The instructions were straightforward: “Put ice, a Ziploc bag, and a 20 in the cooler. I’ll call you when he makes the drop.”

Like a beer-fueled, slam-bang game of Foosball at Liar’s Saloon, the fish deal was proof that a healthy undercurrent of local life continued to flow as the surface trickle of spring visitors swelled to a flood over the Memorial Day weekend. 

I’m not sure how the word got out, but, as always, it passed quickly from ear to ocean-tuned ear while renters settled into summer nests, restaurants worked out the kinks, and roadways clogged to a standstill. The bay was full of bottlefish, a k a blowtoads, blowfish, or puffers, and the pound trappers were bailing them, according to the Bonac telegraph.

What might follow such news are deals by barter or by friends of a friend of a fisherman. In this way, one is kept out of crowded markets — a defense. We all need them.

Consider the blowfish. It is to a tuna what a Model T is to a Ferrari — a clumsy swimmer. And, for this reason God, and/or Darwin, invented a singular adaptation that allows it to suck in enough water — or air if it is on the surface — to become a ball several times its normal size. The swollen puffer either scares the predator away or, when it inflates mid-swallow, literally chokes the predator to death.

This does not protect them from those of us who love their tails, however. With no bones and a cartilaginous spine, the tail of the blowtoad is a delicious piece of fish flesh and a delicate flavor, the kind that goes well when sauteed with a little garlic, butter, a thimble of wine, salt, and pepper.   

And so, ice, a 20-dollar bill, and a Zip­loc bag were placed in a cooler as instructed. The call came about an hour later. Two pounds of dressed tails, 14 in count.

Fishermen reported productive fluke fishing during the first week of the season with fish approaching 10 pounds being caught south of Montauk. Kathy Vegessi, shore support for the Lazy Bones party boat in Montauk, said the new, 18-inch minimum size limit, and five-fluke-per-day bag limit, were making for boatloads of happy anglers.

Chris Miller, over at the West Lake Marina in Montauk, was setting up the pump that will keep his eels alive until they are sold to anglers who like to drift them out into the rip currents around Montauk Point. Surfcasters who climb out onto their favorite rocks at night also favor eels too. Striped bass love eels. Bass are being caught sporadically in the rips and in the surf.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, has published a warning to mariners along the East Coast. Vessels have struck two sei whales and a fin whale so far this season. A rule adopted in 2008 requires that all vessels 60 feet or longer travel at no more than 10 knots within 20 miles of all major ports in the mid-Atlantic region. The whales seem to be migrating closer to shore this year, perhaps following their prey.

Most sightings of right whales, whose population is just beginning to rebound after being nearly fished to extinction, occur within 20 miles of shore.

And, speaking of 20 miles from shore, word around the Montauk docks is that bluefin tuna have been spotted in the area.

Capt. Ken Rafferty, a light-spin-tackle and fly fishing guide, reports big schools of bluefish up to 15 pounds from Shelter Island east to Promised Land on Napeague. If they make it into Fort Pond Bay, the blowfish better skedaddle. Even puffed up, they’re no match for bluefish teeth.

Terry Sullivan is one fisherman who has been around. He fishes the ocean, bays, harbors, tidal creeks, ponds, and trout streams such as the Nissequogue. He’s caught just about every fish that will hit a lure or a fly from a shore at one of the above. He’s seen just about everything fishwise on Long Island, but last Thursday morning he was a bit flabbergasted to find a fish that he never caught here and, maybe, one that he never saw here. And it was a very big fish indeed, one very hard to overlook as it was only a few feet from the edge of the Ocean Avenue parking lot next to the western bubble of Hook Pond in East Hampton Village.

It wasn’t just one fish, but several fish, all in the 10-pound and bigger range. He called me at home and described the scene and I immediately knew the fish that he was watching and photographing: It had to be a carp. The carp is a very large minnow that derives from Eurasia but it’s been here 175 years or so already and is so widespread through the Americas that it is considered naturalized, in the same way that the mute swan or tree-of-heaven is naturalized.

There are several carp species, all from Eurasia, that have been imported — the herbivorous grass carp, the koi carp, a variety of goldfish, and that one presently taking over the freshwaters of the Midwest and about to enter the Great Lakes, the silver carp. Its means of escaping from would-be predators is leaping out of water several feet into the air. When a motorboat passes through a bunch they all start jumping madly. The motorboat is likely to be the landing spot for a few, and the boaters have to be on the lookout because if a big one hits you, it can knock you into the water and give you a big lump on the head.

Goldfish and carp have been aquacultured in China and other parts of Asia since the birth of Christ. Except for the goldfish, which is found in every state in the union, but which does not do well in natural ponds and lakes, the common carp is the next most abundant member of the carp group here. You might raise a common carp in a bathtub, but you don’t raise one in a goldfish bowl because the common carp can attain a weight of nearly 90 pounds and a length of three feet in a lifetime lasting up to 25 years.

