I’m not a world traveler, but I’ve been around. If I had to name my 10 favorite places of the thousands I’ve spent time in, Montauk would be very close to the top of the list. 

Of all of Long Island’s hamlets and villages, Montauk is by far the largest and it has the most dedicated open space of any of them. It also leads in number of habitat types, everything from tiny depressions where insectivorous plants and cranberries thrive to large woodlands, heaths, and grasslands. Montauk’s maritime grasslands were once the second largest prairie on Long Island after the Hempstead Plains. Wildfires once kept them healthy and low, but in their absence, they are growing up at a fast rate, yet still comprise the most acreage of native grasslands on Long Island.

Montauk Harbor was once the largest freshwater body on Long Island. Since the mid-1920s it has been a tidal bay. Fort Pond, also in Montauk, has never been tidal except when it was “seapoosed” prior to the extension of the Long Island Rail Road line along its north end. It’s the second largest freshwater body on Long Island.

Montauk is the hamlet or village with the most marine coastline. There are 12.5 miles of ocean beaches from Montauk Point to the beginning of the Napeague stretch. From the Point westward along the Block Island Sound and Fort Pond Bay to Napeague Harbor there’s another 16.9 miles of shoreline. Add another 1.5 miles of shore along Montauk’s western boundary, the west side of Napeague Harbor, and you get a total of almost 31 miles of maritime coast. At 2.5 miles an hour it would take an average walker more than half a day to get from one end to the other.

By all accounts, Montauk was an island separated from the hamlet of Amagansett by open water between ocean and bay less than 3,000 years ago. Consequently, it was not only at the end of a very long island, it was isolated from the bulk of it. The Appalachian woody plants that reached New York City after glaciation had to travel another 100 miles to the South Fork’s very end, stopping for a few thousand years before crossing the Napeague water gap to Montauk. That is why some — yellow poplar, liquid amber, cottonwood, white pine — have yet to get there. Pitch pines from the west arrived less than 100 years ago.

Montauk has blue-spotted salamanders, which are wanting on the rest of Long Island, and a few other plants and creatures such as the federally endangered sandplain gerardia, an orchid, and a bushy frostweed, all of which are extremely rare to the west of it. No wonder Montauk is the perfect place to start an apprenticeship studying nature.

The Third House Nature Center was started by the late Carol Morrison more than 25 years ago, when Montauk was on the cusp of the worst siege of development the South Fork has ever experienced, to teach Montauk’s young people about nature. It thrived, providing annual natural history instruction to hundreds of Montauk School kids over the years. At first it used the county park, thus the name Third House, but then a town-owned house on the west bank of Fort Pond became available to it.

Lots of wonderful events took place at Fort Pond House until the time when former East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson placed the house on the market. Concerned Citizens of Montauk and the Third House Nature Center sued to block the sale of the public property. The town condemned the building, and closed it to the public. It stood idle for several years, but never sold. Supervisor Larry Cantwell’s administration took it off the market and began to restore the house and property, which became known as Carol Morrison Park. It was reopened to the public earlier this month, and is once again available to such groups as the Third House Nature Center. 

In 2013, the club started taking interns from East Hampton High School’s senior class, a program started by Sandy Taylor and Linda Brandi of the Garden Club of East Hampton. It includes college scholarships.

It started around 2001 under the aegis of the East Hampton Town Natural Resources Department while I was its director. It’s now in its 15th year and going strong. While the Garden Club used to sponsor one or two interns a year, the Third House Nature Center has been adding to that number, this year guiding four high schoolers through the jungles of Montauk almost every Sunday through the fall, winter, and spring, right up until graduation.

The nature center has been concentrating on one of Montauk’s richest and least-known habitats, Big Reed Pond and its surrounding uplands. It has eels, fish, waterfowl, breeding songbirds including blue-gray gnatcatchers, orchard orioles, and Virgina rails, along with several osprey and turkey vultures, and even the occasional bald eagle. 

This year the four interns — Axel Alanis, Cien Estuye, Erin Nolan, and Ally Karlin — have studied many different aspects of that combined aquatic and riparian habitat, including its trees, shrubs, fishes, and other wildlife, its geography, and the spread of phragmites as it takes over the shallows between Little Reed and Big Reed as measured with a GPS. The interns have identified and tagged all of the different tree species and have begun measuring their diameters at breast height and aging them with a tree ringer. One of the oldest is a 48-year-old hickory, which probably started out after one of the last big grassland wildfires. A very large red oak measured 30.87 inches across.

One of the key findings, although not a pleasant one, during the last two years has been the growth of blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, which has shown up in harmful concentrations in ponds and lakes far and wide in mid and eastern North America. The blooms have lead to the closures for health reasons of many local water bodies including Georgica and Wainscott Ponds in East Hampton Town, and Wickapogue Pond, Mill Pond, and Lake Agawam in Southampton Town. Cyanobacteria is fed by nutrients, especially nitrogen, and that begs the question, why Big Reed? There are almost no houses with septic systems in its drain field. Perhaps the nitrates stem from the uric acid wastes of birds and waterfowl and the feces from wildlife and horses.

