Let’s face it, if skates, with their bat wings and rat tails, flew in the sky instead of along the bottom of the sea, we’d run inside like cave people fleeing pterodactyls and wait for them to pass.

I’ve always had a fascination with them, however, and it returns about this time of year because in early spring you can find fresh mermaid purses washed up in the wrack line. They are usually larger and olive green in color because the purse’s leathery skin has not yet dried black and shrunken in the air.

On Monday — the day of the skate as it turned out — nice little waves were peeling in front of the short jetty at Ditch Plain so I grabbed my board and paddled out. On the way into the water I passed the wrack line and spied a fresh mermaid purse. It got me thinking.

For those who see them in their dried state — black, rectangular, with what look like two legs on each end — but don’t know what they are, mermaid purses are skate egg cases. When my daughter was young, we would hunt the wrack line with a pail of seawater in search of fresh ones. When one was found, we’d open the seam on one end of the purse and drop the baby skate into the pail and watch it flap its tiny wings. Then we’d release it into the surf.

When I was a kid, my friends and I would collect the dried purses, stick their legs in the sand in formation as though they were soldiers and throw firecrackers at each other’s armies. Boys will be boys.

Younger still, I was obsessed with Aztecs, their obsidian bladed knives and war clubs, and their feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, which I imagined the dried mermaid purses to be. I found that the purses made terrific sacrifices when placed on a pyre of sticks and lighted. Aztecs will be Aztecs.

After my surf session, Kyle and I went on a mission to the North Fork to buy plants and to visit a vineyard or two. This is a terrific time for South Forkers to take the Shelter Island ferries to Greenport. The ferry travelers are mostly local this time of year. Why else would the ticket taker say in answer to my asking if he thought a storm was brewing: “Maybe this afternoon. We might have to take a reef in the mainsail.” I liked the cut of his jib.

We landed in Greenport having had no breakfast. Where to eat? Why not Claudio’s, Greenport’s smaller but no less venerable answer to Montauk’s Gosman’s? It’s a salty place right on the water across the street from Preston’s chandlery.

Again, this is the right time to hit Claudio’s. It gets touristy in summer, but now one has the chance to admire its world-class bar. A fine collection of framed photos of old J-class yachts hang on the walls. Greenport was home to the mostly-Norwegian crews of those spectacular sailboats back in the ’20s.

Before ordering, I toured the old photos en route to the men’s room, wherein the subjects of a mural painted in vivid pastel shades were mermaids, some swimming, others lounging prettily on rocks. I sensed a theme.

Back at our table, our server took our drink order. She was an older woman and extremely friendly. As she handed us menus she strongly suggested we try the day’s special, skate wings served in a caper-butter sauce. Now, you don’t often see skate wings on menus, even fishy East End menus.

Our server told us how she was offered a taste of skate a year or so ago. The very thought of it at the time caused her to screw up her mouth and wrinkle her nose in a way she displayed. “I catch skates when we go fishing for fluke and porgy off Gardiner’s Island in summer. Eeeee, the way they twist around on your line when you catch ’em.” There was that face again.

But then she said she threw caution to the wind and took a taste. Her eyes widened. A broad smile revealed the happy ending. I happen to love skate wings. Sometimes I’ll get a pair of wings as a gift from a fisherman friend, or keep the bigger skates I catch. They’re easy to prepare. You simply cut the wings from the skates, and using a sharp fillet knife, slice the flesh from the wings’ cartilaginous skeleton. The meat is tightly ribbed, like the skeleton. It has no bones, and the wing meat cooks up white and tender. I ordered the special. It was delicious.

Our server stopped at our table on her rounds and we talked skates. I told her we fished the same waters around Gardiner’s Island, midway between Greenport and Montauk, during the summer. We vowed never again to throw back a skate with wings large enough to eat.

One question remains: Why “mermaid purses”? At first glance the bottom feeders look more like brown, prehistoric bats with sandpaper skin, spines, and shark-like eyes on their dorsal side. But turn them over. Their underside is virginal white, smooth, like the skin of the mermaids in Claudio’s men’s room, with only a pretty little mouth that wears a sweet, perpetual smile.

Best to dress your skates with their scary side up. It’s hard to cut the wings off a mermaid who’s smiling at you.

It’s 1820, the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Two sperm whales have been harpooned from the small boats launched from the whaler Essex out of Nantucket. A bull sperm whale does not like what’s going on. Enraged, it charges the Essex, ramming her bow twice. The ship fills with water, capsizes, and leaves her crew of 20 to head for the coast of South America a couple of thousand  miles away in three boats with nothing but a limited supply of hardtack and very little water. Half die en route, the others barely survive by cannibalizing their fellow whalemen.

I just finished Nathaniel Philbrick’s “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.” The movie directed by Ron Howard hit theaters last week. Haven’t seen the movie, but I hope Howard interprets the “tragedy” in Philbrick’s title broadly enough to include the fate of the whales during a time they were being slaughtered for oil to light our lamps and even the beacon that reached out to sea from the Montauk Lighthouse.

