You might have seen Senator Charles Schumer on the news on Monday taking PSEG and the United States Environmental Protection Agency to task for allowing 95,000 or so penta-treated utility poles to be installed on Long Island. Penta, or pentachlorophenol, is not only very toxic if inhaled, touched, or ingested, it is also classified as a probable carcinogen. That is why it has already been banned for use by more than 26 countries and counting. East Hampton Town and Village had an inordinate share of these poles installed by PSEG without regard for human safety in the early months of 2014.

Penta isn’t the only poison to have graced East Hampton’s plate over the last 75 years. In the 1930s and 1940s it was lead arsenate used on crop fields to kill both bugs and weeds. Long Lane’s fields have received a goodly amount. In the 1950s and 1960s it was DDT, used on the very same farmlands as well as in the salt marshes and freshwater ponds to control mosquitoes. It was banned for use here by 1970. After that came Union Carbide’s Temik to kill the Colorado potato beetle, and many private wells down-gradient of the area’s potato fields paid the price.

The Long Island Rail Road and New York State Department of Transportation used herbicides such as Agent Orange along their rights of way to control weedy growth, but eventually curtailed their use. Chromated copper arsenates (C.C.A.s) were used to treat marine pilings, bulkhead wood, and marine dock works in town waters as recently as the 1990s. As a result, the poisonous heavy metals and their salts — chromium, arsenic, and copper — are incorporated in much of the town’s harbors’ and tidal creeks’ sediments and will be for years to come.

Just because the use of a certain chemical pesticide or biocide has stopped doesn’t mean that the residents are completely safe. Much of the stuff continues to reside in the soils and bottom sediments; some is loosed into the atmosphere during dust storms. Yes, it does go away eventually, but only very, very slowly.

An analysis of the poisons in the fields along Long Lane in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the wake of some cancer cases among East Hampton High School students and recent graduates was an eye-opener. The school district was contemplating the purchase of land across Long Lane from the campus and installation of a new athletic field, but soil tests showed residues from so many pesticides, such as DDT, arsenic, and lead, that the idea was abandoned shortly after it was conceived.

A big chunk of farmland across Long Lane from the high school was purchased by the town during the Schneiderman administration in 2001. Good! Good Samaritans got together with the town’s blessing and began a community garden, the East End Community Organic Farm, or EECO Farm. Not so good. I believe they were misled by early soil tests into thinking that the land was safe for hands-in-the dirt farming and the community farm grew into a patchwork of different crops, but also took on the aspect of a small farm with many outbuildings put up here and there. Finally, a roadside farm stand was added.

A big winter dust storm in the mid-2000s stirred the curiosity of the town’s Natural Resources Department. A well-known book artist, Hilary Knight, living on the other side of Route 114, collected some of the settled dust on his windowsill and called me. I was the natural resources director at the time, and had it tested by EcoTest, an UpIsland firm. It turned out to be rich in arsenic.

This led to a series of tests of the farm soils between Long Lane and Route 114 over several years, the last authorized by the Wilkinson administration in 2010. The soils on the EECO Farm site were targeted and found to be almost as high in arsenic and lead as they were during the first round of testing 10 years earlier. The arsenic values were mostly in the range of 30 parts per million, more than 10 times higher than the arsenic values for samples taken earlier from non-croplands in the town such as the Grace Estate.

I thought something was finally to be done, but nothing was done and that’s one of the reasons my column this week is not so much about nature but about the nature of man.

Well-intentioned individuals have continued to put their hands in the dirt without gloves and inhale the fine soil particles without respirators each growing season day after day, notwithstanding the heavy load of contaminants. The foods harvested from the fields by these well-intentioned weekend farmers are even touted to be “organic” and sold as such.

In a memorandum written around 2010 and circulated to the town board, I strongly suggested that EECO Farm be farmed conventionally and professionally by a farmer and his equipment who might rent the land from the town, but not by individuals with their hands, knees, and noses in the soil who may very well be accumulating heavy metals in their tissues. Apparently, the memo fell upon deaf ears as business continues as usual.

And, oh yes, did I mention that the E.P.A. lists arsenic as a potential carcinogen, just like penta?

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

Ken Ferrin first fly-fished at the age of 19 at Flathead Lake in Montana, where he was the waterfront director at a boys camp.

A long hiatus followed, until four years ago, at the age of 78, he suggested to his wife and tennis and cycling partner, Patti, with whom he’s biked all over the world, that they forgo heli-skiing, which they’d done for 20 years, in Canada, in favor of fly-fishing.

That was many fishing trips ago, to beautiful, remote places in Chile, the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec, the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, Belize, and Patagonia, on the Chilean and Argentine sides of the Andes.

“We love remote places,” Ken Ferrin said.

“East Hampton used to be — when we first came here, in the early ’70s,” his wife observed after their guest had said something about “the Hamptons.”

