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.

    The only butterfly I’ve seen to date is the cabbage white, the one long from Eurasia that lays its eggs on members of the cabbage family, to wit, garlic mustard, wild radish, and the like, also from Eurasia.

    Butterflies and moths are part of the second trophic food level; they feed on the first level, the “producers.” In fact most insects — grasshoppers, various ant species, bees and other nectiferous species, almost all beetles and almost all bugs — feed on plants.

    Dragonflies, praying mantises, cicada killers (certain hornets), and a few other insect groups, as well as spiders that feed on the insects that feed on plants, are at the third trophic level in the food chain or “food pyramid.”

    There is a law in thermodynamics, part of the discipline of physics, that when you convert one form of energy to another form, say, solar to heat, you always lose some to entropy. Energy conversions are far from 100 percent efficient. Otherwise you would be able to run the world and all its countless activities on perpetual motion. In the last half of the 20th century, Eugene Odum and a host of ecologists studying food chains discovered that about 90 percent of energy is lost when one trophic level feeds on another.

    So if you start out with solar energy trapped by green leaves of green plants by way of the process of photosynthesis, you trap about 10 percent of that energy in the form of protein, sugars, and starch. When the gypsy moth larva comes along and eats the freshly opened leaves, say, of a white oak, it feeds on those stored foodstuffs and uses about 10 percent of the energy to make proteins, sugars, starches, and fats to enable it to grow up and pupate. By the time it busts out of its cocoon and becomes an adult, it has used 10 percent of the 10 percent of the original solar energy manufactured by the oak leaves.

    If a member of the third trophic level, say a blue jay or grackle, comes along and feeds on the gypsy moth larvae just before they pupate, it converts 10 percent of the ingested food into molecules for growth, proteins, and flying and carrying on the rest of its activities that characterize its overall lifestyle. By now, only 10 percent of 10 percent of 10 percent of the original solar energy has been captured and utilized.

    What if a bird hawk such as a Cooper’s hawk, a member of the forth trophic level, comes along and catches a grackle in its talons, takes it to the ground, plucks it and feeds on it? It manages to save 10 percent of 10 percent of 10 percent of 10 percent of the original energy. A bobcat, level five, could catch the hawk on the ground and eat it. Another 90 percent is lost, but the bobcat has the energy and musculature to catch another hawk or a rabbit in the future, or, if it’s a female, to nurse its kittens. In other words, only one millionth of the original solar energy falling on the plant is saved by the time the needs of the fifth trophic level are satisfied.

    Such a dog-eat-dog world sounds very inefficient, but the sun is a generous orb, it throws out more light energy every day than all of the plants on all of the world’s land and in all of the world’s oceans, rivers, and lakes could ever use. When the sun falls on a solar panel and is thereby converted to electrical energy, the loss, mostly in heat generated, is much less than the 90 percent waste energy lost by the plant or the rest of the trophic levels up through the food chain. But even so, the most efficient devices that change one form of energy to another waste more than 50 percent in the conversion.

    There is enough radiant energy from the sun to run all of those energy transducers that change one form of energy to another to do mechanical work. Humans are just figuring that out, a bit late in our development, to say the least.

    There is another trophic level, the reducers, they feed on dead stuff — leaves, rotting tree trunks, animal carcasses, and the like, which are ultimately broken down into the very stuffs from which new life will spring. Thus, the Biblical notion “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” is right on.

    Humans feed at each trophic level, two through five. In a world with more than seven billion of us, we would all starve to death if we fed only at level five, i.e., ate the meat of large carnivorous mammals, birds, and fish, say, sharks. “Give us this day our daily bread.” Wise words, indeed. They suggest that, at the very least, we should dine at the second trophic level, the one occupied by those that feed on plants. It would be hard to feed on the primary producers, phytoplankton. We don’t have the sieving apparatus that zooplankton, barnacles, clams, and certain fish species such as herrings, baleen whales, and basking sharks are equipped with.

    That is exactly why we are called terrestrial mammals, ones that evolved from earlier terrestrial mammals. We are given to live off the land. Nonetheless, a little seafood is good now and then, especially on Fridays.

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

    My wife, Kyle, is a sensitive person. She says this is why she adopts a hard exterior at times, a shell, like a turtle. I know this to be true. It’s also why she feels simpatico and keeps her eyes peeled for turtles making their equivalent of a mad dash across Montauk’s roads this time of year.

    She always stops to help them lest they be flattened by insensitive drivers. On Monday morning, she called me from the road. She was on the way to work and spotted “a big, very big” turtle on the west side of Flamingo Avenue. “Can you come get it?”

    I thought it odd that she did not help the turtle herself, but figured she was late for work, and we live right around the corner, so off to the rescue I went. It didn’t take me long to find the creature, a snapping turtle the size of a small manhole cover looking furtively toward the road. He, or she, was going to go for it. I got out of the car and approached just as a flock of spandex-encasxed bicyclists was passing. “Holy shit!” They pulled up short when the snapper caught the lead cyclist’s eye.

    Now, I’ve had some experience with snapping turtles. Rule one: Do not attempt to pick them up by the shell like you do any other turtle. They have long necks and a sharp beak that can cut through a finger like the proverbial knife through butter.

    The snapper hissed dynosaurically. The bikers ooohed. I grabbed the turtle by its long tail and lifted it — it must have weighed 30 pounds — off the ground. As I did, I heard and felt its vertebrae snap, crackle, and pop. The adjustment must have been needed because when I set the turtle down on the other side, it took off like California Chrome at the Preakness.

