Call them what you will — aits, isles, atolls, cays, keys, islands, reefs, shoals, even continents — there are millions of them across the globe. The name that I particularly like to describe the smallest of these patches of raised land surrounded by water, very wet marshes, and in some cases even by sand, is hammock, from the Spanish hamaca. We have a lot of them right here in our own backyard.

Wood Tick Island, just inside Accabonac Harbor in Springs, is a classic hammock. It is a piece of retreatal moraine left by the glacier that formed Long Island as it melted away to the north. A thousand years ago Wood Tick Island was joined to the rest of Springs by earth, but as sea level slowly rose over the millennia, the land under Accabonac Creek was gradually covered by water, mostly fresh, but eventually tidal. Wood Tick Island and three other hammocks in the creek were formed.

As they became more and more elevated, marsh grasses were replaced by shrubs, then trees. Now they are largely covered by hardwoods, mostly oaks. Similar oaken hammocks occur along our coast from Prince Edward Island all the way to the tip of Florida. The oak species change from north to south but not the aspect of the hammocks. As you stand on the tip of Louse Point and look southwest or at the end of Landing Lane and look northeast you will see what I mean.

Hammocks are roughly circular when seen from above, and hemispherical, from the side. The tallest trees are in the center, the shortest around the periphery. The suggestion is that the center of the hammock was the first to go from wetland to upland. If you cored the trees on Wood Tick Island, you might find that the oldest are in the middle.

Another explanation for the hemispherical aspect is that the central trees are more sheltered from the elements than those along the edge. The German word “krummholz” is used in ecological circles to explain the impact of weathering on woody plants. The trees on the windswept bluffs of Hedges Banks or Barcelona are krummholzed, dwarfish, and asymmetrical.

Because they are isolated patches of woody vegetation not easy to reach from land, hammocks have been little studied compared to the mainlands they are closest to. Ospreys and red-tailed hawks have nested in their crowns over the ages and they tend to be mosquitoey in the warm season. Apparently, some are ticky as well, thus the name. They tend to be secretive enclaves, microhabitats as it were, but they can be important refugia of times past.

The great irony is that just as most of these small, coastal, dry land formations were created by falling sea levels as the glaciers stored up more water, became larger and pressed down on the geologic plates with more gravitational force, the opposite is true today. Sea level is rising and the water table with it. These coastal hammocks are doomed.

The same thing has been happening to the salt marsh islands in the Great South Bays system, most radically in Jamaica Bay. As ecologists and conservation officials try this and that to save them from drowning, their ultimate fate is unknown.

The best example of hammocks drowning that is close at hand is the little island in the northeast corner of Fort Pond in Montauk. When Norman Taylor described the vegetation of Montauk in 1923, this hammock was wooded. In fact, it was the site of the only American basswood found on his plant list.

Ninety years later it is a barely visible patch of dead tupelos used by roosting cormorants. Its soil is completely covered by water. Halfway through its transformation, it was called Shrubby Island by some, and lately Turtle Island, after the painted and other turtles that sun themselves on it. Now it is doomed to become a wetland in the very near future and, ultimately, a shoal.

Star Island is a thriving hammock in Lake Montauk, once the largest freshwater pond on Long Island, until it was permanently opened to the sea in the mid-1920s. It houses the Montauk Yacht Club, a large resort home, a bustling marina, two East Hampton Town docks, and the United States Coast Guard Station.

Its undeveloped portion still has much of its original hardwood vegetation as described by Taylor. A busy island now, yes, but it is doomed in the same way that the little island in Fort Pond is doomed.

If you walk out on the marshy hammock between Mile Hill Lane and Northwest Creek in the Northwest Woods section of East Hampton, you will find the stumps of eastern red cedar trees attesting to a time when that hammock was dry land, not unlike Cedar Pont in its vegetation. The Peconic Estuary islands, namely Robins, Gardiner’s, and Shelter Islands are reasonably high and reach well above sea level. They will last several hundred years more, but they will get smaller and smaller as they are being eaten up gradually by erosion on all sides.

In Three Mile Harbor, Penny Sedge Island will most like be gone in a few years, Sammy’s Beach will lose its isthmus status and become an island, as will Jessup’s Point in Noyac. Now they are classic tombolos, once islands. For the moment they are attached by dry land umbilici to the nearby mainlands they issue from.

