We had six inches of rain Saturday and Sunday in Sag Harbor, a downer for the weekend crowd, a blessing for the alewives, frogs, and salamanders. Ligonee Brook is a longstanding stream that runs intermittently down through the last century and more. Its course has changed more than once and it only runs from Long Pond to Ligonee Cove to Sag Harbor Cove once every five years. Nonetheless, it is an important conduit for alewives and eels. Baby eels, or elvers, back from the Sargasso Sea, run up it in the spring to Long Pond to spend a few years growing up before running back down to saltwater and thence to the Sargasso Sea to spawn.

    Eels are one of a very small number of catadromous fishes that go from fresh to saltwater to spawn. Alewives, on the other hand, are anadromous; they run up streams and rivers from the sea to spawn. Their ranks are swelled by a host of other fish — the Pacific salmons, the Atlantic salmon, shad, blue-back herring, striped bass, sturgeons, smelt, sea-run trout, and several others. Long Island has always had alewives but very few of the others.

    While Big Fresh Pond in North Sea has perennially been the biggest spawning base for alewives on Long Island, several other ponds on the South Fork such as Long Pond, Scoy Pond in East Hampton’s Northwest, Stepping Stones Pond on the southwest edge of Lake Montauk, and Big Reed Pond east of the lake’s northwest shore, have all spawned alewives arriving by way of the Peconic Estuary from time to time. Hook Pond, Georgica Pond, Sagg Pond, and Mecox Bay have all contributed to alewife production in the past. Some of those that enter Sagg Pond each spring, if the inlet is not sanded over, make it all the way up to Jeremy’s Hole, a small kettle of freshwater in the northern quadrant of the Nature Conservancy’s Sagg Swamp Nature Preserve in Bridgehampton.

    There is a major emphasis throughout the world’s estuaries on re-establishing these anadromous fish stocks, which have suffered greatly over the years, but especially in this center and the last. Dai Dayton and Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt have been trying the hardest, it seems, when it comes to those using Ligonee Brook. In March of 2010 a good number of alewives made it all the way to Long Pond from Sag Harbor Cove to spawn. That run was helped by record mid-March rains, which totaled eight inches and more during a week’s time.

    Most times, however, Ligonee is so waterless that the stream and its four culverts between its marine entrance and Long Pond are a challenge that alewives can’t overcome. They are stopped in the culvert under the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, as Jean Held has observed in two fairly recent years, or clog the culvert and die at Brick Kiln Road where Southampton Town meets Sag Harbor Village, as they did in 2011. But isn’t that how evolution works? Survival of the fittest? Those that make it may give rise to generations that are a little better at going all the way up.

    On Sunday, Dai and I by coincidence were observing different points along the length of the stream. She was at the Brick Kiln and turnpike culverts, while I was way upstream where Long Pond meets Ligonee. The six inches plus of rain certainly made a difference. For one thing, there was water in the streambed on the Long Pond side of the culvert under the turnpike, which has been dirt dry for more than a year. Secondly, water was overflowing the north end of Long Pond and entering the dried up Ligonee pond exit. The most promising observation, however, may have been made on Sunday by one of the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt, Dennis Kelley, who lives near the section of the stream between the turnpike and Brick Kiln Road. He observed a mature alewife swimming upstream.

    Could this be a banner year? Maybe so, but we could use a little more rain upgradient.

    Of course, in the long term, spawning probability could be greatly improved by cleaning out and/or replacing two of the culverts, those under the turnpike and Brick Kiln Road. The one under the old Bridgehampton to Sag Harbor railroad spur has already been replaced as part of Eagle Scout project with a handsome footbridge constructed by Max Yardley of Sag Harbor.

    East Hampton Town has had a brand-new reinforced heavy duty box culvert, just the thing for alewives crossing, sitting in a Grimes work lot for four years now. It was intended for Alewife Brook Road, which crosses the Scoy run from Scoy Pond on its way downgradient to Elybrook Pond in Cedar Point County Park and from there out to Northwest Harbor. I have a dream that East Hampton will bequeath the culvert to South­ampton Town to be used to replace either of the two failing ones in the Ligonee system. Then alewives will spawn annually in Long Pond and happily ever after!

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

    What is it about old boats, wooden boats in particular? Why do they seem more worthy of respect than old cars, or even old houses? Boats that have lived at sea for years have a knowing character, a wisdom.

