The winter birds are here until March and April. It’s time to stock the feeders for the long winter haul. Most of us who feed the birds will be carefully watching, identifying, and counting, and so will a bird or two whose powers of observation far outstrip our own — those pesky hawks with the sharp beaks and vice-grip talons.

When I came back from living on the West Coast for 15 years to teach at Southampton College in 1974, there weren’t many hawks around during the winter. The feeder birds had it easy. They could relax and enjoy their seeds and suet and didn’t have to continually look over their shoulders.

The 1960s may have been the low point for all New York State birds of prey. The osprey population had plummeted so far that they were considered endangered, legally so after the Nixon administration gave us the Endangered Species Act. DDT and other pesticides were the chief culprits causing the lows in the hawk populations, but hunters, too, were to blame. New York State was one of the first to pass a law protecting hawks, falcons, owls, eagles, and ospreys.

Bit by bit through the years the birds of prey have made a comeback, some of them reaching population levels observed around the time of World War II. The ospreys and red-tailed hawks became common breeders, the others, such as the Cooper’s and sharp-shinned hawks, are following in their tracks. Peregrine falcons have been nesting on bridges across the rivers on both sides of Manhattan Island for almost 20 years now. Three bald eagle pairs are nesting and rearing young on Long Island.

Red-tails are mostly after squirrels and rabbits, not too interested in feeder birds. Screech owls hang around the feeders at night in hopes of getting a mouse or rat. Goodness knows, there are more than enough mice and rats around to feed an army of owls and feral cats.

The Cooper’s and sharp-shinned hawks and Merlins are the most common daytime predators of small and medium-size birds at feeders. They take up territories in neighborhoods with lots of feeders and travel the route, showing up at the line of feeders at different times of day. Some feeders are so well stocked and so much out in the open that a given hawk can almost stay in one place for most of the day to nail a mourning dove or blackbird.

Many of our year-round birds — chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, woodpeckers, and blue jays — have already formed mixed feeder flocks that are semi-nomadic, hitting this and that woodland, pastoral, or residential feeder location in the course of a day. Very often these are accompanied by blue jays, the sentries, always on the lookout for feathered predators and ready to utter their screechy calls upon seeing one.

There are a few things a homeowner can do to cut down on losses when putting up a feeding station. Instead of putting it clear out in the open in plain sight of any overhead passerby, put it near bushes so that the birds can take cover quickly if attacked. When it comes to escaping hawks, songbirds are no match in flight, and, if given the chance, will dart into thickets to escape those sharp talons. 

Keep the feeder away from windows — feeding birds chased by hawks will try to pass through a window thinking it to be an opening and clunk themselves on the head. Unless you are there in a few seconds to pick up the dazed bird and put it in the box with a towel over it until it recovers, the hawk will swoop down and take it.

Come spring, hawks and owls lay eggs in nests, incubate the eggs, and raise hawklets and owlets. They burn up a lot of energy during the winter and need a daily source of energy to keep them fit until spring. As a famous Indian guru once said, “hunters hunt.” He might have easily substituted birds of prey for hunters; it’s in their genes.

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

I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said any village that you couldn’t walk through, one end to the other, in an hour or so, isn’t worth the trip. He probably would have enjoyed walking through East Hampton Village east to west, but if he stopped in the middle to check out the little stream that runs from the railroad bridge, down near the Methodist Church, his interest might be piqued enough to follow that stream south to its end, Hook Pond, and leave the rest of the walk to another day.

Sag Harbor Village has its Otter Pond, Southampton Village its Lake Agawam, but only East Hampton Village of those on the South Fork has a stream running through it, and that stream has a celebrated history. It is also a wonderful spot to take a walk, sit a spell, and enjoy nature. “Eden of East Hampton” is an appropriate name for the stream and the Nature Trail it runs through, as Dell Cullum (a contributing photographer for The Star) shows us in his new book by that name. If you are patient and visit this Eden repeatedly over the years you will discover that in terms of flora and fauna, almost without exception, every plant and animal that you can find throughout the rest of the East End, you can find in a few hours by meandering the Nature Trail.

My mentor in natural history, the late Paul Stoutenburgh, only a few years gone from this earth, was not only a nature writer but also a nature photographer, and he used to tell me that words will someday be replaced by pictures. Mr. Cullum’s book celebrates this prophecy. Yes, indeed, there are words, but without those marvelous photographs of his and some others, the book would not come alive in your hands the way it did in mine when I first opened it. It is truly a work of art.

Raccoon, white-tailed deer, wood duck, red fox, and on and on, they are all here as photographed by the author over a span of several years. He has even given some of them, the muskrats for example, names. As a budding biologist I was taught not to anthropomorphize species. That rule may work for biologists and other scientists, but it doesn’t apply to naturalists. That’s because naturalists don’t see themselves as outside of nature, examining it critically through the microscope or describing it in hours, minutes, and seconds or kilometers, centimeters, and millimeters from a safe impersonal distance; they are one with it, a part of it. 

