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].

“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. 

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].

If you think of life as an unending story that’s whispered to you, shouted at you, otherwise presented, and then knitted together with the wool you’ve gathered — and I do — then you learn to consider the sources.

One of the best things about living in a small town like East Hampton in winter, Montauk in particular, is how the sources stand out, come into relief against the quiet backdrop. Of course, the best source is personal experience. I’d heard by way of a friend while waiting at the checkout at the 7-Eleven on Friday that local boats were doing well on cod.

This was a surprise given the dim reports from Down East where the catch has been so poor that the species has been put off limits for the next six months. I’d heard that boats out of Freeport had been reporting strong cod action, so it seems a more robust population is visiting the waters off Long Island this season.

Since Christmas, the fishing has been good enough for Montauk’s Viking Fleet to run two party boats out into the general vicinity of Coxes Ledge. I thought about boarding one of them on Saturday, but was put off by the forecast that called for wind, rain, perhaps snow. Wintertime sport fishermen are a breed apart, and while I’ve experienced glorious, sunlit days offshore in January and February, I’ve also frozen my butt off confined to the cigar-smoky salons of head boats as their bows took green water in heavy seas.

I should have gone. I met the first Viking boat to return late Saturday afternoon. Snow was blowing on a strengthening east wind, but they’d had a good day of fishing with anglers limiting out on cod up to 22 pounds. I missed the fishing, but more than that I missed listening to the people. Long Island fishermen are New Yorkers by and large, and New York fishermen share the indigenous brand of straight-talk, the no-nonsense gift of gab that’s served up with a healthy dose of acerbic wit found nowhere else in the nation. 

Having denied myself that firsthand source of story, I used Saturday to meet with two individuals in the back room of Montauk’s Naturally Good store at its new location on Main Street across from the Shagwong. Naturally Good has become a cafe of sorts where folks can sit around, drink coffee, and palaver.

At 11:30 a.m. I met Michelle Swaverly, who is helping to bring the Oceans Institute of the Montauk Lighthouse Museum (Montauk Surf Museum) to fruition. We were talking about potential installations that would include profiles of notable surfers, among them Ricky Rasmussen, part of the Westhampton tribe of surfers who rose to international fame during the ’70s. Ricky was a gifted and fearless big-wave surfer who unfortunately fell into the grip of heroin. He was busted while attempting to export the stuff from Indonesia, and was eventually murdered while scoring dope in Harlem. It’s a well-known, cautionary tale among surfers of a certain age, one that made it to the pages of The New Yorker.

A couple were sitting at the next table. “Excuse me,” the man said turning to me. “Did you say Ricky Rasmussen?” I said, yes. “He was my informant. That was 35 years ago,” he said, going on to tell how he was with the Drug Enforcement Administration at the time and put Rasmussen to work tracking drug sources after he was busted. “He was murdered,” he said. I said I knew and asked if he had been on the job at the time. “No,” he said. “We told him to stay out of Harlem. I saw him at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital just before he died.” Here was a firsthand source to a sad, but colorful piece of history. Could I get his name, I asked. “No,” he answered. “That was 35 years ago, a different life.”

At 1 in the afternoon the same day, I met a young man named Najib Aminy. He had called a few weeks back and told me he’d studied journalism at Stony Brook University. He was working on a story about Stuart Vorpahl, a former East Hampton Town trustee, commercial fisherman, town historian, and expert on our founding colonial writ of 1686, the Dongan Patent.

Aminy had met with Stuart and now wanted to pick my brain. As a reporter for The Star, I’d probably written the equivalent of a book about Stuart over the years. I consider him a friend, a great source of historical info, one who continues to insist that, legally speaking, the right to fish “without lett or hindrance” (without taxes or other legal obstacles) given East Hampton residents in 1686 remains in effect today.

Over the years he was cited a number of times for fishing without a state license. Each time, prosecutors saw fit to dismiss the cases on technicalities rather than challenge the legal foundations of the Dongan Patent, which, Stuart points out, were kept nearly intact when New York became a state back in 1777. Quaint as it may sound, it’s Stuart’s quixotic crusade that’s helped keep the patent viable, so that when the state government set out to administer a federal sportfishing license a few years back, the East End townships that were founded by colonial patents sued and won to keep the right to fish in their waters without a license. Najib is of Afghani Pashtun heritage. He intends to go Afghanistan to seek his roots someday. I want to hear that story.

