When a tornado, or tsunami, comes from out of the blue, it rattles our collective nerves. But it’s also unsettling when what we expect of nature fails to occur.

    During colder winters, fishermen in these parts could count on schools of cod pouring south off Georges Bank and taking up residence within range of local boats. There have been lean years before. After all, the folks at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center at Woods Hole, Mass., remind us that southern New England, Block Island, and Montauk are at the southern edge of the Georges Bank cod population, even in winter.

    And, it should be remembered that low cod populations over all have resulted in dramatic quota reductions. The once vast schools of cod, Gadus morhua, were the foundation of New England settlements beginning in the 17th century. Cities including Gloucester, New Bedford, and Boston owe their existence to cod. Mark Kurlansky informs us in “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World” that Norse and Basque fishermen sailed across the Atlantic to reap the cod resource centuries earlier.

    During the 1980s and much of the ’90s, the Gulf of Maine cod stock, and the population living on Georges Bank to the south and east, kept pace with the ever-increasing fishing pressure. In addition to a robust winter sport fishery, Montauk Harbor was also home to a number of set-line fishermen who successfully targeted cod using long lines set along the bottom with a series of buoyed hooks baited with clams. Then the bottom dropped out. Capt. Rick Etzel of Montauk was one charter captain who set cod lines in winter. Last week he said, “When they talk about how many ling they’re catching, you know the cod is way off.” Ling, a cod-like species, is often more numerous, but considered a poor substitute for the real thing.

    The New England Fishery Management Council, which oversees the cod resource, reduced quotas again and again in an effort to spark a recovery. Last year, quotas for both stocks were reduced, 80 percent in the Gulf of Maine, and 61 percent for the Georges Bank stock that our local fishermen target in winter.

    But fishing pressure alone may not account for what Montauk’s Viking Fleet of party boats and others are seeing, or not seeing, this season.

    “We had really good fishing from the end of January to the middle of February, but then it fell apart. We’re still catching some, but not of any size. It’s good for 20 minutes to an hour before light, then the dogs come,” Capt. Carl Forsberg said on Monday — “dogs” being dogfish, the bait-stealing bane of bottom fishermen.

    A warmer-than-usual winter might explain it, but Captain Forsberg said a cold winter, like this one, without cod is unusual. Something else is going on. For one thing, the ocean temperature is not all that cold despite the teens and single digits onshore.

    A joint study undertaken by United States and Canadian scientists found that climate change, more than a species’ biology, has caused shifts in where and at what depths it is found. A paper that appeared in the Sept. 13, 2013, edition of the journal Science proposed that “climate velocity” — the rate and direction of climate shifts in a particular region — explains the shifts in species distribution.

    The U.S.-Canadian study found that ocean temperatures have risen and circulation patterns have changed on the Continental Shelf in the Northeast in recent decades, and these changes have redistributed zooplankton essential to species including cod. So marked are the changes that an ecosystem advisory was published by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center last April.

    This is not to say we should stay onshore. Exceptions are always found within mega-trends. Captain Forsberg said that while cod fishing has slowed, his anglers continued to bring home a fish dinner or two or three. The mystery of the sea is perhaps its greatest protection.

    Turkey vultures were back in town as of the Monday before last. Even more surprising was the sighting of individual ospreys over Sag Harbor by Ted Schiavoni and Jean Held three and two weeks ago, respectively. Ospreys used to nest in trees. Now almost all of Long Island’s ospreys nest on platforms situated on tall poles. Interestingly, the much maligned privately owned Long Island Lighting Company was instrumental in bringing the ospreys back to the area after their numbers were decimated by DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides applied over wetlands to kill mosquitoes from the 1950s into the 1960s. LILCO installed the first osprey nesting platforms on surplus utility poles, and ospreys took to them right away.

    LILCO’s efforts weren’t completely altruistic. Osprey in East Marion and Orient had been nesting on the tops of utility poles during their heyday in the 1940s and 1950s prior to the population collapse. Getting them to nest on platforms well away from electrical lines during the recovery would keep them from befouling the lines and save the utility time and money. The ill-fated Shoreham nuclear plant was the major nail in LILCO’s coffin. In the early 1990s after George Pataki became New York’s governor, LILCO was replaced with the Long Island Power Authority, a quasi-public utility that abandoned all plans to build nuclear plants and took over all of LILCO’s existing utility lines and stations.

