When I heard the news, I thought of his big laugh, big smile. Then the memories began to flood like the tide around the Montauk Marine Basin docks. Carl Darenberg Jr., “Carly,” was always there, like big Carl senior, and Vivian, his mom.

I knew them slightly before becoming the “On the Water” reporter for The Star in the early 1980s. They were hard people, by which I mean strong, no nonsense, serious about taking care of boats and the needs of fishermen, proud of the marina’s place in the history of big-game fishing in the Northeast. Carl grew up in the middle of it and generously shared his knowledge with this reporter.

In the days before the Star Island Yacht Club, it was the Marine Basin where people went to ogle the sharks caught during the annual tournaments, where at midnight on Aug. 14, 1986, Capt. Frank Mundus brought his 3,450-pound white shark to be weighed, and where the week before the Marine Basin’s scales weighed in a 1,174-pound blue marlin. It was the Marine Basin where you went to see giant bluefin tuna dressed for market. So much history and Carl grew up in the middle of it.

Montauk’s docks are always awash in the latest fish news. There are tuna in the Butterfish Hole, snowshoe flounder south of Block. “Did you hear? So-and-so caught a this-and-that.” Carl heard it all, every day, a walking encyclopedia of fish facts.

Two years ago, he broke with deeply entrenched tradition by pioneering Montauk’s first no-kill shark tournament, and as always took a personal hand in promoting it despite criticism from those who had come to view shark tournaments as an opportunity to gamble big money. Carl recognized the Marine Basin’s role in the Montauk community, not just our boating and fishing community, but in all areas of our day-to-day. He was generous.

The shock of his passing stings all the more coming as it did on the eve of “Tumbleweed Tuesday,” the day after Labor Day, when Montaukers crawl from the wreckage and reunite. I will miss Carl Darenberg.

He knew that mahimahi were being caught within sight of land south of Montauk, and that bigeyes were being found well offshore. He might have heard about the whales and bluefin tuna off Nantucket. It will be left to others to keep the account.

Bluefish, big ones, are reported to be feeding within casting range from Hither Hills to East Hampton. Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reports “red-hot snapper bluefish action” in Accabonac Harbor. He said porgies are big and plentiful on the Cherry Harbor side of Gardiner’s Island. The fluke bite in Gardiner’s Bay has slowed, he said, but striped bass in the 30-pound class have been taken on the ocean side in front of the Maidstone Club in East Hampton — WASPy stripers.

Sammy’s Beach just west of the Three Mile Harbor inlet has small bass and bluefish. Best to find them there in the early morning hours. Over at the Harbor Marina off Gann Road, a snapper derby will happen on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with weigh-ins at 1:30 and judging at 2. The fee is $5, and the first 30 to enter get a free lure. Categories are ages 3 to 8, 9 to 12, and 13 and up.

False albacore are spotty so far. Schools have been seen around Gardiner’s Island. That will change. Ken Rafferty, a light-spin-tackle and fly-fishing guide from East Hampton, usually moves his operation to Montauk about this time each year to chase the falsies.

He was getting ready to head out on Tuesday morning from Three Mile Harbor. He said that although some false albacore have been taken on the ocean side, the usual strong run in Gardiner’s Bay had not yet developed, although mid-August is when they usually arrive.

In the meantime, Rafferty said his clients have been catching striped bass and big bluefish in Gardiner’s Bay. Brett Davis, a first-time fly fisherman, caught his first striped bass the other day — “a dead-calm day, water like glass, and bluefish finning on the surface.”

I think Carl Darenberg would have liked that description.

First, a short note to cheer you all for the 4th of July. On Monday I received a communiqué from Kara Jackson, who handles the news for the Nature Conservancy. She said the first eagles to breed on Mashomack, the Nature Conservancy’s pearl on Shelter Island, in more than a century are just about to fledge their chicks. They could easily be in the air on the 4th. Wouldn’t that be terrific? The national bird born and raised and flying above the treetops in the center of the Peconic Estuary; some would say that’s a much better celebration of the independence of our great country than rockets and Roman candles.

It’s been 10 years since the canker worm moth population collapsed, 12 years since the end of the last gypsy moth outbreak. So I got to thinking, are those scourges gone for good? If not, why are they taking so long to come back. Have the oaks, hickories, and other hardwoods worked out a failsafe defensive strategy? Plants don’t have brains, but they can act and react.

I got in my vehicle Monday and retraced the routes I had taken during last week’s whippoorwill listening outing. It was one through the back roads in Southampton and East Hampton Towns, and some in the villages of Sag Harbor and North Haven. This time, however, I made the trip through those same oak, hickory, pitch pine, the white pine, and American beech forests during the day, not at night. I was looking for signs of defoliation, because if it was happening, by this time there would be some bare trees and some mature gypsy moths or canker worm moths flying around looking to mate.

Major’s Path, Noyac Path, Deerfield Road, Edge-of-Woods Road, Millstone Road, Middle Line Highway, Watermill Towd Road, Old Sag Harbor Road, Brick Kiln Road, Noyac Road, and Sagg Road were some of the roads I traveled from noon to 2 p.m. making “windshield” checks of the vegetation on each side of the road.

