The Issue with Goats and Invasive Species in Montauk

East Hampton Town is importing goats. The goats will chew up the impenetrable foliage in our community’s deep woods, making it possible for workers to follow and try to remove an invasive species of beetles that are killing our indigenous trees.

One presumes the goats are indigenous. I suppose the trucks that bring them in will be stopped at the Shinnecock Canal so officials can frisk the goats.   

The last time nonindigenous animals were brought to the Hamptons for one reason or another was in the 1920s, when developer Carl Fisher brought in English sheep to decorate the landscape. During that time, the Hamptons was largely rolling hills, moors and farmland.  Fisher hoped to make Montauk an Old English resort with English-style half-timbered buildings scattered about.   (See the Montauk Manor. Or the Shagwong).

Unfortunately, the sheep brought in ticks. Another invasive species. And we know what happened to that.

As for the beetles, you can look out along Montauk Highway in Napeague and see the dying trees, their limbs and trunks riddled with decay and falling to the ground. All from an invasive species.   

Or are they invasive? What the hell is invasive? Are the trees falling today nonindigenous? I remember the first time I came to the Hamptons. My dad was driving — a Chrysler convertible with the top down — my mom was beside him, and I was, as a teenager, in the backseat with my little sister.

This was in 1955. We’d gone through the sleepy downtown villages of the Hamptons and now, after Amagansett, began driving along the Napeague strip toward Montauk. There were no trees in Napeague then. None. You could look over some sand dunes on the right and see the ocean, look across the railroad tracks and more sand dunes to the left and see the bay. And yes, there was some foliage. It was scattered amidst the dunes. None of it higher than 2 feet.

My dad drove us to our new Montauk home on South Fairview Avenue. One of Fisher’s half-timbered homes. Out the living room window, you could see the Montauk Lighthouse, 6 miles away.

Today, driving past our former home — its still there — you not only can’t see the lighthouse, you can’t even see the home. It’s surrounded by trees. Soon to be victims of the beetle? Tsk. Tsk.

Indeed, black-and-white photos taken back then show long views to the horizon everywhere, not only in Montauk but in all the Hamptons. Look even further back, at old photographs of Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, on horseback, galloping over the dunes through a military encampment of more than 29,000 white tents in 1898 when the entire U.S. Army was ordered to bivouac in Montauk for a month. Almost all the tents are visible in some of these shots.   

If we want to be consistent about denying access to all non-indiginous flora and fauna — new New York State laws now prohibit owning mute white swans because they were brought here from Europe — what about all those illegal humans — the English, Scots, Germans, Irish, Jews, Latinos and Africans (against their will) — shouldn’t they be sent back to where they came from too?

We all know who was here first. Wait. Didn’t they migrate across the Bering Strait from Siberia?

And why do we have to decide who goes and who stays, anyway?    

As was said many years ago by Rodney King, a Black man chased and beaten by the police in Los Angeles but recorded on videotape as it was happening – “Can’t we all get along?”