    Have they taken on the lives of their masters or is it the other way around? Perhaps the bonding — the booted steps placed unthinking to meet the roll of the deck, the deck rolling to meet the helmsman’s feet — comes from surviving together in an alien environment. And of course there’s something of the cradle in boats.

    Capt. Frank Mundus spent the last night of his life aboard the Cricket II as she lay at Salivar’s Dock on Sept. 9, 2008. He died the next day en route to his home in Hawaii. Above his bunk a sign once hung: “This is Frank’s bunk. When he wants in, you get out.” Classic Mundus.

    Word came last week that Cricket, the charter boat that Mundus piloted after sharks offshore for a half century as Montauk’s Monster Man, the boat that, with her ornery skipper, inspired Peter Benchley to write “Jaws,” who in turn inspired Stephen Spielberg to scare the hell out of audiences for the past three decades, will have a new home in North Carolina.

    For a while after Mundus’s death, she sat on the hard at Uihlein’s Marina. Henry Uihlein and a few other business owners attempted to find a way to keep Cricket in Montauk, a landed memorial to herself and her notorious master. It didn’t take.

    Frank had sold her after retiring to Hawaii in 1997, but the separation was short-lived. The dynamic duo returned to Montauk during shark-fishing season for several years, celebrities within the sanguine universe of their own design, like Roy Rogers and Trigger.

    Frank told me the name Cricket came from how others perceived his profile. With sloping forehead and Roman nose, he looked like the Disney version of Jiminy Cricket in “Pinocchio.”

    There was a Cricket I that Frank ran as a charter boat out of New Jersey with his brother Louis for a time, but Louis fell on hard times. Cricket II was built by a Chesapeake bayman named Tiffany Cockrell with the low-decked and beamy design of the oyster dredge boats that worked the Chesapeake. Mundus claimed Cockrell had never seen the Atlantic Ocean, and out of his imagination’s respect for its treachery, the old man built Cricket four times stronger than he needed to.

    Her keel was made from a length of yellowleaf pine measuring 10 by 12 inches thick and cut from the heart of the tree. Cockrell told the trucker who brought the wood that if there was a knot anywhere in it, he shouldn’t bother unloading. The keel was notched into Cricket’s stem piece and transom. Ribs were placed close together for extra strength, as though old Cockrell had foreseen the thousands of monsters that would sashay beneath Cricket looking up. Teeth were snapped off — “like rifle shots,” Frank said — and embedded in Cricket’s planking where she was bitten by white sharks.

    Cockrell bent two-inch planking over the ribs, with another two inches on top of that and half-inch plywood as a skin to which Fiberglas roving and mat were later added. She was completed in 1946.

    In June of 1951, Frank fueled Cricket in Brielle, N.J., loaded his wife, Janet, 2-year-old daughter, Bobby, and a Model-A Ford on board — “I backed the boat up to a steep embankment. Got it close as I could and tied it to the trees by the stern bits and made a ramp out of planking from Cockrell’s boat yard and drove the Model-A up to the stern.” Mundus pointed Cricket northeast, bound for the Fishangri-La dock in Fort Pond Bay, Montauk.

    The same stern bits that pulled the Model-A onboard would tow sharks bigger than the Ford back to Montauk on a regular basis over the years.

    After Frank died, Cricket was purchased by a man named Jon Dodd and taken to Connecticut to be restored. The work proved too costly so Dodd and Capt. Joe DiBella, her previous owner, created the Cricket II Restoration and Preservation Project, a not-for-profit corporation with over 300 supporters.

    On April 2, Cricket — “stripped down and is now just a bare hull with no motor, no decking, no frames, nothing” — was transported to the Bock Marine Ship Builders in Beaufort, N.C., according to Captain DiBella. “We had a police escort of 12 cars, and the Cherry Point Marine Base honor guard saluted her as we passed,” he reported. “I will bring her back to life again, but she will never go back to Montauk. Instead she will be carrying out disabled veterans and wounded warriors, plus we are working with the Children’s Cancer Center.”

    That bit about a police escort, Frank would have liked that. His father worked as a cop during the summer months. Frank always likened fishing — planning the right bait, the right rig, location, all the myriad subtleties — to robbing a bank. If the fish got away, he’d say, “The cops showed up.”

