It’s that time of year again when all of the local birds finish raising and weaning their second broods. The migrants among them have already flown south, and the year-round residents are out foraging and mapping the locations of all of the feeding stations in preparation for winter. 

One of the great trackers over the last decade and the first half of the present one has been Joe Giunta. Without his and his helpers’ work each spring and summer we would have very little idea about the success or failure of eastern bluebirds and four other hole nesters on the South Fork.

Bluebirds were a principal focus of the South Fork Natural History Society in its formative years in the mid-1980s. There were only a couple of pairs in East Hampton then: one in Springs near the cemetery on Accabonac Road and one in Montauk at the edge of Hither Woods. The New York State bird was in sad neglect, as was the osprey, and the thought of bringing them back was a great challenge for the neophyte group.

It just so happened at that juncture that a new bluebird nesting box had been developed in the Midwest, and Kimball Hicks of Montauk was one of the first on eastern Long Island to hear about it. Kim was a stalwart conservationist of the old school as well as a seasoned craftsman when it came to working with wood. He immediately set about making bluebird boxes in the style of those being put up in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Karilyn Jones, then Karilyn Sabin, was one of the founders of SOFO and especially interested in bringing bluebirds back to the East End. She and other members began censusing the existing bluebird population on a year-to-year basis while simultaneously creating bluebird-box trails where they seemed to hold the most promise. One such bluebird trail created in 1987 at the edges of the East Hampton Airport proved to be an excellent choice. Six boxes were erected and two became occupied by breeding bluebird pairs shortly after.

We learned from that moment on that there were more bluebirds passing through the area than nesting, but that there was a shortage of suitable tree holes for them to occupy — other birds like woodpeckers, house wrens, house finches, and house sparrows took them over as soon as they became available. In those days there were a few people putting up bird boxes in their yards, but none were putting up the specially designed boxes that Kim Hicks was making.

For many years running Karilyn and her volunteers managed the bluebird trails put up in East Hampton and Southampton Towns east of the Shinnecock Canal. What began as just a few pairs by the year 2000 became almost 100 pairs breeding locally and almost three times that many tree swallow pairs. Tree swallows catch mosquitoes on the wing, so they were a welcome addition, especially around wetlands and salt marshes where mosquitoes bred. In good years, several pairs breed more than once.

When the work became too much for Ms. Jones, Joe Giunta appeared and took over the routes with the help of some of the original volunteers who had stayed on. This year turned out to be a very productive one. One hundred successful nestings of bluebirds bred and 288 of tree swallows were tallied. The East Hampton Airport trail turned out to be the most productive trail of all, with 61 bluebird nests and 86 tree swallow nests. The Barcelona golf course area and its surroundings came in second, with 20 bluebird nests and 46 tree swallow nests.

Early on it was discovered by Joe and co-workers that some nests were vandalized by raccoons, so raccoon guards were installed on the nest box posts to deter that kind of predation. More recently another marauding mammal entered the scene — the southern flying squirrel, which established a beachhead on the South Fork a few years into the new millennium. It turned out that the boxes at the airport which were along the tree line had to be moved out into the field 15 or more feet, that is, beyond the range of the flying squirrels’ glide path. Thus the rebound in the nesting success during the 2016 season.

It is not an easy job accounting for all of those boxes — as many as 500 — and they have to be maintained from year to year, which means a rigorous cleaning. The house finch population has been down for several years after a peak in the mid 1990s, so they and other interlopers from out of the area have not been such a problem in recent years. However, native house wrens are problematic competitors for the boxes, and 2016 was a big year for them. There were 74 house wren box nests counted, 43 of them at the Peconic Land Trust’s Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett.

House wrens are particularly obnoxious, as a pair will nest in one box while maintaining several others by continually depositing their telltale sticks in them, thus keeping other would-be hole nesters at bay. Black-capped chickadees are also hole nesters and they nested in 10 of the airport boxes in 2016.

Several years ago, I was approached by an employee of the United States Department of Agriculture, which is charged with managing bird populations at Federal Aviation Administration-sanctioned airports to prevent bird-plane collisions. He was told by that individual to get rid of the boxes, as they were a nuisance. He forgot to! 

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

Striped bass and bluefish soon will begin their migration south and, we hope, come within surfcasting range. Fishermen hoping to bend a rod and others eager to observe the spectacle of birds diving, fish crashing bait, and rows of anglers launching lures into the surf will slowly roll their cars off the hard pavement into the soft sand. 

Many take the small leap in terrain in Jeeps, pickup trucks, and other four-wheel-drive vehicles suitable for beach driving. Others, however, try their luck in all-wheel-drive S.U.V.s with low ground clearance and often are greeted by the disconcerting sound of spinning tires when they encounter deep and loose sand. At least that was my experience about a dozen years ago when an UpIsland Subaru salesman assured me that I could drive an A.W.D. Outback on East Hampton beaches. To be fair, he wasn’t completely wrong. I was able to drive it downhill from the Indian Wells parking lot and maybe 50 yards more before it sank into deep sand as I began a turn. 

The key to successful beach driving is to keep the vehicle’s tires on the surface of the sand. A flatter tire rides higher than a fully inflated one, so airing down each tire to about 20 pounds per-square-inch (P.S.I.) is recommended. If the sand is deep and loose, be prepared to further deflate the tires to 12 to 15 P.S.I. Driving on the compacted sand within existing tire tracks keeps a vehicle from bogging down and puts less strain on its engine. 

One reason many people forgo airing down their tires is that the process of sequentially releasing air from four tires is incredibly tedious. But with the availability of small, screw-on automatic tire deflators from Trailhead and other manufacturers, there’s no excuse not to air down when necessary. These neat brass or anodized aluminum devices quickly and accurately deflate all four tires to the user’s desired preset P.S.I. level. The deflators whistle while they work so you can hear when the job is done. 

