a little late this year.” She said that, considering the chaotic world broadcast in national and international headlines recently, hearing the peeps of the pinkletinks feels like “there’s hope.”
We couldn’t agree more.