Then I rested, had a cup of coffee, and started out again, this time covering those very same East Hampton roads where I had searched for whippoorwills and chuck-will’s-widows a week earlier — Route 114, Swamp Road, Two Holes of Water Road, Bull Path, Old Northwest Road, Hand’s Creek Road, Stephen Hand’s Path, Northwest Road, Alewife Brook Road, Springy Banks Road, Accabonac Road, Abrahams Path, Springs-Fireplace Road, Old Stone Highway, Red Dirt Road, Stony Hill Road, Neck Path, Fresh Pond Road, Bendigo Road, and the western section of Cranberry Hole Road.

At the end of four hours of driving and straining my eyes this way and that way I was tired and both relieved and overjoyed. Why? Because I found not one sign of defoliation. The trees along all those roads were as green and as fully leaved as could be. I gave them all “lushness” ratings ranging from 8.5 to 9.5. If it doesn’t rain within a week the lushness ratings could drop into the 7s, but I don’t think there is any chance of any serious defoliation this year and probably not much next year, if at all. True, a tropical storm without rain could come along and shrivel the leaves the way Superstorm Sandy did to so many local white pines in October of 2012.

A second major finding of my trip around the South Fork was that there was very little sign of understory devegetation, the kind caused by gypsy moths, canker worms, or deer. The low-bush blueberries and huckleberries that dominated the subshrub layer throughout and along most of the above-mentioned roads covered 75 to 95 percent of the ground. I similarly gave the subshrub layer lushness values between 8.5 and 9.5. So much for the deer eating up the forests. The only area that was nearly devoid of understory was where it was to be expected, under the beeches that dominate the woods north of Town Lane in Amagansett, especially manifest along both sides of Stony Hill Road.

Last week’s nighttime search was a disaster; this daytime one was nothing but a big, big positive. When I talked about defoliation late in the day with Vicki Bustamante, who was on her way back from Stony Brook, she said, “That’s funny, I saw a lot of freshly defoliated trees along Nichols Road,” the section that runs north from the Long Island Expressway all the way to Stony Brook University. Having taken that road on many occasions since 1980, I am not surprised. The gypsy moth cycle along it is one of the shortest in America, never mothless for more than five years running, it would seem.

Vicki did point out another cyclic downturn in tree health UpIsland. Large patches of mature pitch pines along Sunrise Highway were dying back or already dead. When she finds out the cause she will pass it on.

You may remember that one of the largest wildfires in the history of Long Island occurred in the pine barrens of Westhampton north and south of Sunrise Highway. It happened after a rather severe browning of many of the pitch pines there. Pitch pines are different than oaks, hickories, and white pines. They populate fire climax forests that drop most of their pine nuts after being hit by a hot fire. Trees that are not killed outright re-sprout from the bare trunks, and, given a little rain, the seeds germinate on the burnt-over ground.

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

Most every experienced surfer knows how to rate the pucker factor in increments of fear, as happened early evening on the Fourth of July in Montauk. Dozens were caught off guard by a rapidly building swell and forced to “scratch for the horizon” — paddle seaward to escape a serious pounding. 

Okay, you’ve made it “outside.” Now what? You either take off on a wave that wants to drown you, or. . . . And that’s when the pucker factor is at its puckering peak, when the surfer realizes there is no “or,” no alternative. At that point it either becomes one of the best days of his or her life, or the opposite.

“The waves were waist-high. We were wondering, ‘Where’s the swell?’ Then a head-high set came through, fun waves for a while, then it hit, triple-overhead, 15 feet,” was how Scott Pitches described the arrival of Hurricane Arthur’s violent pulse.

Arthur started as a low-pressure system that drifted off the coast of the Carolinas early last week and moved south into the Bahamas. On July 1 it became the first named storm of the season with winds that accelerated to 100 miles per hour in the next two days as it moved north and east.

The storm was moving fast as it passed about 100 miles east of Montauk. As a result, its pulse dissipated quickly. It was all over in a few hours and by morning, only the stories remained.

They circulated quickly: Grant Monahan’s giant tube ride at Hoffman’s, Chuck Weimar forced to swim a couple hundred yards to shore through the maelstrom when his leash snapped, Peter Cappola’s scary hold-down. Then, there was Lee Meirowitz’s great ride captured on video at the spot known as End of the Road.

It was the second big, fast-moving swell to visit the East End in the past few months. On March 26, a northeast storm produced perfect 8-to-10-foot waves accompanied by a 25-knot offshore wind (in water that was not quite 50 degrees). That swell, too, arrived near dark and was gone by morning.

Marty Ross, a veteran surfer with Australian roots, said he attempted to paddle out at Surfside in Montauk, but was repelled not only by the waves themselves, but by a wall of water, a combination of spent waves and storm surge. The storm was so close to the coast, it had an abbreviated fetch, the distance the wind has over water to develop a swell. When tropical swells are far from shore, a long-period swell develops. There is breathing room between sets of waves. Not so in Arthur’s case. The result was a powerful focus of wave energy that, fortunately for the coastline, did not last long.