I know carp well because as a boy in Mattituck I used to catch them in Wolf Pit Pond a few hundred yards down the road from my house in the Oregon section of the hamlet. Wolf Pit Pond had two species of fish, eels which got there by way of Mattituck Creek a few hundred feet from the pond, and carp, which someone put there a long time ago. The Wolf Pit ones were less than a foot long, they were “stunted” as they say in fishery lingo.

I tried several baits before I hit upon the standard one, the red earthworm, or “night crawler”: tightly rolled dough balls made of wetted Wonder Bread, the bread that helped “build my body eight ways” as the baker proclaimed, but the carp would suck them off the hook rather than bite them off. Worms worked.

Carp are a favorite food fish in many parts of Eurasia including the British Isles, where they were imported early on. Isaac Walton, the dean of freshwater sports fishermen, described catching them in British ponds and lakes and preparing them to eat in the middle 1600s. But carp are very oily. I took a few of the Wolf Pitters home and my mother cooked them up. They were very oily and made me sick. That was the end of carp eating but not of carp fishing.

Carp got very big in Maratooka Lake, a kettlehole lake a little larger than Hook Pond, just south of Mattituck High School. A relative, Tommy Reeve, once speared a 37-pounder there. Carp come close to shore when breeding, beginning in late spring after the water warms up. Two or three males pursue a female and nudge her with their noses and other body parts to get her to sow her eggs, as many as 30,000 in a couple of hours or so. Thus, most of the time the eggs, which adhere to bits of vegetation in the shallows, are fertilized by more than one father, a type of crossbreeding that several other fish species practice, including salmons, anchovies, and shad.

Carp are distinguished from almost all other fish by the presence of Weberian ossicles, modified vertebrae that attach the gas bladder to the carp’s inner ear, the “labyrinth.” Apparently, these ossicles work like the three bones in our middle ear: They amplify sound waves picked up by the gas bladder, which is especially important in hearing underwater. Carp are known to have very strong auditory perception.

There is a downside to the common carp. It likes to grub in the bottom, silting up the water, and its feces break down quickly — bits of fertilizer that eutrophy the water column. However, the carp does very well in most of America’s freshwaters and is not likely to be removed. Since it doesn’t take artificial lures, it is not a popular angling fish, but is becoming more so with each passing generation. And, like the koi, it is a frequent item on the osprey’s menu, especially when the osprey pair is feeding their perpetually hungry young.

The milling around/head butting method of reproduction Terry experienced will shortly be happening in Georgica Pond, Sagg Pond, Fort Pond, Mill Pond, and a host of other ponds on the South Fork. Despite the concerns, it looks like the common carp is here to stay. Interestingly, it has become rather rare, even endangered, in parts of its native Eurasia, not unlike Eurasian phragmites, which is thriving here but not doing well back home. The common carp may not be as American as apple pie, but it’s a fixture here. Then again, didn’t American apple pie start out in Europe?

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

Life: The symphony of birds, thousands of them greeted the sun on Monday morning. Surfers, hundreds of them, awoke to paddle into a surprise east swell that arrived during the night with an offshore wind to sculpt near-perfect waves. Surfcasters greeted the news that big, very big striped bass were caught from the rocks in Montauk’s moorland coves during the night. At Lazy Point, the naming of the same night’s stars and constellations via a stargazer app on a friend’s iPhone was accompanied by a hilarious, wine-spiced prattle regarding Albert’s theory of space-time as the essence of mahimahi wafted from the grill.

This East End, early-summer cornucopia of gifts flowed forth on the first day of the month against the backdrop, the blackdrop of a young Montauker’s untimely death. The shock of it hung in the minds of our close-knit community as we mourned surrounded by the beauty of what should have been.

The stripers were indeed large, perhaps the same body of fish witnessed around North Haven’s South Ferry slip last week. The action took place during the early morning hours of May 31 into June 1. Matt McDermott’s bass was the biggest at 54.12 pounds. Frank LaSalle’s weighed in at 48.52 pounds. Ben McCarron reeled in a 43.8-pounder, and Walter Clymer’s bass that most years would have seemed a spring giant weighed 36.7 pounds.

McDermott’s bass put him in the lead of the Montauk SurfMaster’s spring tournament. The school of big fish may not stick around for long. It’s about time for the larger body of smaller striped bass to appear, first in Gardiner’s Bay outside Accabonac Harbor, Devon, Gardiner’s Island, and along Napeague. A fly fisherman was seen poling along in the shallows at the south end of Lake Montauk on Sunday, a good place to sight-cast for nearly arrived stripers.

On May 26, Gary (Toad) Stephens ventured south of Montauk to find a fluke in the “doormat” class at 8.4 pounds. He’s now the king of the hill in the season-long fluke tournament. The fluke take continues apace, helped along by the new, five-fish bag limit and 18-inch minimum size.