    Whenever I see a snapping turtle, I recall the sight of Tom Lester in black waders trudging across a putting green at the exclusive Maidstone Golf Course in East Hampton carrying two snappers by their tails. Hook Pond meanders through the links, and Tom kept turtle fykes at various points. He shipped the turtles to the Fulton Fish Market. 

    I don’t believe turtles are still sold to the market, at least from East Hampton, but fluke, summer flounder, are. You know that the fluke season has started when you see our smaller trawlers dragging their nets east and west on the south side (backside) of the island close to shore. “The backside” is a term held over from the days when most of the commercial traffic on the East End was between here and southern New England. The north side of the East End was thought of as the front side.

    The commercial season for fluke began last week on Mother’s Day with a daily quota, at 70 pounds, tiny from a draggerman’s point of view. Pinhookers, market fishermen who use the rod and reel, have been doing quite well since the season opened.

    The separate season opened for recreational fishermen on Saturday with bent rods south of Montauk and a good feeling about this year’s liberalized daily bag of five fluke, with a reduced minimum size of 18 inches.

    The bag limit and minimum size are now on par with regulations in both Connecticut and New Jersey and this bodes well for the East End’s charter and party boat industries, which have had to compete, unfairly, with more liberal regs in those states for years.

    Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reports a pick of striped bass in the surf around Ditch Plain Beach, and in the currents that rip past the South Ferry slip in Noyac carrying prey such as squid, bunker, and alewives. The real bass run has not yet begun.

    Montauk’s Fort Pond Bay is now chock-a-block with bluefish. Their hungry arrival was delayed long enough to allow two weeks of fair porgy and squid fishing in the bay, but those species have fled. Remember, the daily bag limit for bluefish is 15, only 10 of which can be under 10-inches long. The first 10 accommodate young anglers who cut their teeth on snapper blues.

    But, where are the spearing? This time of year the bays are usually full of spearing, the small silversides that our favorite predators favor. Baymen who target spearing to supply bait and tackle shops have been frustrated thus far. This is a concern because “the Montauk sandwich,” a combination of squid strips and spearing, is a tried and true fluke bait. Pray for spearing.

    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].

    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.

    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].

    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.

    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].

    I was walking east in one of Montauk’s moorland coves the other day and saw a lone surfcaster heading toward me. It was Eric Ernst, wetsuited, with casting rod on his shoulder. He had been testing the waters. We fell into conversation as the cove’s spring green waves thumped and whispered.

    He confirmed what I’d heard earlier in the day. Small striped bass were being caught from the beach in recent days at Ditch Plain Beach and just east in front of the Montauk Shores Condominiums.

    “I’ve had keeper bass [over 28 inches long] this time of year. Thought I’d give it a try,” he said, while allowing that the ocean was colder than normal for this time of year given winter’s reluctance to leave.

    Ernst, who does tree work, usually alone, is an intense sort with an active mind. I don’t remember how it came about, but he told me that while standing on his favorite glacial erratics whipping cast after cast after bass, he enjoyed putting together phrases — Zen-like poems by the sound of it — using double entendres and homonyms as fodder.

    To non-fishermen, and non-lone-tree-climbers for that matter, this might sound strange, but I’ve found that the sea tends to draw our less conscious selves forward like dreams remembered. I’m sure trees do the same when you’re alone in their branches with a bird’s-eye view. Most fishermen cast their minds into the sea along with their lures, unless they’re fishing up in front of the Montauk Lighthouse beside Gary (Toad) Stephens, in which case they listen to him casting his mind into the sea.

    I invent one-sentence stories when fishing. A while ago, I entered a contest, run by Bonnie Grice of WPPB, for the best one-sentence story. As it happens, my entry was written while surfcasting. Not only did it use double entendres and homonyms, the sentence also included the title of the story. Here it is: “Behind the nun’s habit, a tale.”

    There was a strong wind the day it was written — tough casting. I had given a lot of thought about using, “beneath” a nun’s habit instead of “behind,” but decided that when talking about causes, we speak of them as being “behind” rather than “beneath” whatever it is they’ve caused.

    I think “beneath” would have made a funnier story, but I didn’t want to lose the reader. I also wondered if it was unsatisfying to leave the reader hanging (other than her clothing, what could the nun’s habit possibly be?) but decided that many a good yarn leaves us wondering.

    I hate sour grapes, but my story should have won Bonnie’s contest. It didn’t, nor did I catch a fish that day.

    On Sunday, the Lester clan of Amagansett gathered at Barnes Landing to launch the Miss Mary, Paul and Dan Lester’s new dory. Dwayne Denton, chief of the Amagansett Fire Department, built the boat. It was launched from a trailer backed into the water at high speed in the same way our baymen launched the dories that set ocean seines. That was before the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation banned the use of haul-seine nets for catching striped bass.

    The Miss Mary was christened with a bottle of Budweiser by Susan Denton, wife of Dwayne Denton. The christening, which took place as a light rain fell, was at once a happy and solemn occasion.

    Dwayne Denton’s grandfather Ted Lester was the brother of Paul and Danny Lester’s grandfather Capt. Bill Lester. The “Mary” in Miss Mary was the grandmother of both the boatbuilder and the baymen brothers. A small compartment built into one of the dory’s knees contains the ashes of Calvin Lester, Paul and Danny’s fisherman father. 

    The Miss Mary will be used to set gillnets and tend pound traps, among other things. If the pound traps in Fort Pond Bay, Montauk, were up and working, they would be catching porgies galore, according to a number of reports. 

    Other reports have the first of the skinny “runner” bluefish arriving off Accabonac Harbor.

    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].