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.

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].

Growing up on the rural North Fork surrounded by potato fields and water in the mid-1900s was idyllic for most of us. You could work as soon as you could walk, ride your bike anywhere day or night, play outside games like marbles, tag, hide-and-seek, giant steps, listen, look, taste, smell, and touch. You felt safe and secure.

We had calendars but mostly we got to know the change of seasons by the temperature outside, how long or short the days were, whether the ground was covered with snow or green grass, were there leaves on the trees and were they green, was there ice on the pond, and so on.

Everything was seasonal. The robins would be the first birds to show up in the spring; you wouldn’t hear the honking of geese and quacking of ducks until the fall. Spring peepers would call after the first spring rains, whippoorwills in the first week of May, lightning bugs would light up in July, tree crickets and katydids wouldn’t get stridulating until the middle of summer. Parent birds would raise their young beginning in late April and fledge them all by August. You would only see white-throated sparrows in winter, never in summer.

Farming was the chief occupation and vegetable crops were the chief agricultural pursuit. When the asparagus shot up in the spring, you knew what would follow: green peas, string beans, corn, squash, potatoes, tomatoes, and melons. Cauliflower and brussels sprouts were always the last to ripen; they didn’t peak until mid-November.

Hard clams were the first shellfish to be harvested, scallops the last. One went by the rule: only take shellfish, in particular, oysters, during months, with the letter R in them. Blue-claw crabs didn’t show up in harvestable numbers until August.

For fish it was the same. Winter flounders were the first to bite in the very early spring, frostfish, or whiting, the last to be caught in the winter. In between it was, in order, weakfish, porgies, fluke, blowfish, black sea bass, bluefish, snappers, and blackfish. We didn’t have many striped bass around in those days.

As for farm-raised fruit, we all had fruit trees and berry plants. It went something like this: strawberries, raspberries, peaches, pears, apples, walnuts. As for fruit gleaned from the wilds, blueberries came first, then black raspberries, elderberries, and black cherries, with beach plums bringing up the rear. We didn’t have cranberries; we had to steal them from the South Fork and Riverhead bogs.

You might say we were among the last of the hunter-gatherers of the 20thcentury, certainly in New York. We ate well, raising our own chickens, ducks, pigs, goats, and cows. We were poor, but never went hungry. We gathered and caught what we ate with our hands and feet as much as with special implements such as clam rakes. We could even catch blowfish with our hands.

Almost everybody clammed or picked fruit and vegetables. Picking was as much fun as eating what we picked. As the summer progressed and the days started getting shorter, you began to think of the coming schooldays, which invariably started right after Labor Day.

It turns out that Labor Day was not only the last day to celebrate the joys of summer, but was also one of the best days to catch snappers, baby bluefish born of the year. Just about every one of both sexes and all ages spent a day snapper fishing; the days just before the beginning of the new school year were always the most productive.

We didn’t catch them with our hands but we did use a rather primitive method: bamboo poles provided by the local hardware store, Duryea’s. We tied a piece of ordinarysw string to the end of the pole and a small hook to the end of the string. Spearing, or Atlantic silversides, were the best bait. We caught them with little fine-mesh nets. The best place to catch snappers was just inside the inlet to Mattituck Creek. In an hour you could catch 20 or so. They always put up a bit of a fight. My father got to spend very little time fishing because he was always busy baiting our hooks.

As I think back, those snappers tasted very good pan-fried, not oily and overly fishy like their parents tasted. Of course we asked our parents if we could return the next day for another creel full, but before they could answer we knew that they would say, “No, come morning, you’re off to school. Make sure you’re prepared.” That is how summer would end, just like that, not with a bell or a buzzer, but with a wimper.

Let’s talk bones. On Sunday, we sailed Leilani to the Gardiner’s Island porgy grounds. Before we set sail, I walked across the street to the West Lake Marina (it’s still the West Lake Fishing Lodge in my mind) to buy a package of frozen clam bait. 