Not all the good fishing took place in the brine. Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, reported very large walleye up to seven pounds were being caught in Montauk’s Fort Pond. Earthworms were doing the trick. Next time you’re in his shop, ask him about the times he sat on the porch of his old shop at Skimhampton with Elizabeth Taylor. He says they talked worms of all kinds, baits she apparently preferred.

Gardiner’s Bay also holds fluke and porgies, especially around Accabonac Harbor. In East Hampton, the ocean around the Georgica jetties is yielding striped bass. According to Bennett, weakfish are being caught in Northwest Harbor. He’s looking for help in his shop, preferably someone who speaks Spanish as well as Ingles.

Early warning: The world premiere of Allan Weisbecker’s “Water Time: Surf Travel Diary of a Madman,” will take place at the Crabby Cowboy in Montauk on Saturday, June 14, at 9 p.m. 

My first 21 years were spent on the North Fork looking at this and that. While I specialized in birds, learned the mammals — there weren’t that many — I also knew the local frogs, turtles, newts. and fish, which I learned by catching them. I knew as many garden and farm plants as native plants, I knew that Japanese honeysuckle was not American, and I knew about a handful of other invasives. I knew blueberries, beach plums, black cherries, because I picked them and ate them. I knew poison ivy because it made you itch like the devil. I knew most of the forbs, grasses, shrubs, and trees along the sides of the two miles of roads that I walked back and forth along on my way to school and back home.

I know a lot of seaweeds because while I was crabbing and clamming I would eat them, as well as the stalks of salt marsh grasses, the bases of which were deliciously salty. What I didn’t know were those forbs that grew in deep woods, in wetlands and dunes and the like. I never learned a native lily, although I knew they were around, and I almost never heard the word “orchid.” I would occasionally come across a pink lady slipper, but to me it was just another pretty wildflower.

The Orient potato farmer Roy Latham was much more familiar with the East End’s natural history than I. Since the early 1900s, he had been out finding this and that exotic wildflower, this and that unusual tree. He knew all the fishes, invertebrates, birds, mammals, and the rest of the animal species. I had heard of this marvelous farmer-naturalist, but never met him. He not only knew the fauna and flora, but he wrote voluminously about them. His works are found far and wide, but the majority of them — specimens and hard print works — are in the New York State Museum in Albany.

One of his chief interests was the orchids of Long Island and he pretty much knew every one by both common and scientific name. It is said that even when Latham could no longer walk and was half blind, he crawled to a spot in a Greenport wood to show some naturalists one of the rarest Long Island orchids there. I didn’t learn about Long Island’s orchids until I came back from the West Coast to teach at Southampton College in 1974. In order to teach about the South Fork’s animals and plants, I took a crash course in them. I had to be both teacher and student at the same time.

I was fascinated by the richness of the local wildlife and plant life. It wasn’t the tropics, but it was bountiful and diverse. One by one I learned the orchids — there weren’t that many — and I am still in the process of de­veloping an intimate knowledge of every one. A Riverhead High School teacher, younger than I am and now retired, was way ahead of me. He followed in Latham’s tracks and refound all of the orchids that Latham had collected and written about, and then some others. His name? Eric Lamont. He combed hither and yon before writing “Orchids of New England and New York” with a fellow botanist, Tom Nelson. This wonderful little field guide published by Kollath-Stensaas describes and illustrates the area’s orchids in a terse but colorful way.

And now is the time to begin looking for them, photographing them, but not picking them. Napeague and Montauk are the richest orchid producers on the South Fork. The pink lady slipper not only thrives in Hither Woods and the woody edges of Napeague, but there is a rare pale population of them ensconced in the dunes south of Montauk Highway. In dune slacks that often have cranberries and other treasures, one is apt to find the rose pogonia and the grass pink, or Calopogon, blooming in June.

A very rare orchid and one on the state’s endangered and threatened list is the dragon’s-mouth orchid, or Arethusa bulbosa. Also pink, its local habitat is the peaty top of ocean bluffs in Montauk, a perilous habitat if one wants to stick around, as those bluffs are eroding at a rapid rate.

In the woods of Northwest, where you might come upon the pink lady slipper, you may also lucky enough to find the lesser rattlesnake plantain (Goodyera repens) with its tiny white flowers clinging to an upright stalk and wide green white-veined leaves at the base.

If you are very lucky, you might find another, even rarer June bloomer, the tall whorled pogonia, Isotria verticillata, in the Northwest woods. It generally sports a single white flower.

Platanthera is the orchid genus with the most species, but is perhaps the rarest on Long Island. It does best in shaded, wettish pans. The rarest of these in New York is the pale fringed orchid, Platanthera pallida, the only populations of which are on Napeague and in Hither Hills. This species is yet to be recognized as bona fide, and for the time being it is considered an unusual population of another very rare New York orchid, Platanthera cristata, the orange crested orchid. Almost equally as rare as the latter is the yellow-fringed orchid, P. ciliaris.