Had I gone fishing on Saturday, I probably would have made a cod chowder Sunday morning. You start by boiling the head. I have a great recipe that I got from a source, who got it firsthand from an old-timer, who probably got it from . . . and on and on. Instead, I wound up with a rich, story chowder. Satisfying, but I think a boiled cod head would have made it better. I can almost taste it.

Long Island’s annual holiday-season breeding bird counts have come and gone, the last, the Orient Count, finishing up the lot on Saturday. The two closest to home were the Orient count, which includes part of Noyac, Sag Harbor, North Haven, and East Hampton’s Northwest Woods, and the Montauk count, which includes Amagansett, Springs, Montauk, and Gardiner’s Island.

The weather was benign for the Montauk count held on Dec. 20, and cold, windy, and stormy for the Orient count. Each count circle, 15 miles in diameter and the same year after year, is divided up into sectors. One or more birders cover each sector. Vicki Bustamante, Arthur Goldberg, and I covered East Hampton’s Northwest, Cedar Point County Park west to Barcelona, while Terry Sullivan covered North Haven and Eileen Schwinn and a companion took on Sag Harbor Village.

Karen Rubinstein and Angus Wilson were the compilers of the Montauk count, which has been held annually since the 1920s. The Orient count has been held since the 1930s. This count, largely because of the inclusion of Gardiner’s Island, is one of the richest on Long Island, and this time around found 29,130 individuals from 127 different species.

Among the unusual birds observed were two Eurasian wigeons, eight bald eagles, a northern goshawk, a barn owl, a saw-whet owl, and two snowy owls. Gardiner’s Island came up with its usual bounty, including an orange-crowned warbler and clay-colored sparrow. Other territories accounted for a Lincoln’s sparrow and two common redpolls. More northern birds would have shown up if the weather had been colder.

Woodpeckers were out in force, including 25 yellow-bellied sapsuckers, a count record. Among waterfowl the ubiquitous Canada geese were reasonably common at 831, scoters of three species numbered about 6,000, black ducks whipped mallards, 707 to 156, a nice turnaround, and there were at least 582 common loons. It must have been a good breeding season in the freshwater lakes in the northern states. And that mute swan that was on the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s hit list for a time recently? There were 141 counted, hardly a problem, I would say.

The Orient count results were not all in as this was being written, but the four territories, excepting Jessup’s Neck (Morton Wildlife Refuge) came in below average. Waterfowl counts were low — only 13 common loons and 86 Canada geese, while mallards outnumbered black ducks, 132 to 67, as is usual for this South Fork area of the count. The three scoter species totaled only 18 individuals. Bottom mollusks must be in short supply.

Neither count recorded a bobwhite, a species that has been in serious decline on Long Island since the 1980s. We on the South Fork didn’t chase up a single woodcock on Saturday, while the Montauk count had 16.

White-throated sparrows were the most common of the 14 sparrows on the Montauk count, numbering 722, and were our most common sparrows among the three species spotted on Saturday, with 57.

Blue jays and cardinals showed up on Saturday in higher than normal numbers, with 83 and 50 counted respectively. The same two species were also numerous on the Montauk count, 459 and 352. Numbers of fish crows have been increasing dramatically during the new millennium. In 1982 in the greater Sag Harbor territory only one was observed; this past Saturday there were 6 counted compared to 49 common crows, while the Montauk count had 3 of these southerners and a whopping 715 of the common ones.

Common grackles and red-winged blackbirds can number in the thousands at this time of the year, but the Montauk count only had 50 and 55, respectively, while we in the greater Sag Harbor area had neither. European starlings will be here in large numbers year after year forever, it seems. On New Year’s Eve I counted a flock of about 500 weaving over the farm fields between Route 114 and Long Lane in East Hampton. The Montauk count had 1,212 of them, while Sag Harbor had 50. Both counts recorded robins. Neither count found an American bluebird.

These counts take place each year all over the world, and the results are tabulated to show which bird is doing well, which one is doing poorly, and which one may have disappeared from earth altogether.

The best bird story to fall upon my ear in the New Year had nothing to do with the counts. On Saturday, midmorning, Karen and Barbara Rubinstein were driving past Mill Pond in Water Mill when they saw a bald eagle hovering over a single ruddy duck on the water. The ruddy duck repeatedly dove under, as it is wont to do, while the eagle remained overhead, following its course. After the eagle missed one surfacing of the duck, it stayed the course and waited for another. This time it successfully grabbed the little guy in its talons and flew off with it. This was a clear omen of things to come, as now that our official American bird is re-establishing itself in the area. Fish and ducks beware!