A true naturalist could never call a deer a “rat,” as I heard one North Haven epicurean describe the species; a naturalist loves nature and cannot bring himself or herself to harm it or speak badly of it.

How can one look at the photograph of the two cavorting fawns or the doe staring at the camera and then think about doing them in because the New York State Department of Conservation dictates that we need to take fewer bucks and more fawns and does if we are to be successful at thinning the herd? The mute swans that populate the Nature Trail are absolutely majestic in form and better parents than most of us are, but again we hear from the D.E.C. that they are invasive and should be gotten rid of.

But “Eden in East Hampton” is more than just a book about the area’s nature, it also trolls the long history of the Nature Trail, its former owners, the Hunttings, et al., the Japanese teahouses, the exquisite little bridges, and how it metamorphosed over the centuries into what it is now. All of those historic users apparently loved it as much as the children who go there by the carload day after day to feed and gaze at the waterfowl. And why not? It is the Eden of East Hampton.

While the world is in the throes of going to pot due to global warming, internecine wars, crime, greed, and bad personal habits, and nature is suffering horribly, it is very comforting to know that this beautiful little area with its surprise-a-minute history is squirreled away for safekeeping well into the future for all to experience. Nice job, Dell!

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

A True’s beaked whale, rare to the area, was found dead on Scott Cameron Beach in Bridgehampton last Thursday afternoon. It appears the whale was sickly.

The Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation received a call on its hotline at about 3:30 p.m. and sent a biologist and a volunteer to retrieve the carcass of the 10-foot whale on Friday. A necropsy of the male juvenile was conducted, and additional examinations were done on Saturday. Initial findings showed gastritis and parasites present, as well as respiratory congestion in both lung lobes, according to Rachel Bosworth, a spokeswoman for the Riverhead Foundation.

“There was no indication that the animal had been feeding prior to its death,” she said.

The whale’s lower right jaw was fractured, too. Tissue samples being sent to a pathologist will determine whether the injury occurred before or after the whale died. Results could take several weeks. There were markings on the body due to scavengers.

The whale, 10 feet long and weighing 1,071 pounds, died 24 to 48 hours before the Riverhead Foundation was notified, Ms. Bosworth said.

A radiograph of the skull indicated it was a True’s beaked whale, which prefer deep warm waters of the North Atlantic and can be found in the Southern Hemisphere, such as the Indian Ocean, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries website.

“This species is rarely seen this close to shore, and they are generally found north of the New York area,” Ms. Bosworth said.

Two other whales of this type washed up dead in Southampton and Bridgehampton in 2014. Before that, reportedly only two others had washed up on Long Island in the past 30 years

The United States Army Corps of Engineers and their contractors did in a few days what Hurricane Sandy of 2012 never did, or Irene a year before Sandy, as well as a host of storms prior to those two. 

For some reason the run of dunes between the Kirk Park parking lot and the ocean has had an almost miraculous stability over the years. It’s hard to know why. The up-gradient motels and condos have regularly added sand to the beaches in front of them; I would venture that a lot of that sand made its way easterly to the beach in front of the I.G.A. The southwesterlies that reign supreme from the beginning of May through September pushed some of the sand to help stabilize the dunes to the north in a process the coastal geologists call saltation, a bounding along of sand particles from one place to another, driven by breezes.

In my 28 years with the Town of East Hampton and with the help of William Walsh, a surveyor, and Barnaby Friedman, Bob Masin, and other town employees, the Natural Resources Department studied the coming and going of beaches. The department also did the bulk of the assessment of storm damage work including those damages resulting from federally declared disasters, and thus the town received considerable money from FEMA towards refurbishing the damaged areas. While erosion has been great, say in Cavett’s Cove and Soundview at the foot of Block Island Sound, for some yet unexplained reason that particular beach, beginning a little east of the I.G.A. and running westerly to the beginning of the bluff, maintained itself over that span of time and was almost always covered with beach grass.

So what did the Corps’s contractors do? They started tearing that section of the dune as seen in the eye-opening aerial photo taken by Doug Kuntz for the front page of the Nov. 12 edition of The East Hampton Star. To me, it didn’t make sense to tear a longstanding natural dune apart and use the sand to make an artificial one. Methinks some town employees, politicos, and the Suffolk County Legislature didn’t read the fine print in the Corps’s official environmental review statement signed by a Paul Owen, P.E., Colonel, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Part B of the job description reads as follows: “A total 0f 71,000 [cubic yards of] sand is required to construct the reinforced dune. . . . Approximately two-thirds of the sand fill will be used in the [geocontainers] or placed in the dune. The remaining one-third will be used to construct the berm cap. About 20,000 [cubic yards] will be obtained from excavation and regrading of the existing dune, with the remaining 51,000 [cubic yards] obtained from upland sand sources.” 

Note that the plan clearly calls for dismantling the existing dunes — as shown already in progress in the Kuntz photo — to make the surrogate ones. It took nature hundreds of years or more to make the natural dunes that were sacrificed and will be further sacrificed as part of the project. The sand in the geocontainers will come from an upland quarry. Though chemically siliceous, it will be sand of a completely different composition and grain size, very different in texture and color from the sand grains washed by the sea over the millennia that make up historic dunes.

