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].

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

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].

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].

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. 

As many of you readers have observed (or heard falling in the night), there was a tremendous crop of acorns this year, notwithstanding the dryish summer. More acorns should produce more squirrels, which are famous feeders on acorns during the winter months, having squirreled hundreds away during the fall.

One indication of the size of the gray squirrel population is the number of them killed on the roads in a given year. This past year was a big year for squirrel roadkills here. I’ve recorded on average one per day.

Another indication of squirrel numbers is the number of nests, or dreys, along a given stretch of road or throughout a neighborhood. Squirrels remain active throughout the winter unlike two other local rodents, groundhogs and chipmunks, which hibernate. They prefer holes in trees or attics, but when they run out of these two options, the next best option is a drey perched up in a tree, almost invariably a hardwood tree.

Last winter I noticed an uptick in the number of dreys on the South Fork compared to previous years. This year there is a bumper crop of them. They are very easy to observe after the leaves fall, say from mid-November on. A drey is little more than a bunch of dried leaves loosely woven together to form a round hollow nest about the size of a basketball placed in the crotch of a tree generally 40 or more feet above the ground. Some of them are reinforced with twigs and small branches.

Squirrels are adept at using their forepaws and so can cobble one of the leaf nests together in a matter of hours. They usually make the nest when there is no one or no predators around to observe them. They are a favorite of red-tailed hawks, so they keep out of sight as much as possible when they are high in the trees.

On Monday afternoon I drove around the main arteries and back roads in Sag Harbor, East Hampton’s Northwest Woods, and the hamlet of Wainscott looking through the windshield counting dreys. Because the trees were bereft of leaves I was able to see about 100 feet on each side of the road. During the observation period of about 90 minutes I counted the dreys along 34 miles of road.

They were most numerous in residential areas in oak hardwood forests with with very few pines or in treed shoulders bordering fields. The greatest density was found on a stretch of Stephen Hand’s Path in East Hampton between Bull Path and Route 114, where there were 12.3 dreys per mile. They were also abundant along the sides of Wainscott Harbor Road and Merchants Path, where they averaged eight per mile. All told I counted 102 dreys over a course of 34 miles.  There were almost no dreys in the areas of Northwest where the pines outnumbered the oaks. The lowest number of dreys per mile was Daniel’s Hole Road between Montauk Highway and Route 114, a distance of a little more than three miles. I counted two as the road approached 114 on the north, for an average of .6 per mile. Daniel’s Hole Road is very close to or runs through the East Hampton Airport and one wonders if the squirrels are bothered by the noise of the jets and helicopters as much as the people are.

North Haven, which has very few coniferous trees, had a relatively high number of dreys. The stretch between the traffic circle north to the ferry terminal, a distance of about two miles, had 13 dreys for an average of 6.25 per mile.

Dreys can host more than one squirrel at a time. In many cases a cluster of three or four dreys would be found within a circle less than 200 feet in diameter. One wonders if the 2015 offspring, now almost full-grown, fashion dreys close to those of their parents. When a mother is raising young and using a drey as a part-time home, she is usually the sole adult inhabitant.

Almost all of the nests were 40 to 65 feet high, as few as five were 20 to 40 feet high. Lower dreys were found in woods where the trees were shorter, for example, Hand’s Creek Road in East Hampton and upper Stephen Hand’s Path. The denser the human habitation, the more dreys per mile. Old Northwest Road and Bull Path in Northwest are sparsely populated and had only two and four dreys, respectively. They also can be piney.

Squirrels, like deer, turkeys, and chipmunks, and white-footed mice, are as common in residential areas as they are in the outlying ones. Dense residential areas have far more bird feeders than less populated areas and squirrels are not one to turn down free handouts. Despite all of the modern squirrel-inhibiting bird feeder contraptions on the market, most of them have an Achilles’ heal when it comes to squirrels. They are not dummies.

It remains to be seen if there will be as many dreys next fall as this one. Oaks vary their yields from year to year; more than half the time they produce a small crop. When acorns are scarce as they were in, say, the winter of 1994-95, the number of squirrel roadkills shot up astronomically, as squirrels were forced to wander from their home territories to find food, often crossing busy roads to do so.

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].

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].

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].

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.