Oops, I almost forgot one of our most famous local islands, Hicks Island, between Napeague Bay and Napeague Harbor. Only 60 years ago the site of a thriving bunker rendering factory, it is now, oops again, no longer an island, but a tombolo attached to Montauk at Goff Point, which is no longer a point. The East Inlet to Napeague Harbor, once a longstanding very important gateway to the harbor shown on all the 1900-2000 U.S. coastal charts, and the main flusher of the harbor, which is the tidal body in East Hampton Town that has never had any of its parts closed to shellfishing because of pollution, has been high and dry for several years running.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. There are some wonderful little hammocks in the Napeague Harbor marshes. They are arrested dunes, stopped in their tracks and grown over with woody shrubs and some low trees. The question is, did their dune sandy bases come from the south or north?

So there you have it — islands, isles, islas, aits, cays, keys, shoals, and hamacas in a nutshell. Better look quick, most will be gone by the time this new generation becomes as old as I am.

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

Jordan Enck and Tike Albright leaned against the split-rail fence just west of the Montauk Lighthouse on Monday afternoon beside their bikes with fat tires meant for peddling through sand. The bikes were outfitted with PVC tubes, scabbards for surfcasting rods.

“Where did you come from?” I asked. Lancaster, Pa., Amish country, Enck replied. No, they had not eschewed the internal combustion engine in favor of pedaling up the interstate to Montauk from Lancaster. They were not Amish. They had pedaled from their camper bivouac on the lower level of the state parking lot, a distance of about 100 yards.

“We ride them down to Caswells,” Albright said, referring to a productive cove with rocks aplenty to cast from about a quarter mile west of the Lighthouse. So, the Pennsylvanians knew the lay of the land and had invented a way to range into the coves without a long hike in clumsy boots and waders.

They had been making fall pilgrimages to Montauk for a number of years. Enck had arrived on Sunday, Albright had been here for a week. “I’ll stay until mother calls me home,” he said with a smile. “I’m opening a bike shop,” he said pointing to the high-end cycles, one featuring an electric motor to spare the thighs.

This time of year, the lower level of the parking lot becomes an encampment of migratory surfcasters, hardcore fishermen and women hoping to sync up with the fall run of striped bass. The lower lot is a breeding ground for fish tales.

Enck and Albright fish New Jersey and Delaware, and their own Susquehanna River, a tributary of Chesapeake Bay, home to 80 percent of the stripers that migrate the East Coast, Albright noted. The bay was “getting better,” he said, although he added that outbreaks of Pfiesteria, a type of dinoflagellate associated with algal blooms, continued to wreck the bay’s famous blue-claw crab population, and to destroy fish larvae. “It’s farmers and their fertilizers, people putting it on their lawns,” Albright said. The Pfiesteria was also the cause of the “rot” found on Chesapeake striped bass, they agreed.

They said the other Chesapeake plague took the form of “flatheads,” flathead catfish, a voracious species that “eats everything in sight,” Albright said. “They are invasive in the Chesapeake. Fishermen were supposed to kill them, but nobody did because they’re fun to catch.”

So, the two, non-Amish from Lancaster, migrated from the Susquehanna bass breeding grounds to Montauk in order to meet, with the aid of fat-tired bicycles, their hometown bass on their way back to the Susquehanna and other Chesapeake tributaries. A full-circle, counter-migratory kind of thing.

As we know, a share of Montauk’s fall run of striped bass is heading back to the Hudson River for the winter. For more than a decade beginning in 1985, Hudson River bass were off limits to market fishermen because they were contaminated by the polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs the General Electric Company dumped into the Hudson over a 40-years period.

That era is over, but at the cost of East Hampton’s once-vital, commercial inshore bass fishery. Bass caught on the East End could be sold for food again in 1990, but the damage to the fishing community had been done. “It’s not fish ye’re buying, it’s men’s lives,” Sir Walter Scott’s famous quote resonates from the Hudson down to the Chesapeake during the fall run. Protecting the ocean and her tributaries worldwide should be the goal of everyone who casts a bucktail or sets a net.

Speaking of casting, Gary Aprea stood in first place in the wader division of the Montauk SurfMasters tournament as of Monday afternoon, but his 19.24-pound bass is not likely to hold that position for long.

Bass in the 20-to-25-pound range are being caught with regularity along Napeague and East Hampton sand beaches mixed in with gorilla bluefish feeding on mullet and bunker. Big blues are on the Gardiner’s Bay side of our peninsula, but the bass are getting chased away by seals, according to Harvey Bennett of Amagansett’s Tackle Shop.

Meanwhile, at 4 a.m. Monday morning, Chris Miller of the West Lake Marina was offshore fishing the Tails section of Block Canyon when something feisty took a bait 150 feet down. “We thought it was a bigeye,” Miller said, meaning bigeye tuna. “We fought him on a standup rod for over three hours.” It turned out to be a 256-pound swordfish.