We had a 10-knot wind out of the southeast to give Leilani a broad reach to the north end of the island, where the porgies are thick, both in numbers and individual heft. En route, and with confidence that the boat rod would bend early and often, we called a few friends to see if they wanted a porgy or two, or three, or four, or as many as they wanted. I already knew the answer: “No thanks, too many bones.”

The answer always reminds me of Cecil Wood, a native of the island of Tobago (one of the two islands that form the nation of Trinidad-Tobago, formerly part of the British West Indies), where a few Montaukers including myself repaired during the winter months in the ’80s to surf. We lived in the village of Black Rock on Mount Irving Bay, where we met Cecil and his extended family. 

Back then, the men of Black Rock joined forces to set a semicircular seine from shore just as East Hampton baymen do to this day, but without benefit of gasoline-powered winches. After the net was set, the people of Black Rock would help haul it ashore. Except for the bigger reef fish, as well as tuna and barracuda that went to market, the rest of the catch was divvied up among those who helped bring the catch ashore.

We helped haul and would bring our share — a mix of small fish unknown to us — to Cecil to work his magic with a dish he called “fish tea,” a broth that included potatoes, a few herbs, vegetables, flour dumplings, whole fish, pepper sauce, and always with a splash of rum. It was so good that to me it seemed downright medicinal. I could not get enough.

One year, we brought Cecil to Montauk. He had never been off Tobago and it was November. “Cold, cold, cold,” he said. We told him that the real cold had not yet arrived, which he found hard to believe. I asked if he’d make a fish tea. He agreed and we went over to the West Lake Fishing Lodge to see if anyone had a cod or two to sell. I’ll never forget the look on Cecil’s face as fishermen filleted their catch and tossed the cod racks — heads and bones — into the waste bins. I secured a fish and we were about to leave when Cecil asked if we could take an extra head or two from the garbage can. Of course, I said, nobody wanted them. Such waste was unknown to Cecil, unforgivable.

We got home and he set about preparing the most delicious fish chowder I have ever had, all the while explaining, between gulps of rum and as the cod heads simmered on the stove, that it was the bones that gave the tea, or any fish dish, its flavor. I knew this, and I knew that our country is about the only one in the world that fillets fish and throws the bones away. There are cultural reasons for this, one of which was how frozen fish sticks (required back when the Catholic church demanded fish be eaten on Fridays) gave fish a bad name.

Bone prejudice is waning, but many fish eaters are still wary. They feel that skeletons make preparing and eating fish more difficult. Not true.

The preparation of a porgy dinner is an object lesson in how to overcome bone fear. Yes, porgies (scup as they’re known in New England and among commercial fishermen) are bony, they have scales, and they are relatively small, all of which makes them hard to fillet. So, don’t fillet them.

We passed by Captain Meat just north of Tobaccolot, a good sign, as he is one of Montauk’s more productive pinhookers, or commercial rod-and-reel fishermen. Sure enough, not two minutes after anchoring up and dropping the porgy rig 14 feet to the bottom, the rod bent and didn’t stop bending until I had six hefty porgies in the bucket, “enough,” first mate Kyle announced, seeing as how our bone-wary friends had demurred.

She also demanded that each porgy was dispatched with a knife to “put them out of their misery,” an ethical thing to do, of course, as well as a way to bleed them, always a good idea, along with plenty of ice, to forestall any ripening.

Actually, these Gardiner’s Island porgs were big and fat enough to fillet, but I have a “bone-in” recipe that can’t be beat. The sail back to Montauk Harbor was a challenge. The east in the wind forced us to tack 20 degrees north of a straight shot, and then to fire up the iron wind, the engine, for the last leg into the inlet. The porgies rested in an icy bath.

Back home, I grabbed a heavy knife, a scaling tool, and a large bowl and brought them to the picnic table out back. Off with their heads. I know I probably shouldn’t, but I leave the heads on the lawn knowing they will be gone the next morning, having fed the family of raccoons in the night.