This last one, along with the robust white-fringed orchid, P. blephariglottis, used to grow on the shoulders of several East Hampton back roads, along with bird’s-foot violets and lupine, but a vigorous shoulder rebuilding in the late 1980s did most of them in. There is still a meager population on a roadside of the yellow-fringed orchid. It goes back to at least as long as the 1880s when, perhaps, the East End’s first woman naturalist, Mrs. L.D. Pychowska, found it growing in Springs.

Three other members of this genus, the club-spur orchid, tubercled orchid and ragged-fringed orchid pop up here and there in wet spots such as the Nature Conservancy’s Sagg Swamp and in northeastern Springs, but are never common. Almost all of the Platanthera orchids bloom in mid-July and early August.

The next largest orchid genus on the East End is the ladies’ tresses one, Spiranthes. Members of this group have white flowers and bloom in late August or early September. A population of nodding ladies’ tresses grows on the shoulder of Montauk State Parkway and is mowed down by state highway crews every year just before or just after blooming. Slender ladies’ tresses are often found in old cemeteries and in marine grasslands, such as those at Shadmoor State Park and in the hills east of Lake Montauk. There are three ladies’ tresses species growing farther west on Long Island and we are looking for them here but have yet to find one of them.

Also keep your eyes out for twayblades of the genus Liparis, four species of which occur on Long Island but never commonly. The most unusual Long Island orchid is one found in Greenport, the crane-fly orchid, Tipularia discolor. It flowers leafless in the spring, then the leaves come out in late summer and persist throughout the winter. It’s a neat trick to finish the flowering-fruiting-seed-dispersal stage before the showing of foliage, ensuring that the species survives even if the leaves are foraged by deer, cottontails, and other animals.

And oh, yes, I forgot to mention two coralroot orchids, Corallorhiza — one of which, the long-bracted coral root, is among the most widespread orchids in America — and the autumn coralroot, which has crept into New York State and Long Island from the south. Lastly, we have the long-bracted orchid, Coeloglossum viride. All three are here but I’ve yet to see one and will keep looking.

Yes, we are still finding new plants that have yet to be formally documented for Long Island. So keep your eyes to the ground. You may be the next to identify a new-to-Long Island orchid. If, while looking, you come across a yellow-flowered orchid that you key out to a helleborine, don’t bother to report it. It is from Europe and since it was first discovered near Syracuse in 1879 as reported in Nelson and Lamont’s field guide, it has become our most common orchid. It’s in my yard and is liable to be found in your yard, as well, or, for that matter, in any abandoned city lot. It gets around.

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

    By the time this publishes, we should have blossoms on the shads, sweet cherries, and beach plums, the bird’s-foot violets will turn certain road shoulders purple and the dogwoods in Northwest will be trying to expand their snow-white bracts (they don’t have petals).

    One of the major spring events in addition to the return of the ospreys, the upstream swimming of baby eels and adult alewives, and the flowering magnolias, is the return of the swallows, in particular, the tree, barn, cliff, and rough-winged swallows. They never fail us. Vicki Bustamante saw her first tree swallows, the ones with the green wings and white breasts, on April 11 skimming Long Pond in the chain of ponds south of Sag Harbor. Less than a week later she saw all four foraging for insects over one of the ponds behind Third House in the Montauk County Park.

    The biggest swallows of all came back on Friday. They arrived at the end of their annual pilgrimage from the deep south, back to their colonies on the west edge of Fort Pond along Endicott Place at Elke Grimm’s. Such returns have been going on throughout the millennium like clockwork. They come back together, no doubt with some offspring from past years. At a time when local bird species are decreasing in numbers each year, the return of the purple martins is a great joy!

    When the swallows are back — and keep your eye out for the chimney swifts which are fewer and fewer with each passing year — it means the flying insects are out, the midges, punkies, fungus gnats, and the other ephemerals that emerge from larval lives in the water and ground to strut their stuff, mate, lay their eggs, and fall back to earth dead all in a couple of weeks’ time. It’s all part of life’s game. Fortunately the swallows, flycatchers, and bats that feed on them live for several years if things go right and I have no doubt that at least a few of the martins returning to Elke’s place each year are originals, the ancestors of those that have followed.

    Come May and the leafing out of the oaks, hickories, sassafrass and other local hardwoods, it will be the season of the most colorful and soniferous neotropicals of all, the wood warblers. A few are already back, like the pine warbler, the palm warbler, and the yellow warbler, which we didn’t see but heard singing two Saturdays ago at Big Reed Pond in Montauk. The calls that I wait to hear (while I still can) the most from my open window are that of the Baltimore oriole — each male oriole has a slightly different song — and the mews of the gray catbird, both of which arrive at about the same time.