Big waves, big sharks. The second annual, no-kill, Shark’s Eye tournament will get under way on Saturday from the Montauk Marine Basin. The action will take place offshore both Saturday and Sunday with food and entertainment featuring Brian Neale, and commentary by Sean and Brooks Paxton, the Shark Brothers, who pioneered release-only shark tournaments in Florida. Festivities will include a dock party on Saturday night. Jimmy Buffett’s tour schedule prevents him from fishing the tournament as he did last summer. However, his boat Last Mango, with Capt. Vinny LaSorsa, will be fishing with a crew of Wounded Warriors.

Closer to shore, surfcasters have been productive, especially along Napeague’s ocean beach west through Amagansett to the Georgica Beach jetties. Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported 28 to 30-inch bass being taken on bucktail lures early, and on clam baits throughout the recent days.

Then there’s the curious phenomenon taking place at Georgica where hickory shad, Alosa mediocris, a member of the herring family, have been schooling. John Tostrucci caught one on light tackle and watched it go airborne, as hickories are wont to do when hooked. There is nothing mediocris about the Georgica shad. Bennett said Tostrucci’s fish was nearly five pounds.

Bennett figured the anadromous species has been milling around outside Georgica Pond, attracted by the smell of its freshwater. Speaking of Georgica Pond, Bennett said the blue-claw crabs were small but numerous so far this year. He added that the crab population in Three Mile Harbor seemed to be on the rise after years of no-shows.

It was probably a shad, bunker, or some other kind of herring that drew a 54.12-pound striper to the vicinity of Matt McDermott’s hook on May 31. The big bass won McDermott first place in the Montauk SurfMasters Tournament spring shootout this year. Ben McCarron took second place with a 43.75-pounder caught the day before. Mike Coppola’s 31.16-pound bass was the third heaviest bass. The tournament ran from May 9 to June 28.

It seems like we are halfway through summer, but in reality we’re less than a third through. The roads are already super-clogged with vehicles, many of which are spiffy and go from 0 to 60 in less than 10 seconds, which is all well and good if you are on the Autobahn, but on Old Northwest Road or Accabonac Highway it’s a bit much.

Perhaps it is fitting that as all of these new cars stream by approaching the speed of light, they think they are outdistancing the poisonous odors emanating from the new, horribly brown utility poles that run from Toilsome Lane and Route 114 in East Hampton Village all the way to the middle of Amagansett.

But no matter how fast you move along, you will be breathing in the trenchant aroma of penta, the nickname for the very noxious and persistent chemical pentachlorophenol that is steadily emanating from these towering poles and the ground they sit in, and is so poisonous that it has been banned in 26 countries, but not in the United States of America.

It is a salient slap in the face to East Hampton, which has been a leader in outlawing the use of toxic chemicals townwide and banned the use of C.C.A. — chromated copper arsenate — pressure-treated wood in its waters and on its shorelands nearly 20 years ago, long before it was banned for the same uses and in construction nationwide. The Long Island Rail Road and New York State Department of Transportation used to routinely spray weed killers like Agent Orange on their rights-of-way to kill this and that weedy growth. Ever since they stopped at the request of East Hampton and other Long Island municipalities, what do you think happened? Yes, native wildflowers and native grasses such as milkweeds, goldenrods, asters, purple lovegrass, tall bluestem grass, and broom sedge sprouted up in the weeds’ stead.

So after Sandy, a deal is brokered by Governor Cuomo (and Chris Christie, no doubt): Reduce the Long Island Power Authority to a shell corporation, bring in the Public Service Enterprise Group, PSEG, based in Newark and give it carte blanche to do what they do in New Jersey, install mammoth utility poles treated with one of the world’s most horrific toxins, and prune the devil out of the street trees to accommodate them. Thus, like an army bent on conquering what LIPA was reluctant to, PSEG marched into East Hampton in Suffolk County and Port Washington in Nassau County like the Hessians marched in the Revolutionary War. Thank God, the Hessians were on our side.

LIPA, and LILCO before it, had already buried more than 25 miles of igh voltage power lines on the South Fork prior to Sandy. No threat of lines blowing down if they’re three feet underground. And the trees above them can remain untouched, so we can enjoy their untarnished grandeur as we walk, bicycle, or drive by them. Yes, 100 percent toxic-free and out of view.

It’s a simple matter of going to Google Maps on your smartphone or home computer to see the course of the remaining above-ground high-voltage power lines running from Shinnecock Canal to Montauk. The steel poles and rights-of-way that carry them are as easy to make out as the streets and railroad line that run from west to east. These pole lines cross major north-south roads along the way such as the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, Sagg Road, and Town Line Road. Otherwise, they are mostly out in the woods. Galvanized steel poles are sturdy, insect and fungal proof, and they keep the electric flux fields high up in the air.

If you follow the route from west to east on Google, you will notice something that is very obvious. The power lines are mostly out of harm’s way. They don’t pass directly through populous areas. PSEG comes along and breaks a long-standing rule. It runs the high voltage lines through a densely-populated area, mainly through northern East Hampton Village, but also along the built-up part of Town Lane. It could have run them along the L.I.R.R. line directly to the architectural eyesore it calls a substation at the corner of Montauk Highway and Old Stone Highway in Amagansett. But, noooooooo, it had an alternative method in mind.