For these last three years, the interns have presented what they’ve experienced during a nature day at the Nature Conservancy office on Route 114 in East Hampton. That day is coming up on Saturday, and they have much to be proud of.

How much wood could a groundhog chuck if a groundhog could chuck wood? It’s not quite as much of a tongue twister when you substitute another name for the species. 

The groundhog, a.k.a. the woodchuck or whistlepig, is also called a marmot, a name rarely used in the United States, at least not in the eastern half of the country. Our Marmota monax is one of 15 marmot species around the globe. 

If it weren’t for Groundhog Day and Punxsutawney Phil’s annual appearance on national TV, however, we on the South Fork might not know what a groundhog is. That’s because the South Fork was bereft of groundhogs until the early 1990s, when a few began to show up here in Sagaponack and the southern parts of the hamlets of Bridgehampton and Water Mill.

How did they finally get here? They are not considered great swimmers like their cousins and smaller look-alikes, muskrats, but they could have made it over the Shinnecock Bridge or its much older companion Long Island Rail Road Shinnecock bridge. But why so late? The L.I.R.R. bridge has been there for ages, built in 1892, 28 years before the canal with its locks was constructed. Another popular hypothesis is that nuisance trappers introduced the rodents, members of the squirrel family, to the South Fork after trapping them in Hampton Bays or points west.

Now, the woodchuck has practically taken over here, but I have yet to hear of one in Montauk. It would be quite a feat for an animal with very short legs and a home range of less than a hundred yards or so to get to that hamlet, and there are no fields on the Napeague isthmus to support it should it want to venture east of Amagansett.

On the other hand, how did such a sluggish, close-to-home family of marmot species manage to distribute itself throughout most of the world, taking to grasslands, and mountainous fields, such as in the American Rockies, Swiss Alps, and other Eurasian mountain ranges, as well as throughout the grassy steppes of Asia?

Among North American rodents, woodchucks are second in size only to beavers. They are true hibernators, thus the ongoing fame of Phil and Beauregard Lee to name just a few of the many celebrated groundhogs in the county. They don’t come out of their holes in the spring until they’re ready to and there is fresh food to eat. Other members of the squirrel family — say, our ubiquitous gray squirrel — don’t hibernate; they store food to get through the winter.

Woodchucks are occasionally seen along the Sunrise Highway and the Long Island Expressway, where they feed on the grasses adorning the medians and shoulders; a good many of them end up as road kills. Their dens are occasionally placed atop the sloping shoulders on Route 27 in pine barren country in Westhampton and Quogue and can be seen when driving by. They are perhaps most common along Route 48, or Sound Avenue, on the North Fork and to the west, where grassy fields are common. Across from the Cornell Cooperative Extension fields in western Riverhead there can be several burrows occupied by several woodchucks within the space of a few hundred yards.

Upstate they are, or were, the favorite targets of plinkers, chuckers, and varmint hunters, though they are not eaten and do little harm to crops and fodder. Most of the day they act like prairie dogs, standing up on their hind legs in front of their burrows surveying the countryside, “sitting ducks” to shooters. 

Like squirrels they are very good parents, keeping the young in the burrow most of the time until weaning. One rarely sees baby squirrels unless they fall from their nests or holes. The same holds true for woodchucks. The young are neither seen nor heard until they’re nearly full grown.

The most recent woodchuck that I became aware of is the full-grown one that has taken up residence under the new whaler’s shed behind the Sag Harbor Historical Society’s Annie Cooper Boyd House on Main Street. There isn’t much to forage on and the burrow is close to a wetland, but its occupant is comparatively safe there from dogs, gunners, and trappers. Jean Held, who is one of the stewards of that site, was amazed to find it and blamed herself a bit for not putting a wire fence around the base of the shed. But now that the woodchuck has found a home there, she has welcomed it. 

It may be the first woodchuck to settle in Sag Harbor, the home of Otter Pond, which has long been otter-less.

In a way, you have to love the groundhog. It’s an abiding creature that is happy to quietly take in its surroundings while chewing up greens and other vegetable parts. Lately, it has been joined by another member of the squirrel family long absent to the South Fork, the southern flying squirrel, a species that is capable of spanning the Shinnecock Canal in a long glide and hangs out in piney woods.

The South Fork is not doing so badly then when it comes to taking on new mammalian residents. While striped skunks may have disappeared and the status of its gray foxes is uncertain, we still get a beaver, mink, and otter now and then, and we have gained two members of the squirrel family and one from the dog family. Another one was observed and reported to me over the weekend. Let’s hope we will all be able to get along.

