Pines and oaks are the most common native trees on Long Island. There are two species of pines, pitch and white, and at least seven species of oaks. Oak trees are long-lived — white oaks such as those on Gardiner’s Island can live to 400 or 500 years, equaling the longevity of white pines, while pitch pines, which George Washington called “ill thriven” on his one trip here, are lucky if they make it to the century mark. But all in all, pitch pines probably outnumber all of the other species and in large areas of central Suffolk County they can be the only tree species for acres and acres.

Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University in the early 19th century, toured the Island from west to east in the first years of that century and wrote about its flora and geology. He was impressed by a stand of small pitch pines in the vicinity of Westhampton in western Southampton Town. This area, which still exists 210 years later, is known as the “dwarf pine plains” as it is relatively flat and the trees are small in stature. These “pygmy” pitch pines are similar in most respects to their larger siblings that surround them on all sides, but they produce cones not only along their branches but popping out directly from the trunk.

For a long time botanists and naturalists have wondered whether these pines are merely stunted or are different in some substantive way, perhaps, genetically, from the taller ones, which can achieve a height of 75 feet high in a few spots here. Side by side plantings of the pine nuts from cones from the two different forms have never yielded absolutely positive proof that they are different. It is thought that the soil in the area adjoining Gabreski Airport is different in some way from other pine barren soils, all of which have very limited mineral deposits and produce poor yields of this or that vegetable if used as cropland.

Pitch pines have few enemies. The native pine boring beetles, sometimes called the “turpentine beetle,” bore into their trunks, but the resin oozing from the pine helps fill the holes and keep the tree growing despite the beetles’ incursions. A moth can lay its eggs on the tips of new branches and the larvae eat the sprouting pine needles while they are still tender. They resist drought and can tolerate cold and hot temperatures better than most trees. If burned over, as many of Long Island’s pinelands have been more than once, they resprout from the trunks if not killed outright and reseed themselves. The scales of their cones tightly enclose the pine nuts, which are further protected by a waxy covering. Fires melt the wax without killing he seeds, and the seeds drop out and restart the forest.

The cones of the dwarf pines hold their seeds inside even more securely than the cones from the taller pines. If the ambient temperature doesn’t reach into the 90s the cones may never open, but they are very likely to open in a forest fire. Thus, pitch pine woods are fire dependent. If there were no fires or very, very hot days, they would eventually be replaced by species not dependent on fires. One of Long Island’s great naturalists, the late Roy Wilcox, a duck farmer, visited the dwarf pine plains during a record summer hot spell and watched to see if any of the cones, which take two years to mature, popped open. Indeed, a few did.

In the past two years some of the taller pitch pines have dropped their needles and died. Recent examinations by government arborists and foresters have discovered that the southern pine beetle is responsible for these deaths. The pitch pine can resist the native pine borer, but not the new one. Several adult southern pine beetles attack a tree at the same time, boring densely spaced holes so that the entire circumference is damaged and thus the transport of materials up and down the tree trunk through the active growing layers, xylem and phloem, is so compromised that the tree dies.

Last Thursday Victoria Bustamante and I visited the dwarf pine plains in Westhampton to see how trees were faring. The paths are white, owing to the bleached Plymouth-Carver sands, which define the dwarf pine plain soils. Some of the dwarf pines reached to 15 or more feet in the air and we wondered if they were dwarf or normal size. Perhaps, there was a mixture of big and small ones. In general, however, the large majority were under 10 feet, about the size of those on the north side of Sunrise Highway just west of the road to the airport, where the 1995 pine barrens fire had done so much damage. Indeed, even the normal pitch pines are slow growing, only 10 feet tall after 19 years.

We could find no other tree species among the dwarf pines. There were lots of oaks, but they were only shrubs belonging to the bear oak species. There was a spotty ground cover consisting of heather, bear berry, winterberry, a few bayberries, and a couple of flower stalks belonging to the sunflower family. After walking 300 or 400 yards down a path that was partly covered with coal cinders, we came upon six or seven dead dwarf pines of the taller kind. They were shot through with holes and the bark peeled off easily in our hands.

Further on, we came to another spot with a few dead dwarf pines, which seems in keeping with this parasite’s here-and-there spotty geographic infestation pattern. Two years back, Victoria had told me about some obviously dead pitch pines along Sunrise Highway in Hampton Bays and Quogue, which I assumed were the result of a tip moth invasion. In the mid-1980s tip moths had decimated, but not killed outright, large patches of pitch pines on either side of the highway. I should have inspected the pines then, but didn’t. It was only this year that biologists discovered that the dead and dying pitch pines in western Southampton and in Brook­haven had been attacked by the southern pine beetle.

Now, a question has arisen. Will the attack continue and spread eventually to all of the pines in the Central Pine Barrens Forest, Long Island’s largest protected woodlands, or will something come along, say a forest fire of large proportions or an extremely cold and snowy winter, and stop the borers in their tracks? Dead trees can be cut down and removed, and the pine borer larvae with them. It remains to be seen if the beetles have already made inroads into the South Fork pitch pine woods or the white pine forest of East Hampton’s Northwest.