“Our first fly-fishing trip,” he said, “was on a boat named the Nomad, in Chile, a big yacht that had two helicopters on it. This man, a very wealthy guy, loved to heli-ski and fly-fish. He’d fly people up to lakes in Chile that nobody else could get to.”

“Actually, it was more of a spa, more of a party boat than a fishing boat,” said Patti Ferrin, who even in this weather rides her mountain bike between their house off Lily Pond Lane and the East Hampton Indoor Tennis Club.

“The real fishermen said that this wasn’t real fishing . . . still, they were very nice fellows. Anyway, Patti liked the fishing,” he said with a smile, “and the partying.”

Yes, fly-fishing was a very technical sport, they agreed, and it was a good thing too, they added, that they had both come to it from tennis. “It’s basically the same motion as a serve,” he said. “The rod arcs back and then forward out over the water, shooting the line out. You’re not casting the fly — you’re casting the line.”

“They’re all different weights — the rods and the lines,” she said.

They went for trout — big trout, up to 20 and 30 pounds in some cases, browns and rainbows — on their most recent trip, to Tierra del Fuego.

The routine there differed a bit from what they’re used to. They’d fish from 8 to 12:30 p.m., go back to the lodge for a big lunch, “and then,” he said, “you take a nap and don’t go back until 6. You fish from 6 to 10, until it gets dark — you can catch fish in the dark. And then you go back to the lodge and shower and have dinner at midnight. You’re in bed by 1, and up at 6. You’re so burned out by the end of a week that you could sleep on a rock.”

Since they release what they catch, and often don’t catch much of anything, some friends wonder what draws them to the sport, but both agree, as he said, that “the tug is the drug.” That there’s a thrill when a fish is lured by a tiny, nicely tied fly cast ever so gently and invitingly, usually a few feet in front of it.

“You can’t disturb the water too much,” he said. “It can’t go plunk.”

“And if it takes the hook — the hooks are very small — can you land it?” she said.

“Half the time they jump off,” he said. “We practice out here,” he said, waving toward the snow-covered lawn, just up a ways from the beach, where, in season, they catch bluefish and striped bass. “If you don’t practice, you don’t get better,” he said, as she nodded. “In the course of a week, we make 600 to 700 casts — thousands a year.”

“We’ve come a long way,” he said. “I remember showing the poly bag of equipment I’d brought to a fisherman on the Nomad and saying, ‘I think I have all the things, I just don’t know how to put them together.’ He gave me a dubious look and told me to go see the guide.”

She brought out a small sampling of the lures they have, this particular group including green ones resembling tiny crabs on leaves, said to be favored by the very elusive silvery permit fish. “We’re going to Mexico, to the Yucatan, in April to fish for them. You hope a permit will take your crab rather than a real one.”

“The pink ones,” she said, as their interviewer continued to peer at the box, “are for bonefish, for bonefish and tarpon. We went bonefishing in the Bahamas in November. He caught one, I caught none. It was really bad weather, rainy and windy. Then we found out you don’t go down there in hurricane season.”

So, where else was there to go?

“Oh, there’s Russia — there’s very famous Atlantic salmon fishing there,” he began. “There are really big fish in Kamchatka, that peninsula near Japan that the Russians and Japanese fought a war over in 1905, but I don’t think we’ll go there.”

“You fly direct from Anchorage,” she said. “There’s one flight a week.”

“And Christmas Island, in the middle of the Pacific, where there are bonefish.”

“There’s one flight a week, out of Honolulu,” she said. “A six-hour flight.”

“We haven’t told you about the Seychelles, off India,” he said. “But we’re not going there.”

“He’s said, ‘We’re not going there’ a lot of times,” she said, with a laugh.

We had the opportunity to head for the hills and early Sunday morning we took it: the South Ferry to a sleeping Shelter Island, then we stemmed the tide and a few car-size icebergs over to Greenport on the North Ferry where we bought scones and coffee for the ride to meet the 9 a.m. Cross Sound Ferry to New London, bound for Stowe, Vt.

It must have been the late 1950s when I first skied Stowe’s Mount Mansfield with my parents. I remember being proud when my mother sewed a Stowe patch to the shoulder of my parka, proof of having stem-Christied the legendary slopes. The skis were wooden, the bindings a broken leg just waiting to happen. The attendants serving Stowe’s famous single-chair lift handed you a thick blanket poncho as you got on the slow-climbing chair so they would not have to pry your frozen body off it at the top.

It was a marvel of technology at the time, a lazy man’s way to attack the mountain, compared to bunking in Stowe’s old lumber camp and climbing for it, or ascending Mansfield using the primitive, and dangerous, rope tows in the 1930s and ’40s. A plaque on the brick fireplace of the old Mansfield lodge, with its giant half-hewn timbers, tells those drying their gloves, warming their feet, and enjoying an apres-ski beer that the lodge was built by the C.C.C., Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, in 1941.