    I’m sorry Cricket is not in Montauk. She belongs here even as the shark-fishing craze she helped spawn morphs into a greener, catch-and-release fishery. It was something the Monster Man saw coming and approved of. The cops showed up. A good thing.

    Reading last week’s East Hampton Star about the proposed 200 megawatt wind farm in the ocean 30 miles off Montauk I envision either a free energy Shangri-la or a 256-square-mile death trap for migratory seabirds, which have been plying the same sea lanes back and forth up and down for the last 20,000 years or more.

    There is no such thing as a free lunch. It’s been repeated over and over ever since the Golden Greek culture printed it in Hellenic Greek well prior to 1 A.D. Take a look at land-based wind farms such as those in California which have been turbining away since a few years before the new millennium. Take a look at just one of those farms, the one at Altamont, where the Hell’s Angels killed an unruly fan at a Rolling Stones concert in 1969. The California Energy Commission has been tracking bird deaths there since the start of the farm’s operation. Over five years from 1998 to 2003, 54 golden eagles, 70 burrowing owls, 59 kestrels, and 217 red-tailed hawk bit the dust from collisions with turbine blades and other accidents.

    Certain safeguards were put into play following the accumulation of those statistics without much impact. In fact the number of avian deaths increased! From 2005 to 2010 the bodies of 105 golden eagles, 278 burrowing owls, 199 kestrels, and 394 red-tailed hawks were found strewn on the ground in the vicinity of the turbines. Estimates based on dead bird counts and other factors for wind farms across the United States suggest that about 570,000 birds are killed by turbines each year. The number is a little higher for bats — about 600,000 annually.

    Duke Energy Renewables, a subsidiary of the company famous for its polluting coal ash pits in the Carolinas, operates two wind farms in Wyoming. It was fined $1 million for killing eagles. How much is a dead eagle worth? No one can say. Wind farms situated along the coast of Texas kill thousands of birds and bats each year. Accurate numbers are elusive because the wind farm companies are reluctant to provide data. And now, the first offshore wind farm in the United States may be in the Gulf of Mexico off Galveston, Tex., in a very important flyway area for both seabirds and migrating land birds.

    Of the top 25 offshore wind farms in the world, 22 are in European waters. How many dead birds have they accounted for? No one really knows. Dead birds are easy to find on the ground if they haven’t been scavenged. When they fall into the ocean they are immediately eaten by some marine scavenger or drift away in the tides and currents. The truth of the matter is that very few peer-review studies by scientists have been undertaken with respect to the sea-based wind farms.

    So what kind of assurances that birds and other marine life will be minimally impacted are we given with respect to Deepwater Wind’s planned installation in the ocean off Montauk? Absolutely none. Such pre-studies are incredibly difficult and incredibly costly and generally only speculative at best. And what will be the impact on commercial and recreational fishermen who have been plying those same waters down through the ages, many of whom are based in Montauk and Long Island’s South Fork?

    On the other hand, solar power is extremely benign to birds. There are very few if any records of birds (or bats) being felled by solar panels. A big offshore wind farm here is a dicey situation at best. It was Thomas Edison, himself, who at the beginning of the last century said about our great sun, “Free energy, when?” After all, he reckoned that the sun would be around for another billion years or more giving us 12 daylight hours in every revolution of the earth, day in, day out. He never mentioned the wind.

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

    You can tell it’s spring. Gannets have been seen diving, probably on alewives, in Gardiner’s Bay, a striped bass has been caught in Three Mile Harbor, bait and tackle shops are opening their doors, the Montauk SurfMasters tournament is nigh, and the buzz of power tools can be heard just off Old Stone Highway in Amagansett where Dwayne Denton is finishing up a dory for two baymen, Dan and Paul Lester.

    Last week Denton, who happens to be chief of the Amagansett Fire Department, emerged from a cocoon-like shelter where the Lester dory lay upside down in the final stages of construction with plywood skin covering fir framing and main supports of two-inch oak.

    He stood beside another Lester dory that once served as one of the East Hampton Dory Rescue Squad’s boats. “This one was built by John Collins. I used it for the basic design of the new boat, but built more flare in it,” he said, going on to describe a dory’s rocker, that classic rise from the low profile amidships to its high wave-countering bow and stern.

    The “flare,” or spread of the dory’s beam up and out from its narrow deck, was more pronounced than the rescue dory’s to make it a little more sea-kindly. “The ribs are tighter. It’s a heavily built boat. These boys ain’t easy on boats,” the shipwright said.