Hammer Towing, a Wainscott-based business that rescues vehicles stuck on the beach, gets multiple calls a week during the summer months, according to Elisha Osborn, its owner. Usually the victim is an A.W.D. car with low ground clearance operated by an inexperienced beach driver who has an incomplete understanding of their car’s capability to maneuver on sand. I met Osborn last Sunday when he was called to aid a driver who had mired her Audi Q5 luxury S.U.V. in the lush sand of Two Mile Hollow Beach in East Hampton, where I happened to be walking my dog.

Interestingly, Land Rover is the brand of vehicle Osborn most often is summoned to free. 

Above all, beach driving requires common sense. Every year someone drives too close to the water’s edge or attempts to drive through an area that clearly spells trouble to all but the visually illiterate and then gets to watch his or her car get washed by the sea. That’s certainly not a day at the beach. 

On the water, Capt. Merritt White reported that albie fishing continues to be excellent in Gardiner’s Bay, with fish eating feathers, metal, and rubber equally well. Light-tackle fishing for stripers has been tougher as a result of surges from recent southern storms, White noted.

T.J. at Gone Fishing Marina in Montauk said that bottom-fishing remains strong for porgy and sea bass around the Point, while striped bass action is now centered at Southwest Ledge off Block Island. Blackfish up to eight pounds have been landed around Fishers Island, he added.

Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported stripers along Napeague ocean beaches over the weekend, along with keepers under the full moon Saturday night east of Ditch Plain. There are blues and an occasional striper in the channel leading into Napeague Harbor, porgy and blowfish at the commercial dock, and snappers in local harbors and bays, Bennett said.

Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk reported that Steve Peretto took first place in the shop’s weekend fishing tourney with an 18-pound striped bass. The catch earned the angler a Van Staal VR150 reel. Those willing to hit ocean beaches before sunrise are finding stripers feeding on sand eels, according to the shop.

Sebastian Gorgone at Mrs. Sam’s Bait and Tackle in East Hampton reported blackfish and sea bass north of Plum Island. The porgy bite continues in the bay, he said. 

Ken Morse at Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor said that the opening of Sagg Pond resulted in fantastic striper fishing for several hours while efforts to open Mecox Pond have twice failed. Stripers were found at the ferry slip, while monster blues up to 20 pounds hit a Southampton bay beach around the height of the full moon tide. Shinnecock Inlet was surprisingly quiet, Morse added.

Ben McCarron, a.k.a. the Kid, continues to lead the Montauk SurfMasters fall tourney with his 55.14-pound bass. Larry Welcome is in second place with a 23-pound fish, and Wilan Pilco is in third with a 22.3-pound striped bass. Mary Ellen Kane leads the women’s division with a 19.75-pounder. Jon Bruno is on top of the wetsuit division with a 37-pound striped bass. 

The Star’s fishing columnist can be followed on Twitter, @ehstarfishing. Photos of prize catches can be emailed to David Kuperschmid at fishreport@ ehstar.com.

I’m looking out my window at pines that are more brown than green. “Oh, darn, the dreaded pine beetle,” I say to myself. Driving around the roads today I saw lots of pines already gone and lots of others on the way out. 

I pick up the local paper and the editor has written 500 words on the dreaded pine beetle problem. Those of you who read this column might say to yourselves, “I don’t remember an editorial about the pine beetle in The Star.” And you would be right. It wasn’t The Star that ran the article, it was The Union, the official newspaper of Nevada County, California, which has been published every day but Sunday since it was established “to preserve the union” prior to the Gold Rush days in 1864.

Yes, pine bark beetles, or pine borers as we know them, that are now destroying acre after acre of pitch pines on Long Island are doing the same thing to the ponderosa pines and other native and cultivated pines in Nevada City, which has always been a very piney place.

The three-year-long drought did not help much either. Not only was it the cause of many, many western wildfires over the past two years and this one, it also set up a good number of the remaining trees to be ravaged by the beetle. The fires kill both beetles and trees at the same time. We are fortunate on Long Island because our “ill-thriven” pines, in the words of George Washington, are fire-dependent.

Mature pitch pine forests barely reach 100 years of age before a fire knocks them down again. But they are ready to spring up once burned over because their pine nuts are coated with a resin that seals them behind the pinecone scales until the cones reach very high temperatures that melt the seals. That is why those who start pine from seed first put the cones in an oven to pop open the scales. Our pitch pines are thus fire dependent.

While pitch pines rarely reach more than 75 feet high, the ponderosas are majestic, reaching well over 125 feet at the peak of maturity and an age of 200 to 300 years or more like the native white pine for which New England forests are famous. Moreover, hot flashes are not required to spring open the cylindrical cones of the white pine; they readily drop their seeds when ripe. That is why the white pines of Northwest Woods in East Hampton are spreading far and wide, while pitch pines such as those in Wainscott’s eastern wing of the Long Island Pine Barrens are not giving birth to many new ones. Take a ride along Bull Path from Swamp Road to Stephen Hand’s Path; you will see very few pitch pine saplings and many, many white pine saplings.

Some of our white pines have already reached 100 feet or more in height. A few are on the verge of becoming three feet thick. The white pines of Northwest Woods are the only native stand of white pines on Long Island, save for the few that are on Shelter Island and a few limited UpIsland stands. White pines can’t take a lot of hot weather, but one thing about Northwest Woods keeps them from getting too hot so they can thrive: The water table is very close to the surface of the land. 