I had not been back in quite a few years, nor had Kyle. She too was introduced to Stowe by her parents, and was stunned as a young girl the day her mother offhandedly mentioned that the von Trapp family lived just up the hill.

She loved, no, lived “The Sound of Music,” and its romantic story of the nun, Maria, nurse to the seven children of Baron Georg von Trapp, the Austrian Naval officer who balked at Hitler’s ambitions, fell in love with Maria, and fled with her (the future Maria von Trapp) and his singing brood to where the hills are alive in Stowe, Vt., not Switzerland as in the movie. Kyle knows every song, and will burst forth with “High on a hill was a lonely goatherd, lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo,” et cetera, at the drop of a hat. In fact, a week earlier, before the Stowe trip was planned, she’d bought and read a book about Maria von Trapp.

These days the Trapp Family Lodge, overlooking Stowe Village, serves as a hotel and restaurant. It’s still run by the von Trapp family, which opened its own brewery in 2010 (great beer, by the way). Kyle knew that Johannes von Trapp, one of Georg and Maria von Trapp’s children, was still among the living.

On Monday, we skied most of the day. The mountain had received eight inches of fresh, light, fluffy snow during the night. The conditions were perfect. We quit in the afternoon, that is, our legs quit. We were driving back to our lodging in the village, saw the sign to the Trapp Family Lodge and decided to visit. We hung at the small brewery for a while, sipping on benches, faces to the sun, then decided to visit the lodge.

We walked through the reception area and were led to the bar and restaurant by a man who obviously worked there.  En route, Kyle made small talk with the man. She asked if Johannes von Trapp still lived in the area. He said, “Yes.”

“Do you ever see him?” she asked.

“Yes, I see him all the time. I just got out of a meeting with him. He’s my father,” he said, smiling at her with eyes as blue as the Vermont sky outside.

When Kyle gets emotional, she fans her face rapidly with her hand. I saw the tears welling in her eyes. Needless to say, the hills came alive with the sound of music for the rest of the afternoon, night, and I’m sure for some time to come. Yodel-ee, Yodel-oh, et cetera.

My ichthyologist buddy, Howard Reisman, who lives in North Sea, says that, notwithstanding the monthlong occupation of North Sea Harbor and other inlets and coves of the Peconics, the alewives are out there and ready to move in to Big Fresh Pond as soon as their passageway thaws. They have been arriving annually at this time every year like clockwork for at least a half-century and most likely for several centuries. The streamway connecting the harbor to the pond can be high or low, depending upon the standing level of the water in Big Fresh. When all the snow melts in the surrounding watershed in the next couple of weeks there should be more than enough water to ensure their safe passage.

The ospreys come next, and then the rush of new arrivals from the south is in full motion, not over until the last wood warbler passes through in late May. But not all of our spring and summer breeders will be back. During the new millennium certain birds have either dropped out or almost dropped out of the annual reproductive pool. Among them are many groundnesters, such as hermit thrush, ovenbird, bobwhite, ruffed grouse, and whippoorwill. Towhees are hanging on by their thumbs.

Interestingly, the greatest loss of these groundnesters has been on the South Fork, which is odd because the South Fork has so much in the way of woods and groundcovers. Each year now for the past five or six years, come May I have gone out looking and listening for these rarish birds. At night I have gone out to listen for one, the whippoorwill. Various theories have been put forth to explain their growing sparseness, when they all used to be fairly common.

One suggestion has been the introduction of wild turkeys on the South Fork, which got under way big time in January 1991. Wild turkeys can take over a woods, and in doing so compete for food and territory with other groundnesters. Others have blamed the feral cat population, which in other parts of the United States can be an important detriment to birds that nest on the ground. Foxes also take their share of birds, but are much more focused on rodents, like chipmunks, white-footed mice, meadow voles, and the like. Raccoons and opossums are “eggers.” They could be at work here as well. A few observers have even accused the white-tailed deer of taking eggs.

While the jury is still very much out with respect to deciding on this or that theory based on different wildlife, there has been very little effort locally to relate the low numbers of groundnesters with edaphic, abiotic factors such as light and sound. A lot of the best habitat — say, the morainal pine-oaks woods of Southampton and East Hampton Towns — has been developed. If it is development and its many accoutrements, such as traffic, pets, noise, and night lighting, that are causing these populations to plummet, then side-by-side comparisons of large open-space tracts versus large developed areas should provide a clue.

My many explorations afield, both at night and during the day, show that the groundnesters are equally sparse in both developed and undeveloped areas. I’m beginning to take the view that ambient noise is the chief culprit. Whereas once our woods were silent at night save for the calls of screech owls, whippoorwills, frogs, and tree crickets, the amount of background abiotic noise has increased tremendously over the decades.

Think about it. You are a groundnesting bird trying to defend your breeding territory and attract a mate with your species-specific song, and it is drowned out by a lumbering truck’s passage on a road nearby or a helicopter’s ear-shattering, earth-trembling vibrations as it passes overhead. If you can’t get your melodic words to register with a potential mate satisfactorily, it could be the end of it. She flies off looking for a song she can hear clearly.