Not only are we faced with more and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere each year, but with global warming resulting from it and acidification of the seas. One might say we are in for calamitous times if we don’t somehow reverse these dangerous headlong trends. But how can we, especially in an age when we are so conscious of our own mortality and want to live life to the fullest? Planes, trains, and automobiles. Coal, oil, and natural gas. Self-indulgence? Yes. The need to survive? Surely.

Charity starts at home, they say, but fixing the South Fork, or the entire East End for that matter, won’t fix the rest of the world, which has never in its very long lifetime spun quite so wildly. However, we must face a dilemma, and the dilemma is this: We can’t abandon the home front because the rest of the earth may be doomed.

In a small way we are making progress locally, but we have a long way to go. Let’s take the problem of surface water pollution, for example. Our septic waters and runoff washes are befouling the inshore waters at an ever-increasing rate. It’s bad enough that the atmosphere is charged with nitrogen compounds and other polluting and toxic chemicals, but the nitrogen products from urination that are enriching the waters, as well as the medicines, cleaning agents, and you-name-it stuff that goes down our drains and runs off our roads and yards, is 10 times worse.

We can’t shut off all of the tens of thousands of factories, power generating stations, and foundries west of us all the way to China, but we have a good shot at cleaning up the runoff from precipitation that contributes to water pollution locally. Dealing with the stuff from septic systems and treatment facilities is another matter. Almost all groundwater eventually moves to the seas from the two aquifers that feed the South Fork. That which creeps south to the ocean does less harm than that which creeps north to the Peconic Estuary. The nearest tributaries get hit first, the harbors they feed second, and the Peconic waters ultimately get it all.

Even if we converted every polluting septic system into a new nonpolluting one at a cost of $30,000 or more in 2014, the pollution load into the estuary will worsen because the groundwaters upgradient are more nitrogen-charged than ever. At a foot per day, it will take 14 years for the groundwater to travel from, say, the Springs School to Accabonac Harbor, 44 years from the cemetery on Three Mile Harbor to the harbor itself.

The quickest way to clean the marine surface waters is by dredging. The late Norman Edwards, who had been a town trustee, had it all figured out. Dredge right and regularly and the harbors will be kept tolerably clean. With a master’s degree in oceanography and 30 years in the Coast Guard, culminating in a captainship, Norman knew the waters just about better than anyone. He got up a plan to routinely clear the channels and followed it with a grant application for East Hampton Town to buy its own dredge.

Yes, the dredge was expensive, about $600,000. But the state was going to pay half of that cost. The town trustees and town would split the difference. At the last minute the town pulled out — no wonder, the town was $27 million in debt, leading to the resignation of the town supervisor, Bill McGintee, before his term expired.

It cost $300,000 or more just to move a private dredge from an UpIsland site to, say, Napeague Harbor in Amagansett. It would cost very little to move a town-owned dredge out of Three Mile Harbor or Lake Montauk to dredge one of the town’s channels into the Peconic Estuary.

Dilution is still the best solution to pollution. The more water that comes in and out during each tidal cycle, the cleaner the water over all. Lake Montauk was once the largest freshwater body on Long Island until it was opened in the mid-1920s. It is more and more polluted from runoff and septic sources with each passing year. The Army Corps of Engineers, after a study that cost some $2 million, devised a dredge plan that would deepen the federal channel and produce 120,000 yards of clean sand to bolster the disappearing beach west of the west jetty. It was scheduled to happen 2013 at the latest.

Well, you know the outcome. Two patch jobs at a cost to the taxpayer of around $500,000 each were carried out in the first 10 years of the millennium. They produced no more than 3,000 or 4,000 yards of sand each. The sand disappeared into the depths and around Culloden Point in a few years after each dredging. The beauty of being connected to the Block Island Sound is that the sound’s waters are still the purest around, never having seen the brown or red or purple tide since records have been kept. I’m told the Corps is about to do another patch job this year or next. It’s simply not enough!

Take Napeague Harbor. Suffolk County is dredging the same west channel after dredging it in 2004. Since the west channel was dredged in 1988, the east channel has been closing at a steady rate and is now no longer. One can drive a four-wheel vehicle onto Hicks Island from Goff Point. So why are they doing the west channel? The county maintains that the town requested it in 2013. Oops, that would put the onus on a second administration, the one led by Bill Wilkinson.

Dredging is still the best and quickest answer to cleaning harbor waters. When are we going to learn? Apparently never.