Here’s how I think it went: The utility figured it could kill two birds with one stone and get rid of those noisy supplemental generating stations at the same time. The poles through the northern part of East Hampton Village and along Town Lane beyond will have to be replaced one day; why not do the whole thing in one foray? Replace the poles, transfer the existing domestic and commercial usage power to the new poles, run the high voltage lines on the same poles but higher up. Either way, the trees along the route — many so nicely maintained by the village under the omnipresent eye of the Ladies Village Improvement Society — will have to be pruned anyway. “Beats double handling, don’t you think?”

Damn the public, damn the scenic views, damn the school kids who pass by them on their way to school, damn the dogs who urinate on them! Damn the exposure to one of the world’s most toxic chemicals. Damn the exposure to the harmful electromotive fluxes raining down from the high voltage wires as the current zips along from west to east. “They’ll get over it,” I imagine an engineer saying 150 miles away in PSEG’s Newark office.

Larry Penny, a columnist for The Star, is a former East Hampton Town natural resources director who lobbied to get the power lines buried from Amagansett to Montauk following Hurricane Bob and also for burying lines on Northwest Road in East Hampton. He is a plaintiff in a current lawsuit brought by Long Island Businesses for Responsible Energy’s lawsuit against PSEG. The suit seeks removal of the new, taller electric poles and burial of the transmission line from East Hampton to Amagansett. 

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

Jason Behan said it was like that scene in “Jaws” when the residents of Amity go to sea after the killer shark in every manner of craft and with every sort of weapon imaginable. He wasn’t talking about the weekend’s shark tournament. He was describing the scene that has continued to unfold around Montauk Point in recent days with a growing fleet of fishing boats converging on a school of striped bass, the likes of which veteran anglers say they have never seen.

“School bass are averaging 30 pounds. People are dragging 30 and 40-pound fish along the docks. They’re giving them away. My freezer is full,” Behan said, adding that he’d heard a supplier of live eels, the bait du jour, was called to replenish marinas that had gone through 600,000 eels during the week.

“The Sea Turtle was in the middle of it,” he said, referring to the charter dive boat that services spear fishermen. And, the Sea Turtle was not the only dive boat. Eric Flaherty and friends drove their boat from East Hampton to get in on the action. Flaherty said he drove past the action in the rip currents north of the point to a spot on the south side where they speared three bass over 30 pounds and one 40-plus-pounder. The bass were ‘carouseling’ around us,” was how Flaherty described the underwater scene.

As we all know, gluttony is a sin, one often violated among Homo sapiens, and apparently, among Morone saxatilis, striped bass. Corey Senese, a surfing instructor, was giving a lesson at Ditch Plain in Montauk on Saturday when he spied something white about 30 yards outside the lineup. It was a bass, belly up but still alive.

“There was a lively movement. I went out on my 11-foot board to investigate. I had no idea how big it was until I put my hand in its wide-open mouth. It took one last fan stroke of its tail to get away, but I grappled it. It was pretty much on its last legs. When I had it up on my board, I rode a wave to the beach with the fish on the nose. On the beach we could see something was in its throat. Glenn Krug cleaned the fish and found a giant sea robin stuck half-way down.” The gluttonous bass weighed 38 pounds.

A few years ago, a beach walker found a bass on the beach at Ditch Plain, nearly dead, with a blowfish, ballooned to the max, stuck in its throat. Upon hearing Senese’s story, Jason Behan said he remembered finding a bass with a whole blue-claw crab, the points of its shell piercing either side, stuck in the fish’s opened mouth. Picky eaters they are not.

While this was going on inshore, the eight boats participating in the second annual catch-and-release Shark’s Eye tournament from the Montauk Marine Basin were finding 73-degree water offshore and sharks aplenty.

Joe Gaviola, who led a fishing party on his Free Nicky boat, said that the eight boats fishing were joined by chase boats with divers, scientists, cameras, and satellite tags. In all, six sharks were fitted with satellite tags that will use GPS technology to track the sharks on their migrations. Last summer, the Montauk School students chose the handle “Beamer” for the nine-foot blue shark tagged in their name.

Beamer was caught on a commercial longline off the coast of Costa Rica in May. This year, the Montauk School will follow Big Kahuna, one of two tiger sharks caught by Free Nicky anglers on Saturday. Gaviola said scientists were excited about the two tigers, as none had ever been tagged north of the Carolinas. The Free Nicky wrestled and released a big mako, then caught Bonac, a 250-pound blue shark that got a satellite tag and was named by the Amagansett School.

Tournament rules require the use of circle hooks, a type invented by Japanese fishermen. Circle hooks lodge in a fish’s jaw where they do relatively little damage, rather than in the gut where they usually prove fatal. Points are awarded to boats based on the number, species, and size of the sharks they bring alongside.

After two days of fishing, Free Nicky was tied with Capt. Richie Nessel’s Nasty Ness. Dan Christman, who fished aboard the Nasty Ness, said the tie was broken in the end. The Nasty Ness came out on top for the second year because, while Captain Gaviola’s boat had the “quality” sharks, including the two tigers, the Nasty Ness crew caught and released more sharks overall.

The green approach to shark fishing seems to be growing in popularity. Last weekend’s tournament was featured in an NBC Today show segment Monday morning. Apparently not everyone is green, however. Two signs advertising the Shark’s Eye tournament in Montauk were vandalized in the days running up to the event. Go figure.

