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.”

It’s fall, and pleasant, but dry. It’s another round of the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good? The white and purple asters in the yard that are flowering at a great rate — white wood aster, smooth aster, stiff aster, panicled aster, calico aster, wavy-leaved aster, and heath aster in the order of flowering — with the white wood asters beginning in mid-August. Some goldenrods are chiming in as well, and the bees are going crazy gathering pollen, but as is the state of things in the past several years, none of them are honeybees.

The bad? No rain, lots of plants in the wild faring poorly, acorn yields are way down. The mugworts from Eurasia are having a field day on the roadsides and in the neglected farm fields. The leaves are turning on the hardwoods, but unless we have some late season rain, it will not be a very colorful above eye level.

The ugly? Chiggers.

Last Thursday I went botanizing in the Montauk moorlands with my favorite woman botanist. She wore boots that were duct-taped just below the knees. I wore slip-on shoes and shorts. We went through thickly vegetated areas looking for a sign of the sandplain gerardia, on the federal list of endangered species, which has almost disappeared from Shadmoor State Park in the last couple of years. We had a good day, found a couple of plant species not yet listed for Montauk, and I came out of the woods, not a tick on me.

During the ride home to Noyac I felt fine, if a little tired from clambering over the rugged terrain and through the dense heathland that southeastern Montauk is famous for. I left my clothes outside and took a hot bath right away. I came out of the bathtub as clean as a whistle and proceeded to do the things I do almost every evening, read the papers, watch the news, and do crossword puzzles.

It didn’t get ugly until four in the morning. I began to itch, just a little tickling, about my feet, ankles, and legs. Soon my extremities were afire with serious and painful itchiness. An hour later I began to scratch. There is a certain pleasure in scratching itchy spots, but it soon gives way to an agony. By morning’s first light I could count the bites — 30 or so below my waist, a few on my arms, and some on my abdomen and gluteus maximus.

I had run into patches of chigger larvae. I can see larval ticks but chigger larvae are microscopic. I feel tick bites soon after they attach to the skin. In this case I didn’t feel the chiggery itch until eight hours after leaving the woods. I tried everything to get a little relief.

A new product called Chigg-Away rubbed on each bite provided some relief, but its palliative effects soon wore off. Then, I resorted to my old method, pricking each red pimple with a very sharp needle after dipping it in rubbing alcohol prior to each piercing.

The pain was excruciating; all those individual chigger bites added up. After each pustule was opened and bled, I applied rubbing alcohol to each. Again, lots of pain, but I knew that I would soon find the relief I sought, having been the target of South Fork chigger larvae annually for 30-odd years now. In about 20 minutes the itching and pain subsided. I got some sleep. End of ugly, back to good!

The past week saw a marvelous display of daytime migrant birds and insects. The numbers of monarchs were up considerably over last year. Terry Sullivan was on the Sagaponack ocean beach when dozens were flying by. That’s not all he witnessed: The tree swallows, mostly young of the year, were flying acrobatically, hawking flying insects as they proceeded slowly to the west.

At the same time in Montauk, Victoria Bustamante was observing more than 1,000 tree swallows migrating through, feeding as they went. Just before dusk another larger species of insect-hawking bird, the nighthawk, appeared over the grasslands east of Lake Montauk. They also feed as they move along in a southwesterly direction, their eyes, as in the other goatsuckers, are adapted to see in very low light. Except for an occasional bat, they have the crepuscular insects all to themselves.

Monarchs stop to feed and overnight during their trip to the magic mountains in Mexico where they overwinter. The ones we see pass here aren’t the ones that arrive at the piney wintering grounds; it’s their offspring, produced along the Atlantic flyway, that eventually make it to the sacred spot.

Another insect, the dragonfly, was migrating, too, during the past two weeks. Terry saw them over Sagaponack Pond, Vicki and I saw them over the Montauk moorlands. A reader and Montauk resident, Evan Harrel, had both monarch butterflies and dragonflies stopping in his yard on Monday.

On chiggery last Thursday, Vicki with binoculars and I were watching hundreds of whirligig beetles doing circles across the surface of a pond on the north side of Cavett’s Cove when Vicki cried out, “ I just spotted a dragonfly catch a fly!” Dragonflies are insectivorous and very, very good at feeding on the wing.

I should include the beautiful along with the good. Cavett’s Cove is one of the best sites on Long Island for observing the day-by-day disappearance of the glacial till and other strata that make up the terminal moraine on the South Fork. Water weeps out of the bluff faces, little islands of plants slowly slide down from top to bottom, hoodoos extend their spiny dorsae to the beach. A cranberry bog that I used to visit in the late 1900s is now a field of goldenrods and blackberries — the water it once contained ran over the bluff decades ago. In the bluff face seaward of the former pond, one can see the clayey-mucky layer a few feet thick that was once responsible for holding the water.