If you come upon a pitch pine or white pine trunk checkered with numerous small holes in your neighborhood, call the New York Department of Environmental Conservation on the campus of Stony Brook University or the Cornell Cooperative Extension office in Riverhead.

In the meantime Victoria is going to “hatch out” seeds from both kinds of pitch pine cones in her oven and grow them side by side in her greenhouse to see if they are actually different, and settle that question once and for all.

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

Of cod, blackfish, black sea bass, winter in Montauk, One Million Years B.C., Christmas, and Susan Sontag:

I was watching a documentary about Susan Sontag the other night, an extraordinary woman very much of her time in the ’60s, a feminist, philosopher, and essayist with what were, and to some still are, radical views. As it happened, I had caught the last half of “One Million Years B.C.” starring Rachel Welch on the Turner Classic Movies channel earlier in the day. It was one of those cold rainy days last week, so perhaps I can be forgiven.

“One Million Years,” which hit the screen in 1966, was fascinating in that the dialogue consisted of what sounded like gobbledygook — grunts and growls meant to represent the lingua franca in cave days. Of course, Rachel is Rachel by any other name, and the plot, one tribe fighting the other, dodging dinosaurs, and Rachel’s tribe surviving a volcanic apocalypse at the end, needed no spoken or written explanation.

With this depiction of early man still in mind, I watched the Sontag documentary that evening. Her famous quote, “If there were no speaking or writing there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is,” seemed absurd (literally) beyond words. “No truth?” “Only be?” Like the world in all its glory does not exist unless humans talk about it? I’m getting to the cod, blackfish, and black sea bass and Christmas.

It’s the same problem I have with the atheist who seems blinded to what is, by blabbing about what isn’t, a self-fulfilling prophecy to my way of thinking. If “God” did not create the world, then it created itself, an accomplishment, you will agree, beyond words to describe it. Ultimately, Yahweh, the terrible/wonderful force of creation and its opposite, the entity that cannot be named, exists, as the Old Testament hints, beyond words, beyond humankind’s blathering about it.

I ask you, is it so difficult to consider a world without people? Is it possible that some of us believe the world would not exist without us? Okay, now the cod, blackfish, and black sea bass.

Capt. Michael Potts has been running the charter boat Breakwater from Salivar’s Dock in Montauk these days. On Monday afternoon we met up at the Montauk I.G.A. Don’t we all? As we left, he reached into his truck and gave me two blackfish fillets, an early Christmas gift.

He said the fishing had been productive for blackfish, a k a  tautog, and especially for sea bass, both bottom dwellers. Captain Potts said his anglers were even catching a fair amount of cod, whose numbers have plummeted in traditional grounds Down East to the extent that federal managers are considering banning their harvest there for at least six months. “It could happen here,” he said. Scientists say the absence of cod is likely due to a general warming trend in the northwest Atlantic.

“On Monday, I had people who had already been blackfishing with me three or four times. I thought we’d try for cod. We wound up with 23. We tried crabs [green crab bait] and caught more blackfish. It’s been an excellent blackfish season and excellent sea bass season. On an average day for the last month we limited out on blackfish and sea bass,” the veteran charterman said.

He added that he’d not heard of a rod-and-reel-caught striped bass since late October or early November, and that the smattering of herring schools were not being attacked, as usual in late summer and early fall by stripers. He said schools of medium-size bluefin tuna had been recently spotted offshore around the Hudson Canyon, “but nobody’s trying for them.” Beautiful bluefin going about their business observed by only a few witnesses. The existence of cod, blackfish, black sea bass proved by baited hooks, witnessed by a few of us, otherwise unseen, unspoken about.

I believe it’s easier for people who spend a good part of their lives at sea to imagine a world that exists beyond words. Those who walk a long stretch of empty beach in winter too. I was asked the other day if I believed the story of Christmas. Did I think it was the true? Was Jesus a real person, the son of God, who made blind men see, turned water into wine, and rose again from the dead?

I grew up singing “Rock of Ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee,” so I like the story, not because I think it’s true, but because for me it serves as a guide to understanding the truth beyond its words.

It’s not our seascape, hills and dales,

When I think Montauk, it’s fins and tails.

Not Rita’s mare, or ‘The Affair,’

Not the Light, or stars at night

Not Gosman’s Dock, or Blackfish Rock

Not summer’s sails, nor nor’east gales

What is Montauk?

It’s fins and tails.

During the summer months, you hardly notice them. Too much else going on. But, like the skeletons of trees once their leaves have flown, the dried trophies of seasons past become visible on dock pilings, signs, and telephone poles this time of year.

The fins and tails are scalps of a sort, but also totems to beloved species, to days spent at sea. Unlike deer antlers or trophy heads, fins and tails resurrect movement, mummified memories of the fish’s spirit and power. They continue to swim. 

Montauk’s fins and tails were everywhere as I walked around the harbor on Saturday, and I was reminded of the 300-year-old entries in the records of the East Hampton Town Trustees that note the amount of oil tried from the blubber of whales harvested near shore. The English settlers got the oil, but the local Indians (who helped row the boats and heave the lances) wanted, and were given, the whales’ fins and tails to burn, the smoke rising to honor the animal’s spirit and sacrifice.