Striped bass, sharks, and then there were tuna over the weekend, and well within range of Montauk fishermen. Capt. Jason Carey, who runs the Osprey boat out of the Montauk Lake Club, said he visited the Tails, the northerly section of Block Canyon, on Friday, where he found yellowfin tuna, bluefin tuna in the 20-to-50-pound range, and “plenty of dolphin,” he said, meaning mahi mahi. He said he used a boat hook to lower a GoPro camera overboard to video the fish, and the fishing.

The boat Shearwater out of Harbor Marina in Three Mile Harbor ferried Kevin Gallagher offshore to do some catch-and-release tuna angling in the Tails. Capt. Andrew Zuccitti led the angler to a 30-inch bluefin that was brought alongside the boat using 12-pound test line for a photo op before being released.

How about adding a few cod and a sturgeon or two to the mix. Word has it that commercial monkfish boats are seeing both species at the spot known as the Cartwright Grounds, about six miles south of Montauk.

Naming has come a long way since the days of yore. Now it is used to immortalize individuals, mostly politicos, famous athletes, fallen war heroes, and firemen and police shot in the line of duty. It is also used to name new roads in new subdivisions before they exist and to rename existing roads, beaches, parks, libraries, bridges, museums and the like. There are so many things to name and rename it boggles the mind — so many names that there should be a department of naming.

Very few places and streets are named after women. It is only recently that women have begun to be given their rightful due. Remember that in America freed male slaves following emancipation were given the right to vote, but women here didn’t start voting until 50 years later. It should be noted, however, that when naming landmarks, females have come before pets. One of the first women to have her name engraved on a stone here, was the late Cathy Lester, a former town supervisor, who had an East Hampton nature preserve on Soak Hides and Springy Banks Roads named after her.

In the past and nowadays, too, one has to be dead before achieving that place in history, and in early America, dead for a fairly long time. That has changed. When John Kennedy was assassinated, his name began identifying buildings, streets, schools, and places within a year of his death. It’s pretty much still that way on the national level, but closer to home, names of those still living have been bestowed on monuments. The H. Lee Denison building, the Suffolk County seat in Hauppauge, was so named while H. Lee was still very much alive. Very locally, Debra Foster, a retired teacher of Springs School, former town councilwoman, and former town planning board chairwoman who can walk faster than I can run, has a couple of local parks in her name.

When naming new subdivision roads, the Nancy Goell rule is often followed. You name the road after something the subdivision helped eliminate. For example, there are no more blueberries along Blueberry Knoll Lane off Hand’s Creek Road in East Hampton’s Northwest. You’d be hard pressed to find a woodcock in the vicinity of Woodcock Lane in Springs or a pheasant around Pheasant Woods Lane, Northwest. But, yes, there are still deer in the neighborhood of Northwest’s Deer Path and lots of the invasive bittersweet vine from Asia on Bittersweet Lane in Amagansett.

In one of the most recent name changes on the South Fork, the East Hampton Town “fathers” and “mothers” renamed a street in downtown Montauk after the 1920s developer Carl Fisher. Naming and renaming and re-renaming are not only here to stay, they’re an increasing phenomenon.

Take Promised Land or Lazy Point, two of my favorite names from the past, referring to neighborhoods on Napeague. They both conjure up nice mental pictures of the past, but what does Montauk Boulevard in central Springs bring to mind? Certainly not Montauk. Then there are the venerable names derived from the Algonkian language that hopefully will never be changed. Not only Montauk, Napeague, Sagaponack, and Tuckahoe on the South Fork, but also Aquebogue, Mattituck, Peconic, and Cutchogue on the North Fork. Most of the Indians who lived in those areas are long gone, but the names salute their ancestors.

We live in the “here and now,” in a whir of coming and going, fast times, and the fear of our own mortality. There is no time for allowing a community or neighborhood to take years to evolve its own name, one that befits its character, one that evokes its past and best explains its situation and identity. And shortening existing place names can be worse than renaming them. Most of the summer crowd knows Bridgehampton as “Bridge,” Sag Harbor as “the Harbor,” and East Hampton and Southampton have become one mega-community, “the Hamptons.” When I moved to San Francisco and used the word “Frisco” to refer to my new setting during a dinner date, my father-in-law to be almost made me leave the table.

 I have to laugh. When the Wilkinson administration in East Hampton Town was purging staff, certain councilpeople were forever asking me to leave. In separate last-ditch efforts, both intimated that if I would quietly retire, the town board would name something after me. That was a very bad incentive to bring to the table. I have always loved old names, names that fed the imagination, not stifled it, while invoking a sense of history and a pleasant mental image. Kennedy Airport in Queens is not the same as Idlewild Airport, neither is the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge the same as the Triborough Bridge. The H. Lee Dennison Building is one of the ugliest buildings on Long Island and began the build-upward trend in western Suffolk. The Perry B. Duryea state building right next to it is a fitting companion. Neither were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

A rose is a rose is a rose, so there.

Larry Penny is East Hampton Town’s former director of natural resources. He  can be reached via email at [email protected].

It’s hard to describe. The sound was a rapid quacking like pleading ducks. No, it was more a staccato croaking, frogs imitating a motorcycle, frogs ululating, but it had to be a species of goose I’d never heard before passing by the sloop Leilani on her mooring as I lay on my bunk in the middle of the night that had fallen through Friday’s gloom.