Birds’ hearing is very acute. The beep of a car horn at close range may be irritating for a human; for a bird it could deafening.

Which all brings me to the one spot on the South Fork that up into the 21st century had the most ovenbirds, hermit thrushes, ruffed grouse, and whippoorwills: the moraine and outwash plain of Bridgehampton, Noyac, Sagaponack, Wainscott, and East Hampton’s Northwest. Coincidentally, it is the area on the South Fork where the passage of helicopters is the most tracked and most notable. And what is the major preoccupation of the helicopters? Bringing notables and the well-to-dos directly from New York City to the East Hampton Town airport. It’s as simple as that. 

Yes, we could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring this or that consultant to tell us this or that, depending who is putting up the money and the side he or she represents. These studies, such as the Fire Island to Montauk Point coastal mitigation one in progress locally since 1961, can go on forever and forever, costing millions and millions of dollars, very rarely coming to a hard-and-fast conclusion.

What would happen if helicopters, except in the case of medical emergencies, were no longer permitted to use the East Hampton Airport? Perhaps the groundnesters would come back, and the whippoorwills, not the helicopters, would become the area’s chief nocturnal noisemaker. And such a pleasant noisemaker, at that.

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

The winter of 2015 refused to loosen its grip. As a result, cold-weather passions that have lain dormant in recent years returned with a vengeance in the Northeast.

Ski resorts upstate and in New England have not seen so much snow in years. Iceboats have been dragged out of storage and onto Long Island lakes and ponds. One of the more intense winter passions is the otherworldly sport of ice fishing.

On Sunday morning, Fort Pond in Montauk was a quilt of snow patches and smooth ice. On the ice, not far from the Kirk Park dock, lay the charred remnants of a hand-warming fire, home base for skaters the day before. You could almost smell the hot chocolate.

Two men, Devon Grisham and Kyle Fagerland, stood looking down out in the middle of the pond. Again and again, Fagerland’s dog, Shelby, retrieved a ball, slipping and skidding, never tiring of the winter version of her favorite sport.

“Fishing is my life,” said Grisham, a janitor at East Hampton High School. “Saltwater is not for me. This is more challenging.”

It was early and he had already bored four eight-inch-diameter holes in the ice with his gas-powered auger and was in the process of setting his “tip-ups,” a spring and flag combination that’s attached to a fishing line whose terminal gear, this day, consisted of live bait and bread bait.

The contraption sits atop a wooden crosspiece that spans the hole. The spring, like the kind on a screen door, is bent down and locked to a trigger mechanism. Think mousetrap. When a fish strikes, the spring springs and the small flag flips skyward to alert the fisherman, who is most likely off drilling another hole.

“As soon as the flag pops up, I’m running,” Grisham said.

He told me how ice fishing had hooked him starting at age 8. His father introduced him to it, he said, as he pulled a sled filled with the sport’s accoutrements along the ice to the next hole. He took one of the small fishing rod-and-reels from the sled and lowered the line into the hole in a process called “sounding,” that is, determining how far the surface of the ice — it’s at least six inches thick these days — was from the bottom.

He said he was preparing the holes and setting the tip-ups in anticipation of his father’s arrival with baitfish purchased at a tackle shop in Riverhead. “When my bait gets here — ahh. I can’t wait.”

Grisham said he was hoping to catch walleye, or largemouth bass, but would also be going for carp, a vegetarian fish that will go after bread bait. Carp grow to well over 10 pounds in the pond.

“I don’t kill any of the fish I catch,” he said, although, in his opinion, carp should be culled from local freshwater bodies. They tend to crowd out other species. “Hook Pond used to be my favorite, but it’s filled with carp now.”

Grisham said he also works Fresh Pond (also called Hidden Pond) in Hither Woods, Montauk, where, he said, a friend had caught a “three-pound bass and a four-pound pickerel” through the ice the day before.

“My favorite is Fresh Pond in South­ampton,” he said, although Southampton was proprietary about its freshwater. While fishing in most freshwater bodies on Long Island is managed for all state residents by the State Department of Environmental Conservation, South­amp­­ton keeps theirs for locals only.

A resident permit is required, although a “plus one” that accommodates a visitor is available, and outsiders are able to hire a local guide to take them fishing. Grisham said he was aiming at getting a guide license, as well as a freshwater bass boat. That’s the big, expensive dream, and when it comes true, he will take the boat “all over.” He already knows many of New York’s freshwater fishing haunts.

I left him as he prepared a “live well” in the ice by using his auger to drill several connecting holes halfway through the ice, then punching a small hole through to the water. The water fills the well, and the well holds the fish until photos can be taken and they’re released.

