George Thomas
Robert Frazier
With over 600 pieces in its collection, the Artists’ Association of Nantucket owns the island’s largest inventory of 20th-century Nantucket art. Many of those gems go on display this summer in an exhibit called “The Art Colony on Nantucket : 60 Years of Contemporary Art.” Artists George Thomas (l) and Robert Frazier (r), who are also AAN board members, keep tabs on the group’s collection, which includes this painting by Philip Burnham Hicken (1910 – 1985), an island resident and former instructor at Harvard and the Art Institute of Boston.

Bette Spriggs
From the early 19th to early 20th centuries, the one-room African Meetinghouse served as school, church and community center for escaped slaves, free African-Americans, Native Americans and immigrants who lived nearby. Purchased by Boston’s Museum of Afro-American History in 1989, local activists spurred restoration of the meetinghouse, which is tended today by Convenor Bette Spriggs, a long-time public servant and community leader.

Alan Reed
John Sylvia
Cheryll Reichwein

On Nantucket, the lightship basket in all its forms reigns as the island’s most famous native craft. Originally made by mariners stationed aboard lightships, the round, wood-bottomed baskets were made to be decorative but functional. Today’s interpretations turn them into purses, planters, and even coffee tables. Since 2002, the Nantucket Lightship Basket Museum has enshrined the hallowed tradition. This year’s featured exhibit, “Lightship Hand Baskets to Handbags—A Purse Parade.”

Bob Kennedy
When not keeping track of Nantucket’s resident ospreys or counting growth rings on scallops, Dr. Bob Kennedy, former professor of ornothology at Yale University, oversees the Maria Mitchell Association’s Natural Science Museum at 7 Milk Street, home to the island’s most extensive display of local flora and fauna. Although Maria Mitchell, Nantucket’s famous astronomer, studied the sky and heavenly bodies, the MMA also stresses natural phenomena found on terra firma.

Susan Boardman
Lincoln Thurber
The word Atheneum comes from a Latin word meaning “a school for the study of the arts.” At the Nantucket Atheneum, the island’s public library, that notion lives on through its collection of more than 700 Nantucket-related books and documents, and in an impressive collection of fine art celebrating Nantucket history. When she’s not creating her sought-after needlework embroidery, Atheneum trustee Susan Boardman oversees the care and preservation of the library’s art and antiques. Lincoln Thurber, a reference librarian, ensures a long life for the library’s collection of historic manuscripts and periodicals, most of them located upstairs in the 19th-century Great Hall. Beneath the building’s antique veneer, modern technologies allow for borrowing or researching of materials from around the world.

Jean Grimmer
Stacey Fusaro
When Admiral Sir Issac Coffin started the Coffin School in 1827 to teach descendants of Tristram Coffin — a group that included almost every child on Nantucket at the time — nautical skills were taught along with reading and writing. Today, the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies continues that tradition through exhibits, publishing and educational programs.Executive Director Jean Grimmer, who until last year was director of development at the Nantucket Historical Association, enlisted the help of Office Administrator Stacey Fusaro (right) to arrange this year’s co-exhibit with the Artist’s Association of Nantucket, which continues at the Coffin School on Winter Street through October 10. The Institute’s own collections of portraits and paintings can be seen as well.

Jeremy Slavitz
Called Massachusetts Humane Societies, they were the precursor to today’s U.S. Coast Guard. The Nantucket Life-Saving Museum tells the dramatic stories of how Nantucketers in the local Humane Society have rescued hundreds of mariners from sinking ships. Rescue boats, historic graphics and memorabilia are colorful reminders of The United States Life-Saving Service and the United States Coast Guard motto: You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back. Curator and director Jeremy Slavitz, previously an educator at Nantucket Historical Association, curates the Nantucket Life-Saving Museum and works with island teachers to incorporate Nantucket history into the public school curriculum. Now part of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies, the Life-Saving Museum opens daily through Labor Day at its Polpis Road location, which offers spectacular views of nearby salt marshes.