I climbed up the companionway to investigate. Nothing, not a sign of them and what’s more, not a sound but for the wind and the metallic music of waves lapping on the old Grumman dinghy. I retreated to my berth and there it was again. Some of whatever they were sounded close by, others farther from the boat. What could they be?

I wanted to sleep, but if the sound’s disappearance topside precluded birds, then it must be coming from fish through Leilani’s hull. Sea robins croak, blowfish croak, croakers croak. That’s it. The sounds were coming from a large school of mystery fish settled in the south end of Lake Montauk to converse. In and out of sleep I imagined them as a flock, like submarine birds singing, a mating ritual perhaps. I felt like Richard Attenborough on the cusp of discovery.

Wait till I tell wife Kyle sleeping in the forepeak. For a moment I thought I should wake her. No, not a good idea. 

I’d been wondering about what prey species the large striped bass were feeding on for the past couple of weeks. No one can remember such an invasion of cow bass. What has brought them here? The ongoing bite is a fisherman’s dream come true, trophy-size bass a virtual surety.

The word was the bass were feeding on a glut of bunker and porgies. Perhaps bunker croak, I thought, or the cows were being drawn to the tidal rips around Montauk Point by a mystery school’s siren song — heretofore an unknown phenomenon. I’ll call Carl Safina over on Lazy Point, I decided. He led the Audubon Society’s foray into fisheries matters a number of years ago. He might have a clue.

Next morning over coffee on the backdeck, I revealed what I’d discovered in the night. There was no immediate verbal response, only a look that spoke volumes. No, she hadn’t heard the talking fish, she said kindly. Later, I asked Peter Spacek if he’d heard the fish. His boat is moored close by. He said no, but allowed that some fish croak. I could tell he was being polite.

Saturday night, there it was again. I placed my iPhone on the below deck and activated the record app, but the waves slapping against the hull obliterated the proof I needed.

Next day, I walked the docks down in front of Salivar’s and Swallow East, once known as Lenny’s and Tuma’s bait and tackle back in the day. Capt. Skip Rudolph had just tied up the Adios charter boat. Four striped bass in the 40-pound range lay on the dock waiting for the mate’s fillet knife.

“I’ve been asking my customers to be happy with one. They’re allowed two, but I tell them these are breeding females, the future, and it’s working,” Rudolph said. “Rick’s doing the same,” he added, meaning Rick Etzel, skipper of the Breakaway boat.

Boating anglers working live eels or trolling single lures around the Montauk Lighthouse have been enjoying the big bite thus far.

The unprecedented bass fishing has evolved into something of a slaughter. No one had expected it to last this long, and Montauk’s responsible guides are urging anglers to put on the brakes. Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk said on Tuesday that the lunker bass continued to school out of range of surfcasters for the most part, although smaller bass were being caught around the Lighthouse.

Bluefish up to 20 pounds, most likely gorging on bunker and porgies, and whatever croaks in the night, have made forays within range of surfcasters along the south side of Napeague. Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reports, “large fluke are back off of Napeague on the bay side, and the snappers are here.”

The state season for black sea bass — yum — opened on July 15 and will run through Dec. 31. Anglers report a productive first week.

I didn’t hear the fish on Sunday night. Gone, and with no recording, nothing to buttress my story of discovery. I rose early Monday morning, boiled coffee water on the Coleman, climbed through the companionway as the sun lit the tops of the trees to the east, and settled against Leilani’s bulkhead with my cup. The wind that had tugged on the boat’s mooring lines for days was sleeping, as the German’s say. The lake was still, and then . . . there they were again, but this time the fish were audible topside. Their calls were coming from the east.

You know, humility is a good thing. It might smart at first, but it’s probably healthy in the long run. The world’s religions tell us so, pride goeth before a fall and all that. Okay, so the staccato croaking, my school of submarine birds, my discovery turned out to be the gas generator on a sailboat about 100 yards away. I haven’t told Kyle.

Biogeography is the study of flora and fauna and how they got where they are today. It also applies to humans. We are pretty sure that Asians began to settle North America not quite 20,000 years ago when glaciers covered half of the northern hemisphere and sea level was 100 feet or so lower than today. Many, if not all, came by way of the “land bridge,” now submerged, between Siberia and Alaska. Many mammals and other vertebrates came to the Americas by the same route.

On a very local level, Long Island has had several land bridges by which fauna and flora moved from the south to the north. The barrier islands once ran all the way to Amagansett. Remnants remain today, including the beaches between Hook Pond and Georgica Pond and from Wainscott Pond all the way to Agawam Pond in Southampton Village, interrupted along the way by several ponds. East of Shinnecock Bay, these former barrier islands have moved onshore and merged with the mainland. Fire Island and its extensions to the east and west are still largely intact and separated from the mainland by Shinnecock, Moriches, and the Great South Bays.

How did the blue-spotted salamander end up in Montauk 100 miles east of its off-Long Island population in New Jersey? The ancient barrier island route may account for it reaching the very eastern tip of Long Island. The most active land bridge on eastern Long Island is Napeague. It’s only about 3,000 years old. Water used to pass freely between the Peconic Estuary and the Atlantic Ocean, where condominiums, restaurants, and single-family residences sit today. Napeague Bay once connected to the ocean, but was closed off on the south by re-entrant sand drifting from the east and an offshore bar moving onto land.