    Until then, the purple grackles caterwaul and walk on my leaf-covered yard each day turning over this and that leaf with their bills, gobbling up this and that morsel as they go. On Sunday the Carolina wren with a much smaller bill, but perhaps a much greater zest for life, was right in there with them doing the same thing. I wonder if all Carolina wrens do that or have they learned from watching the grackles?

    By the end of the first week in May the terns — least, common, and roseate — should be back to join the piping plovers and the handful of other shorebirds and waterbirds that nest here — the willets, oystercatchers, and skimmers. The ospreys have had a few weeks of easy digs, competing only with cormorants, seals, and a few bald eagles for fish, but from now until October it’s going to be a range war.

    And, oh yes, come the first new moon or full moon, those three-million-year-old horseshoe crabs will be approaching the bay shores to lay their eggs at the extreme high tide line. Some of them are as old as us, no doubt. They’ve seen the world from a different perspective. The first one out of the mold was a good one. They haven’t changed much, only grown sparser in population, down through the ages.

    Their bluish eggs will be deposited after mating, only to hatch less than a month later during an equally high moon tide. You can bet that the ruddy turnstones and red knots will be gobbling some of the eggs up before hatching, giving them an energy high before they pick up and fly up to the Arctic Circle to breed.

    Yes, this is the moment we have all waited for, the flowers, leaves, the sweet odors, the vibrant colors, the songs and calls of late spring. We certainly deserve it, we’ve endured a very tough winter.

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

    An infinity of tiny fish darted and gathered in the green glow of a submerged squid lamp on Monday night. The long tentacles of a pulsating jellyfish swept for food in the slow current. Time passed. Larger fish jetted through the small, lighted section of bay carved out of the night by the lamps. “Bunker,” a voice declared, breaking a long silence.

    There are tea leaves, of course, but they pale beside the divining offered up by a quiet, windless night of squid fishing. Fishermen read the movements of fish in spring, comparing their comings and goings with those kept in logbooks and legends.

    This is the time of year when schools of bunker, short for mossbunker, a k a menhaden, appear in Montauk’s Fort Pond Bay like big, dark purple blossoms.

    The oily filter feeder forages on plankton, dense clouds of which drifted through the light of squid lamps that night. The bunker won’t stay in the bay for long. Striped bass will be hot on their trail. Nor will squid. The squid may have vamoosed already, scared away by arriving bluefish. Squid buckets remained fairly empty on Monday.

    One squidder said he was witness to the brief visit of a tremendous school of porgies in the bay last week, a bountiful surprise. He said he’d never seen the like. It seems like the local porgy population has been growing steadily.

    Weakfish show up when the lilacs bloom. They may have beat the blossoms this unusually cold spring. Word has it that weakfish, one of the most beautifully silver, purple, and yellow-colored species around, are being caught in and around Sag Harbor.

    Small striped bass are in the wash on the ocean side of Montauk, Amagansett, and East Hampton. They are falling to those rubber, fish-shaped lures. Rubber fish work well when fishing for toothless bass, but they get expensive once a toothy school of bluefish begins to chomp.

    Organizers of the Montauk SurfMasters spring tournament for striped bass have announced there will be a youth division this season after all. The tournament starts tomorrow morning and will run until June 28. The entry fee is $100 for adult competitors, free for youths 18 and younger.

    Summer boats are being launched. The State Department of Parks and Recreation is alerting boaters that a new law requires that anyone born after May 1, 1996, must have taken an approved, eight-hour course in boating safety in order to operate a recreational vessel. The new law supersedes a 2012 Suffolk County requirement that all motorboat operators earn a boating safety certificate. Courses are offered by the Parks Department, the Coast Guard Auxiliary, and the United States Power Squadron. A list of approved courses can be found on the Parks Department website, nysparks.com/recreation/boating/safety-courses.aspx.

    On Monday I took a drive through the hills of Noyac, Bridgehampton, Water Mill, and North Sea that make up the bulk of the so-called terminal moraine left by the glacier that retreated 15,000 or so years ago. When I moved back to Long Island from Oregon and California in 1974, those hills were only sparsely covered with houses. The pitch pine and oaks carpeted the ups and downs of the knob-and-kettle topography, and to the south, the farm fields spread from west to east as far as the eye could see. How things have changed.

    Houses are going up everywhere. Not ordinary houses, but those with several bathrooms, big, pretentious, I would even call them garish, or grotesque, or even gadzookish. There is enough room in them for several families, but most of them are only seasonally occupied. Talk about leaving carbon footprints! Most of them leave very big ones in a year’s passing.

    Sixty years ago, across the bay in Mattituck, where I grew up, every once in a while someone from outside such as Jim Norris, the owner of the Detroit Redwings at the time, would have one of these kinds of nouveau riche houses built and it would become the topic of conversation for years to come. It was a very big deal. Today if someone had a new house constructed and it only had 800 square feet of living space like my house in Noyac, it would similarly become the topic of conversation.