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

Following the end of World War II there was a big building boom across the country as our servicemen came back from the European and Pacific theaters to resume the American way of life that they missed during four years of nonstop fighting against the Germans and Japanese.

There was not only a building boom, but the nursery business expanded exponentially as all of those new houses, such as the hundreds built UpIsland in Levittown in a matter of a few years, needed lawns, flowers, shrubs, and trees to highlight the tiny tracts upon which the new houses were constructed.

One of the most widely planted low shrubs cultivated at the time were evergreens of the genus Juniperus. These junipers stayed green and shiny all year around, needed very little care, and provided effective low hedges to hide the concrete foundations and other not so pretty exterior features. They went by exotic names like Korean juniper, Chinese juniper, Persian juniper, and the like, notwithstanding the fact that many of the varieties or “cultivars” as they are popularly referred to in the landscaping business, were developed right here in America.

When Long Island was first settled, there were two species of junipers present — one quite rare and a plant more of grasslands than of forests, the common juniper; the other very common and one of the most abundant trees around at the time, the eastern red cedar. The “common” of the former derived from the botanical literature. Linnaeus had named it in the mid-1700s, Juniperus communis, because it was found throughout the northern hemisphere, in Europe, Asia, and North America. The “cedar” of the latter is a misnomer as true cedars grow in the Near East and northern Africa and belong to the genus Cedrus.

In Eurasia, the common juniper is a tree; in most of North America it is a low spreading shrub. Here on Long Island it is quite rare and, more often than not, found in open areas, such as old fields and maritime grasslands. Victoria Bustamante, a local botanist, has found two thus far in Montauk, one near Money Pond on the north side of the point, and a second, just a week ago, on the north side of a low ocean dune near the I.G.A. in Montauk.

I grew up on the North Fork and don’t remember seeing any growing there in the wild. In 42 years of my South Fork existence I know of only four: one on the Bell Estate old field in Amagansett, which I haven’t seenfor several years now, a second on Route 114 poking out from the woods north of Swamp Road, and two in the Soak Hides Nature Preserve east of Springy Banks Road at the very bottom of Three Mile Harbor. These last two are in a mature hardwood forest with trees averaging nearly a foot in diameter and reaching 55 to 65 feet in height.

On Sunday I visited the site, having been stimulated by Victoria’s Montauk find. I was pleased to find both common cedars intact and measured their size accordingly. The small one was about 25 feet in diameter, the large one was 65 feet wide along one axis, 50 feet wide along a second axis perpendicular to the first. In other words the canopy of the second, reaching barely a foot or more above the ground, occupies about 2,000 square feet. Can you think of a local tree that has such a spreading canopy? I can’t. Interestingly, while deer often feed on the lower branches of the red cedar, thereby sculpting it along highways such as the Sunrise in plain view of passing autos, deer don’t seem to bother with either of the two in the nature preserve.

While the one on Route 114 is not doing well and seems to be dying back after continually being cut along its leading edge by periodic shoulder mowing, the two in the nature preserve are dark green throughout and in excellent condition. Throughout the 30 years I have known them, I have yet to find any cedar berries on them. The common cedar is dioecious, like the American holly and sassafras, meaning male and female parts don’t occur on the same individual. The two specimens could quite possibly be males.

Michael Dirr, a world famous landscape gardener and onetime professor at Duke University, wrote one of the definitive treaties on woody plants. While in the mountains of Switzerland he came upon a common juniper and wrote, “Two things in life are inescapable, taxes and J. communis.” 

Not too long ago, another arborist, Thomas S. Elias, wrote in his book “The Complete Trees of North America” that the common juniper was the only American tree to also occur in both Europe and Asia. Very few plants can claim such a distinction. Phragmites australis, which grows profusely a mere 40 feet away from the larger of the two common cedars, grows all over the world, but was apparently brought to America by humans.

In the latest plant manuals, the common juniper is listed as a variety of the species, appropriately named J. communis var. depressa. But there is also a hybrid species, J. horizontalis, that is listed in Mitchell and Tucker’s “Revised Checklist of New York State Plants,” published in 1997 by the New York State Museum in Albany. It is endangered.

Hmmm. I better go back and take another look.

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

Spring is moving right along in good stead. A car ride through the local roads gives one an up-to-date reading of its progress. Today, for example, during a back-and-forth, up-and-down trip through the back roads of Northwest Woods, the signs of advancing spring were readily apparent.

The shoulders have greened up. The black and scarlet oaks are beginning to flower, while the white oaks, which burst out a good week or two later, are looking on jealously. Shads and sweet cherries, which began to blossom two weeks ago, are holding on, but it’s hard to see the white cherry blowers because the leaves are almost fully expanded and hiding them. By the time the shad leaves are full out, the petals will have fallen and the very first stages of fruiting will have begun.