    LIPA’s day-to-day operations were recently taken over by PSEG Long Island, a division of PSEG of New Jersey, and here is where my story begins.

    As soon as it took control, PSEG began “improving” existing utility lines to make them more hurricane-resistant. LIPA’s strategy — developed in the wake of Hurricane Bob, the Halloween storm of 1991, and subsequent 100-year storms of December 1992 and March 1993 — was to hire tree pruning companies and methodically trim branches along Long Island roads and rights-of-way so that they wouldn’t become a chronic menace to power lines during major storms with gale force winds. Untold millions were spent with private companies for their tree-pruning services.

    The remaining years of the last decade of the 20th century were meteorologically benign and the tree trimming strategy was hailed a success. But, halfway into the first decade of the new millennium, things changed. Storm after storm hit Long Island and outage after outage occurred, topped by Hurricane Sandy, the icing on the inedible cake. Enter PSEG.

    PSEG thought it had carte blanche and immediately went to work. Its storm-abatement strategy was based less on tree trimming, more on installing utility poles to position the electrical wire above the majority of the street trees. A key presumption on which such strategy was based was that the majority of trees along the rights-of-way were less than 50 feet tall and if the utility went to even taller poles, there would be a hue and cry. PSEG presumed wrong. Fifty-foot trees will continue to grow and the taller they become, the more prone they are to blow over and for their branches to blow down.

    There was little input from local authorities, a major break from the past when LILCO and then LIPA consulted with local municipalities on several occasions and modified their plans thusly in the interest of the taxpayers and the environment. Starting in the late 1980s, LILCO came before the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals several times having to do with a substation on Cove Hollow Road in East Hampton, a Montauk substation on Industrial Road, and for plans to fix pole and wire damage on Napeague on the high-voltage transmission system that serves Montauk.

    Finally, after suffering considerable chronic storm damage along its Napeague lines, LIPA came to the town for a natural resources permit to bury the high-voltage lines to Montauk, after which most of the tall poles that formerly served the system were removed by helicopter. That underground system has served Montauk well for 20 years without a single failure and saved LILCO, then LIPA, a considerable amount of money.

    After being informed that Northwest Road in East Hampton was a state-designated scenic highway, LIPA revised its plan to extend electrical lines from the northernmost house on Northwest Road to Alewife Brook Road, consulted with the town, and buried about two miles of electrical lines to satisfy the connection.

    Bowing to pressure in Southampton Town, LIPA buried miles of high-tension electrical lines from Southampton Village to the hamlet of Bridgehampton in the rights-of-way of several roads between the two points.

    It should be pointed out that the cooperative two-way relationships that existed between local governments and LIPA came to fruition during Kevin Law’s tenure as chief. Kevin, who is now the CEO of the Long Island Association, is a Long Islander who understands Long Island ways and bent over backwards to accommodate local ways.

    The Suffolk County Water Authority buries all of its water lines. All natural gas conduits and many Verizon telephone lines are buried, as well. No, PSEG does not have a carte blanche here, far from it. What is good for New Jersey is not necessarily good for Long Island. PSEG should get in step and build meaningful two-way relationships with Long Island towns and villages before undertaking major works. In East Hampton Village and East Hampton Town, it should take a tip from its predecessors, retrace its steps, and begin anew. Ospreys never nest underground.

    Larry Penny can be reached at [email protected].

    During the winter months, the Montauk Post Office is like a watering hole in the Serengeti. Residents of all stripes approach cautiously for fear of crocodiles in the form of home-heating bills. Their junk mail becomes buffalo chips to feed the fire. They drink in gossip and news of the whereabouts of others not seen at the hole of late. They bay for summer, yet speak in fear of the herds that will descend on their place as the weather warms.

    Now and then I’m told, as though asking, “Montauk must have changed a lot since you’ve been here?” Well, yes and no. I’ve lived here for nearly a half-century, but tend to view myself — as I greet the older silverbacks at the watering hole — newly arrived. It’s all relative.

    The greatest change has taken place at the watering hole itself. Back in the day, Montauk denizens loitered there in summer, grazing for information and kinship as they do now in the colder months.

    These days come June we gather more furtively — a quick drink for fear of predators. That, and summer is the season to make hay while the sun shines. Or, do we become hay? We are fodder in a sense, happily grazed upon for a price. I find that the older members of our herd panic the least. They know that winter drives the predators and ruminants away, always has, always will.