    No one will ever build one as large as the famous Sagaponack mansion-and-a-half with 80,000 square feet of living space. That house made a mockery of local zoning and building codes, which have since been changed to prevent a repeat.

    There is a discernible difference, however, between houses in East Hampton Town woodlands and those in Southampton Town woodlands. In the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, George Miller led the town planning board while Tom Thorsen was the planning director. They did something that was unheard of at the time on Long Island, they worked “scenic and conservation” easements into the planning process, especially where subdivisions were concerned.

    Nowhere on the South Fork is there a better example of such planning than on the back roads of East Hampton’s Northwest and northern Amagansett. Protective easements were taken along the road frontages, building envelopes were set back 100 or so feet on large lots. When you drive down, say, Bull Path in Northwest or Stony Hill Road in Amagansett, you may have to squint your eyes to pick out the houses through the trunks of trees and understory foliage.

    In Southampton Town, it is a different matter. Take Deerfield Road, for example, houses built in old field lots that were formerly farm fields stand right out, you have to squint to see the fields behind them. Although much of the woodland of the moraine has had five-acre zoning restrictions since early 1980, thanks to then-town attorney Fred W. Thiele Jr., supervisor Marty Lange, and Dave Emilita, a planner, the clearing restrictions are much more liberal and the houses so large, they don’t hide behind the bushes as they do in East Hampton.

    This may be great for those out driving at night in the weeks preceding Christmas who are into seeing gaily decorated and gaudily lighted houses, but it is not so aesthetically pleasing during the rest of the year, especially at night when the houses are lighted up, room after room after room.

    Most of the older houses, such as mine, in Noyac are comparatively small. The bigger ones are up in the hills behind the ones along Noyac Road. But there are a couple of giants on Payne’s Cove, a block down from Long Beach Road, into which my house would fit several times over. One of them has an osprey nest in front at the edge of the water. The other one doesn’t, but it has a battery of lights that shine across Payne’s Cove all the way east over Sag Harbor Cove to the bridge leading to Sag Harbor two miles away. Ospreys start out each year in fine fettle, but when the lights go on next door in mid-May, they find it hard to cope.

    After all, birds have biological clocks that are very sensitive to light changes; they are tuned to long days during the breeding season, but dark unlighted nights after the sun goes down and before it rises the next morning. They can take the full moon every two weeks, their brains are programmed for such, but a battery of 100-watt lights is an entirely different matter.

    Some of you may have noticed the dramatic turndown in the whippoorwill population. Hearing whippoorwills calling at dusk and into the night from the woods was once a common sign of late spring, just as peeper calls at night are a sign of early spring and tree crickets trilling at night, a sign of midsummer. Whippoorwills are very sensitive to light and noise. Most of our woodlands are no longer quiet and dark in the evening, so whippoorwills have almost disappeared here.

    Notwithstanding the advances in zoning, the many purchase of open spaces via the Peconic Bay Region Community Preservation Fund, it will be a challenge to keep even a semblance of the richness of nature that those of us who grew up here on the East End of Long Island remember so fondly. Difficult though it may be, we have to try as best we can. Doesn’t the Bible say that “God gave us dominion over the animals.” Dominion is just another word for “stewardship,” and we are all stewards.

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

    Driving down Bluff Road in Amagansett on the sunny morning of July 28, 1992, I looked up and watched an osprey flying landward with a small striped bass in its talons.

    I was en route to the protest of a new state law that banned the ocean seine as a means of catching striped bass. The regulation capped a decades-long effort on the part of powerful sportfishing interests, in cooperation with UpIsland politicians, to cripple the East End’s inshore commercial bass fishery.

    Billy Joel, whose hit “Downeaster Alexa” told the story of a bayman regulated out of the bass fishery, was arrested by state police after taking possession of bass from an ocean seine hauled ashore by Dan King’s dory crew. Then-Town Supervisor Tony Bullock was arrested too. Larry Cantwell, the East Hampton Village administrator at the time, and the current town supervisor, also participated in the protest.

    “This stinks out loud. This situation is a product of rank politics and corruption,” Supervisor Bullock said. He was right.

    The following evening, Joe Pintauro’s play “Men’s Lives,” a loose adaptation of Peter Matthiessen’s book of the same name, premiered at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. The title of book and play was taken from Sir Walter Scott’s “The Antiquary”: “It’s no fish ye’re buyin’ it’s men’s lives.” The play was reprised two years ago on the 20th anniversary of the haul seine ban and the protest that followed.

    I reported on what came to be known as the bass wars for The Star starting in 1985 and for the next decade. Since then I’ve written about that day in July 22 years ago a number of times. It’s a part of local history that should not be forgotten.

    A great injustice was done to a proud segment of our community. But there was an even greater injustice, in my opinion. That’s why I mentioned seeing the osprey that morning. It was, and is, an image of nature’s give and take, of balance, and the goal of sustainability.