After the shads and the cherries come the dogwoods. They don’t have true petals, but the largest bracts assume that role, turning a lustrous white from pink at their peak. Apparently, the bees and other insect pollinators do not have degrees in botany or arborculture; they treat the dogwood blooms like any other flower.

Unlike the sweet cherries, the wild cherries, which outnumber the former 10 to 1, leaf out long before the flowers appear. The leaves on the ones in my yard are nearly fully expanded, while in Northwest Woods, the wild cherry leaves are only halfway out. You will notice that several of them on the edges of Route 114 between the villages of Sag Harbor and East Hampton are almost naked. If you take a closer look, you will see cobwebby clusters where branch meets trunk — the tent caterpillars have been out and about devouring the leaves as quickly as they unfurl. Tent caterpillars use their tents to protect them from predators during the daylight hours. They stick to members of the genus Prunus, particularly wild black cherries and beach plums of the woods and dunes, respectively.

Dandelions have been here more than 100 years and they’ve been flowering since before the middle of April. There were several patches evident on the shoulders of the 20 or so roads I traveled. A few patches had both fresh yellow flowers and ripe globular whitish seed heads ready to scatter at any moment. One could spend a lifetime trying to eradicate them and never quite accomplish the job.

The red, or swamp, maples are found throughout the Northwest Woods. They are among the first large trees to flower; most have already dropped their red blooms and are working on expanding their foliage. In wetter spots — and there are many such areas in Northwest — they are often accompanied by tupelos (also called black gums, sour gums, etc.), which are completely bare now. They are the last of our native trees to get their leaves and, ironically, the first to redden and drop them to the ground come September.

I stopped along Alewife Brook Road, which ends at the waters of Northwest Harbor, and took a walk into Scoy Pond. No alewives at all in the stream. The new culvert pipe under the road is hardly adequate to allow them to pass from Ely Brook Pond to the stream, but there were a great many sprouting oak seedlings from last year’s huge crop of chestnut oak acorns. Chestnut oak acorns mature in their first year — not like the acorns of our other local oaks, which take two years before they drop — and the acorn nut is bright pink-red. Along the trail you can see them here and there. Try to pick one up and you meet resistance; a well-established root is already holding them in place.

Coming back I took Bull Path through the heart of Long Island’s only native white pine forest. Because it wasn’t paved until the late 1980s, it has only a few utility poles at its south end that spring from Stephen Hand’s Path. Thus, as you drive north the oaks, pitch pines, and white pines are not at all pruned, but quite stately and tall, street trees growing as they should grow, free from the encumbrances of electric and telephone wires. You get the idea that the dominant white pines will retain their dominance well into the future, as all of the smaller trees, down to those one foot in size, are white pines and very thickly distributed.

You can pick out a sassafras or hickory here and there. They are just beginning to bud out, sparsely so along the trunks and branches. And, yes, the white oaks are still completely bare. When they start to flower in another week or so, the branches will look sanguine, as white oak leaves and flowers mostly start out red.

As I approached Sag Harbor along Route 114 there were many green areas along the pavement. They were made up of fresh green Norway and planetree maple flowers. What was the signal that made them all drop to the ground at the same time? Most certainly it was the combination of their respective genomes and increased daylight. 

God and evolution don’t leave things up to chance. I had to ask myself, if I were in Norway at this very moment would I see similar green patches along the pavement?

Finally, I’m on Long Beach Road, Noyac Bay is quiet, the invasive yellow spurge is resplendent, and the beach plums are beginning to bloom. A fitting end to a fitting trip as I motor home.

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

Some people say that we on the South Fork are going to hell in a handbasket. We look across the Peconics and see mostly green fields of grapes, vegetables, and other produce. Here most of the farmland is up for grabs, but thankfully that wonderful organization, the Peconic Land Trust, is out there grabbing. It is not only keeping viable farmland in production, it is revitalizing farm plots that have long stood dormant and recruiting young farmers, mostly the sons and daughters of old farmers, to make the land fertile once more. In a way, it’s the same way with fishermen.

In the old days men and women did both on the East End, fished and farmed. Then in the early 1900s, big money started to come to town, but that money belonged to a few of the noble rich. Nowadays, the money is mostly put up by the ignoble rich. Each generation tries to outdo the last, and, as a result, houses continue to become bigger and more pompous. As if overnight, truck farms are turned into ornate lawns with specimen trees. Hedges get even taller and thicker. The nouveau riche, as often as not, rent out these McMansions for the summer for as much as one could use to buy a decent-sized family house in the’70s or ’80s.