The story of the Essex was well known in the 19th century. In fact, it fired the mind of a young whaleman named Herman Melville after he read the account of the sinking and the horrors of the crew’s subsequent fight for survival written by the Essex’s first mate, Owen Chase. Given the times, his account, and “Moby-Dick,” focused primarily on the human trials in the face of the cold, unmerciful power of Nature.

It would be interesting to see a comparison of the relative value, in economic terms, of the whale fishery of that time to the recreational fishing industry today. It’s apples and oranges, of course. Whaling itself was a purely commercial enterprise, while catching a fish is fun. It’s the supplying the means of the fun that has become a giant industry. The two fisheries share an almost religious belief in the right to pursue a natural resource.

I leave market fishing out of this equation because the 19th century could have been, and was, lighted by other than whale oil, but fish was, and continues to be, a primary source of food for much of the world.

Reading Philbrick’s well-told story coincided with the recent agreement among Atlantic coastal states to reduce the harvest of striped bass by 25 percent. The stock has rebounded from its collapse in the 1980s in large part due to careful management of both commercial and recreational fisheries, but the numbers are still huge. The commercial fishery has grown from 3.4 million pounds in 1995, to about 7 million pounds per year since 2004. The National Marine Fisheries Service and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission put the recreational catch at 19 million pounds in 2012.

Managers say that in pure numbers, the stock is not being overfished. However, the population of the female breeding stock has been hit hard. Computer projections suggested that if the fishing mortality rate were maintained through 2017, the spawning stock would be overfished. Studies show that a strong 2011 year class will help offset this trend. A 25-percent reduction in overall catch was recommended in deliberations by member states of the Atlantic Marine Fisheries Commission over the winter.

This will most likely translate to a catch limit of one striped bass per day measuring 28 to 34 inches, plus, if you’re lucky, one “trophy fish” measuring at least 36 inches. The one fish per day rule will hold for anglers aboard boats for hire who were permitted two fish measuring at least 28 inches in the past. The rules have been agreed to by New York’s neighboring states. This state’s recreational bass fishery is due to open on April 15.

It was heartening to hear veteran charter captains agree that an obscene number of large breeding females had been taken during the season. A number of the more responsible captains urged their customers to be satisfied with one fish despite what the regulations allowed for.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, even the biggest striped bass are not large enough to capsize a small boat full of fly-casters, leaving them no alternative but to eat each other. Then again, we are fast approaching a time when more of us realize that cannibalism does not refer only to human eating human. We are now painfully aware that the word also refers to the human race’s voracious appetite for the world’s resources.

The snow is melting away quickly, and the ice in the bays is disappearing almost as fast. Spring is three days away. Things are heating up. The black widow spider that lives between the panes of my south-facing window has made her end-of-winter debut. I’m sure she hasn’t eaten a thing since the end of summer, as she is the same size as when she retreated in the fall.

We are all waiting for the ospreys to return. Howard Reisman’s spot on North Sea Harbor in the hamlet of North Sea is generally early on the osprey’s return list as they feed on the alewives that annually leave Peconic Bay, then the harbor, and make their way upstream to Big Fresh Pond. It’s an annual event that surely dates back to the founding of Southampton.

The winter birds that have been feeding day in and day out in my yard and that of my neighbors haven’t appeared for four days. Are they out in the wilds looking for food uncovered by the melting snow? It’s hard to say, but perhaps it’s because of the sharp-shinned hawk that flew into my yard and landed on a bush today. A week ago I found the feathers of a freshly killed mourning dove. Once a bird predator like a Cooper’s hawk, peregrine falcon, merlin, kestrel, or sharp-shin starts hanging around, the feeder birds are wont to find a safer place to spend the day.

It’s been a very tough winter for those mute swans the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has been trying to get rid of. Last week Terry Sullivan found two dead ones along the Redwood Causeway in Sag Harbor. Swans have evolved long necks so they can reach down to the bottom of ponds, coves, and shallow bays to feed on the aquatic vegetation rooted there. All of the freshwater ponds and many of the salt ponds, tidal creeks, coves, and bays have been frozen for more than a month so that the swans have little to feed on. In order to find open water they’ve had to use the ocean or the middle of the bays and Long Island Sound. Calm such waters are good for over-nighting, but much too deep for feeding. It looks like Mother Nature is saving the D.E.C. some embarrassing work.

Canada geese are not having an easy time of it either. They feed like swans when they’re in the water and feed in the fields when they are not covered with snow and ice. A dead Canada goose showed up in Otter Pond in Sag Harbor. On the other hand, the black ducks, mallards, and other puddle ducks that use the spring-fed shallows of Otter Pond and East Hampton Village’s Nature Trail aren’t doing all that bad. Keep in mind that groundwater that seeps up in springs here and there is about 55 degrees, so upwelling spots like those along the south and southeastern edges of Otter Pond manage to stay unfrozen during even the coldest of winters.