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

Skating south, I squinted into the sun reflecting off the cold obsidian of Fort Pond in Montauk on Sunday, my blades carving the surface with the crisp metallic notes of swordplay.

The ice mirrored my fellow skaters. They appeared to be skating both right side up and upside down, joined at the blades. A few kids huddled, looking down through the ice in search of fish. “Through the glass darkly” came to mind, the way Corinthians suggests most of us view life — that is, imperfectly.

“Slash, slash,” my skates continued their swordplay back north again toward Industrial Road from the covered deck at Kirk Park where I knew hot chocolate would be waiting upon my return.

I quickened my pace at the thought — slash, slash, parry and thrust — of Prince Valiant fencing a dark villain, one of the fiends who killed the cartoonists in Paris. “Killed the cartoonists?” Can the world possibly get more absurd? Did it ever occur to them that cartoons can only be killed by other cartoons, in this case by caricatures of ignorant people living in a brutal, centuries-old world frozen in time?

They say that Moses’ “parting” of the Red Sea and the un-parting that drowned the pursuing Egyptian army might have been based in fact, a tsunami or something, same with Noah’s flood.

Slash, slash. I turned my blades to the east. Matthew tells us that Jesus walked on the water, or maybe it was the apostle Paul who did the walking after Jesus promised he could do it if he believed.

What if there’d been a meteorological anomaly 2,015 years ago, an arctic blast? Temperatures plummeted below freezing as far south as the Sea of Galilee. Observed from shore, it appeared as though Jesus stepped from his boat onto the surface of the water. He did, but it was frozen water, something unknown in that part of the world.

He took a few furtive steps, felt his sandals glide, and while skates were unknown to Jesus, his powers were such that just the idea of a sharp metal blade fastened to the bottom of each foot set him free. And, although a man, he was also the Son of God and so was able to channel Peggy Fleming.

From shore, it looked as though Jesus had donned a chartreuse tutu. The Apostle Paul had joined him by then, holding him around the waist, twirling the Savior over his head, then back down on the ice for side-by-side sow cows, and a finale that featured Christ bent backwards over Paul’s outstretched arm, one leg pointing skyward, toe pointed.

Jesus’s sexuality was questioned by several of those who witnessed the pair skating. The Aramaic phrase, “degree of difficulty,” originated with Thomas’s doubts regarding the Savior’s manliness after hearing of the performance. Word got around to Pontius Pilate, already strictly enforcing the Roman army’s policy of don’t ask, don’t tell. The rest is history.

The episode was suppressed. The tutu became a halo, the ice melted into plain old water, but “the truth” of that day lived on in hushed tones from generation to generation until three monks from a breakaway order, while illuminating the Gospel according to Matthew, drew Christ in a compromising posture wearing a chartreuse tutu.

They were shot dead, and the truth has remained buried until the stone was rolled away here today, in The Star’s “On the (Frozen) Water” column.

I skated back south with Pogo, Brenda Starr, the Wizard of Id, Shuman the Human, and Mr. Natural in my head to where the kids continued to look for fish under the crystal-clear ice. Not yet, but their new perspective, the thought of their skating above the fish swimming below, the idea that life was thriving beneath the freeze, kept them glued.

I remember seeing a couple of guys ice fishing in the pond a few years ago. Don’t know how they did. I was told by four weary anglers buying coffee at the 7-Eleven on Sunday after skating that the bountiful cod harvest was continuing offshore. “Fifty of us caught 200 pounds,” one of them said.

And speaking of slings and arrows, hikers and birders should take note: The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation has extended both the gunning and archery season for deer on the East End. The season will continue through the month of January, but this year, hunters will be hunting on weekends as well as weekdays.

So, keep your head down. Elmer Fudd is in the woods.

A cruise around the South Fork last Thursday revealed that about 99 percent of the deciduous tree leaves had fallen. The ground beneath the oaks, hickories, and other trees on either side of the roads in Northwest and Middle Line Highway and Old Sag Harbor Road in Bridgehampton were completely covered with brownish leaves from this year’s crop. The woods, per se, were as they should be, bare trees, underbrush, and a thick leaf groundcover.