Fortunately, the county and the five eastern towns responded in their unique ways. Using zoning, which came into play in the ’60s, they began saving this and that parcel, this and that farmland and habitat, first without the benefit of the Peconic Bay Region Community Preservation Fund. Gifts to the Nature Conservancy and Peconic Land Trust and Suffolk County and New York State’s contributions of extra dollars for farmland and natural open spaces purchases were finally and graciously buoyed up by the addition of C.P.F. funds. We owe a lot to those political leaders who enacted the legislation to gird these acquisitions on the federal, state, county, and local level. Fortunately, some of them, like our local state assemblyman and state senator, Fred W. Thiele Jr. and Kenneth P. LaValle, are still in there pitching. Bravo to all of the environmentalists and farming enthusiasts who urged these acquisitions on at every level.

What we are left with as the East End builds out and the size of potential subdivisions dwindles from hundreds of acres of raw land to less than 10 acres, are wonderful family farms and wonderful patches of natural lands and scenic landscapes. Just think, the oak-holly-beech forest that comprised Hither Woods with all its little niches, is now in permanent open space status. More than 170 acres of Culloden, or “North Neck,” in Montauk is saved, and more than 700 acres of the Montauk moorlands’ low heath habitat rare to New York State, with its sandplain gerardia and numerous other rare plants, is safe for years to come.

Thanks to Concerned Citizens of Montauk, and the feds, state, county, and town, at least half of Montauk’s downs — now the largest prairie on Long Island in the absence of the over-developed Hempstead Plains, and, perhaps, the largest in New York State — has been spared the developers’ bulldozers for generations to come.

And, oh yes, in the ’90s the state acquired the land south of the highway and east of Camp Hero in Montauk, given the moniker the Sanctuary by the would-be developers. It is the site of the New York State Point Woods, perhaps the richest woodland on Long Island in terms of species. In 1923, Norman Taylor of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens described the diversity there and now it is safe from development forever.

The Grace Estate, Barcelona, Northwest Woods, and Cedar Point County Park could have all been developed, but they are largely intact except for the camping grounds of the latter. Much of Wainscott’s pitch pine and oak forest is now in permanent open space, as is at least 50 percent of the unique white pine and pitch pine forest in East Hampton’s Northwest. Much of Napeague’s pitch pine forest, coastal dunes, and the one and only dune plain in the state, south of Cranberry Hole Road, is protected from development one way or another.

East Hampton Town in 1984, followed by East Hampton Village, then Southampton Town, passed a law protecting all wetlands, coastal bluffs, and dunes. East Hampton’s ordinance protects every wetland, even one as small as your living room, from destruction and ruin, thus greatly bolstering the state’s freshwater and tidal wetland laws enacted in 1973 and 1974, respectively.

As far as East Hampton goes, it all started in 1926 when the state, under the newly created Long Island State Park Commission led by Robert Moses, created the park that now includes Atlantic Ocean beach, coastal dunes, Hither Woods, and the Walking Dunes — 1,750 acres large. For the South Fork a major push for preservation got under way in Montauk. No wonder that the hamlet of Montauk has more parkland per acre than any other political subdivision on Long Island save, perhaps, for Brook­haven Town, in which most of the protected pine barrens forest is situated.

I grew up on the North Fork, where I toiled and gloried in the acres and acres of fertile farmland, but there were very few woodlands, heathlands, maritime grasslands, and other unique habitats and plant communities, which we have so many of on the South Fork.

There is still much to do. In the meantime I guess we will just have to hold our noses and look the other way as we drive by all of those new looming pretentious houses, knowing full well that the very soul of the best of the South Fork’s marvelous ecosystems have been set aside for both rich and poor alike to enjoy for generations to come.

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

Anglers are drawn to new technology, particularly when it improves the performance of their gear and increases their catch. So it’s not surprising that software companies are developing mobile phone apps for fisherman. The market is huge. There are nearly 49 million recreational fishermen in the United States alone, according to the website Statista.com. 

Some fishing apps are worthless, while others are valuable or at least intriguing to those who angle from a boat or from land. While it’s always tricky manipulating an iPhone with fingers covered in fish slime, it’s worth giving these apps a close look. 

FishBrain is the self-proclaimed larg­est social network of fishing enthusiasts with some 1.5 million anglers participating around the globe. The app was developed in Stockholm, the Silicon Valley of Sweden, but covers the whole United States, including small bodies of water like East Hampton’s Hook Pond. One can follow (think Facebook) a fish species, a body of water, or anglers you have invited into your personal circle. Recorded catches are displayed on a Google Earth-type map along with information about the bait used. Pictures of your trophy can be uploaded to taunt angler friends who decided to stay home and mow their lawns. Like with most social media platforms, it works best if you get a large group of people to participate in the fun. FishBrain should be attractive to a fishing club or marinas. The app is free for basic access, but costs $5.99 monthly or $39.99 annually for more detailed and valuable information.

There is nothing more frustrating to an angler than losing a fish due to a failed knot. Learning which knots to use and how to properly tie them is critical to fishing success. For example, while a simple clinch knot is fine when using light monafilament, one is better served using a uni knot with slippery braided lines. Animated Fishing Knots is a wonderful app because it uses simple step-by-step animation to demonstrate how to properly tie many different knots for a variety of purposes including line to line connections. Text instruction accompanies the animations for those who lean a little old-school. The app costs only 99 cents, which is less than the replacement value of whatever may be thrown in anger after a lost fish. 