    “I built my first boat when I was 14. I’m 53 now,” he said, the first few built alongside his father, with the woodworking skills passed down through at least four generations. He knows what fishermen require in a boat.

    Denton is a Lester on his mother’s side, a grandson of Ted Lester, captain of one of area’s most productive haulseine crews in the days before the ocean seine was banned. His uncle was the late Capt. Stuart Lester.

    He took a visitor into his shop where the last of the dory’s knees were being finished. He held one that would support the well where the outboard is mounted. The well is located just forward of the transom and just aft of where Dan or Paul Lester will steer the dory. The knee will have a space drilled into it. Some of Calvin Lester’s ashes will be sealed in the space so that Paul and Danny’s late father will remain by their side, as he was in life, as they tend their traps, set nets, or tow a scallop dredge.

    “It will be painted on the weekend,” Denton said with a smile, “and christened with Budweiser.”

    It’s time for surfcasters to sign up for the Montauk SurfMasters spring tournament for striped bass. The hard-fought contest will get under way on May 9 and run until June 28. Unlike the SurfMasters tournament that targets the fall run of bass, the spring version has no divisions.

    Waders, wetsuiters, and adult men and women all compete against one another. An extra prize of $100 will be awarded for the first bass weighed in over 25 pounds. The entry fee is $100. The awards ceremony will be held on June 28 at Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk, breakfast compliments of Goldberg’s Famous. Paulie’s in now open on weekends.

    Harvey Bennett, whose Tackle Shop in Amagansett is doing early spring business, said one customer kept coming in for night crawlers, which he reported were attracting walleye in Montauk’s Fort Pond.

    Bennett has put great store in Monday’s Blood Moon to spur alewives into dreens for the spawn. A check at the dreen entering Little and Big Reed Ponds in Montauk on Monday found none entering the conduit under East Lake Drive, but Bennett said they were no doubt around. He could think of no other explanation for the gannets he’s seen diving near Devon in Gardiner’s Bay. It is early for gannets, and relatively rare to see them working in the bay.

    No doubt seals keep their eyes peeled for alewives and any kind of herring. Twenty-nine seals were seen lounging on their favorite glacial erratics on Block Island Sound just west of Montauk Point on Sunday.

    Alewives have entered Big Fresh Pond in North Sea in waves beginning two Mondays ago. Most of the ospreys are back, their returns scheduled, it would seem, to coincide with the movement of river herrings — alewives, shads, blueback herrings — from marine waters into fresh to spawn. The double-crested cormorants’ return seems to be tied to the same rhythmic phenomenon.

    There are no seabirds more adept at catching fish than cormorants. They show up at the mouth of Mill Pond in Water Mill every spring precisely at the same time that the alewives begin to enter it from Mecox Bay. Cormorants are the marine counterparts of wolves: They work together to round up the alewives into tight groups to make capturing them more efficient. A cormorant has little trouble swallowing a 10-inch-long alewife in one bite. Bald eagles have also been lurking over the fishways — they probably deign to take an alewife or two, but they specialize in scavenging dead deer and toy dogs and cats where available.

    The alewives come in such large numbers, hundreds at a time into Big Fresh Pond, that the predators can’t take them all. It’s a kind of reproduction strategy called “swarming,” the same as oysters laying thousands of eggs at a time. A tiny fraction, but just enough, will get through and survive the gauntlet of growing to adulthood to keep the species going on an even keel.

    While the adult alewives are running upstream, a tiny baby fish is liable to be going the same way. Alewives, smelt, shads, sturgeons, and many others run upstream to spawn and are said to be anadromous. The tiny baby fish going up with them are one of the very few fish species that go downstream into the seas to spawn when mature — the American eel, Anguilla rostrata. It and the European Anguilla species are said to be catadromous.

    Because the baby eels, or elvers, are transparent to the degree they are — they are called glass eels when they leave marine waters and enter fresh ones — we rarely see them. No doubt would-be predators don’t see them all that well, either. They have another quality going for them: They can surmount almost any kind of barrier on their way to the lakes and ponds where they will spend their adolescent years — they can scale small walls, get through almost any kind crevice or hole, even shinny over wet land using their characteristic sinusoidal gate, much like snakes.