Lots of plants and non-flying animals reached Montauk by way of the Napeague isthmus. Perhaps the best example is the pitch pine, Pinus rigida. It came from the south with many other trees, shrubs, and wildflowers that followed the retreating glaciers northward. Long Island, most likely because of its separation from New York and New Jersey by the East and Hudson Rivers, was one of this procession’s last stops. Of the three most common conifers native to Long Island, the pitch pine is the most abundant and is the dominant tree in the Central Pine Barrens. The juniper, or eastern red cedar, is the next most common and the white pine ranks third, but on Long Island it is only abundant in East Hampton’s Northwest Woods.

The pitch pine and eastern red cedar have been slowly marching eastward on both the North and South Forks. Pitch pines are well established on Napeague, but not in Montauk, with the exception of the Walking Dunes area at the west edge of Hither Woods. The eastern red cedar has reached farther into Montauk but is nowhere near as common as white oaks, Canada shadbush, and hickories. The Japanese black pine, introduced into East Hampton’s and Amagansett’s dune lands shortly after World War II, has been moving easterly over the Napeague land bridge at a relatively fast clip and is about to conquer Montauk unless it is stopped. The population on the Montauk Downs golf course was planted there.

Chipmunks were not common in Montauk in the early 1900s and gray squirrels are still rather rare. But larger mammals — gray fox, red fox, skunk, deer, opossum, and raccoons — negotiated the Napeague isthmus early on. Today, except for a very rare sighting now and then, skunks and gray foxes are almost nonexistent in Montauk.

Woodchucks have been on Long Island, including the North Fork, for centuries, but only within the last 20 years have they been establishing on the South Fork. They have yet to reach Amagansett and Montauk, but it will happen. Southern flying squirrels are longstanding in central Long Island and the western part of the North Fork, but it’s only been in this century that they have been seen here and there on the South Fork as far east as Wainscott and Bull Path in Northwest. Some say that nuisance mammal trappers are responsible for these two rodents on the South Fork; it remains to be seen.

Tupelos have a southern Appalachian origin but have had no trouble reaching Montauk. It’s a different story, however, for tulip trees and walnuts. Though they are not uncommon in Noyac and deciduous forests to the west, you’d be hard pressed to find one in Montauk. On the other hand, American holly is well established in Montauk all the way into the Point Woods, but is very rare on Napeague, although not uncommon in Springs and western Amagansett. Holly berries are favorites of certain migratory birds such as robins, bluebirds, catbirds, and towhees. The same migratory birds that are responsible for bringing us southern ticks like the lone star tick, probably brought us holly berries hundreds of years ago.

Black cherries are everywhere and much of their distribution is attributed to birds eating the fruit and defecating the pits around. A close relative, the chokecherry, produces berries that are similarly eaten by birds, but for some reason are rare on Long Island. Maybe that’s because they ripen in late summer when the birds are beginning to go south and not north.

Local indigenous people preferred white oak acorns for making flour over acorns from black and scarlet oaks. Maybe birds shared a similar preference and that’s why Hither Woods is filled with them.

Southern plants and southern birds continue to make landfall on Long Island as the northern hemisphere warms up and the winters become milder. Flora and fauna are always coming and going. A biped mammalian species is the biggest user of the Napeague land bridge these days. Where would Montauk be today without it? And didn’t someone see a coyote or coy-wolf in Bridgehampton recently? There you are.

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

Sure, they loved him. He was their father, a brother, an uncle, a husband. They loved him, but they didn’t know, or appreciate, his inner fisherman. The extended family was spread out on the downtown Montauk beach on vacation a week ago.

“They didn’t pay attention to me all day,” he said, sweating, the tip of his surf­casting rod nodding in obeisance to a big fish. After he quietly fought — probably, it just had to be — a big striped bass for at least 15 minutes, the younger members of his family began to gather around. Triumph, the revelation of his hitherto unknown prowess was at hand, but. . . .

Do you know the word hamartia? It’s from ancient Greek and means a flaw, a characteristic, habit, or quirk that might go unrecognized for years until circumstances bring it to the fore with tragic results.

After paying little attention to the careful packing of his rod and gear for the trip, their smirking tolerance of his clam baits, they began to realize that he had actually tied into a big one. Now, even the older members of the clan gathered, rapt as he took a turn or two on the reel handle, standing stalwart as the fish took back the line he’d won.

He was being patient, not trying to horse the fish, but wait, what was that? Every few minutes, he would walk quickly toward the water, point the tip of the rod down in the direction of his hidden triumph-to-be so that the rod was no longer bent, and then start reeling. Hamartia!

He was breaking the cardinal rule of fish fighting: Keep the tip up. “To be, or not to be.” The angler had unknowingly joined the pantheon of tragic heroes. His fall was only a matter of time, but what a time it was.

He was finally joined by the woman who must have been his wife. She stood by his side, her estimation of him growing in his mind’s eye. “Go John, go,” she and members of his extended family shouted. Their exhortations encouraged him to quicken the pace of his exertions, to add the tragic, three-steps-forward, point-the-tip-down flourish more often.