The porgies were headed and gutted and their scales were scraped off. I then made three slices a few inches apart on each side of the fish. They were then dipped in a marinade of soy sauce and ginger. I marinate them overnight.

If I still had a smoker, I would have smoked three of them, but I don’t. Instead, I took them out of their marinade, and into the slices I slathered a mixture of mayonnaise, lime juice, and minced garlic. Then I wrapped them in aluminum oil. At this point, you can either put them on a grill, in a saucepan with olive oil, or in the oven. I chose the oven this time around. Yum!

Once cooked, the slices stand off the bones of the spine, bite-size. Once the meat of one side of the porgy is eaten, the spine is easily lifted off to lay bare the boneless other side of the fish for easy eating. We ate three porgies hot out of the oven and put the other three in the refrigerator to be consumed cold on Tuesday.

I like them cold. For some reason, the porgies’ subtle flavor is stronger. Makes for great puupuus (finger food). Same with black sea bass. I hope to catch one today. Baked, bone-in, with ginger. Wow!

We all know about the Venus flytrap. It’s a carnivorous plant that lives sparingly in the coastal Carolinas and catches insects in its trap. How many of us, however, know that right here on the East End we have more than a handful of such plants, which eke out a living by catching and eating insects.

Depressions in dunes that fill with native groundwater for part of the year are favorite places for a bunch of flowering plants that are not only attractive but unique in other ways. They have carved out niches in spots with very low mineral contents where flowering plants that require nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, magnesium, and other natural elements would have a hard time getting started.

It’s not that these unique pothole plants don’t require nutrients; they have evolved very special ways of acquiring them — in many cases, not from the water or wet soil they reside in, but from the air surrounding them. They attract insects, trap them with sticky hairs or cups of liquid, then digest them in the same manner as animals digest their foodstuffs, with specific enzymes and catalysts.

These are the insectivorous plants of science fiction movies and books, but, unlike in the movies, they are not capable of ingesting a human or anything much larger than a horsefly. They get by winningly on the small stuff, especially that which they can attract with colors, odors, or other enticements.

Long Island is not known for its rich flora, say the way inland areas like Appalachia are, but it has its share of unusual insectivorous plants, particularly because its glacial, Aeolian, and wave-washed soils are, for the most part, lacking in essential plant nutrients.

The largest of the carnivorous plants is Sarracenia purpurea, the purple pitcher plant. It has red-purple flowers and spiraling conic leaves. The tips of the leaves are wet with a slippery fluid that not only attracts insects but also slides them down the inner column of the leaf into a vat of digestive fluids mixed in water. Very few insects that land on the edges of the leaves make it out alive.

You can find a bunch of them in the bogs off Route 51 in the Town of Southampton. While the pitcher plant is death to intruding insects, it is a home to myriad rotifers, midges, protozoans, and other so-called inquiline micro-organisms that commune in the wetness and share the bounty from the digestion of befallen insects.

There is one insect with wings that makes it in and out of the pitcherplants’ pitchers with ease. It is the pitcher plant mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii. In fact, it trusts its host so much that it deposits its eggs in the pitcher’s water, just as the mosquito that bites you at home lays its eggs in an old tire, can, or fish pond. The larvae hatch from eggs, feed on the smaller organisms swimming around, and eventually morph into adults that aren’t normally sanguineous — the female doesn’t require a blood meal in order to lay fertilized eggs. Thus humans, other mammals, birds, reptiles, and other critters are not bothered by it except in a few areas around Arkansas and Texas at the bottom of its range, where it can look for blood before depositing a second egg crop.

Closer to home are the three species of sundews that reside on the North and South Forks. They also have pretty-colored diminutive flowers and leaves covered with fine glandular hairs that stick to and close on any insect that lands on them. There are two sundews with normal-looking leaves except for the thick covering of reddish glistening hairs — the round-leaved sundew and the spatulate-leaved sundew. The third and most spectacular of the three is the thread-leaf, so called because its leaves are erect, longish thin cylinders, not at all leaf-like, but covered with the same glistening reddish hairs. The flower stalks get to be six inches tall and so, in a way, the thread-leaf has a decided advantage over it smaller cousins.