    At the watering hole on Monday I met Capt. Michael Potts. The bad news was that his Bluefin IV charter boat has a blown engine, a serious situation with the 2014 fishing season nigh.

    On the plus side, Skip Rudolph, captain of the charter boat Adios, said he towed the Bluefin to a yard in Rhode Island at no charge.

    Senior Chief Jason Walter of the Montauk Coast Guard Station walked in with a package. He said he was unable to attend the dedication of a new beer to the service men and women under his command on Saturday, but appreciated the gesture. The Montauk Brewing Company, founded three years ago by three local young men, created Guardsman Stout in honor of the Montauk search and rescue station and the crew of the cutter Ridley. The dedication, with free food and beer, took place at the Swallow East restaurant across the harbor from the Montauk station.

    On my visit to Goldberg’s Famous on the outskirts of the watering hole, I met Jack Perna, principal of the Montauk School. I asked whether the kids were still following Beamer, the 200-pound blue shark that was tagged in their name last July during Montauk’s first Shark’s Eye, no-kill tournament. It was held from the Montauk Marine Basin. Beamer was fitted with a satellite tag that allows the school kids to follow her travels on their computers.

    Mr. Perna smiled and told me an amazing thing: That during Beamer’s southerly migration this winter, she visited Rincon, Puerto Rico. What? Rincon, where dozens of Montauk families of the surfing variety have retreated in winter for years? Was it only a coincidence?

    I think not. By letting her live, we welcomed Beamer into the fold last summer. I think she was visiting the Montauk diaspora in appreciation. The watering hole is larger than we thought, and getting friendlier.

    In the early 1980s there were only about seven active osprey nests on the South Fork. The osprey was still on the New York State’s endangered list. But there were even fewer eastern bluebirds on the South Fork and just a pair or two on the North Fork. The state correctly made a big hullabaloo about the sparse osprey population, but did very little to encourage the recovery of the bluebird, which, ironically, at that time had already had the distinction of being New York’s official bird for decades and decades.

    Several volunteer bluebird groups sprung up around the state, one of which was formed by the the South Fork Natural History Society. It had been in existence for less than a year when the late Kim Hicks of Montauk advised the club that he was building bluebird boxes of a special design developed in the Midwest, ones with a removable roof so that the box could be periodically cleaned.

    Karilyn Jones of SoFo led the effort to bring back the bluebirds locally beginning in 1987 using Kim Hicks’s homemade boxes. At that time we had located two pairs of breeding bluebirds, one in Hither Woods and another in Springs near the Green River Cemetery. Don Ferris had noticed a pair there year after year.

    Bluebirds prefer open country, and so under Ms. Jones’ direction we set about starting bluebird trails — one in Hither Woods, one at East Hampton Airport where a bluebird had been spotted, and one on the Sag Harbor Golf Course at Barcelona and, a year or two later, another one at the horse farm in Northwest owned by the Freemans, who own Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage on the highway in Wainscott.

    The boxes were mounted on steel stakes about four or five feet above the ground along the edges of open areas and set at about 100 yards apart. The design was a good one because in the first year at least three bluebird pairs found them and nested in them. That’s the kind of encouragement we needed and more boxes and more trails were added in ensuing years. There were several volunteers tending to the boxes and keeping track of the baby bluebirds and their fledging success. Several boxes were occupied by tree swallows, a bonus, a few by house wrens, and even one or two by white-footed mice.

    The boxes had to be cleaned and repaired every year and Karilyn handled that responsibility well for almost 20 years. The trails became so promising under her tutelage that early on CBS sent a videographer and a TV journalist out to record the growing population. The segment aired nationally on the weekly Sunday morning news program.

    At some point, the ranks of the monitors thinned and the trails began to overwhelm the few that remained to count the young and clean the boxes. The United States Department of Agriculture, which is responsible for animals at Federal Aviation Administration-sanctioned airports, complained about the boxes at the airport. Some others were vandalized. But reports from locals who had bluebirds coming to their birdbaths regularly made the time well spent. Raccoons, however, were beginning to raid the nests and there were more and more nest failures in the latter part of the century.