Motor along Northwest Road after a larger than average rainfall and you will see what I mean. The water table reaches the surface, creating ideal shallow-pond breeding areas for spadefoot toads, which emerge from the ground before the rains fall and start calling and breeding. The groundwater that pushes up is a coolant, averaging about 55 degrees throughout the year. The cooling action of the groundwater bathing the rather shallow root ball of the white pines keeps them from getting too hot as they move that water up their trunks and out onto their branches during transpiration, the action that allows for photosynthesis to take place as water and carbon dioxide are turned into sugars and starches. Cooled by groundwater in summer, warmed by it in winter, white pines, unlike pitch pines, can remain active through much of the winter.

Global warming presents a much more pressing problem than fires or pine beetles. The southern pine beetle, which is presently devastating parts of the Long Island Pine Barrens, is a case in point. Originating in the more southern pine belt regions, it has been slowly extending its range. 

While it has been attacking the extensive pitch pine forests of New Jersey for several years running, it is also starting on our pitch pines. Pine beetles are not great flyers, but they can easily fly far enough to attack a new plot of pines down the road upon becoming adults.

California pines of several species are drought-resistant to a point. But the drought in progress is too much for many of them. That is why the people of the neighborhood I am visiting and those to the north were indeed happy to have four straight days of rain. Fire-risk danger has fallen almost to zero and new pine trees will shortly emerge to replace those that are dead and dying. 

While most East End fishermen wisely retreat to the comfort of home during a period of fierce northeast wind and rain, others pull on their waders, grab a stout surfcasting rod, and head toward the Point in search of big striped bass. 

Fishing during these conditions can be dangerous and painful. A fall from a rock perch under the Montauk Lighthouse can be life-threatening. Rain droplets propelled by 50-mile-per-hour winds feel like a shotgun blast of small needles against exposed skin. 

Fishermen brave these harsh conditions because the outcome can be spectacular. Albert McReynolds hooked his then-record 78.5-pound striped bass in a northeaster.

The roiled surf produced by a strong northeast wind pushes and tumbles schools of small baitfish toward the shore, where they get trapped in the churning whitewater created at the intersection of breaking waves and water retreating from the beach. Large striped bass, with their powerful tails and broad shoulders, can easily navigate this rough water and feast on the disoriented and vulnerable prey. 

Big fish are naturally lazy. In normal conditions, they prefer to position themselves behind a rock, which deflects the current and allows them to utilize very little energy to maintain their position while they wait for their next meal to swim by. But when conditions turn nasty, with strong northeast winds and cloud cover in the mix, large striped bass get out of the La-Z-Boy and become active and aggressive feeders close to shore. The first day or so of a storm is golden time for surfcasters, before the on-shore winds dirty the water with suspended silt and every cast lure returns dressed in sea grass.  

Surfcasters who are inclined to rear back and sling their lure as far as possible must adjust their strategy in windy conditions. A long cast buys nothing when the fish are feeding in the wash. Here a sidecast that keeps the lure below the full force of the opposing wind can work better than the traditional over-the-top cast. Of course this might not be practical if you are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a fellow angler. 

One can’t go wrong with a bucktail adorned with pork rind when fishing angry surf. The size, shape, and color of the bucktail will depend on multiple factors, including what time of day one is fishing, depth of the water, sweep of the current, etc. The surfcaster who is experienced in fishing these conditions will quickly deduce the winning combination while the novice might have a difficult day. If the angler a few yards away is catching fish and you are not, observe what lure he is using and how he is presenting it. Even if you don’t catch anything that session you’ll take one step forward on the learning curve.

The way things are going there’s a good chance the East End will experience another bout of strong northeast winds and those who want to try rough water fishing for the first time will have their opportunity. But newbies should first visit a local tackle shop to make sure they have the right gear to make the trip both safe and rewarding. 

Ken Morse at Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor reported a successful opening to the blackfish season with fish up to eight pounds caught among rock piles northeast of Plum Island. Some nice sea bass are mixed in with the tautog and a large striper was diamond-jigged around Jessup’s Neck, he added. Stripers up to 35 pounds were caught on trolled tubes off Montauk Point and fish up to 50 pounds were found off Block Island, Morse said.

Sebastian Gorgone at Mrs. Sam’s Bait and Tackle in East Hampton reported that the opening of Georgica Pond last week yielded stripers on bucktails and pencil poppers. Some monster blues were caught at Gerard Drive and small pods of albies continue to roam the bay, he said.

Paul Apostolides at Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk said that a change in the wind over the weekend dispersed the fish somewhat, but fish continue to be taken around the Point and ocean beaches. Paulie’s is holding a fishing tournament from noon Friday to noon Sunday with just a $25 entry fee. Prizes include a Van Staal reel, custom GSB surf rod, Rockhopper gear, and other items precious to surf casters. 

Ben McCharron landed a 55.14-pound bass under the Lighthouse on the evening of Oct. 4 to lead the Montauk SurfMasters tourney’s waders division. John Bruno made the first move in the wetsuit division with a 37-pound fish to take the top spot. Montauk surfcasters were finding 20-pound-class fish north and south of the Point, according to tourney organizers. 

Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported stripers and false albacore at Hither Hills State Park, blowfish in Three Mile Harbor, and blues and bass between Bostwick Point and the Ruins.

Reports of strong albie and striper action from Rhode Island to Cape Cod suggest the fall season is just beginning. The relatively warm water pushed in by northeast winds is keeping fish to the north of us in place. A few blasts of cold weather should start sending them in our direction.

The Star’s fishing columnist can be followed on Twitter, @ehstarfishing. Photos of prize catches can be emailed to David Kuperschmid at [email protected].

A great number of striped bass over 40 pounds have been caught locally so far this season. Among these cow bass are several that weighed over 50 pounds, which for many serious anglers is the dividing line between a large and true trophy fish. With big schools of bunker still roaming our waters and more bait arriving daily, will this be the year that a dedicated, if not lucky, fisherman catches a world-record striper?