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

Stephen Lobosco of Sag Harbor, whom many of you will know as the man with an impressive antique fishing lure collection, was coaxed out into the rain by a friend on Saturday morning, a morning that turned into an all-day, arm-wearying, catch-and-release marathon in one of Montauk’s easternmost, south-facing coves.

Lobosco went into great detail about there being such a huge school of striped bass in the cove, that while wading out to a rock perch, “I could feel them brushing past my legs.” The bass were in the 20-pound class. “We were throwing small bucktails, and it was every cast.”

Fishermen have varying relationships with the fish they catch. Some seem to take out their frustrations on them, yanking rather than playing them when they’re hooked, violently retrieving their hooks and throwing them back, as compared to never failing to meet their eyes before letting them go, as Lobosco said he did.

Early Tuesday morning, Bob Howard, a retired New York City police detective, cast a Super Strike needlefish lure into the dark on an undisclosed “sand beach” and came up with a striped bass weighing 39 pounds, and measuring 46 inches. The fish put him in first place in the Montauk SurfMasters tournament’s wader division. “I seldom weigh in my fish,” he said, meaning he releases them. “If I wasn’t in the contest I would have released her.”

Word of the catch circulated quickly via veteran casters’ truck radio communication. Fellow casters congratulated the angler in turns as they pulled up at Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk to get a look at Howard’s beautiful cow bass. Howard is affectionately known as Bob Lockbox Howard for the strongbox he keeps in the back of his pickup in which he stores his fishing gear. It’s reinforced with stainless steel cable.

Why? “Because some people can’t help themselves. They have to steal. I once watched two guys cut a perfect circle through wood and steel to get into a place. I waited until they got in. If you stop them before they get in, it’s attempted burglary. If they’re in, it’s a felony.”

A sweep of the Shinnecock area by Southampton Town Bay Constables found that theft of a public resource is getting out of control. The constables engaged over 150 fishermen over two days, Oct. 5 and 12. They issued 40 summonses for possessing more than the legal limit, taking undersize fish, illegally dumping or discarding catch, and spear-fishing in a marked channel. A good number were ticketed for failure to possess the required New York State Saltwater Fishing Registration.

Gary Aprea stands in second place in the Montauk SurfMasters tournament with a 19.24-pound bass. Mary Ellen Kane holds first place in the women’s division with a 13.04 pounder. Joan Federman is in second place with an 8.62-pound bass.

The Columbus Day crowd of casters fished pretty much shoulder-to-shoulder on both the north and south sides of Montauk Point over the weekend with mixed schools of bass and bluefish moving between the flotilla of small boats and the line of surfcasters on the tide.

On Monday, a swell that increased through the day kept boaters torn between a shoreward advance after fish and the possibility of getting capsized by a set of waves. There’ve been a fair number of such capsizings around the Point in recent years caused by boaters with their blood up looking toward the beach instead of the waves.

Speaking of boating safety, the Coast Guard Auxiliary is offering a boating education course on two consecutive Saturdays, Oct. 25 and Nov. 1, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day.

Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reports a number of weakfish being taken at Georgica Beach in East Hampton in recent days. The aforementioned Lobosco caught what he thought might be a new state record weakfish on Oct. 5. The standing record was held by Dennis Rooney of Seaford who caught a 19.2-pound weak in 1984.

Bennett reminds hunters that the sea duck season begins tomorrow and runs through Jan. 31. The woodcock season started on Oct. 1 and ends on Nov. 14.

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].

I was returning from a dump run the other day, and for once did so without having plucked some doodad from the freebee table of claptrap, jettisoned painfully or not from a Montauk neighbor’s horde of bric-a-brac — gizmos with wires, romance novels, and a turkey-handled potato peeler that probably hadn’t skinned a spud in years. 

As I drove east, feeling proud for having kept my hoarding instinct at bay (although Thanksgiving is nigh and a turkey-handled peeler would . . . no, no), I noticed a small sign with the words, “Fishing Yard Sale.” Elsewhere in the country, the meaning of the sign might not register, but in Montauk such signs are not all that uncommon. They beckon this time of year, and they are sad.

I have a friend who is a serious, some might say pathological, hoarder. We all have a touch of it, and while I’m not a shrink, it occurs to me that hoarding is a reach for immortality: The three gas grills in the garage, each needing work, a switch to repair, a wheel missing. I’ll get to them some day. The curtains. All they need are rods. The Andersen windows I picked up on the side of the road. They’ll come in handy when I put the extension on the house. “I’ll get to it.” In other words, the piles in the garage, closet, and attic — they are the future. The bigger your pile, the longer you’ll live.