Commercial fishermen have long used National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) buoy data including wind speed and direction, wave height and period, water temperature, and barometric pressure to fish more productively. NOAA Buoys Live Marine Weather is a free app that conveniently delivers local buoy data to all anglers with handheld devices. Want to invite a landlubber neighbor to go fishing for striped bass around Montauk Point? Probably best to check wave height and wind direction before leaving the dock.

FindMeFish is one of the odder apps. It establishes a market economy where desperate fishermen pay professional fishing guides for the locations of the guides’ favorite spots. The professionals set their own prices for the information and can limit the number of people who can access the data. While there aren’t very many guides offering their info right now, perhaps some local captains might be able to auction off a favorite striper hole to one or two well-heeled fishermen. 

Missing from the vast universe of fishing apps is one that detects whether or not your fishing buddy or loved one is lying about the big one that got away. So until that app arrives, just let them enjoy their moments. Please withhold the eye roll and snickers until after they have left the room. Remember, while golfers lie, fishermen simply mistruth. 

Action is heating up locally for both saltwater and freshwater anglers. 

Paul Apostolides at Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk reported that schoolie striped bass are at Ditch Plain. Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett added that schoolies have been caught at Napeague beaches on a stubby Hopkins tin and that alewives were in Gardiner’s Bay, which suggests good things to come. Ken Morse at Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor reports schoolies up to 22 inches have been taken in Southampton creeks on swimming plugs and that larger striped bass are now in waters to the west. He added that bunker remain plentiful in the bays and that spearing have surfaced too. The Viking reports tough cod fishing, though Steve Doughty caught a nice pollock, according to Harvey Bennett.

Fort Pond in Montauk is experiencing great walleye action. Fish have been taken on small jigs with grub tails, spinner baits, and small swimmers as well as on minnows and worms. The open season for walleye in Fort Pond is the first Saturday in May through March 15. That fish fry will have to wait. Largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, and even crappie also are biting at Fort Pond. 

Freshwater fishing is a great way to introduce a child to fishing and there are many ponds on the East End. Give it a try. Local tackle shops can provide gear, tackle, and information about the best fishing spots.

Have a tale to tell or a catch to report? David Kuperschmid can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @ehstarfishing. 

A recent study published in The New York Times observed that the female and male humans’ brains were identical in anatomy, yet males and females are so different behaviorally and physiologically in so many ways. How is it possible the brains are the same?

It has to do with hormones, namely, progesterone, but also other vital factors.

One thing that differentiates females from males in almost all mammalian species is that females look after the young from birth until they are weaned and then some. In the marsupial mammals, such as the opossum and kangaroo, females have pouches on the front of their abdomen where newborns nurse and reside until they are ready to ambulate on their own.

In birds, with few exceptions, it is the female that incubates the eggs. The phalaropes that breed on the tundra are one exception — males do most of the incubating. Another is the piping plover, which breeds locally; males will spell the females off and on. When it comes to feeding young, in the majority of species both males and females take part. Males, however, compensate for non-incubation by bringing food to the incubating female.

Even in some reptiles, for example the crocodile, the female exhibits motherly care. She hangs around and watches the nest where she has buried the eggs and often helps the young out and into the water during hatching. Male sticklebacks guard the young in their nests, while male seahorses raise seahorse young in their marsupiums, or pouches.

Now that more women are in the work force between 9 a.m. and 5, there are an increasing number of men who stay home and care for the children. But in most species of vertebrates, it is the female who provides the bulk of infant care.

In matriarchal mammalian cultures, as in elephants and whales, the females lead the pack, i.e., they collectively care for the young. If an elephant mother is hurt or shot or otherwise incapacitated, an elephant aunt will take over the nurturing and protective duties.

As a young boy, if I woke up in the night from a bad dream, my mother was there beside me in an instant. I always wondered why my mother worried so much as I and my siblings grew up. Later, I discovered that my wife was equally inclined to worry and still is, even though her son and stepson and stepdaughter are long matured and two of them have children of their own.

It’s part of being a human. But now it turns out, as we probe further and further into the secret lives of wild animals without being able to converse with them audibly, that practically all female mammals and birds are in a perpetual 24/7-care state of mind even after their young have grown to maturity. The female deer, or does, that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation would have us selectively cull along with their fawns, are just as caring as your mothers were when you were growing up. They are rarely far from their young. So it is with many mammals and birds.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo supports the D.E.C.’s position on eliminating mute swans. Have you ever witnessed a mother or father more dedicated to protecting their young while simultaneously teaching them the facts of life? The adult swans even go so far as to swim while carrying the babies on their backs when in danger from, say, snapping turtles lurking below the surface.