I’m not a “retreatist” philosophically; I don’t think we should stand by and let the sea ultimately reduce Long Island to a pile of rubble. On the other hand, I would never recommend sacrificing a longstanding natural dune to scrabble together an impromptu one, one that might readily fall apart in the next big coastal storm. Please read the fine print in the future before acting hastily.

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

The black and scarlet oaks with their lobed and pointed leaves may be on the way to becoming live oaks, the ones in the South and California that never lose their leaves in the fall and are, thus, evergreens. It will take thousands of years for such a conversion, but global warming may shorten that time span a bit. We’ll see.

While the leaves have yet to completely fall from the deciduous trees, shrubs, and subshrubs, the asters and goldenrods have pretty much finished blooming and colored flower heads have been replaced with gray-white fruit containing the tiny plumose seeds ready for takeoff. Asters are in the sunflower family. While some sunflowers produce large seeds that don’t float but drop to the ground, like the ones humans and birds eat, the large majority of them use the wind to disperse their seeds.

While the last act of fall is about to open, northern breeding birds have been setting up winter territories. White-throated sparrows, juncos, kinglets, and the like, just down from the north, are returning to last year’s feeding tables hoping they will be up and just as fruitful. The sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks are also back and on their tails. They know how to navigate the feeding station trails as well as you know how to get from your house to McDonald’s or the post office.

The most spectacularly showy of our feathered friends that are turning up here and there as they set in from the north are the waterfowl. They are the puddle ducks, scoters, mergansers, geese, and, if we are lucky, the tundra swans. The ducks and geese retain their colorations through plumage changes. The duller loons and grebes lose their nuptial feathers, which are replaced by gray, black, and white winter ones.

Hook Pond, that troubled bit of freshwater in East Hampton Village behind the ocean dunes, is the pond that annually has the biggest assortment of waterfowl each winter because it is not only rich in pond weeds of many different species but it is also a safe haven; hunting is not allowed in the village. 

The little stream that Dell Cullum (a contributing photographer for The Star) is writing about, photographing, and filming almost daily and which begins at a culvert outlet on Fithian Lane just south of Montauk Highway, is a favorite with local families and their children because several species of ducks as well as turtles and muskrats depend on their charitable gifts of food. You are more likely to find wood ducks there than at any other local spot, but at times there is quite an array, particularly of the non-diving ducks — the mallard, black duck, teal, and so on.

You will occasionally find a Peking duck. The famous white mallard was first cultivated in China, then later elsewhere around the world, including New York State, where its name was changed to the Long Island duck. It was such a big thing here that local entrepreneurs in Flanders built a giant store that looks like a duck, but doesn’t quack. It is right behind the Montauk Lighthouse in terms of annual visitors. Recently, under the auspices of the Peconic Estuary Program, a rain garden was added to the property to keep nitrates and other runoff chemicals out of the Peconics.

Some of the sea ducks are just as colorful as the pond ducks. The red-breasted merganser, or shelldrake, the American goldeneye, the long-tailed duck, or old-squaw, and bufflehead are colorful and even comical above the water and swift and slick swimmers when feeding underwater. The scoters, or coots, the surf, white-winged, and black ducks are not colorful, but their long skeins flying low over the sea, even in the most tumultuous of times, are sights to behold. They are looking for the next mussel bed or some other shellfish collection to feed on. The duck hunters that “line out” in a string of boats to shoot them, don’t eat them, but must enjoy them as much as I do.

My favorite sea duck is the goldeneye because the males not only have a glossy green head, but when both sexes fly, their wings whistle and can be heard coming from a long way off. On the North Fork we called them “whistlers.” Two ducks that are rarities locally but can be found if you look long and hard are the canvasback and redhead. The males of both are redheaded. They are half sea duck and half puddle duck; they prefer feeding in freshwaters, but they dive as skillfully as the sea ducks. Otter Pond has one or more canvasbacks each winter while Big Reed Pond in Montauk is a favorite spot for the redhead.

Two other rarities locally are the pintail, the male of which has a long tail, longer than the tail of a long-tailed duck, and the gadwall, a black duck look-alike, but with a gray back instead of a brown one.

The pintail is a very fast flyer, like the canvasback and a hard duck. The similar plumage of the male and female gadwall and black ducks make them the only two local species where it’s hard to tell male from female.

To return to Hook Pond — some say it is in trouble — there are some ducks in it that always show up in the annual January waterfowl count, but rarely elsewhere locally: the common merganser and the hooded merganser. Fort Pond in Montauk is a second spot to find the green-headed common merganser. Mergansers have serrated bills, are fast underwater swimmers, and pursue fish for food. Those sharp little points, or serrations, on the edges of the beak hold onto a fish when it is snapped up and before it is swallowed whole.