Snow began to fall hard Sunday afternoon. I returned late in the day. I could barely make out two figures, one kneeling, one standing — Devon Gri­sham and his dad. I walked out. A string of holes stretched across the pond and it was getting dark. No fish had been caught. Devon’s dad was ready to call it a day. Devon said, no, not yet.

It was clear, as the snow fell like a white shroud on the pond, that Devon’s hope that the tip-up’s red flags would spring to attention springs eternal.

The great American winter pastime for those of us who live not too far from the Arctic Circle: feeding and watching birds. Each bird species has its own unique way of staying active when the windchills are in the single digits and the sun is covered up by a pale gray sky for most of the day.

If you’re a bird, in order to generate body heat when there is no external source of heat to draw from, you have to stay active. Fly back and forth with a great flurry of extra wing movements, move over the terrain hither and yon, never stand still for more than a few seconds at a time (except at night in some protected niche), and one more thing: feed, feed, feed. Eat all you can. The more grist for the mill, the more heat for the body, the better the chances of survival in a winter such as this one.

The behavior of birds, more than that of any other kind of animal save humans and livestock, is responsible for the rise in the scientific discipline ethology — to some of us, wildlife behavior, to others, animal psychology. Its origin is European. Aristotle in the early B.C. years observed bird behavior, as did a host of early naturalists, but before it became a true science it needed some help from the likes of Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz of the old continent.

American naturalists were particularly interested in bird behavior early on. In the early 1900s in this country, a group of birders studied this and that bird species and charted their collective observations in a series of monographs. Hunters were also keen on bird behavior. How does the flush of a quail differ from that of a pheasant or a ruffed grouse? What ducks approach decoys low over the water, what ones come in high over your shoulder, then descend rapidly? How different birds fly was part of the general hunting lore. How much do you lead the fast-flying canvasback duck or the laggardly, lumbering Canada goose?

Snakes move by sinusoidal movements of the body, reptiles and salamanders by putting one foot after the other, frogs and toads swim, or jump and hop, turtles plod. Bird locomotion is highly specialized, just as mammalian locomotion is, and differs dramatically from one bird group to another. Since almost all birds flock at one time or another in their lifetime, a species has to know its own flight pattern; otherwise it is liable to wander off with the wrong group.

Roger Tory Peterson was very keen on bird flight types; his bird silhouettes on the inside covers of his bird field guides reflected that interest.

Woodpeckers, including flickers, move up with each sweep of the wings, down with each glide. Thus they are one of the very distinct up-and-down fliers that can be recognized from a long way off. Goldfinches fly similarly, while mourning doves fly in a beeline with rapid wing movements, such that they whistle when taking off or in straight-line flight, perhaps a warning signal with respect to predators. Herons have very large wings and oscillate them very slowly and glide a lot between strokes, with their long necks in a tight S shape, the long spear-like beak projecting forward only slightly beyond the bend of the neck.

Other long-necked birds like cranes and bitterns extend their heads and necks fully forward in flight. The brown pelican flies in small family groups of five or six, one after another in a straight line. When the leader stops flapping, the followers also cease in precise succession, and the group glides for a spell. When the leader decides to stop gliding and start flying, the followers pick up the beat one after the other with the same synchronicity.

Some hunting birds such as kingfishers, rough-legged hawks, kestrels, and kites are capable of hovering in place for minutes at a time as they try to get a precise fix on their prey below. They beat their wings rapidly and curl them accordingly while doing so. Some birds, such as vultures, ravens, and gulls, are capable of long flights while barely beating their wings at all. Thus they conserve energy for other uses. Some hummingbirds common in the Northeast beat their wings more than 50 times per second in order to keep in place while sucking up nectar from a tubular flower.

Some birds use flight for dual purposes — getting around and courting. The American woodcock male makes circles over the female hiding in the bush, then drops down with a bunch of piped notes to where she sits for mating. The European skylark, as in Shelley’s poem, does its territorial singing and courting from above, not from aside. Our local swan, the mute swan, is not much of a vocalist, but when it flies overhead it sounds like a World War II bomber, whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp, and so on. The American goldeneye duck sings with it wings. As a group of them fly over the water, they beat their wings in synchronicity, producing a monotonal chord that is both melodic and comforting to the listener on the shore.

“Birds of a feather flock together.” That old saw clearly plays homage to the importance of the uniqueness of bird flight and species recognition.

The shape of birds in flight as seen from the ground by other birds is important, as well. Hawks have a longish tail and shortish head and neck. The falcon silhouette, as seen from below, is rather typical of most hawks. Geese and ducks, on the other hand, have long protruding necks and short tails in flight. When Lorenz, using two-dimensional goose silhouettes, moved them forward on guide strings over baby chicks, the chicks were not alarmed and went on feeding. When he moved them tail first, they appeared hawk-like, and the same chicks scattered.