Because the canopies were bare, one could see the tops of the trees, trunk, branches, and all as naked as an ancient Greek or Roman statue. One could easily pick out the quarter-size pale-yellow-to-ecru patches of last year’s gypsy moth eggs, waiting for April and May to hatch out. There were some birds perching as well as some flitting here and there above and around the treetops.

Right away, I noticed a circular mass of leaves and twigs about the size of a basketball. I saw several of these clusters as I drove along, all 40 feet or higher, close to or in the treetops. I was reminded of my boyhood in Mattituck on the North Fork, where such sights were common during the winter months.

What I was looking at were dreys, warm cozy places where gray squirrels cozy up during winter storms and freezing or near sub-zero temperatures. Gray squirrels don’t hibernate the way that chipmunks and woodchucks do; they stay active the year round, but, as we humans, need shelter during the worst winter days.

I’ve never seen a squirrel making one of these globular masses, but apparently they make them quickly, because one day you see nothing and the next day you look again and you see one. And I’m not sure how they construct them, but it would appear that it is from inside out more than outside in, say the way carpenters build our houses. Such a method would lend an air of privacy to the degree that the squirrel couldn’t be seen while making its temporary home.

And it would appear that gray squirrels make dreys when holes in hollowed trees are lacking or when garages, sheds, eaves, and attics that provide warmer, drier, and windproof shelters aren’t available to them. I have a pair of adult gray squirrels in my oaky yard and don’t have a single drey.

If the drey is big enough and left empty for a time or abandoned altogether, an opossum seeking comfort and security while napping during cold spells may occupy one. White-footed mice, which are as adept at climbing as squirrels and don’t hibernate, frequently occupy them. Great-horned owls, which very rarely construct their own nests the way most birds do, may modify a drey to fit their breeding needs the way they will take advantage of an empty crow’s or red-tailed hawk’s nest locally. Since their nesting season starts as early as mid-January, they have the pick of the lot when it comes to over-wintering abandoned nests.

During good mast years, when acorns and other squirrel feed is plentiful, a female squirrel may have two litters, one in the summer or even early fall. In such cases the drey is not only used as a winter shelter, but as a shelter for nestling squirrels and their mother.

Some winters are milder than others. Based on my observations over the years, it would seem that there are very few dreys to be found in the mild winters, more by far in the arctic-like ones. Does the number of dreys predict the severity and length of the winter season? That remains to be seen, as so many other factors are in play, in particular the size of the gray squirrel population in a given community.

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

It’s Sunday morning. We have just lifted off in the rain from J.F.K. bound for San Diego, where the plan is to rent a car for the short drive north to San Clemente, home of the Surfing Heritage Foundation. The foundation archives surfing history and works to protect access to surf spots around the world.

I’ll be meeting with the foundation’s executive director, a man of Hawaiian lineage, and a surfing god of sorts, a legend in his own time beginning in the 1960s in the waves of Waikiki.

I know this because back then I was part of what was called the Tongs Gang, a group of young surfers who hung at a secret sort of spot way to the east of Waikiki proper, closer to Diamond Head. Regulars at Tongs and the breaks known as the Winch and Rice Bowl included Paul Strauch, Sammy Lee, Jeff Hackman, and a number of other surfing pioneers who were moving the sport forward stylistically and outward geographically. 

Although I grew up on Long Island, I happened to spend three summers there starting in 1963 at the age of 14 by virtue of the fact my father was a hospital administrator who found consulting work that paid for our family’s extended summer holidays. Lucky for me. Surfing as a sport and lifestyle was just beginning to catch fire on the mainland.      

Fast-forward to my watching the jet exhaust pour from the starboard engine of our Jet Blue chariot as it charged down the runway on Sunday. Yup, the same exhaust and the millions of similar carbon expulsions helping to overheat the earth worldwide.

A good part of my reason for becoming involved in the creation of the Oceans Institute of the Montauk Lighthouse Museum, a k a the Montauk Surf Museum, is to make the science-surf connection in people’s minds — not only to explain the meteorology, geography, and oceanography that makes and shapes waves, but to get across to the uninitiated the love of the sea, and the accompanying desire to protect the marine environment, that comes from making oneself part of it.

Many will remember the summer months back in the ’90s when “red-bag waste,” that is, medical waste including syringes, was washing up on Long Island beaches. The Star carried a number of stories about the effort to control the dumping of garbage, including red-bag waste that was being dumped at the 106-mile offshore site located in the New York Bight, halfway between New York and New Jersey. At the time, barge operators were making a habit of dumping well shoreward of the dumpsite.