    When one takes into consideration that these little guys come all the way up from the Sargasso Sea, a vast gyre bounded by four separate currents on the west, north, east, and south, where the adult eels spawn, it wouldn’t be fair to travel a thousand miles northwest and northeast, to the American and European coasts, only to be kept from making it to their final goal, a freshwater pond or lake where life is easy and food is plentiful.

    According to Howard Reisman, our bona fide local ichthyologist, there are 15 species of Anguilla in the world, but only three go to such great lengths to spawn. The Japanese eel is similarly catadromous. Elvers reach maturity in fresh waters; the mature eels swim a thousand miles into the south central Pacific where they spawn and then die, just as the American and European ones do. Pacific salmon belonging to several species swim upstream to spawn like their Atlantic counterparts, but as with the three species of eels, die after shedding their eggs and sperm.

    One can see alewives, salmon, and sea-run trout swimming upstream to spawn, but it is rare to see the elvers doing the same. That is why I was so excited upon hearing the news that Matt Stedman of Montauk and a member of the Third House Nature Center witnessed several glass eels emerging from a culvert pipe and entering Big Reed Pond in Montauk on Sunday. I’ve witnessed such an event only twice in a lifetime of 78 long years: The first time when I saw a single glass eel slowly making its way up Brush’s Creek in Laurel from Peconic Bay on the North Fork at about the age of 8, the second when I witnessed for 30 minutes or more a steady stream of glassy elvers moving up Scoy Run through a culvert under Alewife Brook Road in Northwest, East Hampton, in April of about 2009.

    The American eel is a species of special concern, as it is becoming more and more of a rarity. Part of its demise is tied to its popularity as bait for striped bass and several other large fishes that ply the Atlantic. Second, many of their maturation ponds or the streams to them no longer exist, have dried up, or have been closed to elvers in some other way. The oiling of freshwater ponds and treating them with DDT to control mosquitoes in the second half of the 20th century didn’t help them either.

    Male eels are more estuarine than the females, which stay in fresh water until they are five or six years old, three feet long, and as big around as a tennis ball. When the appropriate signal is given they go downstream. The males, which have become silvery and are called silver eels, follow or join in somewhere along the way, and they all proceed to the sea and head to the spawning grounds, a one-way trip, as it were, to collect and shed their eggs and spawn in a swirling mass made up of both sexes deep down in the sea.

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

    The former Salivar’s, Montauk’s iconic, dockside eatery, reopened during the past week following an impressive renovation inside and out.

    The people who gave us the West Lake Clam and Chowder House are running the place. They have brought their popular menu and sushi bar across the harbor to the green building (a lighter shade now) that began serving food and spirits during a time when raw fish, as the saying goes, was bait.

    The food and renovation are being well received, and the opening has prompted a humorous torrent of nostalgia. After all, Salivar’s was the place where time stood still.

    As we know, the Earth makes a full rotation on its axis every 24 hours. It follows that dawn here is dusk on the other side of the world. That is, unless you were lucky enough to be at Salivar’s round about 4:30 a.m. back in the day.

    In New York State, bars must close by 4 a.m., which is late if one was doing the rounds from, say, the Shagwong, to Trail’s End, to the Lakeside Inn, winding up at Salivar’s for a nightcap and game of pool.

    Of course, 4:30 a.m. is early and right on time if one is a fisherman who’s driven to Montauk from up west ready for a plate of eggs and hash browns before boarding a party boat for a day of fishing.

    When the clock struck 4, the late-night inebriants at Salivar’s flowed into the breakfast room with brains on the far side of the world, for all intents and purposes. There they met happy, chattering fishermen all coffeed up, bright-eyed, and bound for the bounding main. One man, face down in his eggs occupied a stool beside another, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Hemispheres collided. Time stood still.

    The same scene was repeated throughout the summer months with regulars often exchanging roles from yesterday’s early-morning angler to today’s late-night headache and vice versa. Ships passing in the gloaming. Ah, those were the days, or were they nights?

    The walk from Salivar’s to the Viking Fleet dock was, and is, a short one for party boat fishermen. Last weekend, Viking boats ventured far afield to the spot known as Hydros after tilefish and to Stellwagon Bank for cod. They did well.

    The fleet will continue on its winter fishing schedule until about May 15 when boats will begin to venture to Cherry Harbor on the west side of Gardiner’s Island in search of porgies. Round about that time, bluefish will begin to appear, first the scouts called runners, skinny from their migration.