But the most spectacular geologic feature of the day was not the hoodoos, or run-out wetlands, or the garnet-colored sand, or the occasional boulder jutting from the cliff face ready to drop during the next coastal storm. It was the circular “cusps” of smooth rounded rocks that appeared at the ocean edge. They extended a good 200 yards to the west and were all about the same size, 10 feet or so in diameter, 30 feet apart at regular intervals.

Cusps occur on rocky shores throughout the world. Sometimes they are made up of marble-sized stones, sometimes of stones as big as cantaloupes. But wherever they may be found, on the coast of Oregon or Ireland, they are similar in aspect. They are a kind of standing waves that move very, very slowly laterally along the shore and almost always have an inherent periodicity, i.e., the intervals between them are the same for any given area. They are yet to be completely described and understood. The ocean shore east of downtown Montauk is one of the best places in the world to observe them.

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

I was sitting with one of the world’s most noted algologists and marine phycologists in the world having lunch in a restaurant in Amagansett with him and three women. We had just listened to the address by the National Audubon Society’s president at the Nature Conservancy’s headquarters in East Hampton. The East Hampton Garden Club sponsored the event and it included a presentation by three recent East Hampton High School graduates who were interns this past year working under the naturalists at Third House Nature Center, which was started by the late Carol Morrison in Montauk almost 20 years ago. The Garden Club has been sponsoring interns, scholarships attached, for East Hampton High School seniors working with local environmentalists and naturalists for two decades, without interruption.

Because two at the table had studied at the University of Chicago, the conversation touched on the Fields Museum, the longstanding science institution in that city comparable in scope and coverage to New York’s equally well-known American Museum of Natural History and not so different in age.

The phycologist interjected that he used to go there often while a student in the 1950s, one of the purposes of which was to try to figure out how televisions worked. The museum devoted much of its time and space to showing how modern American appliances, motor vehicles, electronic gadgets, and the like worked. Notwithstanding his probing, he left Chicago with the television conundrum unresolved. His experience was similar to my own. I’ve always wondered how things worked, ever since I learned in fifth-grade science about simple tools — the lever, screw, ramp, wheel, and so on that derived from the age of the Golden Greeks and probably earlier, well before the dawn of Christianity.

I thought how lucky we were to grow up in rural America, in my case, Mattituck, in the 20th century when simple tools were still much in use and how we learned about them and how to use them even before we learned the theory behind how they worked in public school. In farm and fishing country, as the North Fork was at that time, we couldn’t have gotten by without them. In order to move a very large object such as big rock out of the way all you needed was a strong iron crowbar. It was easier pedaling your bike up a road with a very gradual slope than up a steep one. We launched our rowboats over the beach using a stuffed textile roller (wheel), and when far out to fish or clam, we rowed. We had no book knowledge of Newton’s Third Law, but when we “levered” two oars in one direction, the boat went in the other direction. We understood by doing, not by understanding the theory of how things worked, a kind of osmosis approach to solving problems.

Yea verily, the Golden Greeks and the Egyptians may have perfected the simple tools, but in actuality they derived from primitive humans and even from other so-called lower vertebrates, not just simians but other mammals as well as birds and even, maybe, fish. The archer fish, for example, shoots a stream of water two to three feet high to knock insects off overhanging branches, not just for itself but for other archer fishes hanging around. It is deadly accurate.

We’ve known about rats solving mazes as fast as humans for a long time now, but we are just learning about how octopi use their tentacles and locomotive agility in any number of ingenious ways to solve complex chains of actions that even some of us humans would scratch our heads at. No, apes, crows, rats, octopi and all of the other clever animals don’t understand how TVs, computers, and smartphones work, but neither do most of us. We use them without understanding the theory behind them.

Growing up in the boondocks taught us a lot. As in one of the late Pete Seeger’s monologues. He cited a city slicker in a pricey car riding through Maine who stopped in front of a man on his stoop to get directions. The man wasn’t able to help him, to which the city slicker replied, “You’re not very smart are you?” Came the reply, “No, but I’m not lost.”

Our rural public schools weren’t all that bad. We learned to read with Dick and Jane, we learned the theory behind adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, we learned about simple tools and the science of how things worked, but except for the reading we were already fairly accomplished in such matters before attending school, taught by our fathers and mothers, older brothers and sisters, relatives, and neighbors. Mostly, we learned by observing and doing. Shop was my favorite course ever.