While we wait for the osprey’s return several of us have been fascinated by the number of bald eagles, both white-headed adults and brown-headed young, around. They have been especially plentiful around Sagg Pond east of Bridgehampton where Greg Boeklen has been making a photographic study of them. Bald eagles take live prey, many times injured prey, and also frequently scavenge, which osprey very rarely do. They are both the generalists and the opportunists of the raptor clan. Because of the latter trait, Ben Franklin felt them unworthy of “national bird” distinction.

Nevertheless, they are wonderful to look at, wonderful to watch, and are fantastic flyers and nest builders. And, we are told, they often mate for life.

This year has been the biggest one since 1991 for eastern Long Island bald eagle sightings. It may have something to do with the fact that at least two pairs are steady East End breeders. The Nature Conservancy’s Sagg Swamp Preserve, comprising the headwaters of Sagg Pond, has many tall trees that could easily support an eagle’s nest or two. Don’t be surprised if a pair takes up residence there this year.

One sign of spring is the song of the red-winged black birds. They’ve been regularly “okareeing” for a week now around Big Reed and Oyster Ponds in Montauk, according to Victoria Bustamante, who can hear them from her house.

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

I’ve been working on a book. Slow going at first. But, as most writers will attest, once the narrative ball gets rolling, even if it seems at times to be rolling uphill, the work becomes an oasis of sorts, a place to repair to in your mind.

It’s a bit like having the ability to summon a dream, or a semi-obedient genie whose job it is to gather kindling to feed fantasy’s fire, or at least provide food for thought.

So there I was on Sunday, helping to prepare the Promised Land Salvage Company’s 50 Shades of Montauk float for the St. Patrick’s Day parade when a fellow salver, and longtime friend, mentioned that he’d come upon the remains of a very large (over six feet long) leatherback turtle on the ocean side of Napeague.

Seemed a weird time of year to see a beached sea turtle. I called Kim Durham at the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation. She heads up the team that responds to strandings of marine mammals and sea turtles all over Long Island. If they’re dead, she endeavors to find out why.

Yes, she agreed, it was odd. March is the month when ocean temperatures are usually at their nadir, especially after the winter just past — or has it passed?  Durham said leatherbacks possess a higher level of body fat than other sea turtles. This, and their large size allows them to survive in colder water, she said. In fact, they are known to migrate as far north as Newfoundland. But mid-March, with ocean temps in the mid-30s?

Durham said it was possible that the big turtle had been buried under sand, snow, and for a long time, like the vegetable monster in the “The Thing From Another World,” or Otzi the iceman found frozen in the Austrian-Italian Alps, a natural mummy at least 3,000 years old. And also like the carcasses of birds and deer, now appearing, that winter’s reaper harvested and then entombed in snow.

It’s different to see evidence of Nature’s cull all at once in the spring melt, while at the same time listening to birds singing in the spring. Perhaps the contrast explains the five turkey vultures roosting shoulder to shoulder on a neighboring rooftop facing the setting sun on Sunday. We’re listening for peepers, watching for alewives making their return to sweet water dreens to spawn, and for the first striped bass to show. The ocean-warming Gulf Stream is still a long way off.

How ’bout a children’s book about a wise old leatherback that loved Montauk so much that she decided to forego the usual southern migration with the others, to risk the cold. And if she didn’t make it, it would be okay to die here, she thinks. It’s been a long, rich life.

But then she lives through the winter to tell younger turtle friends about the ice, the seals, and the surfers dressed as seals who rode the waves dodging big chunks of ice. She tells of befriending a young surfer girl, who, after being scared by the big turtle at first, finally accepts a ride on her leatherback. I see an evil gill-netter whose nets ensnarl the turtle.

A friendly member of the East Hampton Town Marine Patrol — Ed Michels comes to mind — frees the leatherback with a knife. The turtle falls in love with her gallant savior and asks him to sail away with her into the sunset, sailboats being the only kind she’d be able to keep up with, but Michels explains that to sail into the sunset would mean going through the Panama Canal, and besides, he hates sailboats.

Heartbroken, and immune to the “you have the whole world before you” efforts of her surfer friend to raise her spirits, the old leatherback decides to wait for the coldest part of the coming winter, crawl up onto the beach and let Nature freeze her into the mysterious heroine in a story that becomes so famous — Owl-and-the-Pussy-Cat famous — that a fan cuts the head off her carcass as a wall trophy to remind his young daughter of the moral of the tale. . . . 

I haven’t got that far, but it’s true, the part about someone taking the leatherback’s head. And if he mounts it, like the one that has peered sagaciously from the wall of the Shagwong bar and restaurant for the past half century, the turtle is sure to generate stories more farfetched than this. In fact, the truth is very far-fetched, that is it has come a great distance in time. 