The fins and tails preserved on dock pilings — the older ones shrunken and warped by the sun — must seem like part of a primitive ritual to some of Montauk’s summer visitors, and, of course they are. Taking the lives of our fellow creatures should not be taken lightly. It tends to draw ancient impulses from deep in our DNA.

To some, fins and tails are like the ears of a brave bull awarded the toreador after a successful fight, or a religious relic, like the dried finger of a saint. A few traditions go deeper. I watched two fishermen take bites from the still-pulsing heart of a giant bluefin tuna as they prepared the fish to be shipped to Japan for sushi. They made light of what they were doing, but there was no denying it was a ritual of respect, a primordial stab at absorbing the giant’s spirit. 

It’s impossible to explain, I guess. The other day I was rummaging in the attic and found the tail of a 444-pound, bluefin giant I caught 20 years ago. I remember the mixture of pride and regret I felt when the fish was hoisted aboard the Blue Fin IV charter boat.

I took a picture of the fish hanging on the gin pole before it was wrestled on board, a magnificent creature whose incredible strength and endurance had drained my own during an hour-long battle. I seem to have lost the photo, but I still have that great fish by the tail.

The winter birds are here and hungry. The Pennys haven’t had a winter feeding station out for more than five years running — no more rats, but very few birds. Having been recently stimulated by watching visitors feed the birds at the Morton Wildlife Refuge a few blocks down the road in Noyac, I decided it was time for me to return to the practice. My understanding of avian ways had become blurred because I had stopped observing them at close range. One bird was just like another, just as all the different gulls are called seagulls, all trees are oaks or pines, and all Americans are European, Asian, African-American, Latin American, or American Indian.

So I erected a feeding station outside my bedroom window made from a four-foot-diameter plastic tabletop mounted upside down five feet off the ground on a single iron fencepost. The table had a two-inch-wide down-turned lip, which became upturned when the table surface faced down. The underside had plastic ridges acting as spines and holes from which the four plastic legs had been removed. The compartments created by the supportive spines and pockets for the leg inserts would allow me to put different kinds of seeds, berries, and corn kernels in each area. The pockets could be filled with water so that the bird could eat, drink, and be merry at the same time.

I would keep the pesky squirrels away by situating the elevated feeding table six feet away from the nearest tree. I bought a big bag of mixed birdseed and added it to my smaller bag of black sunflower seeds, put the seed out, and waited for the birds to come. The first day not a single bird showed, but a gray squirrel did. It had no trouble jumping the six feet from the longstanding black cherry onto the feeding table, where it sat up nonchalantly and chowed down the black sunflower seeds one after another. It obviously had been watching my efforts to create a squirrel-free birdfeeder from above and quite possibly was amused by it.

I opened the window and growled and banged on the panes. The gray squirrel correctly interpreted my animated growls and knocks, quickly jumped off the feeding table on to the cherry, and up it went. I had clearly underestimated its ability to raid the site.

I scratched my head, got a role of aluminum flashing from the basement, and wrapped and nailed several strips of it around the cherry trunk. Ah, I thought, I wouldn’t let wily squirrel outsmart me two times in a row. Just as planned, the flashing worked, the squirrel couldn’t get a grip on it. Failing to do that, it merely climbed up the shingles on the side of the house facing the feeding table and in less than 20 minutes was back atop the table eating the sunflower seeds.

I spent the next two days growling out the window and banging on the panes. I was not going to move the feeding table. I was not going to let the squirrel get the best of me. After keeping the squirrel away for two days, the birds began to show. At first two tufted titmice came, one at a time, each taking a sunflower seed and departing as quickly as it arrived. It began to rain, and the compartments filled with precipitation. I drilled several weep holes through the bottom of the table, and the water drained out slowly.

After three days, five different species — titmice, white-throated sparrows, song sparrows, male and female cardinals, and a pair of blue jays — were routinely visiting the feeding table. On the fourth day a black-capped chickadee showed up. I was in business!

Once or twice each day I would have to throw open the sash and growl at the gray squirrel, which was determined to get the best of me. That methodology, although hard on the neighbors, worked to a fashion. The squirrel’s raids became fewer and fewer. More birds showed up, and I was happy that they were getting most of the food and that I could still tell a sparrow from a jay, a male cardinal from its much duller mate. I had succeeded, notwithstanding the bungling and poor planning, the birds were back and feeding to their hearts’ content, and, yes, an occasional squirrel, but not a rat in sight.

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

This is the time of year when we seem duty-bound to reflect upon the year just past. I suspect a formalized, perennial look back has always been part of our basic makeup on whatever calendar, and upon whatever date, was chosen as the start of a new year.

The day after Christmas, I had the privilege of attending a small gathering of Montaukers hosted by Chip Duryea in an enclosed area of the Duryea and Son lobster pound and restaurant on Fort Pond Bay. There were about a dozen of us, including a few of the hamlet’s elders — to be honest none of us were spring chickens.

The building we were in and its surrounding structures and dock are the last vestiges of the old Montauk fishing village, most of which was moved to its present location following the devastation of the 1938 hurricane, and the Navy’s takeover of Fort Pond Bay during World War II.

A couple entered our dining room, ordered, and had their lunch while we palavered about the past. If they were listening, they got a history lesson.

We talked about the superior taste of bluefish compared to striped bass. I thanked Chip for keeping broiled bluefish on his menu, as far as I know the only restaurant in Montauk to do so.

We talked about cooking sea ducks, mergansers and scoters, and Vinnie Grimes offered up the old joke about how the best way was to soak the “coot” with a wooden board in saltwater, place the coot on the board in the oven, then throw away the coot and eat the board. Chip and I disagreed and praised sea ducks for their flavor.

Duryea and Son has been sold, including the house across Tuthill Road that has been home to the Duryea family for five generations. Next season will be its last, and Chip said the house might be razed.

Gene Beckwith, our eldest guest, told how the house had been rolled on logs from behind Ruschmeyer’s restaurant down Industrial Road to its present location. And, he told how the old Napeague Coast Guard station was moved across the Napeague isthmus, lifted onto a raft in Napeague Harbor, and towed by Carl Darenberg Sr. through the Montauk Harbor entrance to its present location on Star Island. “And they hit some weather,” Beckwith recalled with a chuckle.

Likewise the Ditch Plain Coast Guard station, which was moved upland to become a restaurant and boarding house. Its garage is still used by denizens of the “trailer park,” a k a Montauk Shores Condominiums. “They used to move houses,” Beckwith said. A number of houses along Flamingo Avenue were moved from the bay, as were the cabins that make up the East Deck Motel.

Chip said he and his wife, Wendy, had bid on the windmill section of the Rhein­stein estate back in the ’70s, with a thought of building a house around it, but Peter Beard scooped it up, hoisted it by helicopter onto a flatbed truck and moved it east down Montauk Highway to his Moorland property, where it later burned to the ground.

It occurs to me that years pass like houses moved rather than razed. We don’t start from scratch. We bring the good and familiar, and we store the worn and broken like hoarders. Their repair becomes part of our future.

I thought about the past year and realized that most of what stood out were experiences and events tied to nature: being towed on my kayak by a big bluefish I’d hooked, the day we sailed Leilani on a starboard tack from Gardiner’s Island to the harbor in a 17-knot wind, sails in perfect trim as the sun set, the sharing of some exceptional waves with friends, feeling part of a community that rose up against the development of the East Deck Motel property, watching glorious sunrises on the lake, inhaling the rich smell of a productive scallop season — the essence of our bays — inside the Lesters’ shucking shack in Amagansett.

And, I guess because of this column, I remember the many friends and acquaintances who stopped to tell me of whales they’d seen, fish they’d caught, birds they’ve watched, a beached turtle saved, and, last week, a friend who stopped his truck and rolled down the window to tell me he’d seen herring, “dead, they’re probably mostly bones now, down on the beach by Stewey’s trap.”

Imagine being so lucky as to have someone realize that I’d be as fascinated as he about a bunch of herring skeletons in the windrows and wrack lines of Fort Pond Bay.

“Auld Lang Syne” is how Robert Burns expressed “times gone by” in the Scottish tongue. One stanza of the song that will be slurred, shouted, and mouthed at midnight tonight seems to have been written especially for this place:

We two have paddled in the stream

From morning sun till dine;

But seas between us broad have roared

Since Auld Lang Syne.

We all know the names John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and James Audubon. Most us are familiar with the more modern names, Rachael Carson and Erin Brockovich.

But before those two came along there was another woman who almost nobody knows about, and until recently, neither did I. But she was one of several conservationist-environmentalist women who never received the accolades they deserved. Her name is Rosalie Edge. She was a life member of the American Audubon Society and she created the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania at the age of 56. She was also a feminist (when feminists were rare), a poet, and a bird lover. She established the sanctuary in 1934 by leasing 1,398 acres of rugged undeveloped mountain land in the Appalachians near Allentown in eastern Pennsylvania.

But why, and why there? It turns out that the particular piece of land was part of a much larger wild piece that once was occupied by the Unami tribe of the Lenape American Indians, the same Lenapes that were ancestors of the Shinnecock, Montauk, and other Long Island tribes. The Unamis lived off the ample supply of game, plants, and other “raw materials” in the area. Along came European white men and women in the late 1600s and they established a colony which remained small in population right up into the present day. They also lived off the land, and it was only sparsely developed.

In the early 1900s when passenger pigeons were on their way out, Hawk Mountain was known for its large number of migrating hawks, which, abetted by the updrifts from valley winds, soared either north or south during their annual spring and fall migrations. The hawks were so plentiful that they became the target for hundreds of shotgunners who killed them by the thousands as they flew past. In 1932 another strategic player named Richard Pough, who was a photographer, naturalist, and hawk lover, visited the site because he had heard that there were a large number of goshawks shot by hunters at the mountain at a time when each dead goshawk could be turned in to Pennsylvanian authorities for a $5 bounty.

He photographed the slaughter and his photo of hundreds of goshawks lying on the ground dead has become one of the medallions of the movement to stop the killing of raptors, which came to fruition in the 1960s largely based on his work. Throughout most of the 20th century, hawks were considered vermin that preyed on game birds and chickens. Almost none were allowed to fly past the hunters’ guns without receiving a blast of lead shot.