For many, the red-bag summers, and before that the outrage over leaks in the pipeline that carries untreated sewage off the south shore of Long Island at Bergen Point, placed the concept of ocean pollution in their minds for the first time.

We are terrestrial beings for the most part, although mariners — including fishermen, and especially surfers, who share the slime of oil spills and infections from sewage with their fish and marine-mammal counterparts, not to mention bearing witness to the plastic strangling of turtles and birds — are in a position to be the canaries in the marine coal mine.

The environmental legacy of thinking surfers is becoming more profound by the year, and I believe the Oceans Institute will help spread the word.

During the week just past The New York Times ran two front-page stories, one about the damage being done to the sea by human activity. Most of it comes from habitat destruction and over-fishing. (Although one should be careful to identify the real culprits. The United States has a good track record in regulating fishing, relatively speaking.) Then there’s mining on the sea floor, plastic pollution, careless oil drilling, container ships striking migrating whales, you name it.

But perhaps the most destructive element is the warming of the earth via greenhouse gases now in the process of drastically altering the habitats of nearly all sea life from corals up through the various food chains that sustain life on earth. Our local fishermen are beginning to see its effects in real time.

Surfing is not just riding waves. I’m hoping that the Surfing Heritage Foundation will help Montauk’s new Oceans Institute emphasize, in the public mind, the good that can come from an intimate appreciation of the sea.

Paul Strauch visited Montauk last fall to see how the foundation might help the Oceans Institute, and how the institute might further the foundation’s efforts to collect East Coast surfing history.

He said the Heritage Foundation was already involved in displaying efforts that show how the petroleum-based resins used in making surfboards and wetsuits might be replaced. A display that shows surfboard builders using sustainable materials could be one of the Montauk Surf Museum’s first events.

Now, if we could just find a technology, or the time, to go surfing in far away places without jet fuel.  

Only 37 days till March and the return of the ospreys and piping plovers. So far, it hasn’t been much of a winter as far as brutal weather events are concerned. The local freshwater bodies froze over, as they almost always do, while some of the salt creeks and lagoons, to wit, Upper Sag Harbor Cove and Otter Pond, were glazed over with the usual coating of thin New Year ice. The edges of the bays in the Peconics system have been white on and off with a pudding of concentrated seawater ice crystals. These manifestations of winter we witness almost every year, but we haven’t come close to having a devastating snowstorm or northeaster of the magnitude of the blizzard of 1888 or the post-Christmas storm of 2010.

Consequently, the conditions are tolerable for both the humans and the wildlife. The winter birds are fat and sassy as they challenge each other at the very large number of feeders distributed throughout the South Fork. On warm days they eschew the easy pickings and investigate the nearest fields and woodlands. Is it better to stay north with a bounteous supply of store-bought seed, or 1,000 miles south and tempt meteorological travails that often accompany such a long flight.

Each year we see more and more summer residents winter in the north, robins, catbirds, towhees, red-winged blackbirds, grackles, and great blue herons among them. As the late evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson liked to say, it’s a betting game. You’re as liable to be struck down or survive an act of God whether you go south or stay behind. If you stay behind and survive the winter, you are at a distinct advantage. You don’t have to make the arduous trip north come spring.

In the beginning, the world’s diverse biogeography was brought about by cataclysmic changes. The underlying tectonic plates broke apart, rode on top of each other, or sunk down. One way or another, many continents were sprung from one. Thus there are different freshwater lungfish species in Australia, Africa, and South America separated from each other by thousands of miles of ocean water. The sluggish lungfish is not much of a swimmer and could never undertake such a journey from one island continent to another. These different species were rent from each other by tremendous geological forces, the same ones that are moving us apart from, or closer to, each other, but in a kinder and gentler way today.

Like the lungfish, the ratites — ostriches, emus, cassowaries, and rheas — are also found on different continents. They didn’t get from one to the other by flying (they don’t know how to fly) or running. They were also passive migrators, drifters, as it were, carried along by the spreading underground plates.

