Published Articles
Cleaning Up Udalls Cove
With the weather warming, the trees producing new buds and spring well under way, another yearly event recently came to pass: the annual cleanup of Udalls cove, which occurred Saturday, April 21st. The spring cleanup, which involves Key Clubs, volunteers and environmentalists from all over Long Island and the Long Island North Division, was a great success, leaving Udalls cove immaculately clean and promising for the coming seasons.
Udalls Cove serves many important and indispensable functions in our community. Besides being a beautiful park and home to species like egrets, herons, ducks, geese, swans, muskrats, raccoons, and many others, it provides a fishing ground and home for ospreys, where the regal eagle-relatives have been raising young since 1977. Ospreys, with wingspans up to six feet, are magnificent birds with dark brown backs and pure white undersides. The amazing creatures, native to most of North America, are capable of staggering 50-100 foot dives into the water. Yet human disturbance of their habitats and use of pesticides like DHT damaged osprey populations all over America. With the help conservation measures like the ones taken at Udalls cove, the Osprey population has increased over time.
Cleanup at Udalls is vital to its function as an osprey home, beautiful park, and habitat for various animals. The tides accumulate garbage and refuse over the course of each year, waste building up on the marshy shores. At the first Udalls Cove cleanup, seventeen car wrecks had to be removed from the Cove. However, recent clean up efforts involve picking up smaller wastes that pile up along the shoreline. Cleaning up this small, usually plastic trash is essential to the maintenance of Udalls Cove as a park, wetland and home.
This year, scores of volunteers picked up countless pieces of trash from the shores of the Cove: tattered plastic bags, water bottles, Styrofoam planks, and a myriad of other items, filling several garbage bags. After a morning of hard work, volunteers enjoyed the satisfaction of leaving Udalls a cleaner a nicer place for its animal and human inhabitants.
Editor Holly Mandel
Click picture to enlarge.
Left to Right: Co-President Ashley Kim, Division 4 LTG Zack Goldstein, Co-President Kristina Chen, Editor and Secretary Holly Mandel