Niles Parker
If you see a gold Ford Explorer on the road, you might want to pull over and let it pass. Chances are it’s Niles Parker and he’s in a hurry to check out a newly available Nantucket historic artifact or to fine tune something at Nantucket Historical Association’s new Whaling Museum. Among his many duties, Parker guides the cataloging and care of the NHA’s extensive collections, a portion of which can be seen here at the NHA’s warehouse facility. As point man for executing the restoration and new exhibit designs in the Whaling Museum, Parker watches over everything from the two story, one-of-a-kind beam press in the Candle Factory Gallery to the tiniest scrimshaw button in the Decorative Arts Gallery.

By Peter Brace
Every chance she got during summers growing up on Nantucket, 24-year-old Amanda Bixby found her way to the beach. She delighted in the good fortune of having parents who loved the outdoors enough to share its wonders with their children.

“I was born and raised here, and every Sunday we would go out to the beach for a picnic,” she said. Bixby’s school vacations with her parents had a similar theme: “For spring breaks all through high school we would go to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands and stay on the wildlife preserve in Cinnamon Bay.”

What Bixby got from those experiences—knowledge of and deep respect for the natural world—complements her current career as the Town of Nantucket’s first Town Beach Manager. In that position, she oversees the town’s endangered bird species monitoring program, which protects and counts piping plovers, least terns and American oystercatchers.

Because Bixby doesn’t have time or resources to babysit all locally nesting pairs of these protected shorebirds, she relies on a recent collaborative of other Nantucket avian enthusiasts who’ve heard the naturalist’s calling and who now monitor shorebirds for either the town or local nonprofit conservation groups.

All are part of an island-wide shorebird protection movement that began over a decade ago when reckless overuse of Massachusetts’ beaches by vehicle drivers threatened piping plovers and least terns. Smith’s Point and much of the South Shore on Nantucket became flashpoints of troubling human and shorebird interaction that led to beach driving regulations, fencing and signage. A Town BeachManagement Committee and the extremist citizens group, the Angry Plover Society, grew from those conflicts.

Humans vs. birds

Piping plovers descend on Nantucket near the end of March and into April. Their courtship, nesting, egg incubation and fledging of hatched chicks lasts through July and into early August, when the plovers begin stuffing themselves in preparation for their southerly migration. Least terns show up around the first or second week in May, when they begin their dating ritual immediately and then lay their eggs from the third week in May into the second week of June. Most tern chicks are fledged—taught to fly—by mid-August. The terns are gone a month later.
Problematically, most of Nantucket’s summer visitors and residents are also here during these warm months. With their own courtship and dating rituals on their minds, along with fishing and sun worship, most beach goers have been largely unaware of the fragile birds’ needs. That changed in advance of the Boston Pops benefit concerts in August 2003 and 2004 on Jetties Beach.
Since then, piping plovers with young still unable to fly have kept event organizers alert to possibly canceling or postponing the concerts to protect the chicks. Every August the town holds firm in its resolve to give the plovers their space. Thankfully for concertgoers, so far the young shorebirds have gotten their wings in time for the sand symphony to go off as planned.
“The town’s beach management program works really hard to provide a balance between the public’s access to beachfront areas and the endangered species requirements by following the guidelines that are set by U.S. Fish and Wildlife and the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act,” Bixby asserted.
But the higher level of respect locally for a nearly invisible bird the size of a Marshmallow Peep, and the genesis of the town’s own endangered species program, did not come easily.

Careless driving

Until the last decade or so, local beach vehicle drivers went wherever their vehicles could take them on the island’s public and resident-owned beaches, a rare privilege in the U.S. that many here mistook as a divine right. Drivers’ often callous driving habits brought many complaints from Nantucket’s private beach owners during the summer of 1991. Private beach owners threatened to close their properties unless the town practiced better control over careless drivers. Nesting plovers and terns were in grave danger unless they set up housekeeping on beaches owned by the Trustees of Reservations, Massachusetts Audubon Society, the Nantucket Conservation Foundation or on nearby outer islands.In response to the beach owners’ complaints, Nantucket’s Board of Selectmen formed a Beach Vehicle Committee, which hatched a beach management plan in the fall of 1991.
After Town Meeting voters in 1992 approved the plan, $20 beach driving stickers went on sale that following August for drivers wanting access from Tom Never’s to Smith’s Point, to Eel Point and to the 40th Pole beach from 5 p.m. to 9 a.m.
Shorebirds were left to fend for themselves, until four piping plover chicks hatched in a nest in the middle of the sand trail leading out to Smith’s Point on June 17, 1994. That’s when former Massachusetts Audubon Society property manager Swede Plaut roped off the nest, effectively blocking access to the point. A beach-use rights battle ensued involving Massachusetts Audubon Society, the town and the state. Before it was over, somebody had vandalized Plaut’s car, 20 least tern chicks were run over in one day on Smith’s Point and bumper stickers reading “Piping Plovers Taste Like Chicken” and “Ban the Town Bylaws” appeared on island vehicles. To counter that sentiment and to raise shorebird protection awareness, Plaut formed the Angry Plover Society.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts subsequently urged the town to develop a bird-monitoring program, but the Massachusetts Audubon Society criticized the plan as out of step with state and

federal guidelines. “Basically we stepped in and said, ‘You’ve got to protect these birds; you’re violating the law,’” recalled Scott Melvin, senior zoologist for Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. The Audubon Society took legal action as well, pushing the town to adhere to the Commonwealth’s regulations.
The town reacted by floating a home rule petition that would have exempted Nantucket from state regulations, but that effort failed in the Massachusetts state house by a large margin. Consequently, the town conformed to the state’s bird monitoring requirements.

That summer’s first plover egg was laid on the 25th anniversary of Earth Day on April 20, 1995, fitting for a fledgling town shorebird protection program.

Fellow birders

Joining Bixby in her efforts, today’s consortium of local bird protectors last year led to Nantucket’s boasting of the highest production of piping plovers in Massachusetts. “It’s part of what makes Nantucket so special,” said bird monitor Edie Ray of the island’s burgeoning bird population.

The prospect of sitting on the beach and getting paid for it might sound too good to be true, but it’s a major task for Nantucket’s bird monitors from late March well into August. How did these budding naturalists find themselves on Nantucket spying on beach birds? Childhood exposure to the outdoors with family and an educational influence seem to be the common link.

“I grew up in suburban Long Island, where my parents took us on camping trips to New Hampshire and the mountains. That kind of opened my eyes to the natural world in general,” said Karen Beattie, the ecologist for the Nantucket Conservation Foundation. With Beattie’s guidance, the Conservation Foundation also monitors endangered birds on island beaches.

For Cheryl Creighton, Executive Director of Tuckernuck Land Trust, similar youthful inspirations brought her to the Nantucket Land Council as its resource conservationist and led to her now running the nine-year-old Tuckernuck Land Trust’s shorebird-monitoring program.

Ray, also a member of the Nantucket Marine Mammal Stranding Team, recalls communing with winged and four-legged critters from early on. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested,” said Ray, who works with Bixby and other dedicated local bird lovers to monitor shorebirds on Jetties Beach, Low Beach and Smith’s Point.

Once a splintered array of local groups and individuals, Beattie, Bixby, Creighton and Ray, along with eight or so other monitors, are now a unified team. Since last summer, the town, the Conservation Foundation, Tuckernuck Land Trust, the Trustees of Reservations and the Massachusetts Audubon Society have converged into an organized bird watching collaborative. Vigilant bird watchers from each entity now share valuable information on conditions, predators, locations of nests and colonies and how to deal with less than cooperative beach users. “It used to be very competitive between the various groups,” said Bixby of the different monitors. “Now it’s lost that competitiveness.”

Successful stewards

That spirit of cooperation has not only made the monitors’ jobs easier, but it has helped the local bird population. Of the approximately 3,200 pairs of piping plovers in the world, roughly 500 pairs live in Massachusetts at over 100 sites, according to Melvin at Massachusetts Fisheries and Wildlife. “We literally have a pair within sight of the New Hampshire border and in sight of the Rhode Island border, and everywhere in between,” Melvin noted.