    Each year, it’s a question of whether the spring squid run will arrive before the bluefish or vice versa. Hopefully, the squid will get here first this season so that squidders can jig up a bucket or two before the ravenous blues chase them away.

    Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett called to say he’s got some new, fancy surfcasting rods by C.T.S. rods of New Zealand and just-as-fancy reels by Zee Baas, a Connecticut company. The Zee Baas reels were created by the designer of the hearty Van Staal reels. Bennett reported seeing the same few gannets on the hunt and diving into Gardiner’s Bay over by Devon in Amagansett. He has deduced: “Something’s going on.”

    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].

    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.

    Victoria and Nicholas Bustamante were walking Shadmoor Park on the ocean in Montauk on Saturday afternoon when a bat flew overhead. Nicholas threw up some pebbles and the bat made a pass at them. It looked red, Vicki said, and was a little bigger than a little brown bat, the most common bat on the East End during the summertime.

    Most bats are nocturnal and have well-developed, built-in sonar systems for locating flying insects in the dark. They don’t see so good in day or night. The bat that Vicki and Nick saw was an exception to the rule. The red bat is one of the few bats that is not nocturnal and is able to see to feed quite well during the daytime.

    Red bats tend to be solitary, unlike the little brown bats that roost, nest, and fly in groups. The brown bat population is being depleted by white mouth, a fungal mouth disease. In the winter brown bats migrate from subfreezing temperatures in the north to caves farther south where the temperature rarely goes below freezing. They spend their days in semi-hibernation clustered together on rocky niches, a good way to wait for spring, but not good if one or more have the disease. It easily spreads under those conditions.

    Bats’ echolocation works during the day or night, so why not feed both at night and in the day? Because insect hawking birds — the flycatchers, swallows, swifts — and others that are adept at removing insects from the air column and by sight evolved those abilities prior to bats. Bats, with the exception of a few, would not be able to compete. So the bats that fly during the day and are solitary are an exception to the general rule and manage to eke out a living feeding like flying birds.

    Having the night air all to themselves, bats evolved to fill several different niches, just as the birds did before them. There are fruit-eating bats, fish-eating bats, blood-sucking bats, and those that feed on other plant and animal stuffs. Many bats will take mosquitoes now and then. The vampire bat has evolved further; it competes with the mosquito for mammalian blood. Watch out for global warming, as it will bring us lots of newcomers from the south, new disease-carrying mosquitoes, as well as blood-sucking bats.

    Many North American bat species migrate north in the spring, south in the fall, as do many species of birds and fish, as well as a few butterflies and dragonflies. Bats usually arrive a month or so later than the early birds, which are already upon us. When the Major League baseball players go south for spring training, several bird species arrive in the north from the south to begin the next breeding season.

    On Feb. 4, a flock of about 30 male red-winged blackbirds showed up at the Bustamante feeders in Montauk east of Lake Montauk. On the same day, a similar-size flock flew into my neighbors’ yard to feed. In both cases, all of them were males. The sexes are segregated in many early migrants, including robins and purple grackles. A few grackle males were mixed in with the red-wings in both situations. It’s that same old argument that created separate boys and girls schools and colleges in America. Keep the sexes separate, fewer premature births. It works for birds. Does it work for humans, too? The jury is still out.

    We non-snowbirds have suffered enough already, but relief is in sight. The great migration has begun. Spring is just around the corner. The permanent resident birds — the titmice, cardinals, and chickadees — have already started singing their territorial songs. The white-throated sparrows that winter here and fly farther north to breed are looking fine of feather and singing their very mellifluous “Old Sam Peabody” song. If you stick your head out the window on a warmish sunny day you may be able to hear it. Unfortunately, the song is well above old Larry Penny’s hearing range. I can only observe the sparrow uttering it. But as sparrows have no lips, I can’t figure out what he’s saying.

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

    As I write away midway through Sunday evening the outside temperature in Noyac has slowly crept down. It just fell a 10th of a degree below 35 degrees. I’m hoping that it never makes it to freezing. All the snow is gone and most of the fresh ponds have shed their icy coats. Should the weather hold for another three or four days and we get a touch of precipitation it might be just enough to start the great migration, not of birds — that’s already well in progress — but of amphibians and alewives.