The current world-record 81.88-pound striped bass was caught by Greg Myerson on Aug. 4, 2011, on a live eel while fishing at night from a boat off Westbrook, Conn. Myerson had previously caught multiple striped bass over 50 pounds including two over 60 pounds and was considered an elite striped bass fisherman even before landing the slob.

Myerson’s fish broke the record held by Albert McReynolds, who hooked a 78.5-pound striper on Sept. 21, 1982, on 5 1/2-inch black and silver Rebel swimming plug while casting from an Atlantic City jetty around 10 p.m. during a northeaster. He fought the fish for nearly 90 minutes on 20-pound test line. There were many who thought that McReynolds could not have caught the record fish from such a perilous perch during a violent storm and that, instead, it was given to him by a commercial netter. The record striper earned McReynolds a $250,000 cash prize from the tackle manufacturer Abu-Garcia but also propelled him into a life filled with lawsuits, confrontations with old friends, and perpetual accusations of cheating from fellow fishermen. His story begs for big-screen treatment. Are you there, Mr. Spielberg?

Many giant striped bass were caught at the start of the 1980s. Jon Baldino caught a 71-pound fish off Norwalk, Conn., in July 1980. Twelve months later Bob Rochetta, now a charter boat captain based at Orient Point, landed a 76-pound world-record fish on a live eel off Montauk Point that remains the largest striper caught in New York State. That same special night and place, Dennis Kelly caught a monster 66-pounder. On Nov. 3, 1981, Tony Stetzko landed a 73-pound striper on a black teaser fly above a live eel while surfcasting at night on a Cape Cod beach. 

The heaviest striped bass on record was captured in a seine net in Edenton, N.C., in 1891. At 125 pounds it would have dwarfed the current world record. Fish over 100 pounds were netted in New England in the 1880s, according to local reports. One was estimated at six feet long. In 1876, a haulseiner off a North Carolina beach netted 350 striped bass averaging 65 pounds each. In 1995, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources netted a 92-pound fish while conducting research in the Chesapeake Bay. 

Striped bass between 40 and 50 pounds, which are almost always female, are about 16 to 18 years old, according to data supplied by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The relative abundance of large striped bass this year suggests the class of fish born around 2000 possesses genetic traits that have allowed them to thrive during their lifetimes. This begs the question as to whether or not fishermen should do more to conserve these large fish so that young anglers might catch a trophy fish in 20 years.

An Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission report notes that a 50-pound striper can produce over 5 million eggs annually while a newly sexually mature striper, typically about 4 years old and six pounds, can yield as few as 372,000 eggs. The report also cites studies that suggest some stripers older than 10 years might not spawn every year. 

Fishermen who want to release a trophy striper can always take a quick measurement for bragging rights or photograph the behemoth. Interestingly, they also can pluck a scale from the fish and use a magnifying glass to count its annual growth bands. The approximate size and weight of a striped bass can be extrapolated from its age. Maybe it’s time to start releasing big stripers and let a scale tell the tale.

Sea bass fishing in federal waters, including Frisbees and Cartwright, is closed until Oct. 22. Expect a visit from the men in orange if you are bouncing bait in these areas.

False albacore largely refused tins and flies north of Gardiner’s Island but were more cooperative from Fort Pond to the Montauk Lighthouse. They also came within casting range of Albert’s Landing on Monday morning, according to Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett. Cocktail blues and snappers continue to feed in the bay, Bennett said.

Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk reported that lots of stripers in the 10-pound class were landed by those participating in the New York State Parks Department’s Montauk Surf Fishing Contest this past weekend. A 27-pound striped bass and 13.4-pound bluefish took first-place honors. A white bucktail with red pork rind proved to be most productive. The abundance of bait of all sizes is setting up nicely for improved surf fishing, those at Paulie’s say.

Bass fishing remains good for boaters but there are bluefish in the mix now, reported T.J. at Gone Fishing Marina in Montauk. The strong sea bass and porgy bites continue, he said.

Sebastian Gorgone at Mrs. Sam’s Bait and Tackle in East Hampton reported stripers along ocean beaches and sea bass north of Plum Island. 

Ken Morse at Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor reported false albacore and striped bass at the Shinnecock Inlet jetty. Morse proudly added that his 10-year-old daughter, Thea, landed her first albie while fishing alongside her dad on the jetty.

Saturday is the start of the deer bow-hunting and woodcock open seasons. Hunters are urged to consult the East Hampton Town Hunting Guide for regulations and permitted hunting areas. It can be found at ehamptonny.gov/documentcenter/view/698 or obtained at the town clerk’s office on Pantigo Road.

The Star’s fishing columnist can be followed on Twitter, @ehstarfishing. Photos of prize catches can be emailed to David Kuperschmid at [email protected].

It’s the season for migrating monarch butterflies. The seabeach goldenrods are blooming, the temperature has been favorably warm, and the wind velocities have been on the low side. Monarchs rest during the night, become active at daybreak, flapping their wings up and down slowly to raise their body temperatures and take off, stopping to feed on asters, goldenrods, and other fall flowers on their way south.

Some of the new adults fresh out of their chrysalises apparently fly all the way to Mexico, others stop somewhere along the way and may reproduce before traveling on. It is a long harrowing flight, but they have a special protection that most butterflies lack. They taste bad. Monarchs fed to toads experimentally are rarely eaten. They are mostly rejected after one bite, and thereafter the toads will not touch them. In fact, they are unpalatable to almost all of the predators that feed on insects and butterflies, including other insects, amphibians, bats, and birds.