Carl Safina of Amagansett wrote “Voyage of the Turtle,” a wonderful book about leatherbacks, which he calls the closest animal there is to a living dinosaur. I suspect this old turtle died in late fall and washed up. A storm surge buried it in sand, which was then covered by snow. A recent storm has brought it to light in the spring thaw. The moral of that story is: The wondrous circle of life is revealed in the season when youngest life meets its oldest remains.

After two major retreats spring marches on. There is no turning back, or is there? In this millennium there have been several spring northeasters, and in March 2010 the East End got more than seven inches of rain in two close-together storms.

Along the roadsides, as the last bit of snowplow snow and ice melts away, groups of grackles, robins, and red-winged blackbirds are searching for things to eat. The earthworms haven’t come up yet, so pickings are meager. Redwinged blackbirds are singing, grackles are croaking, robins have yet to sing. The red-bellied woodpeckers have been staking out territories for more than a week using their meow-y calls to attract mates.

Some ospreys are finally back. Margaret Smythe gets the prize for seeing the first one locally. It was on March 13 when she was motoring along Long Beach Road and saw an osprey visiting a familiar haunt at the edge of Sag Harbor Cove. On St. Patrick’s Day Al Daniels, a fellow nature observer, saw perhaps the same osprey in the same area. On the 18th Vicki Bustamante saw two — a conjugal pair? — flying side by side over the outflow of the Peconic River in Riverhead.

The ospreys are trickling back, but the bald eagles, which strutted the stage a week earlier, are ebbing. Waterfowl of several species are becoming common in the coastal ponds as they slowly give up their icy coating. Terry Sullivan observed a flock of ruddy ducks at the north end of Sagaponack Pond on Saturday. When he looked closely there was a red-necked grebe in the center of them. Red-necked grebes are seen here and there from time to time, but they are rarely encountered in numbers here like the horned grebes are.

On Friday Chris Chapin saw one of the first pairs of plovers to return. No, not the fabulous piping plover that hangs around the seashore, but one of the upland plovers, the killdeer, which nests in fields and is the earliest of the plover group to nest on Long Island each year. Jean Held was in her Sag Harbor yard on Saturday when a turkey vulture flew over, another early spring arrival. She even saw one of her chipmunks up from underground making a dash along the side of her house.

On Thursday afternoon I caught a glimpse of two adult mute swans flying over Montauk Highway toward Mill Pond in Water Mill. Vicki Bustamante came upon a pair in an open water spot near the inlet to Oyster Pond from Block Island Sound in Montauk. So, at least we know some of the swans made it through the record cold and snowy iced-over winter. Ironically, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is starting on a two-year elimination of this beautiful creature, the largest of our waterfowl. Governor Cuomo vetoed bills sponsored by Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and Senator Kenneth P. LaValle to postpone enacting a management plan until the state’s population is better assessed.

At least the D.E.C. says it won’t kill them outright, just neuter their eggs and the like.

On Monday the treetops of the tall black willows, which are so plentiful in Sag Harbor because of its high water table, were beginning to leaf out. It won’t be long now before red maples, shads, and beach plums follow.

And, oh yes, I forgot the lovely plant photographed so wonderfully by Carissa Katz in last week’s Star, the skunk plant. It can remain green under snow and ice like vinca, or myrtle, and it is genuinely native to Long Island. It has an antifreeze component, which keeps it going and gets it up to flower earlier than the other natives at the end of winter.

Look for the first butterfly to emerge from its winter leaf mulch bed each spring on your next walk in the woods. It’s the mourning cloak and it’s bigger than the monarch, which won’t arrive until mid-May or later. And beware the ticks! They come out during the first dry days in the last week of March and remain out until the end of October.

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

I’m embarrassed for my freezer. It’s pathetic, or it was. So much in and around the house that needs attention after the harsh winter just past. Where do I start? Then I opened the freezer compartment of the refrigerator and it screamed. 

A frozen wasteland. A scene from “Dr. Zhivago.” The coldest, most uncomfortable day of the winter, heavy clothes strewn about the house, wet boots, the rattle of the furnace, an old, leaky window — all of it was before me when I opened the freezer door, a diorama of the winter of 2015. I closed it.

No, I can’t shut it in. Like the gutters and eaves, the empty bags of rock salt, a bag of garbage, a pile of ash from the wood stove, all that remained invisible under the snow until now, the freezer demanded I open the door and deal with the shame that came in two forms.

First the contents: I extracted from beside a stack of three ice cube trays, a slice of pizza in a frost-filled plastic bag (it had turned into an artifact from an ancient civilization), two plastic bags containing clam bait left over from a porgy expedition, probably still serviceable. I put them aside.

From deep in the back, I pulled a plastic container of chili. I think it was chili, or chowder. No, chili. I’m pretty sure I saw beans through the frost. Old beans. Then came a rumpled plastic Zip­loc with something black inside, and along with it the second, more intense wave of shame.