You may have noticed, also, that the way birds move over the ground is somewhat species-specific. Robins hop, two feet side-by-side at a time, for short distances, then stop, motionless. Mour­n­ing doves walk one foot after the other, rapidly. Quails scurry, with bodies almost hugging the ground. Roadrunners, which are perfectly capable of strong flight, run with quick long strides, in the manner of the ratites, the ostriches, emus, and rheas, which are flightless. Sparrows both hop and walk. Almost all shorebirds walk, or run, one foot after another, as they descend and rise with the coming and going of each wave swash. Crows, wild turkeys, and pheasants are also walkers, not hoppers.

The way birds feed can differ according to species. Starlings peck ravenously. Titmice pick up a large seeds and fly off with them, land on a branch, then work them over with their beaks while holding them in place securely with their feet. On Saturday, the winter robins, not those back from the south yet, were on the top of the cab of my black pickup parked at the end of the driveway next to the leafless hedges on either side. They were working away at something. When I went to look later on, the top of the cab was covered with half-eaten black privet berries, seeds partially exposed, not the robins’ favorite food stock by any means, but the only berries left in the vicinity at this time of year.

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

As I write this on Presidents Day in the afternoon while looking out my window across the snow-covered yard to see which bird will show up next, the temperature hovers at 21 degrees. That’s the highest it’s been all day and it’s starting to sink lower. Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology’s annual birdfeeder count took place over the three-day weekend. I haven’t always been a participant, even though the bird lab was started while I was studying ornithology and wildlife conservation at Cornell in the mid-’50s, but I know some who are locally and keep my ear to that grapevine.

Thus far it’s been a slow day for birds. The usual white-throated sparrows and juncos are around. I can see them in my neighbor Ellen Stahl’s yard. For as long as I can remember, more than 20 years now, Ellen has not let a day pass without taking care of the birds. If it were not for her, I probably wouldn’t be writing this column.

These winter birds are well equipped to handle most winter days, but when the snow covers the ground for weeks on end, the cedar, holly, and autumn olive berries have all been taken, and the only berries left are those on the privets, Virginia creeper, honeysuckle, and Asiatic bittersweet, things can get desperate. Hence the need for supplemental feeding. In the old days it used to be breadcrumbs, but now it’s pretty colored cereals that are available in a great many local stores including Wild Bird Crossing in Bridgehampton.

When snow covers the ground, it not only covers forage, but it hides grains of sand and small pebbles. A bird can fill its crop with enough feeder seeds to last through the day in a few minutes, but if it doesn’t have the grit in its gizzard to grind them, it can’t digest them. Thus my wife Julie discovered the sparrows and juncos eating as much of the sand that we put down as slip-prevention on the walkway as seed that we spread. On Friday when she pulled into the driveway after shopping, there was a bird species that we have only seen once before in our yard in the 36 years we’ve been living here — a wild turkey. It was busy eating both small seeds and sand and, judging by the number of turkey tracks scattered around in the semi-fresh snow, the turkey had been there for some time already.

Fresh water is another problem. If Noyac Bay is frozen over solid, and it is, then all of the sources of freshwater that the birds need to hydrate are also frozen. Then the birds start eating the snow, as well, which is not hard to do, as many of the seeds and sand grains have sunken into it. It’s kind of a meal and drink for the homeless, but it suffices for most birds.

The icy conditions are not easy on waterfowl. On Saturday morning I received a call from Wayne Whitmore of Amagansett. He had been to Napeague to check out the coastal birds, having seen some western sandpipers earlier on the ocean beach. He discovered a common loon that was barely alive and wanted to know where to take it. Call the 728-Wild, the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center, was the answer. He started out for that facility with the bird being warmed by his car’s heater, but after only a few miles, the loon succumbed. Sad.

Vicki Bustamante has also been feeding birds for 20 years or so near Big Reed Pond in Montauk. She photo-documents almost all of them. She’s had a great-horned owl roosting around, and every other day or so she finds the remains of the owl’s kill. Today, a fox sparrow, common neither in the winter or summer, was flushed by a hanger-around sharp-shinned hawk, flew into a window while trying to escape and died.

Stationed near the very tip of Long Island, Vicki gets a great variety of birds, many which almost never visit my neighborhood. While keeping track of the birds for the Cornell count, what did she see perched in a tree within eyesight? None other than a red-shouldered hawk. Red-shouldered hawks are among Long Island’s rarest raptors and generally head south with red-taileds and other migratory hawks before winter comes. She was able to get a good shot of it, sent the photo to Angus Wilson, an expert birder, for confirmation, and got a positive reply.

All told, Vicki had 21 different species, not counting crows, gulls, geese, and other flyovers, at her feeder. Cardinals, both males and females, were the most common, at 32, while the 25 house sparrows came in second. Two cardinals were attacked by hawks. One she saved; the other bit the dust. She also had two purple finches along with a couple of house finches. For some peculiar reason goldfinches were missing.

Red-shouldered hawks are rodent, squirrel, and rabbit eaters. She noticed that none of her feeder birds paid much attention to the hawk when it perched nearby, but were all were sent into a frenzy each time marauding sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks made a pass.