The fish was close, perhaps only 20 feet from shore, but it was a moose, still taking line. Then, like a crazed shorebird, a suicidal matador, the angler charged, tip down and reeling.

Oh, the impotence of a slacked line. The silence, the rote philosophical commiserations, his wan smile and feigned stoicism, his family walking away, the kids laughing, happy as kids can be at the beach on a beautiful summer day — his utter defeat. Tragic.

The point is, fishing rods are made to bend. The bending, and the loosened drag setting on a reel, allows a fish to pull and jerk, to take line without stiff resistance, the kind that will unfailingly shock a hook from their mouths. Keeping tips up also prevents slack in the line that gives fish the opportunity to shake the hook free.

I wanted to say, “Like reeds, rods bend only when their tips remain pointed toward the sky, Grasshopper,” but it looked like he was in no mood for parables. I might have offered advice during the battle, but I didn’t want to interfere with the natural order of things.

There are fish that can be caught with an unbending rod, snapper blues, baby bluefish under a pound, long before they grow big and ferocious. There’s a bumper crop of them in Three Mile and Accabonac Harbors this summer, according to Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett.

He, and others, mentioned the relatively high number of dolphins seen feeding in Gardiner’s Bay and Block Island Sound this summer. “I saw six at Cartwright Shoals on Thursday and some off Ditch Plains. They eat a lot of fish.”

Bennett reported “porgies big as trucks everywhere, even on the ocean beaches.” Striped bass are on the ocean at White Sands on Napeague and Georgica in East Hampton. Daybreak is best. Bennett said the crabbing in Georgica Pond had been good, but the town trustees who oversee the pond advised fishermen last Thursday not to fish or crab there because of elevated levels of blue-green algae and potential health risks.

Shark fishing definitely requires that rod tips be kept pointing skyward. The 22nd annual mako and thresher shark tournament will be held from the Star Island Yacht Club on Friday and Saturday, with a captains’ meeting at the Yacht Club this evening.

While we humans are fighting all over the world, killing children, women, and men, as well as doing in all kinds of rare beasts such as elephants, rhinoceroses, scaled anteaters, and whales for keepsakes, the local fauna are raising families. And I imagine, except in the war-torn and poached parts of the globe, they are doing the same the world over. It is a pity that the most intelligent animal of all lags behind the others even though this very same animal is a reader, polyglot, writer, emailer, and maker and user of all tools ever devised. Yes, this animal is intelligent, but has yet to become wise.

Thus, daily I contemplate the simple daddy longlegs that clings to the ceiling and very asymmetric thing of a web above my bathtub. It hardly ever moves, except if I get too close; then she spins like a top without losing her perch, each of her legs fastened to one of the strands of the poorly designed web. She stops after a minute or so, then gains her composure in an instant and sits quietly waiting for an insect to happen by, which only occurs once in a blue moon.

How do I know she is a she? Well about a month ago, after a week with nary a bite to eat, she produced an ecru-colored ball about as big as a pea, almost as big as her body and began holding it in front of her like a human mother holds her very small infant. I’m onto this behavior, having observed and pandered to the daddy longlegs in various parts of the house for 20 years now, even feeding them from time to time with carpenter ants and Indian meal moths, the kind that like to live in the cupboard where flour, breads, dry cereal, and other carbs hang out.

So I check her out each day and see how she is doing. Then three weeks after I first observed her tightly clutching the little ball, the ball suddenly was no more, but the makeshift web was filled with tiny specks, at least 25 baby daddy longlegs no bigger than the plumed seed from a dandelion that takes off in the wind with a little blow. They were all upside down like their mother, and spread out over an area covering a four-inch-diameter irregular circle.

Hours upon hours, day after day, they didn’t budge, and neither did their mother. Seven days after they were “born,” they disappeared and I became concerned. I couldn’t see the mother anywhere. However, my angst was soothed a day later when I woke up and found that she had returned to the “nest.” At this juncture, the tiny spiderlings began to move away from the web center like an expanding nebula in the cosmos. They were a tiny bit bigger and I did observe a few motionless gnats caught in the silk strands. Had they been fed on?

As one by one the little guys moved farther and farther away from the nest, I wondered where they would go and if any of them would make it. The mother timed it right — the last weeks of July were very humid and fungus gnats and biting gnats were in ample supply. Even though I am a scientist of sorts and a keen observer of things in nature, it was hard for me to figure out exactly what was happening.

The attic and basement are full of daddy longlegs and arachnids of other makes and descriptions. The adults, especially the sedentary ones like the longlegs, can apparently get by on a meal a month, as I don’t find that many insect carcasses in their webs or tunnels. I do find their little droppings on the workbench under the cellar ceiling.

I guess they carry on as most invertebrates and vertebrates do, almost all of which defecate, mictuate, or do both “one” and “two” and, of course, eat and reproduce.

I find it comforting in a world where news is dominated by human terrorists and celebrities that the spider over the bathtub is satisfied with merely bearing young and bringing them up, and doing it in a quiet, nonintrusive way. She tolerates me and I, in turn, tolerate and appreciate her. “Common core” and the classics, aside, I think we could learn much of value from observing daddy longlegs!

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