Shelter Island profile: Mike Scheibel, a life in the great outdoors

When Mike Scheibel, Natural Resources Manager at the Mashomack Preserve, speaks of the destruction of a sliver of barrier island beach in Bellport Bay, a place of profound emotional significance to him, he takes the long view.

“It’s the best thing that ever happened,” he said. “It will eventually fill in on its own. It may take years. I’m all in favor of letting that natural process continue.”

Mike was a kid growing up on Long Island in the 1950s when his parents moved the family every summer to a large canvas army tent on a remote beach called Old Inlet. Mike and his brothers fished, crabbed and beach combed while their father commuted to work across the bay in a small boat.

“Sand was in everything,” Mike said. “I don’t remember ever having a sandwich there that didn’t have sand. I don’t know how my mother lived through it.”

Growing up in Brookhaven, Suffolk County was so rural that Mike could trap muskrats across the street from his home, a house built by his father ”with his hands,” Mike said. “He’s the guy who nailed the 2 by 4s.”

Mike continued to go to Old Inlet for five decades with his wife Lynne, their children Sara and Bryce and grandchildren Julia and Marin. In the 1970s he clammed in those waters and knew every inch of the bay bottom. He scattered the ashes of his parents at Old Inlet.

But in 2012, Sandy tore a breach in the barrier island, an event that Mike, a man who had made protecting nature his life’s work, not only accepts, but embraces. “Old Inlet doesn’t exist anymore,” he said.

Mike has been at Mashomack, the 2000-acre Nature Conservancy property that makes up almost a third of Shelter Island, for two decades. Prior to coming to Mashomack, he worked for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) for 20 years, spending time documenting the endangered osprey population on Long Island.

His decades of work monitoring the comeback of these beloved fish hawks resulted in a recently published, coauthored article in “The Journal of Raptor Research.”

When Mike was 13 he first laid eyes on Mashomack, which in those days was a shooting preserve, stocked with pheasant and chukar partridge.

Mike’s science education at Bellport High School was excellent. His biology teacher, Art Cooley, was also an activist, whose efforts helped end the use of DDT in Suffolk County, and who later went on to help found the Environmental Defense Fund. Like Cooley, Mike went to Cornell, where courses in forestry, botany and a brand new discipline known as ecology, deepened his interest in the natural world. He graduated in 1971.

When Mike got to Cornell and realized he needed work, he discovered an arrangement where he could live in the local firehouse in exchange for fighting fires, called the bunker system. The Ithaca firehouse had a pool table, a kitchen and a pole to slide down from the dormitory-style quarters when it was time to respond to an emergency.

“If you were in the building when the alarm came, you went, but if you had one foot outside the building, you had no obligation,” he said. “I kind of got into it.”

He later joined the Ithaca Fire Department as a volunteer and is a life member of the Brookhaven Volunteer Fire Department.

After Cornell, Mike sought a career in natural resources, but for six years after graduating, he worked as a bayman, clamming, which he describes as “a good and bad way to make a living.” The good part was being outdoors on the water every day. But Mike and Lynne had married in 1973, and their daughter Sara was born the next year. “It takes a special kind of person to do that work and raise a family.” He decided he was not special in that way.

In 1977 Mike went to work at the DEC on Long Island as a seasonal wildlife technician. By the mid-1980s he was a senior wildlife biologist in charge of the regional endangered species program. It was during this period that he began to study and document the Long Island osprey population, a bird that was prominent on the endangered species list as a result of heavy use of DDT.

Although DDT was no longer used, the osprey population was still in danger; his first count of active nests showed 76 nesting osprey pairs from New York City to Fishers Island. Mike undertook a count of nesting pairs every year, decreasing the size of the territory he covered as the population increased. By the time of his latest count in 2015 there were 46 nesting pairs on Shelter Island alone.

From 1986 to 1996 Mike was the New York State representative on the Northeast Roseate Tern Recovery team, one of a group of researchers, including Ian Nisbet, a leading authority on roseate terns, charged with monitoring a federal plan to restore the dwindling population of a rare and lovely shorebird that in our area nests only on Gull Island.

In 1980 the Nature Conservancy bought the Mashomack property and three years later Director Mike Laspia asked Mike to be on the Board of Trustees. He served until 1994 when he took a job with the Nature Conservancy and a year later came to work at Mashomack.

When Mike weighed the decision to leave the DEC to work at Mashomack he knew he would take on a long commute from Brookhaven to work for a nonprofit that did not pay particularly well compared to his permanent state job. He had two college-age children. “I had a long heart-to-heart conversation with my wife,” said Mike, “Regardless, I took the job.”

“This place has a magical allure to it, hard to define, but it’s certainly there,” Mike said. “It’s really a dream job, a fantastic place to work.”

His marriage did not survive the transition, but eight years after their divorce, Mike and Lynne remarried.

“After years we both realized how much our family and our relationship really did mean to us,” Mike said. “I’ve married that woman twice now, on the same day, August 19, 1973 and 2006.”

In charge of all living things at Mashomack, Mike said the issue that has dominated the agenda over the years is the overpopulation of white-tailed deer, which is wiping out hardwood tree regeneration and causing tick-borne diseases. He points out that the deer didn’t start it.

“If we were willing to get rid of all the houses, the deer population would go back to a respectable number,” he said. “I’m not blaming the deer, I’m blaming the people.”

Mike established the Deer & Tick Committee over 10 years ago. He’s currently the chairman and sees the development of a solution to deer overpopulation as one of his primary goals.

Mike’s affection for birds is life long, but in recent years it’s grown into a passion and even a personal competition. If he’s outdoors, binoculars hang around his neck, ready to deploy. He quotes the well-known American ornithologist David Sibley to describe the intensity of his interest, “‘I don’t go birding, I am birding.’”

Mike has identified 800 bird species so far and is hopeful to have 1,000 on his life list. “My goal is to get to 5,000 bird species in my lifetime,” he said with a smile, “but I just picked that number out of the air.”