As far as showiness goes, my favorite ducks looks like a large male mallard with an exaggerated Donald Duck bill. It’s the shoveler, which uses that oversized flattened bill to suck up subsurface pond vegetation and the organisms found in it in vacuum-cleaner fashion. You’re apt to find this one in Sagg Pond or Mecox Bay.

The American widgeon, or baldpate, is a nondescript puddle duck smaller than a mallard with a white forehead, and it’s always very busy dabbling when on the surface of a pond. It’s a very rapid and maneuverable flyer, like the blue-winged and green-winged teal, two of our smallest waterfowl, which wheel and deal when flying from the hunters’ raised guns. You may be lucky enough to find a Eurasian teal, which is reddish brown in color, unlike any other duck in these parts. 

The ruddy duck is ruddy like its name. It’s a little bigger than a teal, has a tail that points up not out, hangs out in large flocks, and dives for its food. It invariably inhabits Wainscott Pond in the late fall, winter, and early spring, when it’s not frozen over. The pond is owned by the East Hampton Town Trustees as are Georgica and Hook Ponds, but it is surrounded by private landowners and is not easy to access. Maybe that’s why the ruddies like it so much.

The scaup, colloquially the bluebill or broadbill, was once the most common of the diving ducks in Long Island waters, especially in the Great South Bay and the other bays and coastal ponds situated behind the barrier beach and the ocean dunes between the Rockaways and Hook Pond. There are two species, greater, with a green head, and lesser, with a purplish head. They were the favorites of the south bays’ duck hunters, as they were good eating and could be drawn to decoys by hunters waving a white flag, before ducking back down into the blind as the ducks approached. They are curious. Now they are scarce.

Two closely related ducks are the ringnecked and tufted ducks. These two species can often be found in proximity to scaup. Big Reed Pond in Montauk and Shorts Pond on the north side of Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton are two spots to look for the ringneck, the more common of the two.

The two ducks with the finest and warmest feathers of all are the eiders, king and common. They are diving sea ducks like the scoters and two arctic species, along with the seals, that are exceptions to the global warming trend. They move a little bit farther south each year. Indeed, they have already bred on Fisher’s Island, and one can see the brown juveniles hanging around in small flocks among the surfers near Montauk Point in the middle of summer.

Having mentioned Montauk Point, I can’t leave out the most exquisitely colored sea duck of all, the harlequin. Every other winter or so, a pair will take up residence just off the point, where they dive for their food among the large glacial erratics. When I was at Southampton College a pair used to set up in the Shinnecock Inlet near the rock jetties every December and January, as well. The college is gone, so are the harlequins.

Everyone knows the Canada goose. Some are here all year round and, like the mallard and the mute swan, are common breeders here. They were very scarce when I was a boy, but now they rank among the most numerous species on Long Island waterfowl counts. There is a smaller subspecies, the Richardson’s goose, that is identical in appearance and is frequently found among them in fields and coastal ponds. Every year we get some blue geese, usually the white morph of the species, the snow goose. They have a distinctly different honk and you are more apt to see them or hear them flying over than see them on land or in a pond. We are also visited by the barnacle goose and very, very rarely by the Ross’s goose, a half-size goose that, if found locally, is bound to attract a crowd.

The tundra swan, or whistling swan, is my favorite of all. Most of them go to the Southwest for winter, but each year we get a small complement of four or more. And where do you think they choose to hang out between here and Riverhead? In that troubled Hook Pond. You can occasionally find one of these pure white swans in the fields feeding beside Canada geese. They are grazers when on land, dabblers when in the water. They are a bit smaller than our common mute swan, the Eurasian species that has established itself in the eastern United States for 135 years or so and the one that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Audubon Society are hell-bent on getting rid of.

The mute swan is the real whistling swan, but it is almost “dumb” vocally. When it flies you can hear its low whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-whoosh from a quarter mile away. It pretty much stays in the water, except when it nests on land along a shore. It uses its long neck to reach down two to four feet underwater to feed on rooted pond flora. The male and female form a near monogamous pair and raise and protect their young for almost a year after they hatch. But, finally, they can no longer put up with them, so they push them away, at times, forcibly. Hmm . . . not unlike we humans at times.

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

Most of the eastern United States is made up of counties, townships, cities, villages, hamlets, and neighborhood areas that have names but have no local government. The western states, which came latest, have counties and cities, but also neighborhoods that have distinct names as in the East. Some of the Midwest states, which joined the union in the middle of its growth, have towns and villages, as well as cities and counties.

The eastern states patterned themselves after Great Britain, partly by choice, but also because they were under English control and ownership until the end of the American Revolution. Having very small units of government was one way of furthering local control. Nassau County has only three townships, two cities, and a slew of villages. In Suffolk County newly incorporated villages such as Islandia and Mastic are formed here and there, and, not infrequently, a hamlet such as Montauk will try to become its own village, but a referendum is needed to make it happen.