Scientists were always after us college students in wildlife biology to not be anthropomorphic and to maintain a strictly objective view when studying mammals, birds, and the rest. Then ethologists and animal behaviorists came along and, lo and behold, told us that these subhuman creatures weren’t so different from us in many respects. Although they still preached objectivity, they often treated their objects of scholarship anthropomorphically, something that the Humane Society and, later, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals knew from the beginning: Treat animals with the same respect that you would treat your fellow humans.

In grade school all of my teaches were women. Practically every kindergarten teacher in these times is female. Grade school and kindergarten teachers are filling the ranks of elementary levels not because it’s the only job they can get; they, themselves, are natural-born teachers. The education courses they took in college are extra. What they do with their children at home they do with the pupils in school.

It turns out that many autistic children who have a hard time relating to their human peers, relate on a one-to-one, almost instantaneous basis with chickens, goats, sheep, ducks, and other poultry and livestock. Little by little we are learning, but at what a cost to humanity and wildlife?

Tender loving care is what the nurses call it. The question is: When will we all learn to practice it?

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

I started this environmental and natural history column in 1981, and except for about four years in the latter part of the 1980s it has been going ever since. I hope to keep it going on into the 2020s. We will see. Nature and the environment are in a lot of trouble and need all of the help they can get. Who wants to live on Mars?

We start out the New Year with the semblance of a typical January, less snow. But my itching knee tells me that after a week of very cold weather, January will become almost as warm as December 2015. We will see.

Global warming is not a new phenomenon. Our world in these latitudes has seen bitter cold and tropical warmth alternate several times in the more than four billion years the earth has been around. Only 20,000 years ago, sea level was so low that one (if around and bipedal) could walk to Block Island, a big chunk of glacial till consisting of boulders, rocks, stones, sand, and clay that represents the forward edge of the last glaciation before its retreat. Shelter, Robins, Gardiner’s, Plum, Big, and Little Gull Islands, as well as Fishers Island, Nantucket, and North Haven were all connected to each other by dry land.

The sea level rise has been ongoing for at least 10,000 years, but only lately has it been accelerating as the earth warms up at a spectacularly fast pace. Those abovementioned islands have long been isolated by rising seas, otherwise, Gardiner’s and the others would have a similar complement of mammals as we have on mainland Long Island. Field mice, or voles, perhaps, even a species distinct from our own two here on the East End existed on Big Gull Island but have been absent for the last 30 years or so. How they got there in the first place is still a mystery.

The trees and shrubs of Nantucket and Gardiner’s, Robins, and Fishers Islands are similar in species composition to the ones in East Hampton and Southampton, suggesting that some of them came before the animals that later populated them. During the warming up following the retreat of the last glacier we lost a few northern tree species — the larch, hemlock, aspen, and two spruces, red and black. 

On the other hand, southern trees such as the tupelo and pitch pine moved in to take their place and are still arriving and establishing today, to wit, three magnolia species that Andrew Greller, a botanist, has recorded on western Long Island, along with a red bud on Gardiner’s Island, catalpas, and southern red oaks. It’s always hard to tell, however, which established here after escaping from cultivation and which got here on their own.

Global warming cannot be used to account for the rise locally of harbor seals and other seal species, great black-back gulls, great cormorants, and several other species which arrived and established here from the north rather than from the south. Wild animals and native plants are capable of adapting to different climes and substrates either by ecophenotypic development or evolution. They are always in a state of flux, one way or another.

A few little islands, for example Hicks Island between Gardiner’s Bay and Napeague Harbor, formed during early settler times. A few, like Star Island in Lake Montauk and Brushy Island in Fort Pond, probably were here during the Native American occupation.

Hicks Island is one of those that switches back and forth from an island to a tombolo. After the 1938 hurricane it reconnected to Promised Land, then became an island again after the filled-in former inlet was re-dredged by Suffolk County in the 1950s.

More than 3,000 years ago, Montauk was an island, Gardiner’s Bay was continuous with the Atlantic Ocean. As pitch pines marched from west to east after arriving on Long Island, they were stopped in their tracks by this sea barrier. Finally the channel between ocean and bay was closed by sediments washing out of Montauk’s bluffs, carried by the Block Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean on the north and south sides by the littoral drift currents running westerly, and then ultimately dropped on Napeague so that one could walk across from one side to the other without getting wet feet.

What will be Long Island’s new shape once global warming has raised sea level by a meter or more, say by 2075? Sammy’s Beach will be mostly under water, Penny Sedge Island in the northeast corner of Three Mile Harbor will be gone. Wood Tick Island in Accabonac Harbor will be a mere nub without trees. Brushy Island in Fort Pond will be a shoal never to raise out of the water again. There will be no Little Reed and Big Reed Ponds east of Lake Montauk, only a “Bigger Reed Pond.” Hook Pond in East Hampton Village will reach all the way to Ocean Avenue on the west and flood much of the Maidstone Club golf course on the east. Georgica Pond will cross Montauk Highway on the north. 