Although plovers nest by themselves and are fairly easy to monitor, least terns nest in large colonies, are aggressively territorial and therefore difficult to count. Still, Nantucket, Tuckernuck and Muskeget collectively offer premium nesting habitat for least terns. Consequently, the immediate area is home to one of the highest populations of these birds in Massachusetts. Melvin has initiated a Commonwealth-wide count of endangered shorebirds, which appear to be reclaiming the northern part of their range. “It’s just been in the last two or three years that we’ve asked monitors to start censusing them,” said Melvin.
Meanwhile, civil penalties remain strict today for threatening these birds. Premeditated destruction of plovers’ nests brings a maximum fine of $10,000. If done accidentally, a maximum fine of $500 can be levied.

So far Melvin is pleased with the success of these coastal shorebird programs.

“It’s occurring in the context of millions of people using Massachusetts beaches for recreational purposes every year, and that use is continuing and growing every year,” he said.

By Andrew Spencer
Photography by Cary Hazlegrove

Dinner at the Nantucket Fire Department’s firehouse. Cooked by firefighters. In March. Yummee.

I flashed back to my undergraduate days, sweating in the kitchen of a small apartment in Austin, Texas, reading the directions for cooking a package of ramen noodles. When that failed—which was usually the end result—pizza delivery was on my speed-dial.

Back to the present. I was about to sit down for a dinner prepared by firefighters. A dinner I was expected to eat. I steeled myself to bear witness to what was sure to be a culinary disaster, practicing my best, forced smile and the “it’s sooo good” response. I thought I knew the real reason for the success of those much-touted firehouse diets: less than savory meals.

When I arrived at the firehouse, the first thing I noticed in the kitchen area was the refrigerator magnet advertising a local pizzeria. My expectations weren’t mountaintop-high. But the magnet gave me a hint at what might be ahead.
Note to self: Go for pizza after pretending to eat. Save receipt, submit for reimbursement. Call it “article-related research.”

But then the vision before me began to ease my cynicism. Words like “color” and “texture” and “presentation” came to mind. I looked up and saw a group of firefighters-turned-chefs standing at a long counter, like line cooks at a glamorous restaurant. They bantered back-and-forth in the way only tight-knit family members can, trading secret recipes, telling jokes and referring to one of their brethren as “Boo Boo,” a nickname bestowed upon him that night by our own photographer. But what struck me most were the aromas emanating from their workstations. Things suddenly looked promising. Very promising.

“We always eat like this. Every night it’s just like this,” joked NFD Chief Everett Pierce with a wink towards the grand spread the firefighters had put out to whet our palettes: Smoked Salmon Crostini served on pumpernickel cocktail breads and fresh-caught scallops wrapped in apple-smoked bacon. Those choices, coupled with the fusion of taste in the Antipasto Bowl, would have been enough for me. But these folks are fire experts, so grilling was a must. The grill masters’ plat du jour was simply nirvana. You have to taste his Asian-Style Barbecued Flank Steak to believe it. One bite of this scrumptious piece of beef and the once lowly flank steak was elevated to astronomical heights.

My mother always said that silence at the dinner table is a fantastic compliment to the chef, and I always say that my mother is right. Few words were exchanged during the meal; we were all too busy eating. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, enter dessert, a Vanilla Raspberry Pavlova fit for firefighters and anyone else. Jeanette Hull, the station’s Office Administrator who doubles as the pastry chef, has made a tradition of baking cakes for the firefighters on their birthdays, and after my first taste of the rich custard pastry, another idea struck me.

Note to self: Be sure to tell Jeanette when my birthday is. Tell her it actually occurs once a week. Telling her it’s every day might sound a little suspicious.

Next time you see one of our firefighters around town, thank them for the job they do keeping all of us safe. And while you’re at it, see if you can score a recipe or two. Trust me when I tell you that it’ll be worth your time.