In the hamlet of Mattituck on the North Fork, where I grew up, it is very much like a village with its own post office even, but it has no village board and does not actually govern itself; it’s governed by the Town of Southold, in which it is located. The townships were originally under the control of elected trustees answerable to England’s state government, but when New York State passed a law in the early part of the 20th century creating townships run by town councils, only three of Suffolk’s 10 townships kept active town trustee units — Southold, Southampton, and East Hampton — as separate government entities.

Moreover, townships and villages had their own police departments. The five eastern Suffolk townships and most of their villages still have local police departments, but, in the interests of economy, Suffolk’s other five towns elected to use the county’s police department to maintain law and order in their jurisdictions.

The trustees deeded out parts of the land primarily for subsistence farming and the like under state “patents,” such as the Dongan Patent, according to which East Hampton Town Trustees still govern and are stewards of their public lands. Town councils and trustees are often at odds, especially in Southampton and East Hampton. Hamlets do not have local laws; cities, townships, and villages do, once approved by the state. Then there are county laws enacted by county legislatures. In Suffolk County the 10 townships and their villages were under the control of a county board of supervisors until after the middle of the 1900s, when the boards of supervisors were replacedby county legislatures. A few years later Nassau County followed suit. The posts of county executive were created to lead the counties, but only with the consent of the legislatures that enacted laws and helped oversee county departments.

It seems complicated, but it all works. Some of the hamlets like Wainscott, Montauk and Amagansett have their own post offices. A few hamlets have their own public schools, one of which, in Wainscott, is very small, but quite long-standing. Sagaponack in Southampton Town was a hamlet with its own one-room schoolhouse, but near the beginning of the new century became an incorporated village, and still has its oneroom schoolhouse.

One of the largest neighborhoods in East Hampton Town, as large as any hamlet and not in a hamlet, itself, is Northwest Woods. Others are Promised Land, Beach Hampton, Montauk-bythe-Sea in the hamlet of Amagansett, Camp Hero and Oceanside in the hamlet of Montauk, Whalebone Woods in East Hampton, Lion Head in the hamlet of Springs, and Georgica in the hamlet of Wainscott.

What does this have to do with nature, you ask? Well, hamlets have their own shtick, as it were, just as nature has different territories and ecological communities. The various human political units and neighborhoods have distinct characters.

Noyac, where I reside, is a lightly populated middle-class hamlet on Noyac Bay and Sag Harbor Cove. It abounds with birds, mammals, frogs, salamanders, snakes, you name it. It has its own crow population and crow roost up in the hills. On the other hand, it has almost no nightlife in the manner of Montauk and Amagansett. It is idyllic, save for Noyac Road, which is progressively busier year after year as it competes for traffic with Montauk Highway and Scuttlehole Road in the early morning and late afternoon in fall, winter, and spring, and throughout the day in summer.

All of these neighborhoods, hamlets, and villages were created bit by bit going all the way back to the first South Fork immigrés who crossed the Long Island Sound, sailed into the Peconics and landed at the edge of North Sea Harbor in or about 1650 and proceeded to settle Southampton, which was, in part, already settled by Amerindians for thousands of years prior to white colonists’ arrival.

Cart roads were fashioned in part along old trails. Some were constructed on the marsh with cut cedar poles laid side by side for hundreds of yards. If you have visited the Midwest you will find the roads there quite different. They are laid out in an east-west north-south grid and are as straight as an arrow for miles and miles in any direction. Not so on Long Island.Trails meandered and roads meandered in their tracks following geological contours and avoiding glacial erratics, which littered the surface of the higher areas.

Everyone had a place and a name and mostly got on. They were all in the same boat, as it were. They created schools for the young ones and almost everyone attended church on Sunday. The men teamed up in volunteer fire departments, worked together to catch whales and bring in long seines by hand. There were no Levitts or Farrells to come in and build you a house as if overnight. People pitched in, helped each other out, communed, and enjoyed Sundays, the weekend day of leisure.

Even later on when motor vehicles replaced horse-drawn carts, steam engines moved back and forth from New York carrying people and freight, bicycles became as popular as walking, motorboats replaced rowboats, refrigerators put the ice man out of work, and so on, it was still very folksy in the hamlet of Mattituck right up until the end of World War II.

Then the concept of “upward mobility,” something borrowed from city life, began to rear its ugly head. We began to compete zealously; we left the womb of nature and natural life; we went amok. In my way of thinking we are still amok, caught in a rat race that is fed by greedy self-serving politicians, but trying mightily to return to some semblance of old ways, old days, when a man on a tractor or wielding a hammer or a Stillson wrench was as important as an attorney in a three-piece suit or a celebrity eating at a local restaurant.

Now comes the real rationale for such a long and boring tale. The hamlets of East Hampton are to be studied by professional planning consultants picked by the town. In Southampton, the Flanders area is to become gentrified, at least as shown in Newsday’s futuristic pictures under the watchful eye of another team of high-paid consultants.