Do you know the verb “to put up”? Like my mother, my Aunt Ethelyn was a farm girl, but unlike my mother Ethelyn remained upstate her entire life, in Chittenango to be exact. She was a gardener, no, a farmer. Her garden was too big to be called a garden. In the fall, she “put up” the vegetables she’d grown, jars and jars and jars of green beans, yellow beans, carrots, a cornucopia of veggies stored in her basement, lined up on shelves “as neat’s a pin,” as she would have put it.

The black thing in the Ziploc — for shame — was a black sea bass I’d caught off Gardiner’s Island at the end of last summer. It had not been put up. It was bagged and thrown into the Frigidaire. It was crumpled, and freezer-burned, a crippled, inedible reminder of that fine day the fish was caught. Such a wasteful injustice to the waters of Gardiner’s Bay. I swore upon the frozen sea bass carcass to right the wrong and put my freezer in order.

All Montaukers recognize the great irony of living on a peninsula surrounded by the bountiful Atlantic with a hometown commercial fishing industry and yet living for months at a stretch without access to fresh fish. Sure, a lot of us have “connections,” and there’s Duryea’s and the Gosmans’ wholesale market if they’re not frozen shut, but no proper fish market. There are complex reasons for this that I won’t go into now. It’s beside the point.

Which is, at least in my case, a feast-in-summer, famine-in-winter mentality that is totally unnecessary. I’m going to buy a chest freezer, and I’ve already begun to seek out those in the community who know how to freeze fish. Keeping fish so that when it’s defrosted it has kept its juices and flavor is an art.

I caught up with Capt. Skip Rudolph and his wife, Vicki Ridgeway, at the Naturally Good store on Monday afternoon. Skip runs the Adios charter boat and — this might sound funny — he cares for fish. Not all fishermen do. I asked him, did he put up fish for the winter? A strange question to ask a fisherman with an endless supply of fresh fish in season? No. Skip has little more access to the fresh stuff during the winter than the rest of us. He said yes, he did put up fish, and that he’d found the best way to do it. I’m all ears.

Most people know that air is the enemy of anything frozen. Air left in a freezer bag sucks the moisture out of whatever’s been frozen. You can bag a piece of fish, then lower the bag into water to force the air out before sealing it. Another method is to freeze fish in a brine. I’ve had some luck with this, but if left in the freezer too long, brine-frozen fish becomes soggy when thawed.

No, the ideal way to freeze fish is to vacuum seal it with one of those FoodSaver vacuum systems. There are other brands, but they all work by totally eliminating air from the freezer bag. They cost anywhere from $100 to $200. Skip Rudolph told me that as good as the vacuum sealers are, there is a refinement he strongly recommends.

He said that in a sense the vacuum machines worked too well. That is, they tend to suck moisture out of the fish as they remove the air. To counteract this, Skip first wraps the fish in a piece of plastic wrap, then places it in the vacuum bag and into the machine. It was as though the fish put up in this way were thawed back to life, he said, going on to extol the qualities of black sea bass, as a species, a food, and as one of his charters’ favored target species.

That’s it. No more fishless winter dinners. I vow to put up fish that I catch (striped bass, porgies, sea bass, blackfish, and bluefish) and fish (bluefish mostly) doomed to waste by surfcasters who treat them like footballs to be kicked back into the suds in order to quickly get their lure out to catch the preferred striper. I will walk the beaches begging bluefish, get FoodSaver to sponsor me, feed the needy — sorry, getting carried away, but waste not, want not is the point.

What about that bag of clam bait? Do you think I could make a chowder?

When the peepers start singing two things come to mind. There’s water in the vernal ponds and it’s warming up.

As of Monday the alewives are slow in coming but, nonetheless, many of the ospreys are back and ready to catch them as soon as they appear. On Sunday afternoon the spring peepers were peeping away in Big Reed Pond in Montauk. Evidently, they had just come up from hiding after a very long, cold, and snow-covered winter. Once they are up, they don’t retreat. They are mandated to sing and reproduce.

Sunday was the weekly meeting of three East Hampton High School seniors — Makenzie Scheerer, Travis Santiago, and Madison Aldrich — who intern with the Third House Nature Center of Montauk, courtesy of the Garden Club of East Hampton. They were there with Matt Stedman and Vicki Bustamante identifying and GPS-ing trees for an ongoing study of Big Reed Pond and its surroundings.

Matt spotted an eastern ribbon snake also freshly up from its winter sleep and Makenzie photographed it. The ribbon snake is a smaller and much narrower version of a garter snake, but unlike the latter is equally adept on land or in water. The spring peeper is one of the ribbon snake’s main menu items and you can bet that when the peepers get chanting, the ribbon snake rolls over and says to itself, “It’s time to get up and get going. Breakfast awaits.”

