Opinion
CORMORANTS AND FAIR GAME
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
Perhaps Capt. Buddy Vanderhoop’s choice of words and his efforts to diminish the population of cormorants sound a bit callous to many, but he has pointed out a very real problem the Vineyard and many other seaside communities are facing. (You mention that 24 states allow measures to control their cormorant population. Needless to say, landlocked states with no waterways have no need for regulations, so this number is obviously misleading.)
If you’d gone out to the right fork at South Beach on any sunny summer afternoon in the last 40 years, you would have seen her. Dressed in long shorts and shirt, a wrinkled white hat, thick socks and sneakers, Ellen Kendrick would have been there, crouched on a towel, talking to friends. The stories were familiar to the group that met at the same place in the sand all summer.
The anti-conservation comments made by fishing charter Capt. Buddy Vanderhoop in the July issue of Martha’s Vineyard Magazine about shooting cormorants are outrageous.
“They have no predators here — except me. It’s so much fun to shoot ’em!” Mr. Vanderhoop told the interviewer. Recounting shotgunning a large number of cormorants in 2003 on Wampanoag land, he continued: “Because it was done on tribal property, the state couldn’t prosecute me, but the tribe banned me from the herring creek for a year.”
On and off, for almost 50 years, my family and I have been returning to the Island for at least one month every summer. My first rental in 1962 — a ramshackle old sea captain’s cottage — is still there, isolated and sea-swept, not far from the Gay Head Light. I was 30 years old and recently divorced against my husband’s wishes; I had come to the Island with my four young children, little steps ages seven to three for a summer of healing. There have been many other rentals since then.
Bird of Paradise
From Gazette editions of July, 1959:
August Days Begin
This used to be called changeover weekend, when the July people left and the August people came. But the lines of tradition are not so clear anymore when it comes to vacation patterns, and one summer month melts into another much the way one summer week melts into another.