    The local population peaked and then began to fall. Enter Joe Guinta, a bird trip guide for New York Audubon early in the 21st century. He picked up on the raccoon problem right away and began installing raccoon guides on each nest pole. Nest failures diminished and the local bluebird population made a second comeback. In 2005, 38 baby bluebirds fledged, in 2006, 45, and the population grew and grew until 2012 when a record 143 bluebird babies joined their parents in flight. The airport trail produced almost half the fledges, 67.

    By the same token, more and more bluebirds showed up here and there on Long Island during the winter bird surveys. Meanwhile, while the South Fork bluebird populations was prospering, John Potente, a dentist from the central Suffolk area, also started trails in his neck of the woods, as did many others on Long Island. Soon eastern bluebirds were no longer a thing of fantasy. They were again the official state bird with a capital B.

    In 2013, notwithstanding a drop of bluebird fledges from a record 143 to 67, 29 of which were at the airport, the 15 bluebird trails and the 160 boxes serving them also produced 249 tree swallows, down from 318, 169 house wrens, up from 91 and, for the first time, two crested flycatchers. This last species is famous for including a molted snakeskin in its nest cavity, at times hanging down from the entry hole, not always easy to come up with. No snakeskin, but Jon did find a strip of plastic that apparently served as a snakeskin mimic.

    It is no easy job tending to all those boxes on all those trails year after year. But the rewards are great: two or three pairs in 1987 more than a 100 last year.    Tree swallows count mosquitoes among their prey. In the early fall when migrating through, they can often be seen 100 or more at a time, adults and young, perched near salt marshes or hunting over them.

    I’m sure Joe and SoFo would be happy to accommodate a few more dedicated volunteers in 2014. If you are interested call the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton.

    Larry Penny can be reached with questions or comments at [email protected].

    Walked out onto the rock reef in front of the trailer park again the other day at super low tide to visit the life in the pools — the little black snails called rosettes, calico crabs, the gardens of red and green weed. Every 20 feet or so, I’d find a surfcaster’s lure, still snagged since the last bass season on seaweed, or trapped in the cleft of a rock.

    I could hear the blue oaths rising from the caster as he or she pulled and pulled, walking their bent rods first to the left, then to the right, pulling and cursing the bottom as striped bass sashayed past the harmless hooks until the casters surrendered, cut their lines, and fumbled for the next barbed enticement.

    This got me thinking about lures in general: The dope peddler offering the first one for free, the dropped handkerchief, the Big Mac on a billboard.

    Two big fishing expos are coming up. The World Fishing and Outdoor Exposition starts today in Suffern, N.Y., and will run through Sunday. The Saltwater Fishing Expo runs from March 13 to 16 in Teaneck, N.J. I saw that one of the shows will feature a new lure that changes colors underwater.

    Of course, the expos, which display every conceivable gizmo for catching a fish, are themselves barbed enticements aimed at hooking those with a salty appetite, a fishing itch in need of scratching for months now.

    Without a knife, it took me a while to unsnag a bucktail whose hook was wrapped in monofilament attached to an even older lost lure — and so it goes.

    Look at us. The fishing aesthete who spends weeks wearing magnifying glasses to tie flies that will match the look of a moth floating down, by virtue of a thousand-dollar rod, upon a babbling brook to fool a trout. Then there’s the grunting hillbilly neck-deep and groping with his hands in the mud in search of a burrowed catfish.

    From a fish’s eye, we are all the same, aliens from outer space, just as we see them as creatures inhabiting an alien world. It must be thus, or it wouldn’t be fishing. What we can’t see and don’t understand becomes a mystery, and it’s the mystery of fish (on the most basic level, what is it that will attract them) that fishermen are driven to solve.

    Why doesn’t the rabbit hunter secrete a hook in a carrot, hide behind a tree, and then reel Bugs in after he takes the hook? I probably shouldn’t suggest this. Surely there’s someone out there who will turn it into sport.

    I’m again reminded of how Stuart Vorpahl, an East Hampton bayman and former town trustee, described the green pride of catch-and-release fishing. Stuart said it’s the same as putting a noose around a rabbit’s neck, lifting it off the ground until it’s almost dead, and then feeling saint-like as it limps away resurrected.

    The point is, we share the same environment with rabbits. We can see them. We let a beagle chase them in a circle, get them in our sights and pull the trigger. No mystery. No need to plumb the depths with a rattling, chicken-feathered, color-changing, treble-hooked Whizbang we pray will mimic a striped bass’s favorite dish.

