Recent Stories: Outdoors

   I heard my first whippoorwill in the woods behind my grandfather’s chicken farm in Mattituck at 3 years of age. Once you’ve heard this magical, three-syllable, eerie chant coming out of the dark of a warm summer evening you’re hard-pressed to forget it.

   Bruce Palmer oversees things at the East Hampton Town’s recycling center in Montauk, directing people with tires to the tire bin, people with old grills and lawnmowers to the metal container, checking for scofflaw dumpers dumping without benefit of a 2013 sticker — all these things with a mind that drifts seaward at times.

   Montauk is bipolar this time of year. When the summer’s southwesterly winds start to blow in May and early June, a Mason-Dixon line of sorts runs the length of the peninsula that is the east end of the South Fork.
    The land south of the line is shrouded in thick, cold fog where the winter ocean first meets warm air blowing off the land west to east. North of the line, where the cold sea has less influence, the land is often bathed in warm sunlight.

   I was at Morton Wildlife Refuge the other day when one of the private ferrying helicopters flew over on its way to East Hampton Town Airport. It’s hard to tell how high it was, but it seemed much lower than 2,000 feet and it made quite a racket as it passed over my head and, incidentally, over one of the osprey nests we put up around 1988 on the Jessup’s Neck spit. The ospreys were back. The female was sitting down low on the nest, and it was hard to tell if she was affected by the noise and vibrations as much as I was.

   Spring is definitely here, there is no going back. The oaks, hickories, red maples, and sassafras are unfurling their leaves, March’s dull and dreary landscape is behind us. The month of May promises to delight all of our five senses, especially those that deal with vision, scents, and hearing. Helicopters and unmuffled motor vehicles be damned, we will not let them destroy our vernal pleasures.

   On April 22, I drove down to Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., with my daughter, Angela, who was visiting me from California. It was a bright sunny day with nary a cloud and not much of a wind. From New Jersey through Delaware through Maryland to Virginia, the sky over the highways 60 to 100 feet above the pavement was filled with sailing turkey vultures. We must have seen more than 25, mostly singles, sometimes in pairs.

    Ready, get set. . . . It’s like surfers waiting for a forecast swell to arrive, or the first crack of the bat for those yearning to return to Mudville. Fishermen are with child for the arrival of fish, as is the case each spring, but this season’s cold temperatures seem to be drawing it, torturously, out.

   The East End is heading back to the future to harvest deer. Figures compiled by the State Department of Environmental Conservation show that of the 1,451 deer harvested in Suffolk County during the regular hunting season that began last October and ended at the end of January, over two-thirds were killed by arrows. The overall harvest in East Hampton Town was the highest on record. Only 143 deer were taken during the regular January shotgun season.

   The Montauk SurfMasters spring shootout tournament will begin on May 10. The first of Montauk’s annual fishing tournaments targets striped bass.
    The entry fee is $110, all but $10 of which will go into the winner’s pot. The ten bucks is for lunch on awards day, June 29. The tournament has no divisions. Waders, wetsuiters, adult men and women compete against one another. An extra prize of $100 will be awarded for the first legal-size bass (28 inches long or longer) that’s weighed in.

   So, there I was driving down the hill on Flamingo Avenue toward the Montauk Firehouse early in the morning last week. Up ahead on the other side of the road was a jogger at the start of her climb. Whoa! What’s that behind her?

    There was a time in early spring, not all that long ago, when baymen set fykes on the bottom of Lake Montauk to trap the winter flounder as they rose from their muddy hibernation. There were enough flounder, in fact, for hook-and-line flounder anglers to get their nose out of joint over the presence of fykes. No more.