Killdeers continue to return. Terry Sullivan came upon nine of them working a field in Sagaponack on Saturday and photographed them. Killdeers, grassy fields, and March go together. When they fly, these plovers utter a string of loud “killdeers,” stressing the last syllable and raising it in pitch.

One of the homecoming ospreys was seen last Thursday on its pole platform nest in a farm field on the west side of Deerfield Road in Water Mill. It must have been a little chagrined at returning, because instead of open vistas on all sides, there were four new monstrous houses to greet its return. The osprey was standing on its old nest and surveying the countryside. “Am I in the right place?” it was thinking. Not only is the South Fork being “Farrellized” with large new spec houses, but the ospreys might be undergoing that mind-bending process as well.

Today when I peered out my bedroom window at the leafy backyard almost completely devoid of snow, I caught the quick jerky movements of something small and brownish against the leafy ground cover. It wasn’t a sparrow or a bird. Oh no, I thought, the rat is back. But when I looked closely, it was indeed a rodent, but this one had two long white stripes bordered with black down its back. It was a chipmunk, fresh up from its winter quarters. Peepers, ribbon snakes, killdeers, ospreys, robins, grackles, and red-winged blackbirds. I thought to myself, it really must be spring.

On Monday evening I drove around Noyac, Sag Harbor, Northwest Woods, and Wainscott listening for spring peepers. Some ponds were completely quiet, but Chatfield’s Hole in Northwest and the pond southeast of the cemetery across from Otter Pond in Sag Harbor was jumping. The largish swamp on the southwest side of Noyac Road also produced several night sounds, but not from peepers. These were coming from black ducks and green frogs.

Noyac Bay was completely free of ice come Sunday, but a few small piles of snow and ice were still strewn along the roadsides during my nighttime peeper quest. In a week or two we should see the first white blossoms of the shads and the crimson flowers of the red maples. There’s no turning back. “Spring is busting out all over,” as the song goes. Look for the vegetated shoulders of the roads and byways to color up in the next weeks. We are about to become completely cloaked in a shroud of green.

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

This year we decided on lobsters for Easter dinner instead of lamb. It seemed the right thing after the hard winter, although I’m not sure why. More celebratory perhaps, or because Duryea’s has a great price on a package deal that includes lobsters, New England clam chowder, and either a bag of mussels or Little Necks. 

We had invited a few friends over, so I set about getting the big lobster pot out of mothballs and searching for the tools needed to pierce the lobsters’ armor. Personally, I don’t need the hinged shell crackers and meat picks.

I’ve found that hitting a claw right at the junction where the two pincers come together with the butt end of a butter knife is the way to go, although the last time I showed off my method, I sprayed two of our guest’s finery with lobster juice. I poured them more wine.

I was afraid I’d have to fall back on the butter knife method — perhaps provide towels in which to drape our guests before my tutorial — because I found we were short of crackers and it was too late to buy new ones. I found only two deep in the knife drawer, but it had been so long since they were used that the hinge on one was rusted, as was one of the three picks. Six people would have to share one cracker and two picks unless I could resurrect the rusted hinge.

As everyone knows, there is only one cure for a bound-up, rusted anything — WD-40. But, of course, this solution posed an even greater danger. The lobster would taste like the WD-40. I thought about lubricating the cracker hinge with melted butter, but melted butter tends to grow rancid quickly, and the tool would look like it hadn’t been washed since last summer. Talk about the horns of a dilemma.

Damn, a boneless leg of lamb imbedded with slivers of garlic and brushed with a glaze made of fresh rosemary and mustard would not have required medieval armor-piercing weaponry.

I headed to the toolshed to see if I cold find a couple pairs of pliers or channel locks, which would serve the purpose, but would not go well with the yellow flowered tablecloth, a fragrant hyacinth centerpiece, candlesticks, and white linen napkins. En route to the shed, I thought about lobster tasting like WD-40, about the connection between lobsters and oil.

You see, lobsters and crabs love oil. Menhaden, the oily fish also called mossbunker, bunker, and, in New England, pogy, is the best lobster bait in the world, especially — because lobsters are scavengers — when they are in the process of decaying.

Whenever possible, lobstermen bait their traps with ripening bunker. The story goes that during World War II, bunker bait became hard to get, or to afford. The processing plant located at Promised Land on Napeague needed all the bunker its boats could catch in order to render their oil and meet the demand for oil used to grease the machinery of war.

Knowing the lobsters’ penchant for oily things, local lobstermen soaked rags, and the bricks used for ballast in their traps, in kerosene. The lobsters came running. 

I’m not sure whether this affected the taste, but if so, it might have been forgiven as the flavor of patriotism, the sense of contributing to the war effort, like replacing melted butter with melted margarine. 

So what if I get the shell cracker limber again using a squirt of WD-40, wipe off the excess as best I can, then plant the kerosene bait story in my guests’ heads before the lobsters are actually served. They might not notice, or chalk it up to the power of a fascinating, historical suggestion.