All three can be found occupying the same square foot of damp soil, however. Perhaps it is a case of “the more the merrier,” in other words the more glistening red hairs, the more likely that flying insects will be drawn to them.

There is a third group of carnivorous plants residing locally. They tend to be aquatic or subaquatic and are called bladderworts. You can find them in Scoy Pond, Crooked Pond, and, in fact, almost any longstanding freshwater pond around that is low in nutrients. Some are floating, like the purple bladderwort; some, like the horned bladderwort, are anchored to the substrate below.

All of these bladderworts have little “catch-’em-alive” traps, or appendages, with “teeth” that close around the aquatic insects that wander into them. Like the lobster trap or crab pot, there is no practical way out once inside. They also have colorful flowers that can rise above the surface of the water. Almost all flying insects are attracted to pretty flowers.

In terms of numbers, the pitcher plants have the fewest species, only three altogether in North and South America. The sundews are more common, with almost 190 different species. Utricularia, or bladderworts, are the most common, with well over 200 species, and are found on every continent except Antarctica, maybe because two-thirds of the earth’s surface is water.

Long, long before the era of fancy outdoor optical instruments for viewing nature, some sharp naked eyes set in patient immobile frames were able to tell that the little sundews and their brethren trapped insects. It was Charles Darwin who had the patience in the 1860s to sit and watch sundew for hours until an insect landed on one, moved, and those glistening hairs fenced it in. His book published in 1875, “Insectivorous Plants,” started an entirely new field in botany, and served to support his theory of natural selection.

Apparently, insectivorous plants evolv­ed from several different plant groups and most likely are still evolving today. One wonders, however, with all the nutrients available in the world’s thick blanket of atmospheric pollution, if evolution in these plants will begin to turn around and proceed in the other direction.

So, I’m standing at the beach with a late-summer visitor, an old friend, looking across Coke bottle-green waves to the horizon, and he says, “You’re so lucky.”

Lucky? Made me think. Sure, I’m lucky in the cosmic sense. I’m alive, in relatively good shape. But, he meant, I’m lucky to be living in Montauk. That’s true too, but it’s a different kind of lucky, like a magnet must feel stuck to the door of a refrigerator. I’m here because forces, seen and unseen, drew me here and required that I stay.

I looked around me that day. The smell of fresh oil paint was in the air. The itinerant painter was at it. He had his paintings on display against the fence, primitive beach scenes, and he was working on a new one. There was the surfer who owned her own landscaping business, the retired fireman and bow hunter who hosts a drum circle each week, the retired eye surgeon, the tall man with the flowing white beard who claims credit for every sunny day and believes the chamber of commerce should give him a stipend. The man with the successful catering business was checking the waves. They were all checking the waves.

Over on the bench was the man with the mind that’s slipping, with the incredible memory, who grew up here and remembers things I experienced that I forgot years ago. Down the beach a ways was a gathering of kids, the next generation of Ditch Plain “groms,” surfers, the children of surfers who will probably — like their parents — be the parents of surfers one day.

Some of these people are my good friends. Others are familiar, fellow magnets. We are stuck to this particular beach and return to it daily like breeding salmon, the steering wheels of our cars unable to pass Ditch Plain Road without turning just for a look at the sea, the waves. Park the car, stroll down to the beach, sit on a bench or one of the logs, take a walk, lie in the sand, get a cup of coffee at the Ditch Witch — get straight.

“Keep your head at the beach” is an old mantra, one that I was indeed lucky to have absorbed from my parents, for whom the beach was a sacred place. Both were from upstate New York, outdoor people, he a hunter, she a farm girl, neither comfortable inside the house. It didn’t matter the weather. We went to the beach every weekend, Jones Beach when I was a kid. The only other people walking in the snow along the boardwalk in winter seemed to be European. Is the need to be out in the wind and weather a cultural thing? I think so.