They taste bad because the adults, which are nectar and pollen feeders, come from larvae that feed on milkweeds and dogbanes. Those plants produce toxic substances, alkaloids and cardenolides, specifically oleandrin, a cardiac glycoside. The sap containing these poisons is bitter, but somehow the larvae thrive on it, as do a few other insects. Thus, the caterpillars have few natural enemies and when they metamorphose into adults in late summer they carry with them the same bitter tasting chemicals.

For perhaps thousands of years in North America, monarchs have avoided the beaks, jaws, and mandibles of most insect-eating animals based on this one factor. Simultaneously, they have evolved bright orange warning colors, so that they announce their repugnant nature wherever they exist. How else could they fly for thousands of miles in a month or two without being snatched out of the air by a hungry hawk or flycatcher?

The larvae are likewise boldly black-yellow-and-white-banded. They cannot be missed against the dull green of the milkweed plant. The butterfly weed, or orange milkweed, is one of their favorites. Most milkweed flowers are white or pinkish. Could it be that the orange milkweed evolved to save would-be predators from unfruitful visits? They can be seen by sharp-eyed predators from hundreds of yards away.

There is a look-alike butterfly, the viceroy, that is rare on Long Island. It is not bad tasting, but because it mimics the monarch’s colors and pattern, it is avoided by predators, too, especially if the would-be predator has already tasted and rejected a monarch.

The story of the monarch’s amazing flights north and south encompassesmore than one generation of adults and was first described by the late Frederick Urquhart and his wife, Norah, in the late 1930s after the two started attaching tags to the wings of adult monarchs before releasing them in Canada at the start of the fall migration. They tagged hundreds, but only a few tags were reported, the most distant of which came from faraway points south, including Texas, just across the border from Mexico, where many of the butterflies head for the winter. 

As a result of their research, Mexico was pinpointed as an overwintering spot for monarchs. Then another lepidopterist, Lincoln Brower, became part of the act, independently, ultimately discovering the piney mountainous area in central Mexico where the monarchs came to rest after their long southward trek. Meanwhile, research taking place on the West Coast showed that there were several overwintering spots for monarchs including Pacific Grove and Santa Barbara, two areas of California where it very rarely snowed or frosted.

Since the work of the Urquarts and Brower, the “hibernaculum” in Mexico has been partially desecrated and the monarch population has plummeted. American populations have suffered from the application of herbicides to kill weeds, including milkweeds that compete with corn and other harvestable produce. More recently, the widespread planting of genetically altered vegetables such as corn, from seeds modified to produce poisonous nicotinoids, has further reduced the monarch and honeybees numbers. Their pollen is poisonous to a host of insects.

Conservation organizations and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as state and local environmental agencies, have banded together to protect what is left of the American monarch population. There are lots of tagging and monitoring groups and individuals scattered throughout the United States trying to help the monarchs. Planting milkweeds and counting adult monarchs stemming from them is just one of the replenishment methods.

Locally there are several monarch counters and a few taggers. I keep in touch with a few of them. Victorian Bustamante of Montauk not only grows monarchs for Warren’s Nursery, but goes into the field to count them. As of Monday she has counted 32. Last year her tally ending on Nov. 9 was 55. Peter Dermody, a hydrogeologist and geologist, started raising and tagging monarchs several years ago. He has not raised and tagged any for a few years now as their Long Island populations have plummeted.

This year thus far, he estimates that he has seen around 60 adults in August and 25 in September. 

Terry Sullivan, a nature photographer and author who is out and about almost on any day when it’s not raining, has seen only a few. He has photographed several adults in the past. He saw three on Sunday and Monday while fishing from the ocean beach in Amagansett. Dai Dayton — the intrepid naturalist, hiker, and head of the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt — has only seen five all summer. Jane Ross, who keeps track of many different members of the animal kingdom, has seen several, some of which, she thinks, grew up in fields in the Georgica Pond area.

Jean Held, who lives in Sag Harbor, is a longtime student of darning needles and butterflies. She also had orange milkweed in her yard and some of it was flowering right until the last week in September. She noticed seven monarch butterfly larvae, two of which she took into her house as they were very large and ready to metamorphose. Even though she watched them closely for long times on end, wanting to photograph the conversion from larvae to chrysalis, it happened so quickly she was unable to capture it in step-by-step fashion. 

There is a question concerning the fall migration routes of monarchs on Long Island. Those that I have seen on local roads in these last two months have all been flying south, that is, toward the coast. It is along the ocean coast that most migrating monarchs are seen.   They are visual migrators: They follow the coast west and then turn south when they reach the city, although some have been seen flying far out at sea. The Atlantic Coast is ideal because of its rich stock of seabeach goldenrods on which to rest and feed.

How they get here from New England is another story. It may be that they island-hop. I have received very few reports of monarchs seen flying over the middle of Long Island Sound, but several observations of them flying along the shores of islands comprising the Long Island-New England archipelago: Nantuckett, Fisher’s, Big Gull, and Plum Islands. A month ago on a Plum Island trip I saw several flying low, all along the island’s coastal edges.

What if our observers all saw the same monarchs only at different times along their migratory route? Then we are left with a grand total of a piddling few. I like to think that they all saw different ones and that the monarch butterfly, at least hereabouts, is on its way to recovery. Then again I tend to be a wishful thinker.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

In the 1940s almost every family on the North Fork had at least one dog and one cat. Many families kept a larger menagerie — pigs, chickens, goats, cows, and sometimes a horse or two. Horses were an extravagance; you couldn’t eat them nor did they give milk or lay eggs, and they were no longer needed to pull plows and other farm implements, having been replaced in the 1920s and 1930s by tractors.

Garbage trucks didn’t come around and pick up the trash; each family used a “community dump,” a pile of debris in the woods that never seemed to get any larger. We didn’t throw much away in those days, perhaps because there was no plastic packaging then. Garbage from meals, or the “slops,” went to the pigs and chickens. The food chains in those days went both down and up.