I don’t think I would be cut out for the “Common Core” approach to public education so highly touted today. I would prefer the apprenticeship approach to learning. And I don’t know what would have become of me if I grew up in the city. I would have fared much better at Cornell University at English courses, reading, writing, speaking, and the like. All the city kids were miles ahead of me in that regard.

One of two sisters sitting next to the algologist and across from me is a whiz with computers, professionally, and a world-class birder when not working. In response to the algologist’s admission about failing to understand how TVs worked, she confessed that she didn’t know how computers worked, she just worked them. If Beethoven had stopped to ponder the chain of actions that each touch of the ivories engendered, would he have written the “Eroica” and “Ode to Joy” symphonies?

Which brings us back to the University of Chicago where Robert Maynard Hutchins assembled “The Great Books” collection. Some theorists say that 1,000 monkeys with 1,000 word processors working night and day for a long time could have done the same!

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

The annual Rell Sunn surf contest was held at Ditch Plain Beach in Montauk on Saturday. Each year the tournament’s entry fees, raffles, and auction raise money to help disadvantaged members of the community.

The event’s namesake was a generous and beloved teacher from the west side of the island of Oahu, Hawaii. She was also a graceful surfer who inspired young women to paddle out for their fair share of waves in what had been — even in recent times — a male-dominated domain. Before missionaries frowned the aloha out of surfing, the semireligious sport was enjoyed by men and women alike. Rell Sunn was taken by breast cancer in 1998.

Rell Sunn spread the spirit of aloha throughout the world. Montauk’s annual benefit in her name has become a joyous, aloha-filled day that brings our already close-knit surfing community closer still. I should say, surfing family.

In fits and starts, the family has grown from the time, in 1949, when Richard Lisiewski, a soldier from New Jersey drove to the Army’s Camp Hero in Montauk with his homemade, 100-pound surfboard stuffed in the back of his Cadillac convertible. As far as we know, he was the first person to ride waves with a surfboard in Montauk, although another soldier named Teddy Roosevelt enjoyed a tumble in the waves, according to a newspaper account at the time. The year was 1896 when all of Montauk became Camp Wikoff, where soldiers recuperated from service in the Cuban campaign of the Spanish-American War.

By the late 1960s, the revolution spawned by the Beach Boys and lightweight surfboards made of polyurethane foam and fiberglass brought the first wave of surfers who put down roots here. A significant portion of Montauk’s current fishing community was drawn here by Montauk’s waves. At the time, there was a bit of shoreside exuberance, minor vandalism performed by a few unruly surfers, so in 1969, the East Hampton Town Board set out to ban surfing in the town.

That would have been impossible to enforce, of course, but to preclude an us-versus-them vibe, Perry B. (Chip) Duryea III joined forces with the Rev. Howard Friend of the Montauk Community Church to smooth the waters. The board relented with the caveat that all surfers must register with the town and wear a medallion. The medallion would identify them as legitimate, law-abiding members of the community as compared to those pot-smoking vandals “from away.” It worked for about two weeks.

One of the medallions and the story behind it will be on display at the new Montauk Surf Museum, otherwise known as the Montauk Oceans Institute, which will be in the small white brick building next to the Montauk Lighthouse overlooking three of the most popular surf breaks on the entire East Coast.

The surf museum will be an adjunct to the Montauk Lighthouse Museum, and while its installations will include the general and local history of surfing, they will also depict the science of surfing. Beyond its trendy social aspects and its physical poetry, the sport of surfing grows from a complex interplay of natural forces.

The museum hopes to explain the meteorology of waves and currents, the geology of ocean bottoms, the marine science of the creatures with whom we share the sea, as well as the destructive energy of a superstorm like Sandy.

The museum is about a year away from opening. Its organizers, of whom I’m one, are just now beginning to reach out to the community for memorabilia and photographs of significant moments in local surfing history. “The Trailer Park,” for instance, now the Montauk Shores Condominiums, where grandfathers, grandmothers, mothers, and fathers of the menehunes (little people) who competed in Saturday’s Rell Sunn first put down their surfing roots in Montauk.

One more thing: The surf on Saturday could not have been better for a Rell Sunn event. A sweet north wind shaped up a modest south swell to create a perfect stage for young surfers to strut their stuff. I say young surfers, but the beauty of surfing is that everyone doing it is young, or becomes young once again.

The day after the Rell Sunn, Tom Curren, one of the best surfers in the world, paddled out at Ditch Plain on a 12-foot soft-top board to play in small choppy waves wearing a straw hat and short-sleeved oxford shirt — just another kid — proving once again that aloha is the opposite of pretense. Mahalo, Rell.