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

“Cabin fever” does not do justice to our frozen state of mind. True, the Arctic temperatures that have descended on us in recent days have kept us in looking out while the oil burner adds to our carbon footprint and subtracts from our bank accounts. But “fever” is not the right word. I think “numbness” or “ennui” comes closer.

    True, a frozen Fort Pond Bay is a sight not seen in many years, and beautiful in its way. The beaches have that desolate feel, the cold ocean steaming as it loses the last of its heat. But our forays out to buy food, gas, or simply to be free of the house, are brief.

    The rest of the time, television brings us relief, in my case, the Turner Classic Movie channel, which has been showing movies that either won Academy Awards or were nominated for them. On Sunday there was a series of noir classics, “The Maltese Falcon” with Bogie, of course, and “The Blue Dahlia” with Veronica Lake and Howard DaSilva. And, there was the Internet too, but the Internet can be a dangerous place in the cold. Best to stay away from Facebook, especially when a good number of your friends are frolicking in unfrozen places.

    Filmmakers of the past used a series of editing tools not seen as much these days. A “wipe,” is when a new scene pushes the previous scene off the screen, usually right to left. A “dissolve” is just that; one scene seems to evaporate as the next, overlapping scene is brought to the surface.

    This was what happened on Sunday as I watched out the window as the snow fell in the cold, blizzard whiteout. I had been on Facebook where friends had posted cruel photos of warm waves breaking with palm trees in the Puerto Rican foreground. There were similar images from the North Shore of Oahu, the French West Indies, and one from a friend from California on a surfari to a semiprivate island in the Tahitian chain.

    I turned off the laptop, shuffled around the living room, and gazed out the window into the backyard, hoping to see the young deer we have been feeding old vegetables to. It’s tough to be a deer, or any other non-hibernating critter these days. Except maybe a hawk. They do well, I think, because their prey stands out against the white ground.

    That’s when I noticed the dissolve. Those tropical Facebook scenes were appearing against the cold, white scene outside. The green pines clothed in snow became palms and I thought that perhaps “fever,” with its tendency to produce hallucinations, was the right word after all.

    Now, if I can only project the opposite dissolve onto my Facebook friends, send a little of my frozen backyard to them as they sit on the beach — even if they perceive it as just a slight chill from a passing cloud. Serves them right. 

While out scanning the frozen waters of Noyac Bay and Upper Sag Harbor Cove on Monday, I noticed that one of my favorite trees and the largest tree alongside Long Beach Road, a willow, was already yellowing up, anticipating spring and flowering time, which comes early for the willow clan.

Willows in the genus Salix are in the Salicaceae family along with aspens and poplars, named such by botanists because their bark is rich in salicylic acid, setting them apart from almost all of the other trees and shrubs in the world. (Salicylic acid is vital to all animals that carry on respiration because it is part of the Krebs cycle, which produces the adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, that energizes muscles for locomotion and other movements.)

Early civilizations such as the ancient Greeks were well aware of the medicinal properties of willow bark and it was widely used to relieve headaches, inflammations, and other illnesses. Primitive peoples throughout the Northern Hemisphere also knew of its powers. After Canada’s northeast and New England were settled by Europeans during the 1600s, willow species from Eurasia, such as white willow, were imported for medicinal use along with other aliens such as osier and crack willows, which were used in basketry and caning. Willows readily transplant. Just stick a willow twig in wet soil and in a few years you have a willow sapling, in 10 years, a willow tree.

In the late 1800s salicylates were isolated from willow barks by drug companies such as Bayer and combined with acetic acid to make aspirins. The “aspir” comes from the same root for “aspen,” as in quaking aspen, in the genus Populus. Until aspirins began to roll off the assembly line in bottles that were distributed globally as pain relievers, those in the Southern Hemisphere had to use other plants as anodynes because almost all of the 400 or so species of willows and poplars were situated in the Northern Hemisphere, in the higher latitudes of North America and Eurasia.

Although willows are widely imported throughout the world, their natural populations still reflect that northern distributional beginning. For example, “The Flora of Nova Scotia” by A.E. Roland and E.C. Smith lists 19 willow species, two of which are exotics, while the “Guide to the Vascular Plants of Florida” by Richard Wunderlin lists six, five of which are native. A few willow species are shrubs and one boreal species, Salix uva-ursi, the bearberry willow, doesn’t grow much higher than 21/2 inches. It’s one of the few woody plants that is found on the tundra, which is dominated by mosses and other lower plants.

One of the foreign willows that is most widely planted in America because of its unique ornamental form is the weeping willow, Salix babylonica, which actually originated in China, not from the Near East as the scientific name implies. The four native willows with the widest distribution in the United States are the peachleaf, shining, black, and Bebb’s willows. The last is the most common willow in Montauk. The famous “pussy willow,” Salix discolor, called such because of its fuzzy, plumose early spring blooms, is also fairly widespread on Long Island.