I ask: Is it possible to come up with a plan that preserves current density or even reduces it in these hamlets? Can we get back to some small houses, uncrowded and peaceful neighborhoods where walking is as important and enjoyable as motoring and playing fantasy football games? Is it possible to stop razing houses to build new ones? Can we let kids learn to work with their hands early on, rather than spend all of their free moments playing video games and Little League baseball? Can we convene as friendly neighbors, help each other out, turn the leaf blowers into hand rakes, keep the loud music within the confines of one’s private space? Does every house need a lawn, a deer fence?

I realize we can’t go back in time, but we can make things simpler, easier, quieter, darker at night, while we still have the chance. How about it, consultants? Square the circle or round the square, but come up with something useful, pleasant, aesthetically pleasing, and nice for a change.

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

One of my closest friends growing up in Levittown was Ronald Kuhlman. His father was a taxidermist, an old-school practitioner of the ancient art who was able to skin a hunter’s pride right down to gut and bone. He would store the essentials (fur, skull, scaly skin) in the fridge while he sculpted the wire frame to recapture a trout’s lunge, or a rabbit’s last hop, and then re-stuff the trophy to a semblance of that moment: that interplay of trigger finger or perfectly cast lure — and immortality.

Ronald and I loved to search his father’s fridge, its rabbits-in-progress, a hawk waiting for its perch to dry. There were the glass eyes, the smell of formaldehyde, and the kindliness of a meticulous craftsman who reminded me of Geppetto.

I’m far from a meticulous type, but I admire them whether their art involves repairing a harpsichord or, like the man with jeweler’s glasses slipping halfway down his nose who last week rebuilt my old Penn reel, the very same combination of perfectly meshed and oiled gears that I hope will do what it was designed for — in fact, what it did two years ago — haul a monster striped bass to shore before the end of bass season.

I wonder which comes first. Is it the man or woman who wants a better way to catch a fish or build a better piano or mousetrap? Or is it the urge to tinker? I think tinkering is the heart of it, tinkering and, more important, the symbiosis that forms between “the fool and his tool,” as my reel-repairman puts it.

It was a silvery afternoon like we’ve been blessed with in recent days, no, make that weeks. Rumor had it that a massive school of very large bass was moving east to west with the tide. A friend urged me to start looking at Atlantic Avenue in Amagansett. I was in the hood, took the tip.

There was a good-size swell with an offshore wind that stood the wave up like tall, powerful grass, and through the brownish-green grass fish streaked, chasing smaller fish — a surfcaster’s dream. I ran west to catch up with a boil of feeding striped bass.

Experience had taught me to stop shy of the boil itself and shy of the casters crowding the spot.

On the third cast I felt the tug, the one that hooks a fisherman at the very same moment it hooks a fish, never to be forgetten, and a reel never to abandon.

The rain and wind of last Wednesday didn’t spoil the fall foliage after all. As of Monday, the oaks in my yard still had three-quarters of their leaves and were more than 50-percent green. Is it a sign of global warming that leaves take longer and longer each year to turn or is it just some enigma that won’t easily be explained and predictable for some time?

The turn of the leaves is late, and so, too, is the hibernation of the spring peepers and other local frogs. On Sunday, the four new interns from East Hampton High School who continued the multiyear study of Montauk’s Big Reed Pond environs accompanied by their Third House Nature Center tutors ran into a bunch of them. Before they saw a few on the forest floor as they walked along, they heard many more peeping away.

We call them “spring” peepers because they peep the most in spring when they begin breeding at the time of the vernal equinox. In California near my old Santa Barbara residence, the tree frogs in the same genus, Pseudacris, and almost identical to our local ones in appearance, could be called “fall peepers” because they peep in the fall around the beginning of the rainy season. They’re called California tree frogs.

Ours are moving underground at this time, although a little later than usual, and the males peep now and then during the process. Is it a rallying cry? “We’re going under now, see you next spring, don’t forget.” “Let’s hope next March and April is wetter and we can spawn a big crop of larvae and tadpoles to make up for this year’s low turnout.” As soon as there is water available after February, the spring peeper, which can stand freezing temperatures in the low 20s, gets going. It is not deterred by cold snaps.

Birds migrate to the tropics and near-tropics to find food in the winter. Amphibians are cold-blooded, don’t fly, and eat mostly insects. Why stay above ground, insect-less, and suffer the cold in November, December, January, and February when you can be hibernating away underground?

Yes, it was a bad year for the early-breeding amphibians. Most of the ephemeral ponds in which they breed had very little water in them or none at all. The gray tree frog, the spring peeper’s slightly bigger brother, did a little better, and bred on and off into late July, whenever it rained.

All of our salamanders save one also need spring water in which to lay their eggs. They must have taken a hit as well. The South Fork salamander that doesn’t need water, the leadback — a morph of the red-backed salamander — should have done well, but, try as I might, I couldn’t find a single one all spring and summer long. In the year before, I only came across one,in Montauk off Flamingo Road.

This species, Plethodon cinereus, occurs throughout most of the country and is reputed to be the most common of allAmerican salamander species. But something is happening to dispute this reputation on eastern Long Island. It lives in the leaf litter and under fallen logs and rocks. You can often judge the success of a species by the number of eggs it lays when breeding.