The author Thomas Berger died recently. After “Little Big Man” one of his titles was “Sneaky People.” It portrayed a kind of negative utopia where women dominated in the business world and elsewhere, and their rise to eminence was based on deception and craftiness. Farcical as his novel was, many would say that’s how men came to rule the corporate and political spheres, and in many cases they would be right.

Women are rapidly catching up but they still severely lag in recognition in some of the arts as well as in math and science. The annual Nobel Prizes were first handed out in 1901. Up until 2013 only one woman, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, had won the prize in physics. Women did better in chemistry; three made it to the top — Marie Curie, Dorothy Hodgkin, and Ada Yonath. In physiology and medicine, the only other Nobel science category, women did better. Rosalyn Yalow, Barbara McClintock, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, Elizabeth Blackburn, and Carol Greider were crowned. Rosalyn Yalow worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory for a time, while Barbara McClintock was at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider became co-laureates in the same year. Ten out of 330-plus winners (not counting duplicate and triplicate males) translates to 3 percent, not a big showing by any means.

I wondered how women fared in the biographical pages of the most popular print dictionary in America, Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. Admittedly, mine was old, published in 1990. I went through the A and B names, 970 of them only, and found 37 women, or 4 percent, not so different from the Nobel Prize percentage of women in science.

Things are definitely changing. Birdwatching is second to gardening among the top American hobbies. Today, there are as many female birders as male birders, and almost as many female naturalists as male naturalists. But, when I was taking my first steps as a beginning naturalist 65 years ago it was hard to find a woman to practice with and learn from. All of the established naturalists were men. All of their tutors were also men.

There is one female botanist who shows up in the early literature concerning the flora of Long Island. She is a mystery to me as I have never been able to find anyone who knew her. I had heard of her and seen her name here and there in New York State Museum publications. Earlier this year I came upon a copy of “The Flora of Long Island” written and published in 1899 by a Pennsylvania psychiatrist and neurologist, Smith Ely Jelliffe. Several of the plants listed for Long Island were found by this mystery lady, Mrs. L.D. Pychowska. She was from East Hampton and extensively botanized the South Fork in the late 1800s, before Long Island’s great naturalist, Roy Latham, who was active through the 1900s until 1979.

Today if I find a plant I can’t identify in the field I take my smartphone and ring up Go Botany, and 9 times out of 10 I will be able to assign a name to it. In the 1800s after the Civil War there were not field guides to the wildflowers like Peterson’s or Newcomb’s to name two popular ones for identifying northeastern United States plants. There were bulky tomes, descriptions often written in Latin, and pen-and-ink drawings, very few photographs and certainly no color photographs.

In that era, one collected and pressed plants between sheets of newspapers or blank papers, putting weights on the pressings to flatten the specimens. One had to know another botanist or travel to a museum in New York to identify a given plant. But here is this curious woman, Mrs. Pychowska, who traveled by foot and sometimes by horse and buggy to get around. She checks out the plants on Sammy’s Beach in East Hampton, in Springs, Amagansett, and elsewhere, collecting this and that one, describing it in longhand, pressing it, perhaps sending it off or hand-carrying it by train to a museum in the city.

What motivated her? There was not glory or gain to be gotten by way of botanizing native plants in the late-19th century. It must have been curiosity. Yes, curiosity. She found rare species in spots where they still exist today. For example, she found and correctly named, scientifically, the yellow-fringed orchid, Platanthera ciliaris, on a roadside in northeastern Springs. This very rare orchid is listed as endangered in New York State. It must have been rare at the time of her discovery as well, for Mrs. Pychowska got around and yet she found that species only in one small patch, the very place where it barely survives today.

There aren’t too many of us plant watchers. The odds of finding a new species are next to nil. Yet just finding one plant that you have never seen before keeps you looking for another and another and another. It’s also a pastime that you can do until you’re 90. Roy Latham was near blind and very decrepit in his late 80s when he led some neophyte botanists to a rare orchid patch in Greenport. It is said by those who were there that he crawled the last 100 feet and used his sense of smell and touch as much as his poor eyesight to find it.

In my eyes, botanizing, especially in the company of fellow enthusiasts like Karen Blumer or Victoria Bustamante, is one of the most joyful experiences one can know. And it is particularly pleasing in your own backyard, i.e., on the South Fork and an island or two in the Peconics. I sure would have liked to have accompanied the late Mrs. Pychowska on one of her walks. I could have been somebody.