    The bass are probably right about now looking up to see the sun climbing the latitudes. They are getting ready to migrate this way.

    The last lure I found was a beauty, a swimming plug, its color worn off, but streamlined with one rusted hook holding tenaciously to some bladderwrack. I think I’ll paint it, supply it with two new hooks, cast it to the wind, and pray it will catch a bass and not the bottom.

    It’s been quite a winter thus far. Snowing every other day for most of February, all of the freshwater ponds frozen over solid, including Long Island’s second largest, Fort Pond in Montauk. If Lake Montauk hadn’t been opened permanently and jettied in the first half of the 20th century, it would be frozen over, too.

    This is the kind of winter I remember growing up as a kid in Mattituck in the 1940s. In those days most of us heated our houses with coal burned in a basement furnace. The heat came up through a central grill in the floor of the living room. Every night my father or brother would bank the coal so there was enough to last until morning. Every morning one of them would shake down the ashes, carry them out to the driveway, then put more coal on to keep producing heat during the day.

    My grandfather had to keep his hundreds of white leghorn hens inside and their cotes heated with potbellied stoves when it went well below freezing, otherwise they would stop laying. We had to keep our 30 or so barred rock hens warm as well. The pigs didn’t stray from the pig house. Domestic pigs are not well furred like their wild ancestors; their fat keeps them insulated from the cold.

    In the late 1940s there were a couple of winters when it got so cold Long Island Sound would freeze over to about a quarter mile out from shore and you could walk on it. Many of us youngsters did just that. No one fell through the ice to my knowledge, although it was treacherous at times. As long as there were winds and waves it would remain liquid, but come a quiet night at 15 degrees and the Sound’s near-shore water would freeze in a jiffy.

    Sea ducks’ legs aren’t adapted to standing on the ice all night, the way Canada goose and puddle duck legs are. They are shorter and evolved for pushing them underwater. So when the Peconic Bay would start to freeze over in the 1940s and 1950s, the long-tailed ducks (a k a oldsquaw) would leave it and fly out to the Sound’s open water just before dusk. Canada geese on the South Fork often fly out and sit on open water in the ocean when their home ponds stay frozen over for weeks on end. Mute swans do the same, but prefer the Peconic Estuary’s open water to that of the ocean. Occasionally one will get semi-caught in the ice and have to struggle to break out.

    There is a well-founded story of a red fox reaching Gardiner’s Island from mainland East Hampton during a frigid winter in the Great Depression era by walking across the ice. One red fox does not a family make and today the island is foxless.

    Cold, ice, and snow cover affect overwintering birds in strange ways. On Saturday afternoon, a gang of male robins with bright red-orange breasts stormed into my yard and attacked the privet berries with a vengeance. Some starlings joined them. Privet berries are a least preferred dietary item for most birds, but the fact that they stay on the branches well into the spring makes them the choice of last resort.    There were near gale-force winds at the time and the robins would rarely perch for more than a second or so. They would spend as much time hovering while picking off the individual dark blue berries as perching and feeding. Apparently they and the cedar waxwings, starlings, and yellow-rumped warblers had already removed the more preferred juniper berries from the eastern red cedars scattered around.

    White-throated sparrows and juncos were feeding on leftover, still-on-the-stalks aster seed from my bountiful crop of white wood asters. Again, they save them for the last moment, preferring the birdseed put out by my neighbors, but sometimes covered over by snow that falls at night. Through it all, they kept their spirits high. When the sun shone brightly for a while on Sunday while it was still several degrees below freezing, the Carolina wrens and tufted titmice even managed to belt out several territorial songs, as if to show that their spirits had not been damped by the rigors of winter.

    Iceboats have been sailing the Great South Bay ice for weeks now. Skaters have wiped the rust off the blades and, after clearing the snow from the ice on many South Fork ponds, have been having a great time slipping and sliding back and forth over it.

    I look out my living room window at Noyac Bay and all I see is white. Notwithstanding the daily communiqués on the news about global warming, this is turning out to be a winter of the kind we had in the old days. It will certainly be one to remember. I wonder if the waterfowl, deer, squirrels, and winter birds that make it through to March will perk up come January 2015 and think to themselves, yes, it’s bad out, but nothing like last winter!