Most frogs and salamanders lay hundreds, the leadback lays eight on average. Moreover, it’s our only lungless salamander; it breathes through it mucousy skin, which must stay moist to enable oxygen exchange, although the babies at hatching have tiny gills, the evolutionary trademark of almost all amphibians. (I should point out that another forest-floor creature, the box turtle, lays about the same number of eggs and it too is in serious decline locally. Its biggest predator is of the four-wheeled variety.)

It’s been dry these last few years, but not dry enough to explain the virtual disappearance of the leadback salamander from most South Fork habitats. And it probably isn’t the dreaded chytrid fungus that has been decimating amphibian populations worldwide over the past two decades. Plethodon cinereus has sympatric bacteria that produce violacein, a substance that renders the chytrid fungus harmless.

I’m beginning to think that the rise of another species in the area is coincidental with the plight of the leadback salamander. That species is a heavy forager of the leaf litter creatures and eats anything that’s creepycrawly in addition to vegetation andberries — the wild turkey, gone from most of Long Island by the beginning of the 19th century, but now making a spectacular comeback after being successfully reintroduced by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in the first years of the 1990s.

It remains to be seen. I wonder how Plethodon cinereus is doing on Gardiner’s Island? They’ve had turkeys running wild over there since the early 1960s. But ever since the late Robert Gardiner died it’s been hard to visit the island during the salamander’s active months, March through October.

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

It’s that time of year again. Greens turn to yellows, reds, and oranges. Colorful birds flit from treetop to treetop, feeder to feeder. Gray squirrels and blue jays gather and sequester bronzy acorns. Azure skies sail overhead and morph into carmine-purple sunsets, then 7-to-7 uninterrupted black. Better to appreciate the harlequin days against a backdrop of lightless nights. Yes, it’s fall, and isn’t that grand?

One could say that we were given dominion over the Earth because we see colors. What about the thousands of mammalian species that see only black and white and shades of gray? They are left to appreciate the change of the season using their noses and ears instead of their eyes. Even lowly insects, which, as members of the animal kingdom, rule the world in numbers, see colors. Birds and fish see colors as we do, and as a result are as colorful as what they perceive with their eyes.

We know why some insects are colorful. Take the monarch butterfly and the milkweed beetle; they use their orange and black colors to ward off would-be predators because they are bitter-tasting and poisonous. Other insects take on the same hues and patterns as the distasteful ones and escape predation. 

The western newt of California, Oregon, and Washington is a beautiful orange. You can pick it up and admire it, but having one slip into your campground coffee when you’re not looking could spell curtains. The reef-dwelling lionfish could not be prettier, but if it pierces you with its spines, you will have to go to the emergency room. The so-called femme fatale is hardly repugnant; watch out or you could be smitten, then bitten.

Butterflies are perhaps the most beautiful creatures on Earth. They are only active during the day when their colors and patterns can be fully appreciated. Their nocturnal counterparts, the moths, on the other hand, are mostly gray, and if not gray, at least drably and dully colored. But a handful of moths are as beautiful as butterflies. They tend to be active diurnally, that is, in the day. The moth that showed up on the door of the East Hampton Library the other day was almost too beautiful to behold. If a Star photographer hadn’t come by to snap its picture, we might never know about it, as it is not from this country but from Asia.

Why is this creature, possibly the only one of its kind on Long Island, in the State of New York, or, even, in the United States, so damn beautiful? Its vernacular name, oleander hawk-moth, provides a partial answer. Oleander leaves are quite toxic to humans and other leaf-eating mammals. The oleander hawk-moth larva that feeds on them is equally toxic, as is the adult into which it metamorphoses. That is one reason.

But it must be more than just a warning coloration that is at work here. This moth is one of the sphingid, or hawk-moths, the ones that are easily confused with hummingbirds that hover over flowers sucking up nectar in the faint light of near dusk. Sphingid moths have siphons that act like the long curved beaks of hummers, and they are equally adept at removing nectar from a flower’s center.

Hummingbirds, especially those in the tropics, are beautifully arrayed, as are the so-called neotropical warblers — prothonotary, blue-winged, yellow, etc. Almost all tropical birds are outright colorful. However, as in humans, invariably one sex is more beautiful than the other. In birds, except for a few very funky forms like phalaropes, the male is the spectacular one. In humans, it’s the female!

Yes, there are lots of so-called hunks — the Cary Grants, as it were — among us. But taken as a whole throughout the continents, women are the most esthetically pleasing. Men may be trying to catch up, but the secondary sex characteristics of the two spell the difference. Let’s face it, penises are ugly, bosoms are pretty. We are the only mammalian species where the female is decidedly different in appearance from the male.

To return to the oleander moth, the autumn leaves, the flowers of spring, summer, and fall, coral reef fishes, jellyfish, and myriad other parts and forms of nature — why are they so damn beautiful? Is it because of evolution? Some biologists have tried to marry function and beauty as hand-in-hand attributes undergoing natural selection over time. We say the cheetah is a beautiful cat because it is so streamlined, yet that trait allows the cheetah to achieve speeds of 60 miles per hour or more in order to catch prey for subsistence. Form and function can be inseparable and usually are.