Edge was inspired by Pough’s photos and reports. She borrowed money, paid $2 an acre for the land, posted it and had it closely patrolled. As if overnight, the reign of terror was halted, very few Hawk Mountain hawks were shot in 1935 and thereafter. Today the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary comprising much of the Kittatinny Ridge is a mecca for both migrating raptors and birders. The number of hawks passing each day by species is recorded and tabulated by trained volunteers and their data is saved and published for all to see.

On Saturday and Sunday three women from East Hampton Town, Vicki Bustamante and Karen and Barbara Rubinstein, were on hand to observe the hawks and other birds passing through. The official count over the two-day period was as follows: Red-tailed and sharp-shinned hawks, 177 and 30, respectively, were the most common. There were 9 Cooper’s hawks, 21 red-shouldered hawks, 12 bald eagles, 2 golden eagles, a merlin, 2 goshawks, 9 northern harriers, 3 black vultures, and a few other individuals — an osprey and northern harrier, among them. All of the raptors along with several ravens were heading south without hardly a flap of their wings — the winds and their updrafts were so favorable for soaring and gliding, thus saving all of those calories for the rest of the flight ahead.

Golden eagles had passed by a week before in large numbers and broad-winged hawks, mostly in September. Rough-legged hawks and the goshawks are more northern and come through a little later, especially so in such a warm October and early November of the kind eastern America has experienced this year. A great-horned owl decoy with real glued-on feathers was seated on a post near the observers. Many of the hawks that flew by, especially the red-tails and sharp-shins, would dive at it as they passed. Vicki says it was the first time she had ever seen a red-tail turn its head back to see if the owl was in pursuit while still flying straight ahead after one such attack.

Along the way, the three observed two pileated woodpeckers, the largest of their genre in the United State, but not on Long Island. They didn’t see a coyote, except, perhaps, for a roadkill, saw bears, and smelled a skunk or two on the trip there and back.

One can see several different hawk species and a few bald eagles moving westerly along the ocean shore in September and October, but not in the numbers they move along Hawk Mountain. If it weren’t for unsung heroes like Rosalie Edge, Richard Pough, and the Audubon Society we would have far fewer hawks and eagles than we have now. All of the raptors are on the upswing.

Isn’t it puzzling that humans all over the globe are killing each other by the thousands daily? We have learned to spare the hawks and eagles; when will we apply that learning to save the human species? Perhaps never.

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

It’s turkey day, and many of us across America will be feasting on what Ben Franklin believed should have been our national bird. Bald eagles don’t taste good, but are more elegant and soar high in the sky; turkeys barely get off the ground when flushed. Vegans will forgo the turkey, but some will dine on the traditional trimmings, meatless stuffing, sweet potatoes, and cranberry sauce.

Colonists and their offspring have been feasting on turkeys ever since they arrived here in the beginning of the 17th century, having been introduced to them by the Native Americans who helped them get through the early years of the first settlements. Wild turkeys were somewhat plentiful on Long Island and elsewhere across most of the nation during those early years. However, by the beginning of the 19th century they were gone from here and much of eastern North America.

As in the case of the Indian wild fowl, America’s domestic chickens, surviving turkeys were easily raised in captivity, and farm-raised turkeys replaced wild ones on the Thanksgiving serving dish before the start of the 20th century. Almost all of us are still dining on the farm-raised ones, while the wild ones make a comeback.

Gardiner’s Island in the Peconic Estuary has had a flock of turkeys run loose since the mid-1950s, but their pedigree is questionable. Genuine New York wild turkeys made a comeback under the tutelage of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which brought back a small population found occupying mountainous regions of the southern part of the state and then distributed them here and there until they once again began to thrive.

As part of the state comeback program, in January of 1991 the D.E.C. live-trapped wild turkeys in the upper Hudson River area and let them go in Montauk’s Hither Woods. After a few years of adjusting, they got going big time and spread westerly, occupying the Napeague isthmus, then the rest of Amagansett and finally western East Hampton Town’s Wainscott and Northwest Woods. From time to time more wild-trapped upstate birds were released on the South Fork. The population further expanded and did so well that a regulated hunting season opened on them in 2011. This Thanksgiving several South Forkers will be feeding on turkeys that didn’t come from King Kullen, but were shot in the wild. Back to the future!

Turkeys have done so famously, why not bring back other wild birds and mammals that were part of the post-Columbus landscape here. Beavers, oters, wolves, bobcats, and maybe bears once did well here but were hunted and trapped into extinction on Long Island. The white-tailed deer population on Long Island was reduced to a few hundred or less by World War II; it now numbers in the upper thousands. Wolves were last found in Long Island in Native American settlements in the role of domestic dogs, but the local white politicians passed laws phasing them out here early on.

We once had several pairs of bald eagles nesting across the island, but they were steadily reduced down to just a single pair on Gardiner’s Island. After 1936 that pair departed; however, bald eagles are finally making a comeback, and from all accounts they have been welcomed by Long Island’s human population. At least three pairs have bred here in this decade, two successfully on Gardiner’s Island and Shelter Island’s Mashomack Preserve.

Minks and weasels have yet to be extirpated here, but may be shortly. Striped skunks and gray foxes were once almost as common as squirrels, then became very rare and were gone entirely from the South Fork east of the Shinnecock Canal by the mid-1980s. Skunks are making a comeback in this millennium; a few have been spotted recently in the Montauk area. A few gray foxes still occupy the Central Pine Barrens, and the pair seen east of Lake Montauk and at Culloden Point from time to time in the last decade may still be around.

Peregrine falcons and ravens are beginning to nest on Long Island again, while not a single ruffed grouse has been reported on the South Fork since the beginning of the 21st century. And where are the bobwhites?

While grouse have disappeared and bobwhites have almost disappeared, woodchucks and southern flying squirrels, which were never on the South Fork as far as we know, are now making serious inroads here. Did they get here on their own or were they released by nuisance trappers? That is the question.

So we see that the original Long Island wild fauna is making a comeback. We even had a real beaver and a beaver lodge a few years back, first in Scoy Pond in the Grace Estate, then at Fresh Pond in Hither Woods. A few river otters have been seen in Nassau and Suffolk Counties in recent years. Why not help both species reestablish in the manner that the wild turkey has been reestablished here? Coyotes (or coywolves) will make it here on their own and, perhaps, already have. Bobcats? Why not? Bears? Perhaps not.

Native raccoons, opossums, red foxes, gray squirrels, muskrats, chipmunks and cottontails don’t need our help. We don’t know if the New England cottontail is still in town. White-footed mice are cute and everywhere, but they serve as prime reservoirs for the Lyme disease spirochaete, and their feces can contain the deadly hanta virus. Nonnative Norway rats are overrunning us and have the potential to carry the plague organism. We don’t need any more of them.

To make the Long Island ark complete again, however, three long-gone species that will require special help from the DNA wizards in order to be resurrected are the heath hen, a species of prairie chicken, the passenger pigeon, and the Labrador duck. This Thanksgiving, before digging in, and while saying grace, add a line for the recoup of the native flora and fauna.

United States Census Bureau figures show that Long Island’s population has begun to shrink. Fewer humans and a few more wildlife comebacks, wouldn’t that be ducky?

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

“Like butter,” was Dalton Portella’s brief and, given the day, appropriate description of the surf as he watched a set of waves peel across one of Montauk’s moorland coves a week ago.

He had just gotten out after a two-hour session before his internal clock told him he’d better get home for turkey at a neighbor’s house. He was shivering, but happily so. It had been a good go-out, and if his peaceful expression was any indication — chattering teeth included — he was grateful on the day specifically set aside for thanks. 

The glassy, head-high waves were generated by the massive weather system that had plunged the Midwest into record-breaking cold for November. The system had moved east and south before heading offshore to produce a windy and rainy northeaster on the day before Thanksgiving. And the forecast promised northerly, offshore winds from a cold front on the day of festive gluttony itself.

These days surfers could deduce the promise of good surf coming either via a sixth sense derived from years of watching sea and sky, or by visiting any of the numerous surf prognostication sites on their computers. Either way, they knew that Montauk’s eastern breaks, as well as favorite beach breaks along Napeague and East Hampton beaches, would probably come to life on Thanksgiving Day. Perfect timing.

Not so thankful (at least in ocean-related matters) were the tribe of surfcasters who have been waiting for the last of the fall run of striped bass to make the annual pass along Long Island’s south shore beginning in Montauk. Alas, it hasn’t happened, despite a healthy showing of herring.

Rick Etzel, captain of Montauk’s Breakaway charter boat, said on Friday that he’d made a run out of the harbor, just off the bell buoy where, for some unknown reasons (perhaps some kind of sustenance flows out of Lake Montauk on an outgoing tide) schools of herring gather this time of year. “I got a bushel or so, but there was no fish on them,” he said, meaning predator bass.

Etzel said he planned on pickling the herring and putting them up in jars as Christmas gifts, with onions, “and a few jalapeno peppers for some heat.” Like cranberry picking, and bay scallops — one scalloper I know said he was able to dredge up a bumper harvest of 58 bags of scallops during the first week of this year’s season — putting up pickled herring is an old East End tradition.

Local waters are not completely void of striped bass. There are reports of small bass being caught on the sand beaches, as well as bluefish along the western end of Napeague and on the ocean side of Amagansett. And birds have been working on schools of something, perhaps herring, in Gardiner’s Bay. I’ve heard a few reports that bluefish are chasing them.

The Montauk SurfMasters tournament for striped bass ended with a whimper on Monday with the vast majority of the big fish caught in September and October.

In the Wader division first place went to Bob Howard for his 39-pound whopper caught on Oct. 14. Gary Krist landed in second by virtue of a 20.72-pound bass caught on Oct. 24. In third place is Gary Aprea who reeled in his 19.24-pounder on Oct. 2. Jason Pecoraro headed the tournament’s wetsuit division from Sept. 28, the day he caught his 50.30-pound cow bass, the largest fish in this year’s contest.

Lynne Torrento topped the women’s division with a 23.38-pound striper caught on Oct. 28. Mary Ellen Kane captured second and third places with 15.25 and 13.04-pound striped bass respectively. The larger bass was the only one on the leader board to have been caught in November.

The winner of a 14-foot East End sharpie sailing and rowing boat will be selected during a drawing scheduled for Saturday at the East End Boat Society’s boat shop at 301 Bluff Road, Amagansett, immediately west of the town marine museum. Each year, the society holds a benefit raffle of a vintage wooden boat built by its members, drawing the winner at its holiday party, which will run from 3 to 5 p.m.

Ray Hartjen, the society’s president, said a new raffle boat is now under way, a 12-foot-10-inch Pooduck, a sailing and/or rowing tender, designed by Joel White, the ninth boat the group has built since its founding. It is a recreational craft that can serve as a tender.

The society’s restoration projects include a 1921 Herreschoff 12.5-foot sailboat and a 1955 Dunphy, a classic runabout that was made through a cold-molded plywood technique developed in the ’50s. It will be outfitted with an engine from that period and will be part of the society’s permanent collection.

Membership in the nonprofit society is open to those with any skill level and costs $35 a year for an individual and $45 for a family. The group meets year round every Wednesday and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The Town of East Hampton stretches from the tip of Montauk Point to just west of the town airport, from the bays of the Peconic Estuary on the north to the great Atlantic Ocean on the south. Within those boundaries is a set of habitats, ecotypes, ecotones, and plant associations that set the town apart from the rest of Long Island and make it a unique treasure in terms of the natural world.

Here are just some of the wonderful landscapes and seascapes that make the town what it is: moving dunes, sandy spits, coastal ponds, marine harbors, streams and tidal creeks, pitch pine woods, oak-hickory hardwood forests, white pine woods, oak-holly-beech woods, maritime grasslands, strand vegetation, beach grass-beach plum associations, vernal ponds, sedge islands, heathlands, highlands, lowlands, old fields, savannas, cranberry bogs, blufftop and bluff-face floras, and the like. Every one is different and although none rivals in size any of America’s deserts, prairies, and montane landscapes, they are miniatures of these large biomes and just as interesting ecologically and geologically.

Many of these, such as the oak-holly woods, Montauk Downs, coastal heathlands, and maritime grasslands, are already described in detail in the records and collections of New York State’s Natural Heritage office and State Museum in Albany. These sites and the habitats they contain are owned by various levels of government, including village, town, county, state, and federal entities, and are perpetual open spaces in the eyes of the law. Several others are held by not-for-profit corporations such as the Nature Conservancy, Peconic Land Trust, and property owners associations, while various subdivisions also contribute many set-asides such as reserve areas and scenic and conservation easements.

One could spend a lifetime studying just one acre of these natural upland or surface waters and wetlands and still not discover all the secrets they hold. Not only are they all occupied by diverse animals and plants, they also are standing records of the development of East Hampton as the glaciers that created them retreated to the north. For example, the soft sediments that are as much as 18 feet deep under the wetlands of Accabonac Harbor shores are marked by the unique strata of different periods of development that go back thousands of years in time and can be decoded by palynologists who study biological and geological history at the very micro level.

I love all of East Hampton’s land and seascapes, but one of my favorites has gone unnoticed by many ecologists and naturalists and is not described in the Natural Heritage ecotype files. It is that expanse of Napeague land once crossed by a spur of the Long Island Rail Road to the old fish factory on Hicks Island. It is a dune plain and there are none like it on the rest of Long Island, perhaps in the whole of New England, which shares many natural attributes with East Hampton.

It stretches from a little north of Montauk Highway all the way to Cranberry Hole Road. On the east it melts into the marshes of Napeague Harbor, on the west it extends almost all of the way to the nexus of Cranberry Hole Road, Montauk Highway, and Bluff Road. It’s a plain but not perfectly flat throughout. There are several arrested dunes here and there and a young stand of pitch pines dating back to the hurricane of 1938 dots the landscape, making it all the way across the isthmus to the Walking Dunes and Hither Woods in Montauk.

It is dotted with dune slacks that often contain standing water from Napeague’s shallow water table. These slacks are filled with rare plants, including an orchid that is rare throughout New York State and may, in fact, be unique to East Hampton Town. Almost all of these slacks contain cranberries, one of the staples of the Native Americans who lived here and the early settlers from England and Europe that colonized the area.

This dune plain is a favorite habitat for the eastern hognose snake, or puff adder; it feeds on the many Fowler toads, which grow up from tadpoles hatched from eggs in the wet slacks. Eastern spadefoot toads also are found carving out their underworld niches beneath the heather and bearberry swatches coating the surface where treeless expanses predominate.

Not only do the pitch pines, beach plums, bear oaks, and shads expand between severe coastal storms and retreat after them, the landscape is one of those that is forever changing but looks as if it is always the same. Most observers drive by along Cranberry Road and think it’s same old, same old, but it is always subtly on the move. It has quiet periods and tempestuous ones. Fierce winds frequently sweep through. In the winter they are mostly from the northwest, in the summer, from the southwest. But occasionally gale-force easterly winds sweep from off the ocean or northeasterlies from Gardiner’s Bay. The same winds that shape the walking dunes at the eastern end of the plain and are forever pushing them southeasterly also torment the dune plain.

But in modern times, the dune plain is quiescent compared to what it was like 4,000 or 5,000 years ago. It wasn’t there! Marine waters once flowed between the ocean and bays, and there was very little land above water along the Napeage stretch. Sands from the south and north gradually replaced the water, leaving Napeague Harbor stranded to the south. The average elevation of the dune plain throughout most of its area is less than 10 feet above sea level. If winds and storms stop depositing sand, much of it will be under water by the time the 22nd century rolls around.

When the fish factory was buzzing, the odor from bunker oil kept a lot of people away. Napeague was very slow to develop. When the factory went out of business in the 1960s and was eventually purchased from the Clarks around 1979 to become Napeague State Park, all of the extra land to the south of it was part of the purchase, with the exception of a strip of land on the south side of Cranberry Hole Road. In the 1990s and early 2000s we have watched large second homes go up on many of those lots in that narrow strip. Some of the vacant lots north of the road along the bay were put into perpetual open space, at least two of which are under the control of the Peconic Land Trust.

Dune plain parcels make perfect building lots. There is very little clearing required, the views in both directions are splendiferous to say the least, there is public water in the road right of way, and the smell of menhaden is gone forever. The rest of the vacant parcels are highly desired, as much so as the very few vacant ones left along the oceanfront. They are the best of the lot in terms of their vegetation and dune plain attributes. Wouldn’t it be great if the owners of those remaining unbuilt parcels donated them to East Hampton, or at least sold them to the town at a fair price, to be paid for from the community preservation fund?

Recently, the town acted to buy two such undeveloped parcels from the Rattrays. The family held onto them as long as they were able to in order to keep them from being built on. A while back the Rattrays put two vacant parcels on the north side of the road in safe keeping with the Peconic Land Trust. And now the recent 2.8 acres picked up from them by East Hampton Town will also be preserved forever. Let’s hope the town moves to acquire as many of the other vacant dune plain lots as possible to save this unsung habitat.

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

I want to talk about beaches and why the Town of East Hampton should do everything in its power to purchase the former East Deck Motel property at Ditch Plain in Montauk and turn it into a park.

I love beaches and have experienced them in many parts of the world — Hawaii, California, Europe, South Africa, Canada, Indonesia, and the Caribbean. Some are defined by dramatic tides or by soaring cliffs. Some are palm-lined. Others are rocky. They can be broad, narrow, isolated, or stretched between cities and the deep blue sea. There is fine sand, coarse sand, coral sand, and sand made of shells ground to a paste. For the record, the fine, quartz, granite, and garnet beaches of Long Island have no equal.

But, in this case I’m addressing not only the physical characteristics of beaches, but their spiritual value, “spiritual” as in what they mean to the soul of a people and a place. My father was fond of observing that beaches were the only places on earth where mostly naked people could sit in each other’s lunches and feel perfectly happy. 

Beaches are places where the confinements we normally impose on ourselves, and what would elsewhere be grating intrusions, go by the board. Beaches are the only places I can think of where the Motley vulgus, as H.L. Menken referred to the human race, acts more like a hive or colony than a gathering of individuals. Blankets, conversations, and lives are free to overlap, children require no preliminaries to form castle-building communes, and in a few years their own tribe of wave-riding, life-living comrades whose own children will eventually return to the familiar sand like nesting sea turtles. My closest friends are people I first met barefoot.

And, speaking of colonies, here in the township of East Hampton, the insistence that beaches are public spaces that cannot be privatized is embedded in the charter set down by English settlers 300 years ago and still enforced by the East Hampton Town Trustees. It is a concept derived from English common law and was, no doubt, shared by the settlers’ Algonquian predecessors.

This tradition is the reason that the plan by new owners of the East Deck property to build a physically imposing and exclusive private club was so vehemently opposed by hundreds of members of the Ditch Plain and greater surfing communities last summer. Ditch Plain Beach with the “trailer park” to the east, its Shadmoor bluffs and hoodoos to the west, is “home” to generations of Montaukers, as well as a popular oasis to strip-mauled visitors from away.

Here’s what should happen: The town should find a way to purchase the five-plus acres of the former East Deck property using the community preservation fund. The old East Deck should be razed and the land should be combined with the town’s easternmost parking area, known as the “dirt lot,” which includes the adjacent town-owned land between the lot and the East Deck property. 

A low-impact park should be created. The dirt lot should not be expanded, but either paved or otherwise stabilized. The town might charge out-of-towners to park at the dirt lot to help defray the cost of the park’s maintenance. The park should have modest restroom facilities and showers like the ones at Gin Beach at the end of East Lake Drive. It could have an area for public grills like Hither Hills State Park. The East Deck’s pool might stay. Why not surfboard lockers, like at Waikiki?

The park, in the town’s hands, would also be maintained in keeping with orthodox erosion-control thinking — no hard structures, let the beach grow and retreat with the help of periodic nurturing, the cost of which would be made more palatable to state and federal partners because of the beach’s public status, and as a resource recognized (I’m confident in saying) by the Surfrider and Surfing Heritage Foundations, groups that work to protect beaches, and public access to them. 

The town’s history of preserving open spaces is a proud one, as is its history of preserving access to them. Nearly 70 percent of Montauk is preserved in public parkland. It is why people come here. An opportunity to turn back time, to indulge in antidevelopment, makes perfect economic as well as environmental sense. Dear East Hampton Town Board: A Ditch Plain Park is a no-brainer.