Weeds were a problem, but we took care of them in short order. We hoed the ones between the rows of vegetables and pulled the others, again, feeding them to the chickens and pigs. When the chickens free-ranged, they eliminated us middlemen, gathering and eating the weeds themselves.

There was no mugwort, Japanese knotweed, garlic mustard, giant hogweed, and mile-a-minute vine to contend with, just lamb’s quarters, ragweed, and dandelions. Lamb’s quarters were highly prized by our barred rock chickens. They would eat ragweed if there was nothing else to chew on, but dandelions were too small to mess with. However, lots of locals made salads of dandelion greens, sometimes throwing in young lamb’s-quarters, which tasted a little like kale or chard.

We all gathered berries — blueberries, wild cherries, wild raspberries, huckleberries, and beach plums — when they were ripe. There were no cranberries to speak of on the North Fork, so some of us made annual forays to South Fork cranberry bogs come early fall. Of course, in addition to the wild stuff, we all had vegetable gardens and domestic fruit trees. And, of course, there were ample supplies of fresh clams, mussels, oysters, scallops, and fish of all kinds. Food was never a problem. We were poor but we ate better than most rich people.

We could do a lot of things with “raw” milk that was fresh out of the udder and neither pasteurized nor homogenized. We would separate the cream from the milk; it was lighter and rose to the top of the container for easy removal. We could take that milk and cream to make yogurt, pot cheese, sour cream, and on very hot summer days, we would get out the churn and make ice cream. Put ice in the bucket, cream with fruit in the churn, and turn and turn and turn and turn, churn and churn and churn. Eventually you had ice cream so thick that you could barely turn the churn. It was so good it was all gone in less than half an hour.

There were no helicopters buzzing overhead and as many bicycles plying the local roads as motor vehicles. Fireflies lighted the evening skies, tree crickets sang to us from the trees and bushes. Strutting roosters crowed at 6 in the morning to wake us up, not the big trucks and motorcycles streaming by on Noyac Road that shake me awake each morning nowadays. Whippoorwills started trilling at twilight and ushered us young’uns into dreamland without a cry or a whimper.

Hard work and simple pleasures got us through each day enthusiastically and with a smile. What a life. If any of you know where I can find a similar niche and habitat to retire to, please let me know! I’m ready and able, one might even say champing at the bit! 

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].  

America is making progress at bringing back lost species of flowers and plants, while simultaneously better protecting animal species that were most vulnerable. The gray wolf and grizzly bear, two species that were approaching extinction in the latter quarter of the 20th century, are now becoming so common in some areas that several states allow hunters to shoot them.

The bald eagle is no longer endangered and is again spreading its wings in every state, with the exception of Hawaii. In these parts ospreys, which were sadly failing on Long Island and the rest of the Atlantic coast because of accumulated DDT in their systems and eggs, are almost as common today as they were prior to the widespread use of that pesticide. With every passing year on the East End, the number of starter nests atop manmade poles increases almost exponentially. Piping plovers, roseate terns, and least terns appear to be holding their own, but still need day-to-day attention during the breeding season. 

For endangered, threatened, and otherwise rare native plant species, it’s a different matter. Take the federally endangered sandplain gerardia, Agalinis acuta, for example. In the 1920s when the Long Island botanist Norman Taylor was studying Montauk’s flora, this plant covered the downs with its pink-purple flowers from Fort Pond all the way to Montauk Point.

Since being rediscovered in Montauk, namely at Shadmoor State Park in the early 1980s, it was given extra protection. However, on a Sept. 3 search of the park, at a time when they should be blooming, not a one was seen. During the 1980s and earlier, Rita’s Stables on the north side of Montauk Highway in Ditch Plain would send out riding groups that would crisscross Shadmoor’s then private trails. The horses would graze along the way, keeping the field low. The sandplain gerardia prospered. When the weekly horse rides were no longer allowed, Shadmoor’s grasslands began to grow up into savanna fields. The gerardia population thinned and now has practically disappeared.

Another state rarity, the bushy frostweed, was also holding out in Montauk, occupying the hill across from Gurney’s Resort on Old Montauk Highway and Ram’s Level in Hither Woods. The hill’s frostweeds and orchids succumbed to clearing for a new house; the Ram’s Level grassy spot has been growing up in the past 30 years and soon will be a second-growth forest. Russell Hoeflich, a former head of the South Fork-Shelter Island Nature Conservancy and lately head of the Peregrine Falcon Fund in Idaho, trans planted some early on to the Conservancy’s Montauk Mountain Preserve west of the Montauk School and Second House Road, but they are losing out to overgrowth there as well.

Speaking of peregrine falcons, not so long ago they were as rare as the bald eagle, but have been making a comeback via a program started by Tom Cade, former director of Cornell’s Ornithological Laboratory and creator of the Peregrine Fund. The program to bring them back is popularly referred to as “hacking.” In fact, Marge Winski, who grew up in Montauk and once was a student of mine at Southampton College in the 1970s, hacked some of the first peregrine falcons on the roof of the Con Edison Building in New York City in the 1980s.

To get the peregrines back, in an ingenious but risky move, Tom removed baby peregrines from existing nests, established them on high-up spots like the top of the Con Ed building, and had them fed by hand, often with a puppet glove resembling an adult peregrine. I was lucky enough to accompany Marge to the top of the Twin Towers after a summer of hacking to look for her charges. No sooner had we reached the top than one flew by as if to say, “Thanks to you I can fly on my own.” She recognized it and both of our hearts tingled.