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

    At first, the sound made me bolt up out of a deep sleep and reach for something to defend the house against an intruder, but now, I simply roll over and reach again for the arms of Morpheus. It’s only a deer eating the ivy off the cedar shakes, and ivy’s not good for the shingles.

    It’s what happens when snow covers the deer’s usual browse. The nibbling came again last night and before Morpheus took me back to dreamland, I thought about snow, the sight, sound, feel, and even the smell of it. I love snow, maybe because I was born in upstate New York during the blizzard of ’47.

    I like the way it changes the landscape, our perception of things, like the unusually low, full moon tide earlier this week that allowed one to walk back in time, out onto the rock reef in Montauk and view the cliffs and dunes, far away like they appeared when the beach was as broad, even at high tide. 

    In these parts, and especially in more urban areas, folks moan about snow. It paralyzes roadways, eats into budgets, closes schools, waaaaa!

    There was a time when I spent winters in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and like other places in the mountain West, snow, deep and continuous snow, was, and is, the norm. We would see the storms coming via the news channel from Blackfoot-Pocatello just over the Tetons in Idaho. You could smell it. What is the smell? Ozone, perhaps the smell of pine and rocks captured and carried by the snow?

    As it began to fall, the local radio would advise people to get to where they were going. If we were skiing — feeling, more than seeing our way down — word would pass around the mountain. The road back to town would likely be closed before long.

    Not a bad thing. There was one night spent sleeping on the floor of the Mangy Moose. Upon waking, I looked out the window and watched as a drift began to move. Out from under five feet of snow emerged two malamute dogs yawning awake in the morning sun. And there was the night I awoke in the back of a pickup buried under four huskies.

    The wild animals came down out off the mountains and foothills when the snow got deep. The elk herd gathered close together in the valley. Eagles watched from the treetops. Antelope pushed through the snow to find food, got their footing on roads until the plows came through and buried them. Coyotes pounced up and down on their forefeet to root out the mice and rabbits they heard or smelled beneath the snow. Huge moose wandered the roads of Jackson, or bedded down beside a car that had become a mound.

    Snow fell in feet until it buried the house that I shared with my friend Bob (Wheels) Barrows and Laurel, his pretty, red-haired wife who hailed from the California desert and used “gooder” in place of “better.” You felt enwombed, cocooned. The world was muffled, all its edges swaddled in cotton.

    Right about then, the deer must have quit the ivy. I slept until wind woke me at dawn, and the snow was falling once again. 

    Sunday was friendly. At four in the afternoon, the Viking Starship returned to Montauk Harbor after a long day on a calm sea — cold, but calm and mostly sunny. Capt. Carl Forsberg smiled down from the Starship’s wheelhouse at the 80 booted, knit-hatted, and well-bundled anglers departing with coolers stocked with cod fillets. They had the look of a day well spent.

    An hour earlier I was skating on Fort Pond. The pond had not frozen like that in four years, solid except the spot in the center where it almost never freezes, where the underground spring refreshes the pond and the birds hang out. But otherwise, the ice was smooth and hard and I skated from Kirk Park on the south end all the way to Industrial Road, a good half-mile and back.

    Then I skated around with no direction. What a wonderful invention, skates, like the wheel in a way. It’s good to be friction-free even if one’s sliding resembles a curling stone more than the Olympian, triple-toe-looping figure skaters, hockey players, and short-track speeders competing in Sochi. 

    The kids had been on the pond most of the day, a group of about 12, skating along together, aimless like myself, the younger ones trying to keep up, a hockey stick or two, a dog, two bicycles, a few firecrackers that punctuated the stillness every now and then. A father had built a fire on the ice, a grill set on top of the wood. He was cooking hotdogs and there was a pot of hot chocolate. The kids had eaten much earlier. I, Norman Rockwell, accepted one of the two remaining dogs on a toasted roll. The chef said, “Wait,” took back the dog, placed a piece of cheese on it, and handed it back. I skated away eating the best cheese dog in America.

    An hour before that, I rode my bike with three friends from Lazy Point down Napeague Meadow Road, with its listing telephone poles — a lone fox way out on the snowy flats — to the ocean, scaring a blue heron into the air as we neared the railroad tracks. We peddled back across the highway and tracks, meandered around Lazy Point, and came to a road end. In the bushes, dirty, and nearly covered with vines was an old sign. It was a Town of East Hampton posting advising shellfishermen that a permit was required.