    Snowdrops were in full bloom behind the Sag Harbor Historical Society’s Annie Cooper Boyd House on Sunday, an age-old sign of winter’s passing. The alewives are massed in the Peconic Estuary’s many bays. It’s full moon time. Everything is in order for the great procession up the spawning streams to begin. The alewife run into Big Fresh Pond in North Sea from North Sea Harbor has been happening each March, hardly skipping a beat since colonial times. The stage is set for another magnificent return. Grangibel Park in Riverhead is the gateway to the Peconic River and its offshoot ponds. Alewives have been availing themselves of the fish passageway through to the river for just about every year since it was installed earlier in the millennium. Ligonee Brook handling Long Pond’s overflow needs an inch or so of rain to raise its elevation enough to start this longstanding stream flowing down towards Sag Harbor Cove. The streambed has been cleaned out and is ready and able.

    Very few people are around to see the alewives when they move upstream. But just about everybody hears the spring peepers, Hyla crucifer, when they start chanting from their breeding ponds just before dark. A few people don’t like the racket, which can be almost deafening at its peak, but most, I’m told, look forward to the clarion call announcing the final end to winter. When those thousands of little gray tree frogs move into the vernal ponds and rev up their chorus, the annual migration of another amphibian, this one black with yellow spots is no doubt already under way. The peepers hop to the water, the spotted salamanders crawl to it in that typical one-leg-at-a-time gait, bending their body sinuously with each tiny advance.

    The spotted salamanders are the most common of our four local species of mole salamanders in the genus Ambystoma. The eastern tiger salamander is the rarest and though it used to be in East Hampton, one hasn’t been found here in more than 50 years. The second least common one in the group is the blue-spotted salamander found on Long Island only in Montauk, although in the long-ago past it could also be found in Sag Harbor. While the peepers are chorusing, the male spotted salamanders are engaged in depositing little white sacs of sperm called spermatophores on submerged sticks and grasses for the females to hover over and uck them up into their cloacas where fertilization takes place after which the mass of sperm and eggs is re-deposited on a stick or reed to enable development to take place underwater.

    The blue-spotted salamander emerges from the ground and goes to its breeding pond in the beginning of April during the same period when the Southern leopard frog would begin spawning in fresh offshoots of Oyster Pond in Montauk. The salamander is holding its own, as almost all of its breeding ponds are in preserved parkland. The Southern leopard frog is another story; it hasn’t been seen in Montauk or elsewhere on Long Island for more than 20 years.

    The fourth mole salamander, the marbled salamander, dark gray flecked with silver, doesn’t breed until September. However, another of Long Island’s salamanders, the four-toed salamander, has a spotty distribution and is found here and there, including in Montauk and on Shelter Island. It likes sphagnum moss, so look for it during its April breeding season in sphagnous pockets of water.

    The other local salamander, the leadback morph of the redback salamander, does not breed in water, but lays it eggs under rotting logs and such in woodland habitats. In this millennium it has been undergoing a major population turndown locally. Why? No one knows. I suspect wild turkeys are doing it in.

    Back to the frogs. A second but more solitary noisemaker frog is the wood frog, Rana sylvatica. Its call is not unlike that of a crow with a low raspy voice. It likes woodlands and come April breeds in small ponds, many of which are ephe­meral. The green and pickerel frogs sing and mate later in the spring. The bullfrog, not a native Long Islander, but imported from the South, starts its low jug-a-rum calls in late April to early May.

    After the first big May or June rain, the gray treefrog starts trilling for its mates and if the rain is really big, the spadefoot toad, not a toad at all but more of a frog, digs itself out of the earth and begins its nonstop “crowing” in temporary ponds, especially those found in slacks between adjacent dunes along the oceanfront of Amagansett.

    The only true toad on Long Island is Bufo fowlerii, or the Fowler’s toad. It comes in two color phases: a darkish morph found in woodlands and a light gray morph occupying open areas such as golf courses but especially dunes where it feeds on dune grasshoppers, dune spiders, and other dune insects. After wet weather in May it is heard uttering its long low monotonic bleats from golf course ponds and those vernal ones situated in the same dunes where spadefoots breed. Its warts secrete an acrid fluid, which makes it unpalatable to frog predators, but the eastern hognose snake, also a creature of the dunes, somehow doesn’t seem to mind. It feeds almost exclusively on Fowler’s toads.

    Long Island once had cricket frogs, the smallest of the frogs in the Northeast. Their call is like the sound produced by one of those toy clickers. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is presently contemplating repopulating them here.