    The ocean seine was banned in the name of “conservation,” but conservation had nothing to do with it. The word had lost all meaning. The ban on ocean seines codified the erroneous belief that the nets of baymen, inshore market fishermen themselves, were responsible for overfishing the striped bass resource.

    The perception that grew from the law hid the truth that a far greater share of the striped bass resource was being killed by recreational fishermen, a fact that Michael Crocker, author of “Sharing the Ocean: Stories of Science, Politics, and Ownership From America’s Oldest Industry,” pointed out in his opinion piece that appeared in The New York Times last Saturday.

    Crocker was bemoaning the shortsightedness — no, let’s call it what it is — the greed that grows from a fisherman’s simple desire to feel the tug of a bass on his line, out of control when capitalized in hands of industry lobbyists.

    It seems the same is true no matter what the finite resource. We are a selfish species, not individually perhaps, but things go awry whenever Huck Finn goes corporate, when natural appetites grow price tags. “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” in the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson.

    The point is, if the coastwide population of striped bass is declining, as  Crocker states, sportfishermen should take personal responsibility — catch fewer fish. Remember, unless you’re a guide or charter captain, you are not making a living at it, so ease up. Don’t leave it to your industry representatives to turn conservation into a political pissing contest.

    Speaking of making a living at it, on Saturday, Long Island Traditions is hosting an outing with veteran market fishermen and their shoreside support on the first of a series of guided cruises that explore the waterways of Long Island.

    The boat trips feature storytelling, poetry, and music. The Viking Superstar will leave Montauk’s Viking Dock at 4 p.m. on Saturday and return at 7 p.m. On board will be Chris Wright of New Bedford, Mass., a scalloper, Chip Dur­yea of the Perry B. Duryea and Son lobster company of Montauk, and Dave Krusa, also from Montauk. Captain Krusa, who started his career digging clams and went on to pioneer offshore lobster and tilefish fisheries, will read from his writings drawn from his lifelong career at sea.

    The cost of Saturday’s voyage is $40 per adult, $20 for kids under 16.

    A very active week in birdland, indeed! Topping the list of May returnees were ruby-throated hummingbirds. The first to return to the South Fork, perhaps, were the four that showed up at the house of my Noyac neighbor Ellen Stahl on May 6. She called to tell me that they were back, she had her hummingbird feeders up, and they were flying in my direction every once in a while. She thought they might nest in my backyard.

    On Saturday, I received news of the return of another hummingbird. This one appeared in the morning at Emily Corwith’s East Hampton house. Emily emailed me with the news and said that it must have been one from last year because it made a beeline for the spot where her feeder had been. Without hesitation, she filled the feeder and hung it back up in its usual spot.

    Lois Markle came back to her Hither Hills house in Montauk for the first time this spring and voila, on Saturday morning she was greeted by two male hummingbirds sparring over the feeder. Before they left in the fall they were tussling, now they’re back and back at it. On Sunday, the two ruby-throats that showed up at the Bustamantes south of Big Reed Pond in Montauk topped off the list.

    Hummingbirds are the world’s smallest birds, but they have the energy of a football running back. They fly fast and furious and are just as adept at rising up and down, vertically, backing up, and going forward as helicopters, and they are almost silent in doing so. They have been reported to fly for 500 miles non-stop during one of their migration legs north and south. When they stop to refuel in the spring there are nectar sources on the way up. In the fall, near the end of the flowering season, there are more nectar sources on the way down.

    How can a tiny bird the size of a dragonfly with a brain no bigger than a pea do that? And come back to the very same spot where the feeder hung the year before? It defies the imagination, and almost defies the theory of evolution. It’s one of those amazing feats that Ripley would put down in the old Sunday newspaper comic sections, “Believe It or Not.”

    Last week was a bumper crop for new spring migrants. The partly exposed shores of Sagaponack Pond were hopping with peep sandpipers, dunlins, dowitchers, plovers, and a yellowlegs or two. They all stopped in on their way north at the precise time the pond was seapoosed to the ocean as it is every spring, along with Georgica Pond in Wainscott and Mecox Bay in Bridgehampton.

    The Rubinstein sisters were out making a day of it on Sunday. At the Grace Estate Barbara found a blue-gray gnatcatcher, not much bigger than a hummingbird, with a new nest. Karen found a rose-breasted grosbeak building one along the Stony Hill trail. They ended the day with 43 species, including 12 different warblers, 2 wood thrushes, several Baltimore orioles, and a scarlet tanager. A lot of song and a lot of color!

    On Friday I attended a wonderfully done celebration of the Mulvihill preserve, one purchased by Southampton Town with community preservation funds, on the border of Bridgehampton and Noyac just a stone’s throw from Sag Harbor. Southampton Town Councilwoman Bridget Fleming served as the master of ceremonies and there were brief speeches by State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., both of whom had much to do with the passage of the New York State act that created the community preservation fund for the five East End towns, Eric Schultz, president of the Southampton Town Trustees, and four generations of Mulvihills, who actually lived in the historic house on the property during part of their lives.