Most willows have roots that seek out water and thus have been used to stem erosion of riverbanks. By the same token, willow roots can disable septic systems and clog water mains if given the opportunity. They get going early in the spring and are active throughout most of the year. Their roots seek out the water table, and if the water in that shallow aquifer contains nutrients such as nitrates and phosphates, the roots scarf them up as well as any man-made denitrification system on the market. It’s the nitrogenous chemicals in groundwater and runoff that often find their way to water bodies and foul them up with excessive weedy vegetation and blue-green algae.

Primitive people in the Northern Hemisphere used to get their drinking water from springs and rivulets, where willows were abundant. They were not only quenching their thirst but were probably being relieved of stress and pains simultaneously because of the salicylates dissolved in that water derived from willows.

The smallest flowering plants in the world, members of the duckweed family, Lemnaceae, which are generally two-leaved and less than a quarter of an inch wide, cover the surface of some of these willow-lined vernal ponds. They accumulate the salicylates in their minute tissues, which helps in regulating flowering and the production of torulas, starchy BB-size balls, which sink to the bottom as the water turns cold in the fall and give rise to new floating duckweed plants in the spring as the water warms up.

If you are backpacking in a remote area and you come down with a crushing headache or you sprain your back and you realize suddenly that you don’t have any Aleve, Excedrin, or Bayer aspirin, try peeling some bark from the nearest willow and sucking on it, or steep it in boiling water to make a pain-relieving tea. Ethnobotanists and herbal­­ists maintain that it still works wonders in such desperate situations, as it has for more than 2,000 years.

Before I beheld the yellowing of the great Long Beach willow against the backdrop of snow and ice on Monday, I was cold and suffering from a case of the winter blues. All of a sudden I perked up and began thinking of spring. Just looking at a yellowing willow in the dark of winter without sucking or chewing on its bark can relieve pain and work miracles.

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

On the grand playing field of human intercourse, nothing gives us as much satisfaction as seeing braggarts brought low, especially if they are the cause, having dashed rather than hoisted themselves on their own petards. It’s what fools are made of, and fools have always been great entertainment.

Brian Williams, the NBC network news anchor, made one of himself with his “Nightly News” story about having been riding on a Chinook helicopter in Iraq when a rocket-propelled grenade shot it down. 

As most know by now, Williams was not actually on the chopper that was shot down. His daring journalistic do turned out to be daring didn’t. He now finds himself in the stocks of public opinion getting the rotten tomato treatment from every direction. But wait, I believe Williams deserves some slack.

A lie, yes, but lies come in categories, and the celebrity anchorman’s belong within the proud category of fish tale. I remember being on Salivar’s Dock in Montauk one afternoon years ago listening to a man regaling friends with a stem-winder about catching a giant bluefin tuna.

“There we were,” he began, or something to that effect, going on to describe mountainous waves, winds so strong they would peel the paint off a building, the hook-up, the battle that went on for an hour, no, it must have been closer to two hours. He wasn’t thinking of time at the time.

The ooohs and ahhhs of the fisherman’s audience spurred him on. He said he reeled the great fish to the boat on three separate occasions only to feel it tear off again toward the horizon. The fisherman provided the “zzzzzzzzzzzzz” sound of line being stripped from the reel. Finally, he and the tuna were exhausted. With his last ounce of strength he reeled the fish to the boat. The mate gaffed it and administered the coup de grace.

There were a few problems with the story. According to the mate who did the gaffing, and who listened to the story unrecognized by the blabber, the fish in question was about half the size as it became in the telling. It was boated in about 15 minutes, and the exhausted fisherman had handed the rod to another angler who landed the fish.

The mate did not bother to correct the tale. It was a humdinger for sure, and after all, it was created on the charter boat he worked on. And what are charter boats for?

Unfortunately, Williams’s charter boat is (or was) NBC’s flagship anchor desk. To him, it must have seemed high and dry, removed from the dangerous assignments of war correspondents, from the lives of soldiers their stories are about. Columnists have accused Wil­liams of having a Hemingway complex, looking for experiences to validate the war correspondent within.

Or, maybe it was something like the bullfight audience in Tom Lehrer’s song “Fiesta Time in Guadalajara”: “hoping that death” — or something close to it — “would brighten up an otherwise dull afternoon.”

I think this was a case of James Thurber more than Ernest Hemingway. Williams, like many of us, is Walter Mitty, a person who escapes the mundane by using the wings of his imagination.

The tale of the downed Chinook is close to a victimless crime. It made Brian Williams a fool in the eyes of real war correspondents and combat veterans. And it makes watchers of the “Nightly News” wonder if they’re getting the facts, or Walter Mitty’s version of them.

But, hey, a Chinook is a fish, a type of salmon. Williams landed it in a thick fog of war — a fish tale, taller than most, but great entertainment.