    It began: “Have you a shellfish permit?”

    Not, “WARNING — clamming without a permit is a violation of statute number 8675945, paragraph B” or, “Shellfishing without a permit is punishable by a fine of $10,000 and a mandatory prison sentence of no less than 20 years.”

    No, the sign was from a time gone by, the spare syntax said as much. We don’t speak like that anymore. It was put there by the East Hampton Town Trustees, the town’s oldest governing body, founded in 1686. And, while the sign did not read, “Have ye a shellfish permit?” its author seems to have had a homier, more neighborly mindset.

    “Have you a shellfish permit?” The sign was addressing good people, gently informing them, reminding them, suggesting that perhaps they’d left their permit at home. Thank you for checking. 

    Coolers full of cod, a hotdog cooked over a wood fire on a frozen pond, and a sign from another time that read: “Sunday was friendly.”

    “The seas will turn red,” it prophesizes in the Bible, having to do with the anticipated Armageddon. The seas are turning red, not with blood, but with red tide phytoplankton. They’re also turning brown, purple, all of the colors in the spectrum except green for the same reason. And it all has to do with more and more nitrogen products entering the seawater with each passing day. Seven billion-plus humans, more than half of whom live only a few miles from any one of the four world oceans, produce an awful lot of nitrogen compounds as waste products. Those wastes eventually reach the water.

    There are nitrogen compounds in the air; some of ours come all the way from China. When it rains, nitrogen compounds get into the water either directly or indirectly. Mammals excrete urea, birds and reptiles excrete uric acid, even fish and marine organisms excrete nitrogenous wastes.

    The earth’s atmosphere is 80 percent nitrogen gas. Nitrogen is as important as oxygen and carbon dioxide for growing protoplasm, the stuff of life. Amino acids contain nitrogen atoms. They are turned into proteins. If we tried to live on a diet without proteins we would first become weak and flabby, then we would die an agonizing death.

    In the cities and other densely populated communities, when we urinate, the urine goes down a hole into a series of pipes and tubes, and eventually through an outfall pipe into the nearest large body of water, in the case of New York City, into the Atlantic Ocean. In Albany, it first goes into the Hudson River, then into the ocean. They call the oceans “sinks” because eventually everything runs into them.

    Phytoplankton are single-celled organisms that make up the bottom layer of the marine food chain. They are made from proteins. When each divides into two daughter cells — yes, blame it on the women — the population doubles. The more nitrogen in the water, the faster they double. Dividing at a rate of every 24 hours, one phytoplankton, say, a diatom, becomes a population of 1,024 diatoms after 10 days, and if none are eaten, more than a half a million after 20 days. Even if half are eaten by zooplankton and filter-feeding shellfish and finfish, a quarter million are left to continue to multiply at the same daily doubling rate.

    Many of the phytoplankton that produce colorful tides also synthesize poisons. When they are consumed in large quantities by higher forms of sea life, that sea life can get very sick and even die. The same can be said for the highest form of life, us. If we eat mussels or clams that have been feeding on poisonous phytoplankton, we can die. Paralytic shellfish poison from eating shellfish that have been feeding on poisonous phytoplankton can be fatal to humans. That is why many coastal states such as California, where red tide is common, have signs posted telling humans not to eat mussels harvested from their waters.

    An even more profound problem arises when the phytoplankton, as was the case of the brown tide organisms in our local waters in the mid-1980s, become so numerous that they remove all of the oxygen from the water. Then they die, too, but take fish and other marine creatures with them. When the phytoplankton crop dies en masse, any oxygen left in the water is removed by the breakdown of the dead plankton cells into molecules of detritus.

    An overabundance of nitrates in the water leads to a different kind of calamity. Eelgrass is a flowering plant, not a seaweed, that grows on the bottom of shallow estuarine bodies. Eelgrass meadows are the best of all sea bottom habitat types, utilized by a host of different fishes, including winter flounder and other important marine organisms, for spawning. It is a favorite food of many waterfowl, including goldeneye, brant, and Canada geese.

    But it has a peculiar weakness for nitrogenous nutrients. It can’t stop itself from overindulging. It takes them up day and night until it runs out of carbohydrates to burn and literally dwindles down to nothing. That is most likely the reason for the disappearance of the major eelgrass bed in Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton. For year after year it thrived just off the Springy Banks shore, marking of the edge of the harbor’s southwestern part. Then all of a sudden a few years ago, it disappeared in a matter of a few weeks.