    I was standing next to Jim Ash, retired director of the South Fork Natural History Museum, both of us to hear not only the speeches but the various calls from nature coming from the tall white pines and the wet fens that surrounded the little plot on which the house stood. Both of us suffered from a loss of hearing and could barely pick out the notes of orioles and other high-pitched songs. Halfway through the ceremonies, we both heard what appeared to be the tremolo of a bird. Jim whispered, “Gray tree frog,” while I was still wondering. First one, then a second, then others, they were summoning their would-be mates to the new water in the fens, giving celebratory speeches of their own.

    A little later, a raucous crow sound descended from some lofty perch against a background of common crow calls. “Raven,” we both exclaimed under our breath. The raven was letting us know that it was establishing (re-establishing) itself on Long Island the way turkey vultures and bald eagles were. That kind of mixed chorusing from the thickly vegetated surrounds was one more proof that the community preservation fund was, indeed, worth it and is bringing about what it set out to do from the beginning — preserve the community of nature.

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

    I don’t go anywhere without my white tick towel; I even have it at hand in the winter. You never know what will happen on a very warm January day. I went out for a walk around Trout Pond in Noyac last Thursday followed by a longer walk Saturday afternoon around Big Reed Pond in Montauk. You may remember that Thursday was very cold with a brisk wind. Saturday was nice and warm and quieter.

    As one might expect, dragging my towel through several different spots at Trout Pond produced nary a tick. Saturday was a different story. Before starting out down the west trail of East Lake Drive east of Lake Montauk, I saw a young couple sitting on the bench at the foot of the trail. The young man was in his 20s and he looked at me and my towel inquisitively. I said I was going to flag for ticks and he shuddered. It turns out he was in the grips of Lyme disease for seven or eight years and is frightened at the prospects of another bout.

    I started out down the path dragging my towel along the edges. I hadn’t gone more than 30 feet when I looked down and saw there were little brown dots at the bottom of it — ticks! When I brought it up to look closer, there were three kinds of ticks, the deer or black-legged tick, the dog or wood tick, and a single Lone Star female tick with the characteristic white dot on the back, which the male lone tick doesn’t have. There were equal amounts of wood and black-legged ticks, the former being easily differentiated from the latter by its larger size.

    I was puzzled that there were so many mature wood ticks, as they have been in scarce supply over the last five years or so, and only one Lone Star tick. The latter, the species that gives one erlichiosis, a more serious sickness than Lyme disease, had become by far the most common Long Island tick in the new millennium.

    The black-legged ticks came in two sizes, nymphs and adults, and two sexes. The females are reddish on part of the back and edges, the males not. A few days earlier, Meg Gage of Springs had given me a very red-backed tick that she found on her cat. It turned out to be a female black-legged tick, so I knew how to tell the females from the males. Males are harmless, it is said, but I’m not sure; I’m not an acariologist.

    I went on and on for another two-plus miles, mainly interested in the flora, but dragging my tick towel here and there. There were black-legged and wood ticks everywhere, but not another Lone Star tick. Maybe they are late coming out. Chiggers, or harvest mites, don’t come out until midsummer. They are the itchiest of all.

    Inasmuch as most of the black-legged ticks, which can also give one babesiosis, start out as larvae on mice, deer mice or Peromyscus maniculatus in particular, I gathered that we had a fairly large mouse population in the area. Perhaps the foxes, which are on the upswing, and the screech owls aren’t enough to depress the small rodent population. Also, I noticed on this walk as I have on almost every other of my early spring walks thus far on the South Fork that there was a bountiful production of acorns last year, many on the ground are still unopened. Turkeys, gray squirrels, chipmunks, deer, and blue jays aren’t the only acorn eaters in town. White-footed mice also feed on them in the winter to a large extent.

    A rather exhaustive study of the relationship of white-footed mice and black-legged ticks aired in The New York Times last week. We had a strong inkling about that relationship before that article, but now we have even stronger evidence that the two are tied together in a very dependent way. The mouse is the reservoir for the Lyme disease vector, the spirochaete bacterium. Ticks just out of the egg are disease free. They find the first mouse that comes along and, zowie, they acquire not only mouse blood but the spirochaetes that live in it.

    Sure, the white-tailed deer and every other mammal around, including feral cats and dogs, are host to black-legged ticks and the two other common ones, but the mice are mostly responsible for hoarding the disease organisms. Perhaps we should hire some sharpshooters to kill off the mice with rifles equipped with silencers. They would have to be very good shots and have the patience of Job. Any takers?

    I took a bath when I got home, but nevertheless, a couple of hours later I felt a bump on my left arm. Yup, it was a nymphal black-legged tick. I had a tussle getting it out with tweezers, but it wasn’t in that long, not long enough to give me babesiosis or another case of Lyme disease.

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