One day, I posed my theory to my hoarder friend. He looked at me as though I’d just discovered the sky was blue, and said, “Of course,” and this is why fishing yard sales are sad on the one hand and smack of the eternal on the other.

There is usually a table or two in the front yard on which the man’s terminal gear is displayed, his lures, the Kastmasters, diamond jigs, bucktails, wooden plugs — a few that bear the teeth marks of bluefish — a bucket of lead sinkers, fillet knives honed to a sliver of their former selves.

A quiver of rods leans against the other table, boat rods, an old Johnny Stick surfcasting rod, and on the table, big reels for tuna and sharks, reels for bottom fishing, casting reels. Reeling in the memories. If only they could talk, and if the fisherman is a good salesman, they do. Next to the tables, an anchor or two, a mooring ball, a pair of rubber boots, waders perhaps, buckets of carefully coiled line.

Maybe he’s old, or moving, or sick. The bottom line is that fishing yard sales are the rituals that accompany a man’s severing his ties to the sea — no small matter around here. Sad. Then again, this particular sort of hoard will be taken up by those who drop by the sale, purchase his rod, his terminal gear for a song — his ties to a salty future. 

On Tuesday morning, surfcasters were awaiting the promised east wind that should blow the schools within casting range at Montauk Point and propel them west down the sand beaches of Napeague, Amagansett, East Hampton, and beyond.

Word has it that 30-inch striped bass were being taken in Amagansett early this week. If you hear the occasional shotgun blast in the distance, it’s a signal that the hunting season for sea ducks, scoters in particular, is under way.

Most of September is summer, but in my eyes all of September is fall. Lots of wonderful things start happening at the end of August. The rich and the rowdy leave for the city. There is less traffic on the roads and highways. The days are cooler and the air less humid. Striped bass and neotropical warblers begin their fall migration southward. Snowy tree crickets and katydids sing the loudest. Asters and goldenrods break out in whites, blues, purples, and yellows. Beach plums ripen. Cranberries begin to ripen.

In September, Long Island, especially along the coast, is a great migration route for shorebirds, hawks, dragonflies, and butterflies, or at least one species of butterfly, the monarch. On Sunday Victoria Bustamante observed the 26th monarch of the year. (I’ve observed two, both on the same day.) It’s been looking glum in 2014, not only for monarchs, but for almost all butterflies. To date, I’ve seen two tiger swallowtails, one checkerspot, and, early in the spring, a single mourning cloak. Something is happening and we don’t know what it is, “Do you, Mr. Jones?”

Monday brought a ray of light. Victoria was at Jane Ross’s place on Georgica Pond checking on a tree. The yard was filled with flowers, and she encountered several monarchs. This is the time, the breezes were right — southwesterly — the sunshine was pleasant, the monarchs were on the wing, although lollygagging here and there to sip nectar. I won’t believe it until Sheila Small, who lives near Gurney’s Inn on the bluffs of Montauk, calls me and tells me that she is also noting monarchs passing in goodly numbers. Many of us know the sad story of how poorly last winter went in the monarch’s overwintering pine forests in the mountains of Mexico. Perhaps this year things will be better.

The monarch butterfly has only two real enemies, unfavorable climate and man and his agricultural pursuits. Long ago this amazing butterfly discovered that if it laid its eggs on members of milkweed family, all of which have a white sap containing poisonous cardenolides (the same giant steroid molecules found in foxglove, or digitalis), that it would do in almost all other insect larvae and, probably, you and I if we fed on them. The larvae don’t get their nutrition from these molecules, they tie them up in little packets that make them inedible when preyed upon. They are brightly colored, as are the red and black milkweed beetles that feed on the same host plants, advertising their noxiousness.

When they eventually morph into pupae, the poisons go with them. When the beautiful orange, yellow, and black imago adults emerge, they are equally poisonous. Again, those brilliant fall colors advertise their unpalatability. Just one taste is a lesson that lasts a lifetime for a would-be predator. Interestingly, the black-backed oriole and black-headed grosbeak that reside in their overwintering area are able to eat them without suffering greatly. One wonders if they, in turn, are protected from marauding hawks and other predators.

Way back in 1964, while a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara, I used to study the West Coast monarch, which is identical and thus far is faring much better than its Midwestern and East Coast brethren. I used to catch them in the fall when they were flying in a southeasterly direction along the coast to their winter grounds. Where, I never found out. They always flew against the wind. I learned to distinguish males with their distinct black markings, one per wing, from the females without them. I would catch them with a butterfly net, overnight them in the refrigerator, take them out in the morning, and note their bearings when they took off. Before lifting off they would pump their wings up and down several times to get their body temperatures up to takeoff temperature.