Peregrines now breed on Long Island annually on a ledge of the Nassau County medical building and atop various bridges that span the East and Hudson Rivers. I saw two peregrines, an adult pair or a pair of siblings, flying over a field south of Kellis Pond two Mondays ago. Don’t be surprised if a pair starts nesting in the next few years on a high spot such as one of the microwave towers scattered around, the old radio tower on Napeague, the high rise condominium on Fort Pond in Montauk that dates back to the 1920s, or on the Lighthouse itself, ironically, the very spot where you are likely to find Ms. Winski, the keeper of the light, writing poetry and other literary pieces and keeping a journal.

In the meantime, it would seem based on annual counts that we are losing some birds. Wood thrushes, towhees, and ovenbirds are much scarcer now then previously. The latter two are ground-nesters and I suspect are intimidated by the wild turkeys, which are more and more prolific since their release in Hither Woods by the State Department of Conservation in January of 1991 and more widely since then. 

While another ground-nester, the whippoorwill, has disappeared from the woods around the East Hampton Airport and from other wooded areas in Springs, Northwest Woods, part of Amagansett, and most of Southampton, it is surviving on Napeague and in the northeastern part of Hither Woods. 

The state-endangered tiger salamander is holding its own in Southampton, Riverhead, and Brookhaven, but has yet to be rediscovered in East Hampton, where it once was. A close relative, the blue-spotted salamander, also on Long Island, can only be found these days in Montauk, but there are old records of them in Sag Harbor and elsewhere on the South Fork. While those two mole salamanders survive here with two others in the group, the spotted and marbled salamanders, another amphibian, the southern leopard frog, has disappeared from the Island. 

Lately I am concerned about the leadback morph of the red-backed Salamander, a lungless one, that lives under fallen logs and in the leaf litter. I have only found one, again in Montauk, in the last five years of searching. I suspect that they have fallen prey to turkeys or some other creature that feeds in the leaf litter.

The last Long Island southern leopard frog population, at the south end of Oyster Pond in Montauk, has apparently bitten the dust. The species is gone from the rest of the Island, as well. The cricket frog, diminutive as the spring peeper, hasn’t been seen or heard in decades.

As for the gray fox, skunk, and mink, they are gone from the South Fork, while woodchucks and flying squirrels have moved in to fill the void. Lastly, the Long Island timber rattlesnake hasn’t been seen on Long Island since the Long Island Rail Road was pushing through the South Fork on its way to Montauk in the late 1800s. Likewise, the smooth green snake hasn’t been seen here for many a year. On the up side, the hognose snake, or puff adder, continues to hold out despite pilfering from time-to-time by UpIslanders. So, you see, it is kind of a crapshoot: some good news, some bad news.

What about good old Homo sapiens? What will happen to our species? It’s hard to tell, but no matter what, there is little chance that we will ever die from loneliness.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

I led a nature walk at Shadmoor State Park for a nice couple from Amagansett who won the walk in the East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society auction held on July 30. Their son and a girlfriend, as well as another woman friend and her son, also accompanied us. I took my large white towel along and swept the vegetation on the sides of the trails as we marched on in the chance that I might find a tick or two. Shadmoor is well known for its large deer tick and Lone Star tick populations.

We walked a bit more than two miles and the towel didn’t pick up a single tick. However, it did pick up a some seeds of a species of tick-clover, which have little barbs for clinging to animal hairs to maximize the dispersion of the species. When I got back to Noyac I checked my body and my clothing very carefully: completely tickless.

However, the next morning I woke up to some itchiness on my calves and ankles. I examined the causes and discovered five small pustules, white in the center, red around the edges — two on one leg, three on the other. Uh-oh. Chiggers, I thought! I went all last year without one chigger bite, but being in the field in Montauk in September of any year is an invitation to mayhem. I led people on a similar walk at Shadmoor in early August of last year and didn’t get a single tick or chigger. I should have known better this year.

The Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County, experts with respect to local tick populations, say that there are no chiggers on Long Island, but that we are actually dealing with the larvae of local ticks. 

I and several other non-entomologists beg to differ. Ask Peggy Conklin for example. She and I are of about the same age. She grew up in East Hampton and remembers chiggers and their bites as a young girl in the 1940s. In Mattituck during those years when I and my brothers and sisters would go berry picking in the woods and fields near our house, before we set foot out the door, my mother would warn us to be on the lookout for chiggers. 

There were wood ticks (also called dog ticks) around in those days, but not the deer or Lone Star ticks. They showed up here in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively.

Adult chiggers are variously known as red bugs, chigoes, harvest mites, and by many other vernacular names throughout the United States. They are more common in the South than here. In fact, in one small Texas town they are so common that the townsfolk there actually celebrate an annual Chigger Day. But I believe we have them as well.

Like adult ticks, chiggers have six legs as adults, but start out with eight legs as larvae. The larvae don’t bite; they extend a tubular mouth part down one of the skin’s hair pores and thereby secrete digestive fluids to feed on the flesh. They remain there until sated, drop off, and metamorphose into nymphs, just as ticks do. The nymphs feed on vegetation and the adults they eventually become are also plant eaters. The ticks that we deal with here are meat eaters throughout their entire life cycle.

Two common tick species that cause us problems are Trabicula alfreddugesi and Trabicula autumnalis from Eurasia. The “autumnalis” suggests that the larvae make their appearance in the fall, and that is when I’ve noticed that chiggers in Montauk’s wilds have been the most prevalent since I began going into the field there regularly in the 1980s. In fact, last year was the only one in the last 38 in which I didn’t suffer a single bite. Once, on a fall trip to Gardiner’s Island when Robert Gardiner was still holding down the fort, I came back with a serious case of what I’m sure were chigger bites.