After careful thought, I abandoned that approach. I served six lobsters, apologized for having only one cracker — “we can share” — and showed them — “and who needs crackers any way” — that the best way to crack lobster claws was with the butt end of a butter knife. In the process, I sprayed our good friend Carey across the table with lobster juice.

As I served her more wine, I wondered if having one’s silk blouse showered with lobster juice was better or worse than consuming a tender morsel of lobster meat dripping with butter and with just a hint of WD-40. It’s the kind of thing my wife would recognize as a conundrumm.

We finally broke through to placid spring, but it was a rough one on us and a rough one on nature. Waterfowl and water birds took it on the nose and so did several fish. Greg Boeklin, the bald eagle watcher in Sagaponack, saw several dead fish at the top of Sagg Pond. He couldn’t tell the species; they were decomposing. They may have been alewives. In some years when the water from Jeremy’s Hole comes down in a gush by way of Solomon’s Creek, the alewives make it up to the little water body to reproduce. On Friday such was the case, the water was flowing briskly under the Sagg Road bridge, but there were no alewives, dead or alive. There were, however, the remains of a great blue heron, only feathers and bones, and a cormorant in a similar state of decomposition, one on either side of the bridge.

So I made my way to Long Island’s alewife capital, North Sea. Two ospreys were close to the alewife stream where it runs to the sea under the Noyac Road bridge, but the water side of the outflow was too shallow for alewives. They probably came in that evening when the full moon tide was at its zenith.

Nonetheless, there were at least 10 fairly fresh alewife carcasses strewn about. They were full-size adults, a sign that Big Fresh Pond was in for some action. The osprey and the alewife are like Bluto and Popeye, but in this scenario, Bluto always wins.

A fish kill probably resulting from two and a half months of thick ice cover with no letup was evident in Hilary Knight’s pond in the southwest armpit of Stephen Hand’s Path and Route 114. More than 15 carp and several frogs bit the dust. Hilary lamented that the carp were as old as 20 years. (Recently, it has come to light that some marine fish, especially those in the rockfish family, live to be as old as 165.) These carps were mere adolescents. When there’s a thick coating of ice for more than a month or two, the fish beneath deplete the oxygen. Such fish kills in shallow ponds with a thick ice cover are quite common.

Montauk waterfowl, especially those in and around Lake Montauk, suffered greatly as a result of the cold. Ginnie Frati, the executive director of the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center, said she received at least 40 of these carcasses, which she sent up to the state laboratory for biopsies. Preliminary inspection indicated that the scoters, loons, little auks, et cetera probably died from starvation, as they were very thin. Some were half eaten.

A letter from a friend, Anne Robins, in Connecticut, included a great photo of a red-tailed hawk dragging a gray squirrel by one talon. She said that the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center there reported that the winter was very hard on the raptors because mice and other rodent prey were well under the snow and the snow cover never went away.

On Friday during my alewife reconnoiter I came upon a red-shouldered hawk sitting on a fencepost just 20 feet from me off Major’s Path Road in Southampton. It looked healthy. A few minutes earlier I saw a red-tailed hawk in a tree on the side of Deerfield Road near some new Farrell-built houses. As the fields that had been covered with snow through January and February were now snowless, that raptor was probably not in any trouble.

Ginnie Frati said the center received very few hawks this winter, but as many as 2,000 Canada geese and at least 15 swans that were in bad shape. Canada geese either graze in fields or use their long necks to feed on subaquatic vegetation. The former were covered with snow, the latter by thick ice. Swans are almost totally dependent on the subaquatic plants so they suffered greatly. One wonders if the survivors will be able to regain tiptop shape and procreate this year.

Raccoons are not doing so well either. Ginnie says that the center gets one raccoon a week suffering from distemper. Distemper spreads easily and is almost always fatal, so the raccoons have to be euthanized. The last very big distemper year was 2003 and the center had to put down as many as 300 raccoons. Euthanization is much kinder than the old method used in 1992 during a major epidemic. Then all of the diseased raccoons had to be shot. The center also gets reports of mangy foxes now and then, but nothing like the pandemic red fox mange cases of the past, and none have been brought in for treatment thus far this year.

Before the wildlife rehab center was established in 1997 on Suffolk County park property, the wildlife rehabbers mostly worked from their houses and vehicles. The center now has a paid staff of 11 and 100 or so volunteers, so it is pretty much able to cover the five eastern towns in a timely fashion.

The center works with East End veterinarians and doesn’t refuse any animal in distress. The ex-Beatle Paul McCartney once sent in an injured butterfly from near his Amagansett house. It didn’t make it. The center rescues the occasional snake and frog, too. There isn’t a vertebrate group that doesn’t have fins and gills that isn’t represented there. The only mammals the center can’t take in are bats because of the strong possibility that they might be rabid. It also doesn’t get any injured fish, although dead fish from the Long Island Aquarium and the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation are used as feed.

