Noman’s Land: It’s for the Birds--Duck!

Military jets scream over this lonely island near Martha’s Vineyard and pepper the ground it with dummy bombs--but environmentalists don’t mind, because wildlife is thriving amid the noise. The important factor is that there are no people here.

The island, Navy property since 1952, is a crucial resting spot for birds migrating from Canada and the Northeast to Central and South America. To protect the rare species found here, the U.S. Department of Interior in 1975 designated the northeastern third of the island a wildlife sanctuary.

The rest of the 640 acres is used as a target range by pilots in the Navy and Marine Corps reserves and the Air National Guards of Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut.

“It’s the only air target range in this region,” said Ens. Edward Matlock of the Weymouth Naval Air Station, which runs the island. The closest alternatives are in Maryland or Canada, he said.

Pilots in training try to drop unarmed practice bombs into a 200-foot ring of tires. The center of the target is a bull’s eye formed of tractor tires.

Recently the site was cleared because knee-high grass was obscuring the target area, said Capt. John G. Kuchinski Jr., commander at the Weymouth Station.

“They end up dropping (bombs) elsewhere in the island,” Kuchinski said.

An inspection team of environmentalists, military personnel and engineers recently did find one of the dummy bombs inside the wildlife sanctuary.

Kuchinski has warned pilots that they could be stripped of their wings if they are caught violating the sanctuary boundaries. And residents of Martha’s Vineyard, a couple of miles across the ocean, keep watch on Noman’s and occasionally report seeing a B-52 or an F-111B stray over the sanctuary, Kuchinski said.

“Flight crews are like everybody else,” Kuchinski said. “Occasionally, you get somebody who thinks he has a license” to do anything.

Conservation officials say they welcome the Navy’s stewardship of the island, however.

If the public were not wary of unexploded ordnance left on the island--live bombs were used in the past--and the penalties for trespassing on government property, visitors would swarm over the island, they say.

“In a very short time, the island would be trashed,” said Augustus Ben David II, director of the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary on the Vineyard.

“If it were turned over to the Fish and Wildlife Service, enforcement against trespassers would go down rather than up,” said Tom French, who heads the state Natural Heritage and Endangered Species program.

When Ben David and French visited the island with the military clean-up crew, they saw birds of 41 species and eight kinds of butterfly.

Ben David said he spotted turtles of three species, Canada geese, herring gulls and “a wonderful muskrat population.” The vegetation is so lush that crossing a cranberry bog is like walking on a mattress, he said.

“Wildlife is all over, even in the target zones,” said Ben David. “It’s absolutely an incredible place--from a naturalist’s standpoint, an incredible place.”

French said he saw Canadian forest birds and birds of prey, including a few peregrine falcons nesting on the 80-foot bluffs along the shore.

“I understand that it sounds terrible to have people bombing the island,” French said, “but what you expect to see and what reality is are worlds apart.”