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].

    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.

    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].

    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.

    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.

    From April 8 through 10, the Montauk Yacht Club will host a meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Marine Fishery Council, one of the nation’s eight bodies created in 1976 to oversee marine resources.

    The Mid-Atlantic Council manages 12 species that include fluke (summer flounder), porgies (scup), striped bass, and tilefish, all important to Long Island fishermen. Montauk is homeport to New York’s most productive commercial and recreational fishing industries, businesses that pour many millions of dollars into the local economy each year.

    For a few decades now, our local fisheries have been well represented by two Montauk women, Laurie Nolan, now a state delegate to the Mid-Atlantic Council who is active in Montauk’s tilefish fishery, and Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association. Both are expected to be on hand.

    Fishermen, especially commercial fishermen, go about their businesses in the background of the more trendy and real estate-based notion of the Montauk and East End lifestyle. This is a bit strange, because from an economic standpoint, Montauk’s commercial industry — despite its many challenges — has kept pace, or nearly so, with landed business. Its future is uncertain, however.

    We seem to be consumed of late by what the sea takes with its rising. We tend to lose sight of what it provides. The setting, in Montauk, for the upcoming council meeting, and its agenda, serve as a reminder.

    Early on the first day of the meeting, a workshop presented by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will discuss offshore wind leasing, that is, the leasing of ocean bottom for the creation of offshore windmills. Fishermen have seen wind farms, located in prime fishing grounds, as a threat. Proponents say that the sustainable energy industry and fishing industry can get along. This workshop is guaranteed to generate a gale of hot wind.

    In the afternoon of the first day, members of the council’s executive committee will discuss their position on the reauthorization of the Magnuson- Stevens Act, this country’s body of fishery management laws. Many in the fishing industry believe the act needs to be totally revamped in order to curtail waste generated by current management schemes.

    Tuesday afternoon, council members will discuss the management of river herring and shad. Both species are vital as a food source for the fish that prey on them, as well as humans.

    Butterfish and tilefish are on the April 9 agenda. Tilefish are especially important to the Montauk economy. Montauk fishermen pioneered the longline method of catching tilefish, a bottom dweller that lives far offshore. Montauk fishermen have also taken responsibility for managing the resource to sustainable levels. The council will adopt recommendations for 2015 through 2017 harvest levels during the meeting.

    Sportfishermen call them porgies around here. Market fishermen call them scup. Whatever you call them, they are extremely important to the sport and commercial industries. Modifications to the council’s scup management plan will be discussed on the afternoon of April 9.

    Laurie Nolan said on Tuesday that local fishermen should attend the scup meeting where tweaking of the southern gear-restricted area will be given a going over.

    Between 4 and 5 p.m. on the 9th, “Who Fishes There?” — a study to identify areas important to specific fishing communities, species, fishing gears, and seasons — will be discussed. The aim is to establish a baseline of commercial fishing effort up and down the Atlantic Coast. 

    On the last day of the conference, managers will get into the thorny issue of bycatch reporting, that is, the tallying by fishermen of species caught while they are targeting other species. