Trees figure prominently in Long Island street and road names, much more so than animals. Why? Perhaps it’s because trees are large in stature and immobile, while animals are smaller and liable to be in one place one day and another the next. Before concrete monuments were used by surveyors to mark metes and bounds for various properties throughout New York in the original division of the state’s lots, trees, especially white oaks, were cut off above the lowest lateral branch so that the tree became disfigured and obvious, going by the name “lop trees” or “boundary marker trees.”

Thoroughfares and their offshoots were often named after trees they passed through as the land became settled by Europeans from the 15th century up to the present day. Thus a listing of streets with trees in their names is a good indication of the predominance of such trees over the years here on eastern Long Island and of those that became common after their importation, such as the black locust.

The Hagstrom Suffolk County Atlas of 1998 names all the streets in the five eastern towns up until that time, and offers a good idea of the frequency of certain tree species. Even school children can give you names of our most common trees like oaks, maples, and willows. On Long Island the three most common trees are oaks, pitch pines, and junipers, a k a eastern red cedars. The junipers followed the oaks and pitch pines, however, as the land had to be cleared first before they shot up, except in instances of natural grasslands such as the Hempstead Plains where they were from the beginning.

An examination of the street names in Long Island’s largest town, Brookhaven, gives a glimpse of the trees most prevalent on the Island. Shelter Island is the smallest town and the one most removed, being surrounded by water. East Hampton and Southold are the farthest from the original source of our trees after the last glacier receded, the Appalachian forest. They don’t have some of the species, such as the tulip trees and sweet gum, or liquidambar, found farther west on Long Island. They just haven’t gotten here yet.

The 1998 atlas lists more than 7,250 roads and streets for Brookhaven. The most common tree name among them is oak; at least 69 of those streets begin with oak. The next most common tree street names, 58 of them, begin with pine. By contrast, the atlas lists about 1,250 East Hampton street names and only 250 for Shelter Island. Accordingly, East Hampton, which is largely covered by oaks and pines, has only six oak street names and four named after pines. Shelter Island is not at all piney, and doesn’t have a street with pine in its name, but is very oaky and has three street names beginning with oak.

Brookhaven has 59 streets with cedar (i.e., juniper) in their names plus five starting with Juniper. Brookhaven didn’t have any grasslands, so to speak, when first settled, so we can only imagine that the cedar-juniper named roads were latecomers. Names beginning with chestnut account for 17 of Brookhaven’s roads and only one East Hampton Road. American chestnuts on Long Island were quite common until they were wiped out by the chestnut blight of the 1800s and 1900s.

Black locusts were imported from the South early on and used extensively in construction. Twenty-two street names in Brookhaven begin with locust, only one in East Hampton, but four on Shelter Island. In early times only one magnolia, the sweet bay, populated the upper edges of streams, several of which were in Brookhaven, but none in East Hampton and Shelter Island. Thus of the three towns, Brookhaven is the only one with magnolia-named streets, 10 of them.

The name for our Long Island tupelo, Nyssa sylvatica, is pepperidge in New England. Long Island was mostly populated by settlers from New England, thus Brookhaven Town has five streets beginning with pepperidge, East Hampton has one, while tupelo only appears in one Brookhaven street name. Maples, laurels, walnuts, dogwoods, willows, hollies, and sycamore, in that order, are the next most frequently found trees in Brookhaven street names. They are all natives and have been here for thousands of years.

There are only a few native ashes on Long Island, all in the western part. Five Brookhaven streets begin with ash. Hemlocks were not uncommon on Long Island, but retreated to the north along with the spruces and birches early on. Two streets in Brookhaven start with hemlock, none in East Hampton or Shelter Island.

In rare cases a foreign tree not present on Long Island appears in a street name. Thus there is a Mahogany Street in Brookhaven. Mahoganies are not cold-hardy and could not survive here. Although many streets in California contain the name eucalyptus, commonly planted in that state, none do here, and, as far as I can tell, there are none of that Australian genus living here, unless in greenhouses or as potted plants in homes, offices, restaurants, or hotels.

In closing I am reminded of the Nancy Goell rule coined while she was the head of America’s Group for the South Fork in Bridgehampton. If a new subdivision street is named after a plant or an animal, such as Canvassback Lane in Quogue or Bobwhite Drive in South­ampton, the odds are better than 10 to one that the critter is no longer in the area.

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

Circles and squares, rectangles and cones, triangles and cylinders, octagons, pentagons, spheres and so on. We are surrounded by symmetry, and why not? The earth is spheroid, the moon and the planets are round, and so, it seems from our perspective, is our sun. According to the conjectures of some astronomers and astrophysicists the universe is circular.

We humans are bilaterally symmetrical. Our pets are also bilaterally symmetrical. Our livestock are bilaterally symmetrical. Most of us live in symmetrical square or rectangular houses. Architects have been fighting the constraints of symmetry for centuries, but no matter how hard they try to get beyond its bounds, symmetry often wins out.

Plants apparently stem from symmetrical ancestors. The first bacteria, blue-green algae, viruses, and other proto life forms were symmetrical. Conifers, especially the spruces, firs, hemlocks, and larches are conically symmetrical just as their cones are. The Hollywood juniper so widely planted now on the South Fork and elsewhere is the epitome of a perfectly conical evergreen. It has become the model. The oak tree that grows tall in your yard looks to be asymmetrical, but if you examine it carefully, you will find out that the canopy’s edges, the so-called drip zone, unite to form a crude circle. The roots that spread out radially and often reach to the canopy’s perimeter also are distributed in a roughly circular fashion.

Take the fruit of trees — the walnuts, the oranges, apples, and even acorns are round or roundish. There is no such thing as a square or rectangular fruit. The walnut hits the ground running, acorns roll downhill when freed from their cup. Maple fruits are an exception; they are bilaterally symmetrical samaras. But when they fall from their trees they rotate like the blades of a helicopter and this rotation can carry them a good distance away from their parents.

The largest and most advanced group of flowering plants, the sunflowers, are almost 100-percent radially symmetrical. While the flowers are disc shape, the seeds, or achenes, with their tufts of hairs, or pappi, waiting to waft them away in the slightest breeze, are frequently clustered in a perfect sphere at the top of the stem as in the common dandelion.

In the marine environment there are entire classes of organisms that exhibit radial symmetry. Starfishes, jellyfish, sea anemones (seen from above) and many phytoplankton species are radially symmetrical. A few fish, like the northern puffer, or bottlefish, can mimic radial symmetry when defending themselves against a predator. They blow up! But most fish tend to be fast swimmers. You can’t be globular and move swiftly through the water.

A few fish, the eels for example, are roughly cylindrical. They are fast swimmers and resort to other means to get away from predators. Snakes are quite cylindrical and legless. Long cigar-shaped cylinders, eels, snakes, earthworms, and the like move sinistrally, they slither in semicircles. In the snakes, the “racers” have such locomotion down to a fine art. They can almost move as swiftly as a human can run. The sidewinder, a rattlesnake of the Southwestern American deserts, has perfected such side-to-side locomotion and can even move rapidly in fine grain sands where it is hard to get a firm purchase. The poisonous sea snakes of the Pacific regions swim sinusoidally like the eels, to which they are not at all related.

There is a TV detective, Monk, who is so tied to symmetry that he exhibits a kind of phobia, “asymmetriphobia.” But he’s a very good detective aside from that. In military barracks, there’s a high degree of symmetry. With the exception of the circular commodes, everything else is rectangular — cots, foot lockers, and the like. The only roundish objects seen are the toes of military boots and perhaps infantry helmets.

Soldiers, like the members of marching bands, move in perfect rectangular lines down rectilinear streets. Tanks and armored vehicles move in the same formations. In the case of marching bands, the people who stand on either side of the street form long parallel lines. The buildings that back them do the same.

Symmetry is a form of very high order. Too little symmetry and you have dystrophy or chaos, which in its most extreme form is nothing less than what the German physicist Rudolph Clausius termed “entropy” in the middle of the 19th century. A very messy room or “sty” borders on entropy. Unless you live in it and are accustomed to it as I am, coming across it unexpectedly can be revolting. Nature abhors a vacuum; humans abhor a very messy room. Like almost all of earth’s other millions of different organisms, in the final analysis we humans are doomed to live out our lives symmetrically. Accept it.

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

I admit it. Sunday night after “Homeland,” I watched the third episode of “The Affair,” which, in case you’ve been at sea for a month or so out beyond cable, is a soap opera based in Montauk, a place I have called home for nearly a half century.

The next day, I went downtown to Paulie’s Tackle shop, always an interesting place to be, especially during this, the height of the fall striped bass surfcasting season, a shop that the writers of “The Affair” might have thought to visit.

Now, I’m a writer, right? In the end, writers are carpenters. We need tools (a basic understanding of the language), a project (story), a plan (plot), and materials. The materials include characters.

In journalism characters are what they are, and it’s up to the journalist to know them. In fiction, characters are created from whole cloth — to mix metaphors — or, more often, are borrowed from people the writer meets while doing his or her research on the Montauk docks, for instance, or the Lobster Roll, a k a Lunch, on Napeague.

So, I’m at Paulie’s on Monday afternoon. Paul Apostolides is smoking a cigarette, talking on his cellphone to one of the hundreds who call from UpIsland each day to see where the fish are.

“They’re on the town beaches. The bunker have shown up. They’re throwing bottles at ’em. Weighed in a 36-pounder an hour ago. Down by Wave Crest, Gurney’s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See ya,” went the one-sided conversation. Wandering around the shop, looking at lures, peering into a few jars of pork rind strips of various colors, and with ears bent to Paulie’s words was a surfcaster recently arrived in town.

His name was Howie Gaber. He said he’d caught a bunch of big bluefish on Napeague earlier in the day. He talked about the relative advantages of casting at ebbing versus flowing tides, depending on where you’re fishing, of course. He told me about how the bait got trapped shoreward of sandbars on Martha’s Vineyard, where the striped bass waited offshore for the tide to rise.

“I was on the cover of Saltwater Sportsman in 1986. A flyrod bass I caught on Martha’s Vineyard. Used to live there. The picture was taken by Kib Bramhall, the old editor, a great artist. Mr. Martha’s Vineyard. Now, I spend summers in Quebec fishing for Atlantic salmon. Then I come here.”

I needed a plug adapter, so I walked across the road to Becker’s Hardware where Billy Becker was holding forth, and not holding back, on his subject du jour, that being how a number of prominent Montauk businesses had blown it by closing right after Labor Day and missing a month of fine weather and brisk business.

Beer flowed like a yellow river on Friday night when Kyle and I went to Zum Schneider for the restaurant-beer garden’s Octoberfest festivities and watch­ed the lobsterman Little Anthony Sosinski dance to the oompah band like a man possessed, long, blond hair flying. 

My point is, if there’s one place in the world with characters, it’s Montauk. “The Affair” features a few fine actors, the cinematography captures much of our beloved home’s beauty, the plot is as old and sturdy as Eve, Cain, and Abel, but where are the characters, the color? The writers must have had blinders on. Where are the likes of Joey Flapjaws, Jimmy Hewitt, Nasty Nessel, Henry Uihlein, Phil Berg, George Watson, Rori Finazzo, Dave Krusa, Bonnie Brady, on and on?

And, let us not forget Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett. He called to report that he “almost got hit in the head by a woodcock coming off the ocean of all things. Don’t ask me what he was doing on the ocean. Must be cold up north.”

Speaking of birds, flocks of scoters are on the wing, thousands of them. Bennett reported “big blues” on Napeague in front of the White Sands Motel,

Out of the mouth of babes come gems . . . to paraphrase a well-based adage about the wisdom of children. Such was the case when Judy Shepard was driving her 4-year-old granddaughter home from preschool in Sag Harbor last fall.

As they passed Otter Pond on their way to Noyac, little Irina asked the name of the pond. When Judy responded, Irina asked, “Are there otters in it?”

“No” came the reply.

“Why do they call it Otter Pond if there are no otters there?” was the third question. Judy explained that there must have been otters living there at one time. Irina thought for a while and then mused “Why don’t they put some otters back in it?”

When Irina’s father, Caleb, heard about the conversation he began thinking about otters returning to otter pond. He’s been working on the proposition ever since.

There used to be otters in Otter Pond, but not since the 19th century, except for an occasional visit by one. For 200 years after the beaver disappeared in early settlement times, otters persisted. The late Roy Latham, a potato farmer from Orient and perhaps Long Island’s greatest naturalist, regularly observed otters on Long Island into the 1930s.

According to Paul Conner, who conducted the last exhaustive search for mammals here in the 1960s and wrote about it in his “Mammals of Long Island” guide published in 1971, Latham first saw them in Great Pond (or Lake Montauk) in 1925 before it was opened to the sea, but he also found them in Montauk’s Big Reed Pond and Oyster Pond. In 1928 he observed two using a slide in Lake Montauk, which had by then been permanently opened to Block Island Sound.

It is not surprising to have had them here, and to the west in Nassau County and Queens for so long a time. After all, the river otter, lontra canadensis, pretty much populated most of North America up until the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. Three sibling species still occupy much of Eurasia. Apparently beavers were more easily trapped than otters and their pelts were much in demand by colonists and Europeans. Today beavers are even more widespread throughout North American than the otter.

A Dutch writer and lawyer, Adriaen van der Donck, wrote in 1656 that beavers were plentiful along with wolves and bobcats and some bears in the “New Netherlands” colony. Evidence of their former presence lives on in several road names starting with “beaver” in Suffolk County. Six of Suffolk’s 10 townships have roads with beaver in their name: Brookhaven, by far Long Island’s largest town, has nine. Southampton has two. Babylon, Smithtown, and Islip have one each. The 1998 edition of Hagstrom’s Suffolk County Atlas lists not a single road with the name “otter” in it.

While I was working with a team of scientists and naturalists on the Mashomack Preserve master plan for the Nature Conservancy in 1981 and ’82, we observed tracks of an otter or two on the Shelter Island site. Shortly after that, actual otter observations there became an annual event. Even today otters or their leavings — slides, fecal matter, tracks — turn up here and there across Long Island. Mike Bottini has been active documenting otter signs and has found at least 39 different locations with signs of otter habitation or visitation. He goes so far as to examine scat, by observing and smelling it, to document his observations. He is a founder of the Long Island River Otter Project, which it is hoped will culminate in the re-establishment of the otter as a familiar mammal here, a feat that has already been carried out successfully in many areas of the Midwest and elsewhere in the United States after the otter’s disappearance.

So it shouldn’t be that hard to re-establish the otter on Long Island, and in particular in Sag Harbor’s Otter Pond. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation reintroduced wild turkeys from upstate New York beginning in January of 1991, and that restocking of a bird long gone from here has been a great success. If little Irina and her father have their way, in the not too distant future we’ll be driving along Jermain Avenue in Sag Harbor, looking at the ducks and geese as we pass by Otter Pond and all of a sudden we’ll see a splash and a furry animal with a fish in its mouth purposing along toward shore. You can bet it will be an otter.

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

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads

The wind is passing by.

                                           Christina Rossetti

The trees were not alone in bowing their heads on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Gusts reached over 60 miles per hour on Sunday morning causing the sloop Commocean to break her mooring and wash up on South Lake Beach in Montauk.

This place is no stranger to wind, of course, but it was the sustained strength of the weekend’s assault that made it different kettle of fish. Speaking of which, how does the wind affect the schools of striped bass, bluefish, and false albacore that feed mid-water and on the surface this time of year?

Richard Jones, captain of the Montauk dragger Pontos, was getting a cup of coffee at Goldberg’s deli on Tuesday morning, remarking on the wind and how it had pulled a cleat from the Pontos causing one end to stray from the dock. No damage done. He said it took a few days for schools to return to the areas they normally inhabit, as though the wind stirred a big pot whose ingredients are finding their places slowly as the wind subsides.

I miss the days when I could call the bayman Stewart Lester, a walking fisherman’s almanac. He would have been able to tell me what a three-day, northwesterly blow in early November forecasted both fish-wise and otherwise.

Surfcasters braved the blow, but it was slow going for the most part, perhaps because of the murky condition of the water itself. But striped bass were caught, and where they were caught (the south-facing beaches of Napeague and west through Georgica Beach in East Hampton) fit with Paul Apostolides’s observation that strong winds cause schools of bait and the predators that feed on them to hug a lee shore.

Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported bass up to 32 inches being caught at Georgica. Word has it that East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell has been doing well from his boat at the Ruins on the north end of Gardiner’s Island.

Because of the wind, the standings in the Montauk SurfMasters tournament for striped bass have remained the same with the exception of Lynne Torrento, who knocked Mary Ellen Kane into second place with a 23.38-pound bass caught on Oct. 28. Kane’s 13.04-pounder rests in second place and Joan Naso Federman’s 8.62-pound striper remains on the board in third. Bob Howard’s 39-pounder has a hold on first place in the wader division, and Jason Pecararo’s 50.30-pound cow keeps him at the top of the heap in the tournament’s wetsuit division.

Bennett said he suspected the best of the bass-fishing season was yet to come, given the amount of prey around, including porgies and even squid, and because of the approaching full moon, known for good reason as the Frost Moon. Indians knew it as the “beaver moon,” when beaver traps were set to secure warm pelts for the winter months.

Bennett said the wind had driven scores of sea ducks into the bay. He reminded hunters that he had an ample supply of ammo, and advised drivers to “Watch out for deer. It’s the rutting season.”

Bay scallop season opened in state waters on Monday and runs through March 31. The season opens in town waters on this coming Monday, and will also run through March 31.

I would not be here today writing about nature if it weren’t for my mentor, Paul Stoutenburgh. In the mid-1950s when I was a teen growing up next to the potato fields in the Oregon part of Mattituck, my mother turned my attention to a small notice in the Mattituck Watchman-Long Island Traveler. It said that a man named Paul would be showing slides of birds at a local church. After a very snowy winter of feeding birds (rather than shooting them with my Daisy BB gun) with old pieces of bread in my backyard and watching them feed with the naked eye from my second-story window, I was eager to learn more about them and so went to the slide show.

It was the beginning of a long and prosperous tutelage under Paul Stoutenburgh’s watchful eye. At the time Paul was married to Barbara Silleck, who contributed equally to my development as a budding naturalist. Paul took me under his wing and I spent many a great day with him watching birds, photographing them, and learning about the local ecosystems: salt marshes, coastal ponds, woodlands, old fields, and such. His primary bailiwick was Long Island Sound, Mattituck Inlet, the Peconic Bays, and their creeks and inlets from Orient Point to west of Riverhead and the South Fork.

How Paul got started photographing nature is a mystery to me. I know that he took up photography at a young age and took his Leica with him on a naval vessel in the Pacific in World War II. Near New Guinea his ship was torpedoed and went down, Paul managed to save himself and, luckily, his camera.

When he returned to the States his camera was by his side and stayed by his side until he got another, then another, as film cameras and their lenses became more and more sophisticated. One of my first treks with Paul was to Quogue, where he had found a killdeer nest in a field in mid-March. From that moment on, I played a valuable role in his photographic pursuits. He would build a makeshift blind close to a nest, come back a few days later with me, and set up to shoot the nester. There were no telephoto lenses readily available in those days, so the blind had to be but a few feet from the nest.

The killdeer spooked. We both entered the blind and sat for a short spell, confident that Mrs. Killdeer knew that someone was near her nest. The next step was brilliantly staged by Paul. I would leave the blind in an obvious fashion and walk away about 200 yards with the hope that she was watching me leave. I sat down and watched from afar. In about 15 minutes she came back and started brooding her eggs, but I couldn’t tell from my faraway vantage point. In an hour or so, Paul stood up outside the blind. “Did you get some good shots,” I asked. “Yes, indeed,” he replied.

Things got tricky when he found a yellow-crowned night heron breeding in a pine tree in Aquebogue. He constructed a tree blind and we pulled the same dog-and-pony trick: We both went up the tree. I got down and hid a distance away. Paul was able to get some magnificent close-ups of the heron.

Paul was also a Christmas bird counter. I went on my first count, the Central Suffolk Count in December of 1952. There were only a handful of us, but most were tried-and-true birders. They were the big five of East End birders at the time. None of them were academic scientists, but they were prodigious observers, data recorders, and writers. Gil Raynor was a meteorologist at Brook­haven National Laboratory, he used an old-fashioned telescope but was as adept at following the flight of birds in the air with it as spotting them roosting or on the ground. He published scientific papers about bird migration in The Auk and other ornithological journals.

Dennis Puleston, an author and public relations person at the Brookhaven Lab, sailed across the Pacific Ocean in a smallish boat. Later he wrote and published a very fine “Natural History of Long Island.” The Long Island duck farmer Roy Wilcox — he worked the South Bays part of the count — was also a writer, and compiled a natural history of Southampton Town among other works. He was also a bird-bander and the Long Island authority on the piping plover and its nesting habits. Art Cooley graduated from Cornell University and taught biology and other subjects at Bellport High School. He led many, many high schoolers into natural history and the environment in the way that Paul did with me.

At that time, along with Paul, and following in the footsteps of the great Roy Latham, an Orient potato farmer, who was self-taught in all phases of natural history, they made up the core of Suffolk County’s active natural historians during the last half of the 20th century.

Paul and I would also go duck hunting together. Set out decoys, sit in a blind on Nassau Point and watch the winter waterfowl skim the waters of Peconic Bay. Many naturalists, conservationists, and environmentalists started out as hunters. Just think for a moment of John James Audubon and Theodore Roosevelt. They both traveled the Americas, often on foot, and shot their specimens in order to collect them for museums and illustrations.

Early on, long before there was email and digital cameras, Paul said that print was fated to be replaced by pictures, namely photographs, and in a way he was right. Ironically, perhaps, Paul was as good in print as behind the camera. But he had the help of his able assistant and wife and co-writer, Barbara, who knew how to spell and type with both hands. He (and Barbara) began writing a weekly column, “Focus on Nature,” in the Riverhead News-Review in 1951. It became a mainstay in the Suffolk Times published by Troy Gustavson. He wrote more than 2,500 nature columns, replete with photographs, covering flora and fauna, fish and fowl, herbs and trees, land and water. His last was printed in 2011. For a short time his column was carried in The Southampton Press, as well.

He was the first nature columnist on Long Island. Back from the Army and Japan in 1961, Paul let me write one of his columns and I guess I was smitten.    Nowadays three East End newspapers, The East Hampton Star, The South­ampton Press, and The East Hampton Press run a weekly nature column. In 2013 Dave Taft began a biweekly nature column in The New York Times Metropolitan section.

Above all, Paul was an ardent environmentalist, working to preserve wetlands at a time when Suffolk County and the Army Corps of Engineers were dredging waterways helter-skelter and putting the dredged materials on wetland vegetation. He started the North Fork Environmental Council, which preceded the Group for the South Fork, which ultimately became Group for the East End. Long before the Long Island Nature Conservancy had paid staff, Paul was one of the conservancy’s most strenuous volunteers, saving land here and there, relying on the good will of people who donated it.

He was also a director for the Peconic Land Trust, helping to preserve farmland. As a member of the Big Five, he helped bring Suffolk County into the environmental limelight by starting and working with organizations such as Defenders of Wildlife in order to get DDT — the mosquito-control agent of choice and the farmer’s right hand in battling the Colorado potato beetle —banned in the county. While a shop teacher at Greenport High School, he started a summer nature workshop program for Southold youth involving seining creeks and coves and other nature studies.

After the DDT era, Paul and others began putting up artificial nesting poles for the osprey population, which had been reduced to less than 20 breeding pairs on Long Island by DDT and other toxins in the food chain. He, Gil Raynor, Dennis Puleston, and I overnighted on Gardiner’s Island in the 1970s to study the breeding bird fauna while I was at Southampton College. We visited Robins Island more than once, and Paul led the fight to protect it. Most of it is now managed by the Nature Conservancy. He studied mammals and marine organisms with me on Mashomack during the formulation of the Mashomack Preserve Master Plan.

Paul was the compiler of the Orient Christmas Bird Count, started by Roy Latham, for more than 30 years. For a long time, he served as a Southold Town trustee where he made deep environmental inroads. He also was a town councilman for a term or two. Paul traveled widely with his wife and family, e.g., to the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec to study the breeding of gannets and other marine birds. In June 2013, the Southold Town Board named the Hashamomuck Pond Nature Preserve in his honor.

On July 15, after a long bout with Parkinson’s Disease, Paul passed away. His body, in keeping with a long-held commitment, was given to Stony Brook University. Southold will celebrate his life and life’s work on Saturday in the Southold High School auditorium. He is survived by his wife, Barbara, who carries on his work and his love of nature and the environment, and by three children. A grandchild, Paul II, is a wildlife videographer working to protect rainforests around the world.

What-ifs. What if Paul hadn’t survived the sinking ship in World War II? What if he hadn’t saved his Leica camera, as well?

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

It’s the smell, finest kind. When I first ventured to the East End in the late 1960s a community existed here that I knew virtually nothing about, yet I recognized them.

This could be because my mother’s side of the family were farmers. As I’ve written here before, my grandfather was an apple grower in Nedrow, N.Y., south of Syracuse. My uncle Scott had a small dairy farm. Uncle Scott was a tall man with bowed legs and so walked with a strange rolling gate.

When my mother and I visited, he’d lead me down — rolling along like a sailor — to the barn before dawn when he started the milking. The cats waited for their morning squirt of milk from the udders, which Uncle Scott never failed to deliver. When I think of the scene, it’s the smell that comes first — hay, manure, fresh milk, an old barn.

That smell, stored by some wonderful chemistry in the brain, I attached to Uncle Scott and a man named Amos who helped on the apple farm, to my grandmother, to the farms and their people, people deeply rooted to a place.

One very early morning many years later, I was fortunate enough to be invited to have bluefish and pancakes at the home of Capt. Bill Lester in Amagansett. I had just sat down when Calvin, his son, showed up with the old man’s daily supply of fresh clams to eat. It was a ritual, the same as my grandfather Hitchings having his breakfast slice of apple pie that my grandmother always had on hand.

On Friday, I drove to the Lester shucking shack in Amagansett for scallops. The state waters in Northwest Harbor had opened the previous Monday, and news of a fairly bountiful crop was raising spirits throughout town.

Opening the door to the shack . . . well, if you could bottle it, slap a label on it, call it Eau du Bonac, you’d put Shalimar to shame. There is no finer aroma than the sweet, muddy, fecund scent that fills a shucking shack and forever attaches itself to the baymen and women in high spirits working their knives through the piles of shellfish before them, people of this place. Yes, yes!

So, where have the striped bass gone? For the past week, surfcasters in and around Montauk have been casting in vain for the most part, strange, because there seems to be plenty of bait around, big bait, like bunker. And, according to Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk, boating anglers have been reporting baby weakfish in the rips around Montauk Point. The boaters are making do with plenty of bluefish. 

Could be the warmer than normal November weather. That was supposed to change today, according to the weather service. What is needed is a cold snap to jog the bass, said to be still feeding in the Cape Cod Canal and southern New England, to come on down. A strong east wind to blow the prey species within casting range wouldn’t hurt either.

Bass fishing appears to be more productive in East Hampton. Small bass have been caught with regularity at Georgica Beach. Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reports that small bass are beginning to move out of Gardiner’s Bay on their migration, and he said shad were making an appearance. In addition to their roe, the flesh of the shad is delicious. The trick is knowing how to cut around all the side bones.

Bennett, a veteran sea duck hunter, reported “tons of coot,” meaning sea scoters, and long-tailed (formerly old-squaw) ducks in the bay. A limited wild turkey season is due to begin on Sunday.

It’s Monday evening. By the time this column appears in print more than 50 percent of the local leaves will have fallen and a good many trees will be completely bare.

When I went out earlier this week to survey the fall foliage, however, less than a quarter of the leaves were down and only a few road shoulders were completely covered by leaf litter. Why are the leaves falling so late this year? It’s hard to say.

It may be related to global warming, but it’s probably mostly related to this year’s spring and summer. We had a dry July, August, and September. We had several rains in October, and the trees stayed green into November. Not all the trees. Tupelos turned into burgundy monuments before the first of October and by Halloween most were standing completely naked. They, along with flowering dogwoods and red maples, are among the first to lose their leaves at summer’s end each year. But many of the red maples are still hanging on; the rains may have delayed their change from greens to reds and oranges.

Earlier this week, the woods along many of the back roads on the South Fork were still ablaze with the colors of fall. The reds and oranges of the oaks — scarlet, black, and even white oaks — were dominant. The yellows of hickories and sassafras filled in the spaces between them.

The understories, mainly consisting of the sub-shrub layers of huckleberries and lowbush blueberries, were a wine red and thick as a carpet. In eastern Southampton Town on Millstone, Old Sag Harbor, Brick Kiln, and Sagg Roads, the thickly distributed and very healthy evergreen mountain laurels provided a middle layer of shiny green between the two red layers, lower and upper. Fortunately the sun was out and low on the horizon, which further lighted up the foliage so that if you looked at it too long and too hard, your eyes would start to play funny tricks on you.

The back roads of Northwest Woods in East Hampton were particularly brilliant. Swamp Road invariably puts on a good show, even in poor color years. Northwest, Alewife Brook, and Springy Banks Roads were added to Northwest’s luster. A little farther south, Stephen Hand’s Path and Hand’s Creek Road were equally impressive. You don’t have to go to the Poconos or Catskills each autumn to see vividly colorful native landscapes; you can see a host of them through the windshield right here on the South Fork.

There have been years plagued by gypsy moths and canker worms when most of the leaves in many of our woodlands were gone by mid-July. But we have been free of their ravages since 2005, after which we’ve had one good fall after another, except when a tropical storm came by. In 2011, a rainless Irene visited in late August making the foliage across all of Long Island drab prematurely. In 2012 things were looking good a week before Halloween, but then Hurricane Sandy came along and did in the foliage of the hardwoods and browned almost all of the white pine needles to create an equally ugly fall.

We were spared this year. The colors should last right up until the leaves fall to the ground. One wonders if the blue jays, squirrels, and deer appreciate the beauty of the fall as much as we do. I believe they do. We know how to poll the people before Election Day, but not how to poll the feathered and furred creatures that live quietly among the pretty leaves. I wonder if they realize how lucky they are!

I keep a journal, not as consistently as I should, but enough so that I’ve trained myself to recognize and acknowledge events or experiences that might cause a particular week to stand out thematically.

These thoughts are birds that seem of a feather, like the migrating flocks of geese we’ve all noticed in recent days, although I confess the ties that bind them are often loose. So it was with a walk along my favorite Montauk beach, an event that now coexists with the photo by Chris Foster sent to me by Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett. Both the walk and the photo involved gunshots.

On the beach I fell in step with a friend, a denizen of the greater Ditch Plain community, a retired New York City cop who is always packin’ . . . a corny joke or two. The photo of Bennett that accompanies this column shows him in his glory as a Thanksgiving provider, wild turkey in one hand, shotgun in the other, “a cross between Thor, or Daniel Boone, and Elmer Fudd,” I wrote in my journal.

The Elmer Fudd comparison is not really fair. Fudd is fiction, a cartoon, notorious as a hapless hunter, while Bennett is self-animated and an exceptionally good hunter.

The short hunting season for wild turkeys opened last Sunday. Bennett worked his way into Northwest Woods just before dawn that day. He was probably the first on the East End to bag a Thanksgiving dinner, a fat one the pilgrims would have killed for.

“Shots, shots fired,” my walking partner said stopping short of his punch line and looking up, listening, on point like an urban bird dog set to retrieve. I’d heard the shots too, but I knew where they’d come from. He didn’t, and for a split second, I watched his instincts come out of retirement and flash across his face.

When I told him the source was a boat just offshore with a crew of hunters blasting away at sea ducks, he laughed and rekindled his joke that involved heaven, a Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and a Muslim mullah. I will not repeat it here, except to say that virgins were involved.

The turkey photo and my friend’s “shots fired” got me thinking about our species’ penchant for killing unnecessarily, the huge gap between the report of guns fired to provide food, and those fired to color in the drab outline of a provider whose real necessity in our society became a cartoon more than a century ago. I doubt the hunters blasting away at the common scoters that day were going to bring the game home for dinner. Most people don’t care for sea ducks.

Sure, I understand the urge to get out into the wilds, and use proud traditions as an excuse to do so, but I don’t get the need to punctuate the experience with unnecessary and wasteful killing. These days, hunting and fishing as sport looks like no more than another marketing opportunity, the chance to sell camouflaged underwear, to replay the provider cartoon using tournaments to fill the void where real need once existed.

There are hopeful signs. More and more of the younger generation of East End fishermen are choosing to hang up their rods in favor of wetsuits and spears in order to be more selective in their killing, and perhaps more importantly, to be in more intimate contact with, and more appreciative of, the sea.

Greater appreciation of the natural world is what’s needed. People bearing binoculars and cameras are the real providers today with the exception, perhaps, of the wolf in expensive sheep’s clothing who once each year bags a Thanksgiving turkey for old time’s sake — to give thanks.

As for my friend retired from the N.Y.P.D. but as alert as ever to the sound of shots fired, that’s just sad.

Little Northwest Creek is, indeed, little and in the extreme northwest corner of East Hampton Town. It serves as part of the border between the town and the Village of Sag Harbor. The stream itself is 10 feet at it widest, but the wetlands on either side of it are substantial and in terms of area coverage rival the wetlands on the creek’s much bigger neighbor to the east, Northwest Creek.

The creek is fed by two groundwater streams, which are fresh until they approach the main creek bed and then are brackish as they become tidal. The two groundwater streams that fork off from the creek are both called Rattlesnake Creek on local maps. One of them originates just west of Route 114, under which it flows northeasterly then northerly where it crosses just north of Swamp Road.

No rattlesnakes have been found in the creek’s proximity in the last 150 years or so, but there once were timber rattlesnakes on Long Island and they were on the East End, including the South Fork. Naturalists still search for them, but to no avail. A beaver dam in western Southampton Town doesn’t have any beavers, and Otter Pond in Sag Harbor, no otters. It is quite possible, even probable, that rattlesnakes once slithered along the banks of their namesake creek.

The hydrography of the area immediately to the east of Sag Harbor is quite interesting. First there is Little Northwest Creek, then a series of semi-isolated wetlands, and finally a pond along Barcelona’s western edge. Round Barcelona and you confront Northwest Creek, beyond which is a sedgy wetland that reaches all the way to Mile Hill Road on the east and Phoebe Scoys Road on the south. Barcelona itself is a giant hunk of retreatal moraine left in a mound as the glacier that formed the South Fork melted back to the north.

Little Northwest Creek and its two tributaries are very rich botanically and have been the home to some interesting fauna, namely red-bellied and spotted turtles, ninespine sticklebacks, and southern leopard frogs. One can still find teal and diamondback terrapin plying its waters to this day. Its outer shoal is a favorite for egg-laying horseshoe crabs come full and new moon tides in early May. Troublesome thick stands of phragmites flank it. It is very shallow and its mucky bed is not much good for clams, scallops, and oysters, but it abounds with small fishes, namely spearing and killifishes during the warmer months. Elvers from the Sargasso Sea make their way up the creek each spring, but there are not ponds where they can grow up at the creek’s end.

The narrowness of the creek made it easy to span and so the first major road from Sag Harbor to East Hampton crossed it by way of a little bridge to Russell’s Neck, the remnants of which still exist. Timothy Dwight, one of the first presidents of Yale University crossed it in the first years of the 1800s in his discovering-Long-Island trip, about which he wrote a book.

The most fascinating thing about the creek is how it oxbows its way here and there in a tortuous journey to the mouth, where it meets Northwest Harbor. The inlet is forever changing in location depending on a small barrier beach that accumulates between the creek at its end and the harbor. At times the stream will parallel this low barrier and run 50 or 60 feet due west before it enters the harbor. Then there are times when it is running high, say after flood rains or very high tides, and it punches straight through the barrier directly into the harbor.

It’s a tiny system but a very important one. New York State purchased the west side of the system early on, and the east side when it purchased the bulk of Barcelona. The Town of East Hampton bought two undeveloped parcels in the headwater region of the easternmost branch of Rattlesnake Creek. Put that together with Suffolk County’s much earlier purchase of most the lands on either side of Northwest Creek and the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s purchase of the wetlands west of Mile Hill Road and you have pieced together one of the great natural treasures of the South Fork and a major tributary system to the Peconic Estuary.

It was all done before the Peconic Bay Region Community Preservation tax began pumping money into the coffers of the five East End towns to make such purchases and set-asides of open spaces a great deal easier. Yes, Little Northwest Creek is a pipsqueak of a wetland-tidal stream system, but it is mighty in its contribution to the entire Northwest Woods open space system. Kudos to the many local folk, environmental groups, and the many levels of government that brought such a fanciful vision to full fruition.

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