Whoever is then governor of New York State will propose a new east-west multilane bypass connecting Southampton and East Hampton Towns. Halt the Highway III will rise up to stop it, and the author of “Nature Notes” will be 140 years old.

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

By all accounts, winter has finally descended upon us. But as of the date for this column, there are only 39 days until crocuses begin blooming. It’s one of the oddest winters I can remember, one with very few winter birds, only a handful of waterfowl, and, as of yet, no ice skating. One wonders if such a winter will be good for all of those coastal ponds of our area that are in trouble, or will it worsen them?

Karen and Barbara Rubinstein did part of the Long Island waterfowl count on Sunday. Can you imagine, not a single duck or goose on Shorts Pond south of the moraine in Bridgehampton, which is normally chock-full of them at this time. And there were very few ducks around in general. Victoria Bustamante covered Montauk water bodies and only reported a handful of them for Fort Pond which is annually one of the duckiest spots on the whole of Long Island.

While checking out Big Reed Pond east of Lake Montauk, she spotted and photographed a great blue heron standing tall on a muskrat wickiup  made of phragmites. Muskrats on Long Island generally live in burrows in waterside banks, but in the absence of them, they occasionally build lodges, and what better material to fashion them out of than phragmites stems and leaves. Maybe, they got the idea from waterfowl hunters, who have been making blinds out of phragmites stems for generations, at least ever since I was a boy.

The great blue heron better pick up and head south or it will be a goner. It is a sign that a lot of the northern songbirds and waterfowl have yet to reach this latitude and that water bodies north of Long Island in New England have yet to be iced over. Next week, following this Arctic blast, we might see an influx of both.

The Rubinsteins did find two of my favorite waterfowl in Hook Pond in East Hampton Village, two tundra swans. These graceful native birds that get their name because they breed on the tundra of northern Canada, are rare visitors to Long Island. Hook Pond is one of their favorite spots to spend the winter. Apparently, while they are here they get along peacefully with our year-round mute swans. They can be told from the latter by their straight-ish necks and black bills.

One of the few places that was hopping with geese, Canada geese, on Sunday afternoon was the grassy cover crop areas of EECO Farm on Long Lane across from East Hampton High School. I counted about 150 on the way to Stuart Vorpahl’s viewing at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton. They were there grazing away on my way into the village and there still on my way home two hours later.

Last year, you may remember, was a bumper year here for snowy owl. This year they have yet to appear, with the exception of a very beautiful one that Diane Ryan photographed at Lazy Point last week. Diane and her husband, Gordon, were two of Russell Drumm’s best friends. They used to mountain bike together every Sunday for years on end. Rusty died on Saturday of cancer.

The owl in Diane’s photograph has an all-knowing look, combining the countenances of all of the great prophets — Buddha, Lao Tzu, Mohammed, Jesus, Moses, and the others — into one beauteous, sublime face. Owls are supposed to be wise, this one is surely one of the wisest. One wonders if its appearance on the South Fork in such a timely way is nature’s memorial to three of our wisest neighbors who were prophets in their own right and at one with nature and the world around them. Richard Hendrickson, Rusty, and Stuart, all three of whom passed away last week.

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

The Montauk SurfMasters Fall Classic ended on Dec. 1, with fewer contenders than usual, due largely to a season that Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle described as “tough, tough, tough.” 

“It was probably the toughest season we’ve had in the history of the tournament,” said Mike Coppola, an organizer. 

The winning fish were all caught back in October “during a three-day span where we had a northeast storm which pushed the fish up onto the beaches,” he said. 

In the men’s wader division, Klever Oleas captured first and second places with bass weighing in at 42.46 and 31.02 pounds. Mike Larson’s 23.86-pounder won him third place.

In the men’s wetsuit division, top honors went to Nick Bocchino for his 35.2-pound striper. 

Mary Ellen Kane’s 26.42-pounder won her first place in the women’s division. “It was the first time in the tournament history that the first-place women’s fish would have been on the board in the men’s wader division,” Coppola said. 

There were no other weigh-ins in the women’s division and none in the youth or kids divisions. 

The Fall Classic ends with an awards dinner at Gurney’s Inn in Montauk on Saturday at 5 p.m. Winners will be celebrated and money will be raised for a SurfMasters youth scholarship fund, awarded to East Hampton High School seniors who have been involved in the tournament. There may still be a few tickets available by emailing Coppola at [email protected]. They cost $60, plus a $10 gratuity for adults; $25 for those under 18. 

Tickets for the 50-50 raffle and a chance to win a Van Staal reel donated by the company are available online at montauksurfmasters.com/raffle-tickets. The cost is $20 per ticket or $50 for three.