Five years prior to U.C.S.B., while at the Army Language School in Monterey, I lived in Pacific Grove, which abuts 17-Mile Drive and the Pebble Beach Golf Course. Its Monterey pines are famous for their large stash of overwintering monarchs. South of Pacific Grove is Pismo Beach, a spot frequently mentioned in jest by the late Bob Hope in his monologues. It’s just north and west of San Luis Obispo and is famous for its monarch butterfly grove, apparently the largest on the West Coast.

Another hopeful sign: A week ago while birding in Springs, Karen and Barbara Rubinstein observed a rare giant swallowtail butterfly. Barbara was able to snap a photo of it. I’m 78 and have never seen one.

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

On Friday, Surfers Healing came to Montauk once again. Israel (Izzy) Paskowitz and his band of Hawaiian surfers travel the East Coast each year visiting popular beaches to take autistic children surfing. Parents travel hundreds of miles to give their kids a day in the waves, an experience that calms and delights them more than just about any other, they say. 

Surfers Healing was founded by Israel and Danielle Paskowitz. Their son, Isaiah, was diagnosed with autism at the age of 3. Like other kids with the diagnosis, he suffered from sensory overload. Paskowitz, a former competitive surfer, realized the ocean calmed him. One day, he placed his son in front of him on his surfboard and took him surfing. The experience had a profound effect on Isaiah and a surprising therapy was born, one Paskowitz and his team of expert surfers now share at an increasing number of Surfers Healing camps each year.

On Friday, a father peered through the telephoto lens of his camera. It was trained on his daughter and her mentor in the waves off Ditch Plain, Montauk. “She’s smiling,” he said in a way that spoke to the scarcity of smiles in their lives. They had driven from Buffalo to attend the Surfers Healing camp first at Lido Beach, and then Montauk.

The sight of these kids, obviously focused and thrilled as they ride shoreward, held upright by their Hawaiian helpers, captivates and humbles those watching from shore. “He rises by lifting others.” The words of Robert Green Ingersoll come to mind, although those who attend Surfers Healing each year might argue that a whole community rises.

It was a beautiful sunny day. Small waves, perfect for the event, rolled shoreward as least terns hovered and pecked at the surface here and there, evidence of fish feeding below — lots of fish. It is September after all, the time when fishermen break out their surfcasting rods, fly rods, kayaks, and small boats to hunt the great variety of fish that feed close to shore.

On Saturday, I paddled my kayak off of Ditch Plain toward a small cloud of birds hovering about 100 yards from shore. I probably should have brought my casting rod, but I chose a small boat rod instead. I held the butt of it down with my legs as I trolled a silver lure that I hoped would not be taken by too big a fish. I did have a line tied to the rod, but you never know.

As I paddled into the birds, the sun lit a school of bluefish. Blues flashed around and under the kayak, feeding on what looked like the white bait, a generic term for any of a number of small, shiny prey. Zzzzzzzz, came the fulfilling sound of line being stripped from a reel. The kayak is large enough so I’m able to swing my legs over and sit on it as though it were a dock or a river bank, Huck Finn style.

The bluefish took line and jumped clear of the water three times before allowing me to grab the leader and boat it. Bluefish have sharp teeth, of course, so the task of retrieving the hook must be done gingerly, especially in tight quarters. It got me anyway.

The fish was eaten that night, with a “fine Chianti and fava beans”. . . just kidding, it was a beer and Boston-baked.

As I worked to extract the hook, my eyes caught sunlight reflected off fish moving faster than the blues. They were either false albacore (notoriously unappetizing) or green bonito, also called Atlantic bonito, delicious sushi-style or on the grill. I’d heard they were around. Not likely I’d catch one trolling. They usually react to shiny lures or flies retrieved quickly.

 The next morning, Lawrence Cook, former New York City fireman and the man behind the annual Archaeology Fest held at the Second House headquarters of the Montauk Historical Society, beached his kayak and walked up the beach with a green bonito in one hand, a fat porgy in the other. The bonito was filleted on the spot, and hunks of breakfast sashimi were handed around. This year’s Archaeology Fest will begin on Oct. 4.  

Maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems there is a greater variety of fish close to shore and in great numbers this year. What’s come to be called the “mosquito fleet” of small boats has invaded the waters around Montauk Point in recent days. So far, surfcasters have watched schools of fish just beyond their casting range, but this will change. The Montauk SurfMasters Tournament began at one minute after midnight on Tuesday.