The larvae of our tick species are tiny, but dark. I can make them out against the pale background that my skin provides. Every once in a while I find an adult Trabicula tick on a plant in my yard. I can see it with the naked eye, red against a green-colored leaf, a little bigger than the head of a pin. But I can’t see the reddish larvae, as small as .2 millimeter in size, with my naked eye. I only notice them after the fact, when the itching starts and the pustules appear, by which time they are gone. I have found a few larvae and put them under the microscope, where I can see them and even count their eight legs. 

Interestingly, chiggers don’t appear to be vectors of diseases the way ticks and mosquitoes are. But sometimes after two weeks of scratching I think I’d rather have a disease that I can cure in a day or two with a dose of antibiotics than suffer the slings and arrows of bites that seem to last forever.

The best way to avoid the discomfort is to stay out of the woods and grassy fields in September and October. There are chigger cures available in most drugstores. I don’t know if they work or not, as I have never tried them. What I do is pierce the pustule with a sharp needle and apply rubbing alcohol. Such an antidote can sting like hell, but somehow the pain is better than the itch.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

All animals of a species have culture. If we accept the notion that plants communicate with one another underground via mycorrhizal connections, plants also have culture. In evolution, not only does a species adapt to changing climes and competition by evolving adaptations — as a fish evolving lungs to become an amphibian — but a species also changes its behavior to keep up with quicker changes in its environment. The Italian wall lizard is normally an insect eater, but when introduced onto an island in the Mediterranean where there were very few insects, it began feeding on plants. This is the kind of plasticity that is needed in order for species to survive short-term impacts. It’s a plasticity not attributable to genetic changes but to behavioral changes, in other words, cultural changes.

The human species is the most adaptable of all and has the most complex cultures, which differ from one part of the world to the next, from one American city to the next, from one township or village to an adjoining township or village. It may be that changes in human culture are occurring faster than ever. Take our pop music, for example. In the early 1900s jazz got under way. It morphed into swing by the 1930s, progressive jazz and mostly vocals by the early 1950s, followed by rock ’n’ roll and doo wop in the mid-1950s, then Motown, the British invasion, beach and surfing music in the 1960s, followed by disco in the 1970s, ending in rap, hip-hop, and pop ever since. Every sphere of human activity is up for grabs. Here today, gone tomorrow is the guiding principle. Some call it progress.

When I look back at my boyhood in the late 1940s and 1950s and glimpse the very structured way in which children grow up today, I am thankful, very thankful that I was born during the Great Depression. Not much school homework, a slew of daily chores such as carrying out the ashes, mowing the lawn with a push mower, climbing trees and picking wild fruit, lots of tag, hide-and-go-seek, giant steps, red light, and marbles, almost no organized sports or other demanding activities, Sunday school and AM radio, no addictive video games to while away the hours and numb the brain.

That was the life! There were no soccer moms back then, no opiates to numb the brain. We didn’t watch TV to see what the weather or traffic might be, we went outside to see: sun, rain, wind, snow, or storm. Ah, for the simple life.

There are some new birds in the yard. I watch and listen to the old ones and follow the antics of the squirrels. The notes issued by the birds familiar to me in my youth are quite similar to the ones I hear each spring and summer today. The squirrels look the same and hide acorns in the ground and then dig them up today, just as they did back then. The tree crickets and katydids that lulled me to sleep as a teenager sound the same today, too. The more things change for humankind, the more they stay the same in nature to some degree.

What if seagulls suddenly stopped dropping bivalve shellfish and crabs on hard surfaces to break them open and get at the meats inside? What if crows stopped calling at before 6 each summer morning to wake me up with the same caws they woke me up with at that same early hour when I was a boy? What if ospreys stopped diving for fish and began doing as the citified gulls do, feeding in Dumpsters, on school playgrounds, and in dumps? It might be a much easier way to make a living, but what would it do to their esprit de corps?

Parenthetically, very few ospreys nest in trees. They prefer utility poles, but during their boom years before the widespread use of DDT on the North Fork, they already had adapted to the tops of utility poles. In East Marion and Orient in the 1950s practically every other pole had a nest atop it. There were no purple martin boxes prior to the 1900s. Now, just about all purple martin pairs nest in these purple martin apartment houses. In the eye of the osprey, what could be more convenient than a utility pole with Peconic Bay on one side and Long Island Sound on the other? To purple martins, any small hole will do, as long as there is a living space behind it.

We humans are not only flipping from one culture to the next every few years, we have never had to learn so many things to survive in the brave new world in such a short time. Computers and TV have changed our daily routines dramatically. My head has become a chaos of details fading into other details, morphing them in the process, almost no instant-recall ability. It sometimes takes 30 minutes to remember the name of a close friend or associate.

Yes, I am 80, but every day I run into much younger humans who have similar recall problems.

The one thing that keeps me going is what I call my automatic memory. If I have to go somewhere, I press the button on my key holder unlocking the car door; as soon as I get in my car, I put on my seat belt. I release the emergency brake, but not always, then start the car in park where I left the gearshift. I look both ways before backing out of the driveway. When I come to a stop sign or red light, I brake. I drive down a familiar route consisting of different roads and streets without thinking. They’re all automatic reflexes, like the kick of the foot when the knee is tapped just so. 

If we weren’t so enculturated, I wonder if we would be able to do some of the things birds and other animals do: celestially navigate, sense an approaching tornado or other storm, sense the presence of a predator stalking us before we actually see it. In the very old literature, the Holy Bible, for example, wise men would take trips to remote areas such as deserts or mountaintops for long periods to sit and ponder; we take vacations. It’s not the same. A thousand people on a cruise ship is anything but a philosopher’s dream. My salvation is sleeping late into the morning. Sometimes, dreams or reverie are much more salutary to the brain than being awake and active.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].