It’s a very different world now. We jet set around the globe and so do the birds, fishes, marine mammals, and whales. The Galapagos finches are a very good example of how several different bird species can evolve from one. Somehow, at least one or more pairs of South American finches got to the Galapagos archipelago. They were either blown there or took off in the wrong direction. A few million years after settling, the one species had evolved into separate ones on separates isles. Some developed thick beaks for crunching seeds the way some of our finches, like the cardinal, do, while some developed thin ones for probing into crevices and holes for insects.

It’s an ongoing crapshoot. There used to be African lions in North America and Asia. Now they’re gone from here and only a few survive in southwest Asia. Otherwise, the rest are all in Africa. California condors ranged from coast to coast, now they are confined to the wild west and would have gone extinct if it were not for the fact the few surviving ones in the wild were all trapped in the latter part of the 20th century, housed in zoos such as the San Diego Zoo, and raised like chickens. Offspring released back into the wild have slowly been re-establishing and reproducing in the Grand Canyon and the Sierras. Just think, if breeding behavior weren’t instinctive and had to be taught and learned, there would be no rejuvenating wild condor population. In nature some things cannot be left to chance!

So here we are. It’s the 21st century and we are still going at it “tooth and nail.” God’s macro-organisms, the animals, plants, and insects, continue to redistribute themselves, while a few fall by the wayside each year never to return. In a way, all of nature is no different from us humans, only its laws and manners are not written in stone as ours are. There are seven billion of us Homo sapiens, or soon will be. That’s a lot of biomass to consider, much more than that of all of, say, the remaining elephants, American bison, gray wolves, and even farm-raised livestock. We are certainly the most populous biped on earth, and may well be the most populous vertebrate. No one has yet to count the number of garbage rats and house mice, to name two other vertebrate species that inhabit all of the continents and most of the islands the world over.

If we can just get through this winter, which we seem to be doing without too much fuss and ado, we might very well be able to figure it all out. And then again, we might not. Happy New Year!

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

“Go take a long walk off a short pier.” Not sure why the dismissive phrase came to mind. The pier at San Clemente was not short by a long shot, 200 yards or more. I think it’s because in our minds, piers are a staple, a construct that everyone understands.

“Why do they build them? Just to fish from? Are they for people without boats?” Kyle asked. Good question, and the answer is pretty much, yes, but more. The Pier, as societal microcosm, parade, and oceangoing adventure for pedestrians, has been perfected in California.

Young women with sleeves of tattoos pushed baby carriages, two tittering Japanese tourists whipped out iPhones to photograph a seven-foot-tall man as he passed, a clutch of fishermen at the pier’s end worked multiple rods and live-bait nets with halibut on their minds, their lines 40 down to the sea surface. One with a scarred head and a T-shirt representing his Marine Corps unit reminded us that Camp Pendleton was nearby. Over the side next to the pier’s pilings, surfers waited for Coke-bottle blue-green waves. At its shoreward end, a restaurant offered happy-hour margaritas, calamari, steaks, and Dungeness crabs. Amtrak’s Shoreliner whistled south, Pelicans cruised the 80-degree air.

At its core, a pier is a place built especially for people without boats who are drawn to the sea, a structure whose purpose is deemed important enough to spend big bucks to maintain it. Montauk has a beauty with its own subculture that the town maintains in Fort Pond Bay.

There once was a fishing pier that jutted out from the beach in front of the Montauk Lighthouse and was repaired each summer after winter storms did their worst. Can you imagine watching bluefish and striped bass passing under the pier, boiling at your feet?

The trip to California was a success. I was able to tour the Surfing Heritage Foundation Museum and enlist its help in the creation of the Montauk Lighthouse Museum’s Oceans Institute. I caught some waves at “San-O,” San Onofre, generated from a storm off Japan. The waves were perked up by Santa Ana winds that carried the occasional burst of 50-caliber machine-gun fire from Pendleton nearby.

We drove the four-lane, 80-mile-per-hour winding anaconda that’s the freeway known as the Five, and the good ole coast highway with its ’50s-style, slant-roofed burger joints, chopped pickups, and ape-hangered Harleys. A pier is built for people drawn to the sea. Or, is it for people escaping each other. Is there a difference?

On the beach beside the pier were strewn clumps of deep-yellow kelp. Small, plover-like pipers minced, and there was bigger shorebird called a whimbrel of the curlew family. A hippy chick in an altered state with arms spread embraced the sea, yoga posed, embraced the sky, drew a circle in the sand with a peace sign at its center, wrote around the inside of the circle’s border, “Only love can save us from ourselves.” And, I’m thinking, perhaps a pier.