And, its appreciation is not something kids should have to wait for until the day they stand next to a friend and say, “You’re so lucky.”

There are the “important” things, school and career, but my visitor reminded me of my requirement for spiritual sustenance on a daily basis — a church, if you will — a place within reach, which rhymes with beach.

The small bumper sticker caught my eye a few days ago in a parking lot at the beach. Its message included the ubiquitous heart hieroglyph that stands for the word “love.” Montauk, the whole East End was suffused with silver light that reflects off the sea at the time of the autumnal equinox when the sun sinks lower on the horizon. I call it Silver September.

Fall fell on Sept. 23, when the center of the sun crossed south of the equator. This year, the crossing was attended by a number of events that would have sent the ancients scurrying. The blood-red eclipse of the supermoon, for instance, and the discovery of water on Mars.

The ancients aren’t the only ones. This week in Mecca during the Hajj, Muslim pilgrims approached a wall symbolizing the Devil with stones to take part in the ritual of “stoning the Devil.” Apparently the Devil took offense and over 700 celebrants died in a stampede. By contrast, Pope Francis, preaching, “let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” kept his in his pocket and completed triumphant visits to Cuba and the United States. No judgment here, I’m just sayin’, the trepidation of the spheres seemed to be especially trepidacious, and it was against this backdrop my eye caught the bumper sticker, which read: “I [heart] peeing in my wetsuit.”

What joy. And, on top of that my friend Peter brought me a black sea bass he’d caught at the spot called the Pocketbook, about six miles north of Montauk Harbor. I headed, gutted, and scaled it using my new scaler of Japanese design, and then fried and ate it with sauce of ginger, garlic, and soy. The point is, it’s important to appreciate the simple things during such transformative times.

Peter said he caught two sea bass and would have caught more had a contagion of dogfish (sand sharks) not descended on the spot. He reported seeing a few schools of false albacore, a presence confirmed by Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, who keeps track of what’s going on in Gardiner’s Bay. So I reckon the fly fishermen and light-tackle aficionados will begin casting their brains loose after falsies, although the weather promises to keep them at bay for a few days.

“There was a 26-pound [striped] bass taken at first light at Indian Wells this morning,” Bennett texted on Monday, “so the blood and moon and eclipse were good for something, but I couldn’t stop howling at the darn thing.”

Bennett: “Porgies are still in the bay, snappers all over, but this could be their last week. Bunker all over the bay, albacore and big blues in the rip, but too many sea robins. The horsefoot was released on last night’s moon. Bug, what are you going to do with a 300-pound horsefoot anyway,” Bennett said referring to the conclusion of an experiment he claims was conducted in Accabonac Harbor during the summer by aliens who genetically engineered a horseshoe crab (“horsefoot” in Bonac parlance) to grow to otherworldly proportions. My question is, where was it released to?

I’m skeptical, but then again a whole lot of people were throwing stones at the Devil and consuming the body and blood of Jesus just a few days ago. And the moon bled, for God’s sake, and water on Mars? Perhaps that’s where the horsefoot went.

Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reported a steady take of striped bass “up front” under the Montauk Lighthouse and the Moorland rocks, as one might expect given day after day of east winds pushing bass and their prey within casting distance.

The deadline to enter the Montauk Surfmasters fall classic tournament is Sunday. It gets under way on Monday. Would-be entrants can apply at Paulie’s. On Saturday, the organizers will be offering a casting clinic by Craig Cantelmo and the Van Stall company, reel manufacturers. The clinic is aimed at kids, but is open to anyone. It will cover safety tips — you don’t want to hook the back of your head. It will be held starting at 8 a.m. at the beach access down the road from Paulie’s Tackle shop. I say suffer the children (of all ages) who “heart” peeing in their wetsuits in the September silver while there’s still time.