    Springy Banks, as the name implies, is always weeping groundwater out onto the shore and into the shallows seaward of it. It provided freshwater from spring holes for local Indians prior to occupation by settlers from Europe. When the town’s Natural Resources Department sampled the water oozing up along that shore in the late 1980s it was found to be contaminated with fecal coliforms and rich in nitrogenous wastes. Why? Houses with conventional septic systems lined the banks. The increase over the years from more and bigger houses and their summer occupancies produced more and more urine. The eelgrass most likely ate themselves to death.

    A son of mine recently moved from Los Angeles to Nevada City in northeast California, not too far from Lake Tahoe and the Nevada state border. His new county, Nevada County, mandates septic systems and septic fields that remove nitrogen products from the waste stream. A day-and-night monitoring system hooked into the county’s Health Department by telephone lets the county know if something is amiss. It cost about $30,000 to purchase and install. It’s been working for more than a year now and is still turning out almost nitrogen-less wastewater. Not a bad investment, some garages here cost that much.

    What to do, what to do? Anthony Towhill, a land use attorney from Riverhead, once said at a Sag Harbor Village meeting that we were being Della Femina-ized, alluding to the large impact one individual had on the South Fork in a short span of time. Right now we are being Farrell-ized at a great pace which has a different impact. Lots of big McMansions spring up here and there, each with a conventional septic system, each with more than one bathroom and lots of capacity for accommodating humans and their guests during high times in the Hamptons, mostly in the summer.

    Conventional septic systems involve massive concrete rings placed underground (out of sight!) fed by a septic tank settling out solids and receiving human waste products, gray water from washing, etc., and anything else the homeowner or renter wants to put down the drain. The wastewater percolating out through the holes of the concrete rings leaches down and eventually makes its way into the groundwater, the freshwater aquifer, as it were, from which we derive all of our drinking water.

    Here on the South Fork, we are surrounded by lapping waters. All groundwater eventually leads to the seas. New houses, especially those monstrous ones should have septic systems that remove nitrogen and other harmful chemicals or are hooked up to community treatment facilities or septic treatment plants prior to any wastewater entering the ground.

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

    Real life is seldom far removed from its cartoon version. The current plague of tattoos suggests the distance is shrinking.

    Elmer Fudd came to mind the other day.

    I was driving out to Montauk Point on Friday, past Deep Hollow Ranch, up the hill to the east overlook with its panoramic view of Oyster Pond and the shores of southern New England beyond it to the north. Halfway down the hill I spied an S.U.V. parked on the side of the road. Suddenly, a deer leapt across the road between the vehicle and me. As I passed, the two men inside, one holding a thermos, were laughing. The story unfolded in a flash.

    It was late afternoon on the last day of shotgun season. The men were hunters just back from the woods tired, deer-less, and, they were acknowledging, Fudd-like, that the deer, its white tail flipping the equivalent of the bird, had won.

    I drove onward to the Point to check the waves. Looking south I saw the guide boat that’s been taking duck hunters out after scoters all season. The boat was anchored about 200 yards offshore of Turtle Cove, its string of black decoys bobbing nearby. I walked into the cove, watched the waves for a while — a peaceful scene, the guns silent aboard the duck boat.

    I continued around the Lighthouse, hiking its rock bulwarks to the northeast side of the peninsula and out of sight of the guide boat. There, stretched toward the horizon, floated a raft of scoters measuring at least an acre in diameter, Daffy gloating among them.

    It made me think of a scene — help me here — I think it was Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd, or it could have been Daffy and Yosemite Sam. In any case, one of them was duck hunting. Daffy had come up behind, shadowing the gunslinger step for step. Finally, he prods the hunter’s butt with a stick and says: “Shtick ’em up, or I’ll blow your brains out.”

    “What’s up Doc?” Are we the hunters or the hunted? I think both. We’re fast becoming caricatures of ourselves. The Looney Tunes are coming for us: Game Boy, Sarah Palin, Duck Dynasty, Dennis Rodman, Justin Bieber, the Wolf of Wall Street, Super Bowl, Governor Christie, Congress, Bad Ink, on and on. They’re creeping up our legs, our backs, our necks. If we’re not careful our hearts will soon be lost upon our sleeves. That’s all folks.