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

“They’re marauding all over,” was how Peter Spacek, The Star’s cartoonist, described the bluefish now invading Montauk waters. If any species can “maraud,” it’s Pomatomus saltatrix.

They are ferocious feeders from baby snapper to 20-pound “chomper.” Their aggressive chomping not only feeds them, but also the less aggressive striped bass that often school beneath the chomping to suck up the scraps descending from the carnage. Just as geese are beginning to fly, big bluefish are flocking to Montauk’s aqua-copia for their fall feed.

The three amigos, the triad of striped bass, bluefish, and false albacore, will soon join forces — the bluefish rounding up the schools of prey, the false albacore racing through for a quick snack, and the striped bass waiting below the swirling food chain for leftovers.

The phenomenon is what Montauk has come to mean for light-spin-tackle anglers and fly fishermen. False albacore have already been seen north of Gardiner’s Island, so it won’t be long.

There are effete fly fishermen, and then there are kayaking handliners like Spacek, who over the weekend brought a cartoon version of a fishing expedition to life. If only he’d been wearing a GoPro camera to record it.

He launched his kayak from the town parking lot, better known as Dirt Lot, next to the Montauk Shores Condominiums, a k a “trailer park,” in the Ditch Plain area of the hamlet. He paddled east.

“I paddled pretty far out in front of Warhol’s,” he said, referring to the former Church Estate, a compound of white cottages on one of the Montauk moorland’s easternmost coves that was once owned by Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol and rented for a time by the Rolling Stones.

“There’s nice bottom fishing there, and I got a nice pile of fish, a fluke and some sea bass. I was thinking I wanted to check out Cavett’s.” That would be the cove overseen by its namesake, Dick Cavett, who lives high on the bluff above.

When Spacek paddles, he trolls a hand­line, in this case one with a diamond jig-white tube combination as terminal gear. He noticed what looked like sand eels, a species that a diamond jig and white tube could mimic. “I had my handline on my foot,” he said, meaning a plastic spool of line.

“Wham, a vicious strike. The spool was spinning on my foot, burning,” he said. The scene in “Moby-Dick” came to mind. The one with Gregory Peck, his lightning scar and ivory peg leg careening through the waves on a Nantucket sleigh ride, the white whale harpooned, and the rope paying from the whaleboat’s bucket, causing the fairlead to smoke so that it had to be doused with water to cool it.

“My foot was burning,” Spacek said. “I was in the middle of the Cavett’s impact zone,” the rock reef where waves break. “The fish wouldn’t let me go forward. I was going into the rocks, shallower. I didn’t want to lose the fish. I hadn’t smoked any bluefish yet. I was backpeddling with my paddle. I needed both hands, so I clenched own on the line with my teeth. No contest. The handline flew out of my mouth.”

I would like to slow the narrative at this point. Is there anyone out there who knows of another fisherman who’s gone teeth to teeth with a bluefish? Might this not become a new extreme sport?

In the end, Spacek prevailed, having had the distinct advantage of hands as well as teeth. “A worthy adversary,” he said of the blue. “I threw him in my basket. Five minutes later I had another.”

To my way of thinking, this was a fishing contest, an interspecies mano a mano with teeth. I remember many years ago while surfing in the aforementioned coves, a few of us in the lineup thinking what fun it would be to attach diamond jigs to the leashes that connected us to our surfboards. It was fall, and schools of bluefish boiled around us. We thought better of it. Again, no contest.

The one held from Uihlein’s Marina and Boat Rental in Montauk over the weekend was again a success, with proceeds going to the Montauk Friends of Erin group, as well as the Kiwanis Club of East Hampton. This year, the annual tournament honored Capt. Barry Kohlus, a charterman who has guided anglers to Montauk’s fishing grounds for over 50 years. Kohlus gave a rousing speech during the after-party, during which he said that he’d enjoyed his decades on the water so much that he felt like he’d never worked a day in his life.

The Montauk Grand Slam Charity Tournament has anglers of all sorts competing in several divisions. Winners are those who compile the heaviest cumulative weights among four species, fluke, bluefish, striped bass, and black sea bass.

The winner in the party boat division was Steve Dewaro on the Viking Starship. Robert Malinowski took top honors in the recreational division with 129.35 points, 43.8 of which came from a single striped bass. Capt. Rick Etzel on the Breakaway boat won among competing commercial fishermen with a 38.7-pound striper, a 12-pound bluefish, an 8.1-pound fluke, and a 4.25-pound sea bass.

Richie Nessel won the individual angler award for a 5.45-pound sea bass, Robert Malinowski for a 43.8-pound striped bass, Sal Zatkowski for a 12.5-pound bluefish, and Sal Zatkowski again for fluke that weighed 8.21 pounds.

Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reports fluke production is strong around the Ruins on the north end of Gardiner’s Island and outside Napeague Harbor. He said the porgies were getting bigger on the west side of Gardiner’s Island, and on the ocean beaches there are big blues on and off during the day.

“I heard there was a large shark feeding on bunker off the beach in Water Mill,” he said. “Let’s hope it keeps eating the bunker.”

Botany again, but before we begin, I should single out an axiom that often goes unnoticed. Someone somewhere somehow knows something that most of us don’t know. Last week I told you about a Mrs. Pychowska who botanized locally in the late 1800s at a time when almost every biologist, botanist, or naturalist was male. A reader, Julie Sakellariadis, emailed me the day after the column came out. She knew about Mrs. P., who was both the wife of Count Pychowska and Eugene B. Cook. Julie found out about her in reading the minutes of the Randolph Mountain Club, members of which were naturalist-mountaineers of a sort.

This week’s botany tale is not as sweet as last week’s. It takes place at Trout Pond, a Southampton Town park in Noyac that long ago used to be a hotel site for vacationing city dwellers who arrived by ferry. The pond actually gets stocked with trout. On Friday there was a young man fishing in it. He caught seven largemouth bass and a yellow perch, all of which he returned to the water.

Vicki Bustamante and I went back to look for the Dutchman’s pipe vine, perhaps the only one on Long Island in the wild that we had found last year growing on a hillside near where the hotel once stood. We couldn’t find it, but we did find a bunch of Asiatic bittersweet vines newly cut off a foot or so above the ground. Perhaps, the root itself will resprout.

We found a bunch of plants that we had not previously identified there, among them, mapleleaf viburnum, white vervain, and purple avens, a wetland species closely resembling white avens, an upland forest floor plant not uncommon on the South Fork. Avens have fruit that are burr-like with little hooks that attach them to the pelt of a passing mammal or the clothes of a passing human, a common method several plants employ to distribute their seed and extend their ranges.

Perhaps the most fascinating plant of the day was the purple bladderwort, which was carpeting part of the pond, mixing it up with the very aggressive invasive aquatic species, Cabomba, an immigre from tropical America that is running wild in much of the eastern United States at this time. The bladderwort is completely waterbound except for the pretty purple flower, which reaches a few inches into the air so that it can be cross-pollinated.

There are 14 bladderwort species, but the purple one is rather rare on Long Island. While bladderworts allow bees and other insect to land on their airborne flowers, beneath the surface they do dirty deeds as far as insects and other swimming aquatic invertebrates are concerned. As their name implies, they have little sacs that open and close. They stay open until a curious little mosquito larvae or other aquatic invertebrate enters, then they shut tight. The trapped prey is slowly digested just as prey caught in the Venus flytrap or pitcher plant are. The bladderwort is as carnivorous as it is photosynthetic.

Perhaps the most beautiful plant of the day was the cardinal flower, a member of the Lobelia genus, which grows on the edges of streams in sediments accumulated in the stream’s oxbows. I had first seen these tall-stalked plants at Trout Pond 30 years ago, but had not seen them since. They come and go depending upon the year. I have never found them locally far from a meandering freshwater stream.

In a way they can be as treacherous as the bladderworts. They beg you to take a closer look. In order to reach them you have to get your feet wet by walking through a mat of hydrophilic plants — sedges, reeds, stick-tights, and different mints. Therein lies the rub. A tiny arachnid larvae less than a half millimeter in size — the harvest mite, Trombicula autumnalis — lives in this damp soggy turf. Such a pretty scientific name for one of man’s greatest tormentors, the chigger.

Vicki had her anti-tick rubber knee boots on. I was attired in short, white socks and slip-ons, as I wanted to test a hypothesis. Vicki had come down with chigger bites from an outing on Big Reed Pond in Montauk the day before. I wanted to see if they were out in my neighborhood as well. They were, big time.

At 4 a.m. Saturday morning, 10 hours after the Trout Pond foray, I couldn’t sleep, the urge to itch and scratch was overpowering. Yes, I had my first case of chiggers this year. Turning on the light over my bed I could just make out the little pimples where a larval chigger had formed its stylostome tube into my flesh and feasted on it before leaving. By the time the itching starts they’re gone.

I applied the treatment I have used for the last 20 years. It also works for lone star tick bites, which raise similar pustules. I took a very sharp needle and pierced each of 30 or so pustules, then applied rubbing alcohol to each. The itching subsided somewhat, but persisted throughout Saturday. When I couldn’t sleep Saturday night, I took two Benadryls. They did the trick. On Sunday morning I was almost itch-free except for a couple of new bites. I had run the gamut and paid for it dearly. The only saving grace was that as far as we know thus far, chigger larvae don’t carry diseases.