Mike Vegessi, captain of the Lazy Bones party boat, was stepping from the Bones on Monday evening and reported that fluke fishing continued to be productive on both the north and south sides of Montauk. He said a 12-pounder was weighed earlier in the day. The season ends on Sunday, after which the Lazy Bones will chase striped bass. Me too.

Have we escaped a superstorm? In 2011 we had Irene at the end of August, in 2012, it was Sandy at the end of October. We missed the bullet last year, but the tropical storm season is not over, and when it is, the northeaster season will be right at its heals.

The glaciers are melting, the seas are rising, the globe is warming. Yet, the Farmers Almanac, which is right most of the time, says we are going to have a hard winter. I have yet to see a wooly bear to measure the brown against the black, and have no idea what the winter will be like.

One thing is certain, however. More and more southern birds are extending their ranges northward and more and more southern plants are found on Long Island as the millennium progresses. It may come to pass by 2050 that snowbirds will be flying the other way come November. Who wants to spend winter in the tropics?

Why the cold snaps when the world is warming? Think about it. Water exists in three forms: solid ice, liquid, and gas, or vapor. Same H20 molecules, but in different forms.

Ice needs heat to turn to water, but when the glaciers melt, the air surrounding them is cooled. That cold air hovers close to the earth’s surface prior to its displacement by air currents, because cold air is denser than warm air. The denser the matter the more it is affected by gravity. That cold air slips down from the Arctic regions like cold air descending down the face of a mountain into a valley after a very cold night above.

Oddly this happens on a much smaller scale right here in Noyac, where my house is situated north of the moraine, north of the highest point on the South Fork, some 280-plus feet above sea level. I’m at the bottom of the mountain. Every evening after a warm fall day, the top of the moraine cools off first, the cooler air, because it is heavier than warm air, begins to slip down those 280-plus feet to meet Noyac Bay at sea level.

Except for feeling dryness or humidity, warm and cold, rain or sunshine rays, we go about our day without really appreciating its coming and going. Most of us are diurnal beasts; we are active in daylight, sleep all night. But what of those that are crepuscular, most active at dusk and dawn, or those, like flying squirrels, bats, and owls, which are nocturnal? They doze during the day, are active feeding and so on at night. They must view the world in an entirely different context.

Because we are human we have an anthropomorphic view of the rest of the world and all its creatures. While making war, yes, we do stop to thinkof the toll in lives, but almost always do so in terms of other humans. Yet every bomb that drops, every land mine that explodes, every blast of napalm or poison gas, takes a much greater toll on the infrahumans, most of which go unaccounted for. Body counts are dedicated to human bodies.

We may develop a worldview, a so-called “gestalt,” but that view is invariably painted in human terms. Take for instance the method of reducing populations of problematic wild animals such as deer. Many of us are appalled at the thought of bringing them down with an arrow or two, but what about catching them, tranquilizing them, and removing their ovaries? Or why not neuter all the males in similar fashion? Most of us think in terms of dollars and cents. Yes, we can imagine the pain of losing our fertility, but how can it be done the most economically?

Because we don’t know how to converse with other animals, we are unable to measure their suffering compared to our own. Pain is a universal symptom of suffering. Torture is the application of painful procedures to inflict punishment or get information and confessions. Humans may be the most humane of all of the two to three million animal species in the world, but we are also the best at inflicting punishment and torture, which we have applied and perfected over thousands of years. When we run out of humans to agonize, we take it out on pets, especially our dogs. Neglect is just another type of torture.

The theory behind the Olympics and other competitions is that game playing is a humane substitute for the killing and maiming that is war. We often apply the word “games” to war, as in “war games,” mock wars where no one gets hurt. Friendly competition is often not so friendly in the final analysis. We become part of the 1 percent, muddle through, or completely drop out. Coming in second may earn a dollar or two at the track but it can be as painful as losing.

Now we are applying the rules of gaming to women as much as to men. Will women become more like men as a result? Of course women have a long way to go in this regard. Just look at the sports pages in the back of the Daily News or Newsday. They appear more and more in each new issue. Take away the sports, celebrity stuff, and advertisements and you have a very thin newspaper. Look closely at the sports section and you will see that 90 percent of the sports news is about men’s sports, men’s leagues.