Ginnie used to keep hurt birds and other animals when she worked for Suffolk County Department of Public Works. Little birds she kept in desk drawers and would tend to their needs during break times and the lunch period. A fellow county employee, Jim Hunter, had a similar interest in helping wildlife and together they left the county after long tenures and started taking care of sick and injured animals in 1995.

Sometimes, as in the case of baby birds fallen from the nest or birds that stun themselves flying into windows, it is better to leave the baby to the parents if they are still around and put the dazed bird in a box with a loose cover until it recovers and is ready to fly away. Ginnie says there have been times when a window-strike bird on its way to the center has come to and started flying around the car.

Keep your eyes peeled to the sky. Adult bald eagles are still in the area. Last Thursday Vicki Bustamante saw one making lazy circles in the sky over Major’s Path where it joins North Sea Road in Southampton Village.

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

Consider the following as an open letter to Larry Penny, The Star’s longtime nature columnist, my good friend, and an indispensable member of the East End community.

Larry, I’m writing this to encourage you to read “H Is for Hawk,” a memoir by Helen Macdonald. Just came out. It’s a beautifully written meditation on one person’s relationship to the wild, and what “wild” means in our time.

I strongly suspect this is your favorite time of year because spring is when, announced by those harbinger peepers, we are joined once again by the wild. This is when your alewives, those anadromous shads, worry their way back up the dreens whose beckoning flavors were imprinted on them eons ago.

It’s a lineage of survival that goes virtually unappreciated in an age when Nature’s comings and goings are too often viewed as curiosities. “What’s that sound?” “Look up, why are those fish swimming into the stream?” “What’s that whistling?” “Why is that bird just staying in one place in the sky?” Or they are not viewed at all.

The peepers’ mating chorus, the alwives’ spawning, the rafts of scoters’ call to gather and choose the next generation, the osprey with her eye on a school to pick the moment to dive and bring one of the fish back to the nest to feed the fledglings. 

Harvey Bennett calls this week “Ely Week,” Bonac for Alewife Week, when this area’s still-abundant shad show up at Little Reed and Stepping Stones Ponds in Montauk. They are in North Sea now. Thank you, Larry, for your tireless efforts to clear our dreens and other tributaries of broken conduit, trash, and ill-conceived roadwork so the alewives can fulfill their mission.

The trout season opened on the first of the month, although trout fishermen must drive UpIsland to places like the Nissequogue River, or closer to Southampton, where access requires a fishing guide for out-of-towners. Large and smallmouth black bass may be caught and released now, but are off limits to keep until next month. Other freshwater species like walleye and pickerel are fair game. The fishing has been described as very good in Big Fresh Pond in Southampton and in Fort Pond in Montauk. I reckon you’d find good fishing Hidden Pond in Hither Woods as well.

Angling prognosticators suspect a good shark fishing season due to the cold winter. Mackerel, high on the mako shark menu, tend to stick around in late spring and early summer. Sharkers should remember that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a bill into law last year that outlaws all but non-stainless steel circle hooks for shark fishing. All shark tournaments must now play by this ruling.

Circle hooks, developed by Japanese commercial longline fishermen, prevent the gut-hooking of fish. Because of its shape, the hook lodges in the jaw of the fish making it easier to dislodge it and improving the fish’s chance of survival when released. The non-stainless steel requirement is meant to allow the eventual disintegration of hooks when dislodging them is difficult or very dangerous. The catch and release of big, toothy sharks can be a challenge. Thanks to State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. for his sponsorship of the non-stainless circle hook law.

Guaranteed, the striped bass that over-wintered here are climbing out of their winter torpor and are beginning to look around for food. The south end of Lake Montauk is a good place to take a peek in a week or two. The striped bass season opened today and will run until Dec. 15. The bag limit is one per day measuring at least 28 inches tail to snout.

Fluke, or summer flounder, are winding their way shoreward and should be here by the 17th, the season opener. This year, anglers are permitted five fluke with a minimum size of 18 inches.

The first half of the porgie (scup) season opens on May 1 with a 30-fish bag and a 10-inch minimum. Anglers fishing from licensed charter and party boats get a bonus bag of 45 porgies through September and October.

Fishing is one popular way to appreciate Nature and her creatures, but only one way.

Larry, you have spent your life educating folks about the wild. As Helen Macdonald makes poetically clear in her book, humans have an innate need to keep the wild close — perhaps not as close as hunting rabbits and pheasants with a goshawk, one of the wildest of feathered raptors — but within a knowing reach on walks with people who know, with binoculars, with bird books, by way of your guiding column, Larry. If we become unconscious of their spirits, we will lose our own, and when we lose that, we lose our lives.

As John Muir put it: “Earth hath no sorrows that Earth cannot heal” and “Nature in her green tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions.” Believe it. We will first see there are no green tranquil woods to heal us in the inhuman behavior of humans.