I relearned (or did I?) a painful lesson that I have relearned every year since my first bout with chiggers picked up at Culloden Point in 1985. Obviously, I am a slow learner. Vicki’s boots didn’t save her from the same excruciating itching bout that beset me, only hers didn’t start until 20 hours after our nature walk. This is the season for chiggers; they’re out there in big numbers, you can bet on it. Stay away from moist vegetation and don’t touch it with your hands or brush against it with your arms.

While I was recuperating and feeling miserable for much of Saturday, Vicki was out picking elderberries with which to make jam. On Sunday her arms and hands were covered with chigger bites. Her son Nick went out on Sunday and picked black raspberries. On Monday he was dealing with 10 chigger bites.

Was it all worth it? You tell me.

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

North American “life zones” as defined by Clinton Hart Merriam in the early 1900s are equivalent to the world’s biomes. They are deserts, northern coniferous forests, or taigas, temperate deciduous forests such as those occupying Appalachia, alpine forests, evergreen tropical forests, and rain forests, and the tundras of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia, and grasslands. Biomes tend to keep their identity for millennia.

The grasslands include our own tall-grass and short-grass prairies of the Midwest, the steppes of Eurasia, much of Patagonia, the savannas of Africa, part of the Gobi desert in Asia, and some parts of Australia. In a way, salt marshes dominated by Spartina grasses, spike grass, and other grass-like species are akin to prairies.

Most of Long Island’s flora is relatively recent, 15,000 years or so old, i.e. beginning with the recession of the last glacial occupation. Nonetheless after the glaciers receded, Long Island was invaded by plants from the west and south, some from Appalachia, some from the coastal plain of New Jersey, some all the way from the Midwest. Grasslands were among the largest floral units on Long Island as they, like “old fields” left by farmers, develop rather rapidly compared to woodlands.

As far as we can tell, the largest of Long Island’s grasslands is (was?) the Hempstead Plains. It was more than 60,000 acres in size and up until the late 1800s sported several plant species now considered endangered or threatened in New York State as well as animal species long-extirpated from the Northeast, including the heath hen, a prairie chicken.

Perhaps the second largest grassland on Long Island in pre-settler times was most of Montauk. The land between Montauk Point and Lake Montauk was all grassland, save for the Point Forest just southwest of Camp Hero and a dwarf forest stretching from the Point to Fort Pond, called the “moorlands” because of its resemblance to the extensive moors of Scotland, Ireland, and parts of England. When Norman Taylor published his work “The Vegetation of Montauk” in 1923, the land east of Fort Hill on the northeast side of Fort Pond was native grasslands all the way to the Point. In fact, one of East Hampton Town’s species on the government’s endangered species list, the sandplain gerardia (Agalinas acuta), covered that entire area from the ocean bluffs to Block Island Sound and Fort Pond Bay with its pretty pink flowers in late August and September.

Hither Woods, occupying the western part of Montauk, was also largely grasslands at the turn of the 19th century, but was beginning to grow up into eastern red cedars and deciduous hardwoods as grazing of livestock, so big in the 1700s and early 1800s, had largely petered out. Already in the late 17th century, lumbering deforested most of Hither Woods and grasslands sprang up in the trees’ absence. Thus, those “maritime” grasslands were not original, but second growth in nature.

A third largish Long Island grasslands was topographically like the Montauk ones east of the lake and stretched from Southampton Village to what is now the Shinnecock Canal. Even as late as 1974 when I came back from Oregon to teach at Southampton College, the Shinnecock Hills still had some large grassland patches and the original native species to go with them, such as the silvery aster, Aster concolor, now on the state’s endangered species list and still hanging on by its fingernails south of County Road 39 where it cuts through the hills.

The Hempstead Plains have been reduced to about 17 acres still in their natural state and those 17 acres still have bird’s-foot violets and several other true grassland species. Artificial grasslands have sprung up here and there. Gabre­ski Airport in Westhampton Beach is one of the largest of these, but if you examine the grasses and the forbs there, you mostly find species from Eurasia dominating the landscape. In Sayville, 100 acres of maintained grasslands, formerly the property of the German company Telefunken, once owned by the Federal Aviation Administration, is now part of the 6,000-acre United States Fish and Wildlife Refuge, or Wertheim Refuge, off the ocean to the east. This grassland also has sandplain gerardia and other rare plants.