Does the female oleander moth find the male oleander moth beautiful? Certainly, we know by their picks and choices that the rather drab female bower birds find the males overwhelmingly attractive, but the males cannot just look equally beautiful, they have to outperform each other to win over the hearts of their would-be mates.

Such canoodling brings us to one of the oldest questions since the advent of prostitution. Are beauty and aesthetics absolute qualities, or are they inventions of Homo sapiens? We can only ask ourselves this question. Perhaps that is why we are so set on finding life in outer space, especially humanoid life. We can go around and around asking ourselves this question, but our answers will never be definitive. They will always be biased by our dual roles as questioner and answerer.

On the other hand, if there is such a quality as beauty and such a quality is important to the progression of life forms, then we can anticipate that animate objects having come this far in four billion years will continue to become more beautiful over future generations. Perhaps even so beautiful that we will all be mesmerized into becoming at once both paralyzed and inanimate, at which moment all life will be transfixed and our universe as we perceive it will end in a flash.

We are left to catch as catch can. Enjoy the fall!

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

Ah, fall, the sound of acorns dropping on the roof on a breezy night can wake you up, but it’s much more comforting than the sound of the rain of frass from a thousand gypsy moth larvae defecating at the same time. The acorn that falls on your roof and rolls off does not fall far from your house.

It’s a miracle of sorts, a potential 150-foot-tall oak in a roundish hard nut no bigger than a cherry. Thousands of such potential miracles have been cluttering up my yard with the odd chance that a few will survive to become seedlings to grow into saplings to become adult trees and acorn-bearers themselves.

Chances are slim, but that is why an oyster in season will release thousands of eggs or sperm in the hopes that a few of each will combine, morph into larvae, develop tiny shells, and drop to the bottom to begin their two-to-three-year course to maturity. Most of the would-be oysters from the first release of their gametes will end up in the mouths of zooplankton, fish, sea birds, jellyfish, even whales.

That marvelously manufactured acorn with its little top point so wonderfully sitting in its cup covered with scales is not only the staff of oak tree life but the staff of life for 100 different critters, including squirrels, blue jays, white-footed mice, chipmunks, acorn woodpeckers, wild turkeys, deer, foxes, opossums, raccoons, even black ducks out of water, foraging on land.

Such diverse forms as the oak tree and the oyster have come up with the same strategy for survival, called “swamping” in ecology. One produces so many of one kind in the course of reproduction that a few will get through the slings and arrows of their consumers and make it to maturity, but it only takes a few.

In the case of the oaks, they have another trick up their sleeves. Mix up your acorn-producing years; don’t produce a big crop every year, maybe only every third or fourth year. Almost all nut producers in nature employ a similar strategy. In this way, the trees regulate the population size of the animals that count on them for food.

The forest is not like a farm field. Practically every seed sewn across a farm field germinates and grows to maturity, given water and the kind of care that seeds in the wild don’t receive. That is why, when you walk through an oak-hickory hardwood forest on eastern Long Island, you find very few offspring waiting in the wings to follow in the footsteps of their parents. Come a massive nut drop or fire and in a few years the place is jumpingwith tree seedlings.

Oaks don’t entirely depend on their fruit-producing strategy. They have another ace up their sleeves. They produce tannins. Oaks lent their name to the little stream that flows under Soak Hide Dreen into Three Mile Harbor’s south end, Tan Bark Creek. Tannins are great for coloring the water brown and treating hides for human uses but taste lousy to would-be nibblers, save gypsy moth larvae, oak-leaf borers, and others like them. The animals that eat acorns almost never eat the foliage. But even the insects that feed on the oaks generally prefer white oaks to black and scarlet oaks because the white oaks have less tannin. It’s the same reason that Native Americans who made flour from acorns preferred the white oak acorns over the others.

On our walk through the woods bordering Long Pond south of Sag Harbor on Sunday last we came upon several little oaks and hickories widely spaced in their distribution. Their leaves were larger in size than the leaves on the oaks and hickories towering above them that spawned them and they were mostly along the trails or in semi-open areas. Why is that? During the growing season from May through August the canopies of the mature trees capture most of the incoming light; larger leaves increase the chances of catching what’s left.

On the same walk, three trail-blazing off-road vehicles screamed past. The boys driving them were obviously not there to see the autumn foliage. But the view across Long Pond at our final stop was breathtaking nonetheless. The tupelos had all turned to burgundy, the swamp maples to reds and oranges. Geese and a pair of swans paddled slowly toward the far side.

One wonders if the deer, turkeys, squirrels, and other fauna occupying those woods appreciate the view as much as we did when they come to drink at the edge of the pond. Aesthetics and the appreciation of nature were not given solely to humans. Think of bowerbirds, peacocks, and the like, and please don’t blame the deer for being themselves.

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