The model for such competition as Darwin stated so succinctly is the wild animal species. But when you actually study wild animals in situ, you find that their competitive ways are extremely mild compared to our own. Yes, they are looking out for themselves, but that is often as far as it goes. An African elephant is killed by a poacher and left to decay. Lions, jackals, hyenas, vultures, secretary birds, and perhaps a crocodile or two discover it and manage to take their share without losing their lives over it. Cooperation in the wild is much more pervasive than we realize.

So here we are trying to survive in a mad and frenzied world. We strive to win the gold, write that good essay, enroll in the college of our choice, “become something,” either in the sports pages or at the celebrities’ charity tables. Compete, compete, compete! Look at me, look at me, look at me! Where will it all finally take us? That question has yet to be answered. While we are pondering that ultimate question, we might try to find a little warmth, comfort, and solace in the company of our wild friends.

—

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

There’s something sad in September’s light, in her sunsets, in her wind that blows a passionate, late-summer kiss, or whispers her warm goodbye, hasta luego, or, as I’ve heard it said in Kentucky, “Now don’t rush off.”

I’m referring to September in the feminine. That’s because I’ve been thinking about what Mike Martinsen said during the Concerned Citizens of Montauk event at the Coast restaurant in Montauk on Saturday. It was a seafood seminar built around an introduction to Paul Greenberg and his new book, “American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood.”

Greenberg was joined by Nat Miller, a 13th-generation bayman and East Hampton Town trustee, Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, Sean Barrett, founder of Dock to Dish, a community supported fisheries company, John (Barley) Dunn, director of the town shellfish hatchery on Fort Pond Bay,  Martinsen and his partner, Mike Doall of the Montauk Shellfish Company oyster farm in Lake Montauk, and Carl Safina, an author and founder of the Safina Center at Stony Brook University, formerly the Blue Ocean Institute.

It was a lively, informative afternoon, each speaker stressing the need to improve marine habitat, and addressing the contradiction stated by Greenberg: “But in spite of our billions of acres of ocean, our 94,000 miles of coast, our 3.5 million miles of rivers, a full 91 percent of the seafood Americans eat comes from abroad” — is imported — “and a third of the seafood Americans catch gets sold to foreigners.”

Summing up his remarks about human population density and its negative effect on once-productive waters, Martinsen said, “The planet is not our planet. I envision her as our mother, the mother of all life.”

So, it was with those words rolling around in my head, that I set sail Saturday afternoon on one of Leilani’s last voyages of the season in a decidedly distaff September wind, and in the company of an equally feminine first mate, Kyle.

Ten knots of wind blew a little west of south, perfect for a course to Gardiner’s Island. We were perhaps a half mile northwest of the Montauk Harbor inlet when Kyle shouted, “What’s that splashing?” She was looking behind us, where every few seconds white water erupted from the surface 300 yards away. I put Leilani about to investigate and it was not long before we were surrounded by a school of perhaps 20 feeding dolphins. Dolphin sightings, near shore, have been numerous, no doubt because Montauk has set a bountiful table for them this season.

Squid, porgies, bluefish, striped bass, bunker, sea robins, alewives — who knows what they were chasing on Saturday afternoon, but their slow grazing was punctuated by leaps and rushes that told us whatever their prey was, it did not want to be eaten.

Sailboats are good for dolphin watching, less invasive of their space. We could hear them moving through the water, a peaceful sound. We tacked, and tacked again, to match their movements with Kyle sitting forward speaking to them in a dialect of dolphin that otherwise would have been drowned by an engine. We parted ways, they heading toward Rhode Island, we toward Gardiner’s Island and the setting sun.

Could they have been chasing false albacore? There are enough of them around. Fly casters, and anglers lobbing light spin tackle have been having great success, especially given the stretch of fine weather. The weather has given offshore fishermen opportunities to find the albacores’ larger cousins as well as yellowfin and bigeye tuna.

Surfcasters continue to wait for the fall run of striped bass to begin in earnest. Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reported small stripers being caught under the Montauk Lighthouse during the week. As of Tuesday, no bass have been weighed in the Montauk SurfMasters competition that got under way last week.

If the dolphins have been fattening up on bluefish, they could have found them aplenty off Sammy’s Beach just west of the Three Mile Harbor inlet in recent days. Blues in the 10 to 12-pound range have kept surfcasters reeling.

Steve (Perv) Kramer reported striped bass in the surf at Surfside in Montauk last week. Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, said there was a rumor of a 57-pound striper caught at night by a surfcaster in one of Montauk’s moorland coves last Thursday or Friday, but this could not be confirmed.

Bennett said that fluke seemed to have moved out of Gardiner’s Bay, although “the falsies are going nuts in the bay, and the porgies are as big as rowboats.”