Old fields are grasslands of a sort, but almost all of them in East Hampton have gone to seed, in other words given way to eastern red cedar, pitch pine, sassafras, exotic autumn olive, and Tartarian honeysuckle. It is in the Bell Estate III subdivision’s bylaws that the old field on the south side of Barnes Hole Road near its end in Springs be maintained as a grassland and that condition has held since at least 1987 when the map became final. It has lots of nice grassland species including orange milkweed and broomsedge.

The grassland at the East Hampton Airport is second in size to the one in east Montauk. It is maintained by periodic mowing and since the airport’s inception on hardscrabble land just after the close of World War II and still comprises mostly native grassland species. It is one of the three spots in East Hampton where grasshopper sparrows procreate and, since 1988, a great eastern bluebird breeding area. Native lupines, false foxglove, Agalinis tenuifolia, a sandplain gerardia look-alike, and little bluestem grass are among those grassland species at the airport.

Golf courses can make great grasslands, especially those that had a natural grassland base to begin with. Thus, Shinnecock Hills and Montauk Downs are two courses where you can still find more native species than exotics if you get down on your hands and knees to look.

But the history of Long Island shows that if grasslands are developed over or left unmanaged, they grow up into shrubby savannas that later on, in the absence of brush-cutting or wildfires, become small treed landscapes. Thus was the fate of Ram Level in Hither Woods, in that part of the woods owned by Suffolk County and now called Koppelman Woods, once the home of the largest population of the bushy rockrose, Helianthemum dumosum, also on the state’s threatened list. In 1983 there were at least five acres of prime grassland in the center of the woods replete with blooming rockroses. Last year when I looked, the grassland had turned to savanna and there were none. In a few more years under Suffolk County’s apparent laissez-faire guidance, Ram Level will surely become a young forest.

Another prime grassland managed by the county is the one easily seen north of the exit from Sunrise Highway to County Road 111 in Manorville. It is sadly growing up into pitch pines and a bunch of shrubs and eastern red cedar. It was once all tall native grasses. The upland sandpiper, a rarity on Long Island, frequently visited it and may even have bred there. But that species is not as fussy for its native homeland as one might think. You can also find it at Zabreski Airport along with a few other grassland species including the vesper sparrow and field sparrow during the breeding season.

The Montauk County Park grasslands at Third House are still large, but the shrubs and trees in the absence of active grazing and human maintenance are disappearing at a fast rate. You can still find a native wood lily, Lilium philadelphicum, or two blooming in July if you scour the area, but how long will it hold out there? Probably not more than another four or five years.

By and large, Long Island is losing its grasslands, and the rate of loss is accelerating. Trees and nonnative shrubs are filling in the spaces. Let’s see what happens in the next few years to that wonderful field known lately as “555,” a doomed development in Amagansett that was recently purchased by East Hampton Town.

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

A week ago, Capt. Skip Rudolph and his wife, Vickie, took the Adios charter boat offshore on an overnight to tuna country. He’s been busy guiding anglers to our rich, inshore grounds for striped bass and blues. It had been a while since the Adios had gone to where the Continental Shelf dives into offshore canyons formed eons ago by rivers of melting glacier.

By the sound of it, the trip was restorative, a time away, and in addition they caught ’em up — four bigeye tuna up to 225 pounds, three albacore, and two yellowfin up to 60 pounds. At the end of an email message, Skip wrote: “Remember, Tumbleweed Tuesday is not far away.”

He was referring, of course, to the day after Labor Day when, after a river of cars, trucks, and land yachts flows east to west like the aforementioned melting glacier, we are left with just the wind whistling through our empty streets.

In the meantime, let’s take to the water, place a moat between us and the crowds, go fishing, sailing, surfing, or if you’re stuck on land, visit your secret spots and appreciate the peace and beauty of this place until Tumbleweed Tuesday.

Offshore success over the past week also included young Max Polsky’s beautiful mahimahi caught within sight of Montauk Point with his dad, George, at the helm. And how about Sophia Ippolito, 10, who has spent much of the summer out in Montauk learning how to fish from her father, Fred. This summer she came in first place in a junior angler division contest by catching a 32.6-pound striped bass. Last week she caught a 130-pound big-eye tuna 200 miles offshore. Her dad gave a little help, but wow!

The fall version of the Montauk SurfMasters surfcasting tournament for striped bass is scheduled to begin at 12:01 a.m. on Sept. 16 and will run until 10 a.m. on Nov. 30. The entry fee is $260, $60 of which will go toward an end-of-tournament bash. Applications are available at Paulie’s Tackle Shop and the West Lake Marina.