Nantucket Walkabout – Head of the Plains

Ocean blue and endless in the distance. A heady, briny aroma. A roar of crashing waves. A vast open coastal plain bathed in fading sunlight with a moon starting to appear. You’ve found Nantucket’s magnificent Head of the Plains at sunset!
On the trail now, you glimpse some sort of hawk hovering low on little or no wind and intermittently gliding short distances randomly interrupted by sudden erratic turns, swoops and dives. These migratory ground-nesting raptors, Northern harriers, hunt for meadow voles, mice, and Eastern and New England cottontail rabbits taking cover among low shrubs and grasses. Soaring higher, red-tailed hawks arc around on ever-widening circles hunting the same furry meals along with ospreys scouting for fish in a nearby pond and Black-crowned night herons emerging with a “croak-croak” for their nocturnal shifts, Higher still are turkey vultures and the always vocal American crows and ravens, ending their daytime scavenging for leftover carrion and heading to night roosts.
As you explore further out on to the Plains, small groups of Whitetail deer sprint and leap from one shelter of pitch pines to another, flashing their tails as they bolt across this wide-open prairie-like habitat on Nantucket’s western half.

On the northeast portion of a roughly 1,000-acre tract of globally rare coastal habitat known as sandplain grassland mixed with heathland habitat, Head of the Plains is jointly owned by the Nantucket Islands Land Bank and the Nantucket Conservation Foundation.
What the Northern Hemisphere’s last glacier, the Laurentide ice sheet, spat out for Nantucket’s version of wide-open spaces 21,000 years ago, Head of the Plains, rivaling only the island’s Middle Moors for shear mass of protected open space, is carpeted with plant species thriving in the fine sandy soils of this coastal plain. Frequently glazed in ocean fog, this low shrub and grass ecosystem boasts Little blue-stem grass scattered through clumps of bayberry and sweeping banks of Black huckleberry. Depending on the month, the mosaic is dotted with Sandplain blue-eyed grass, New England Blazing Star, various asters, Pearly everlasting, Trailing arbitus, Rabbit tobacco, Goat’s rue, bearberry, pasture roses, and more than a dozen goldenrod varieties.

Come for a walk at dusk with us out on one of Nantucket’s most extraordinary conservation properties to experience this unique island ecosystem painted with vibrant, waning sunlight, maybe catch a moonrise and see the stars in darker skies at sea.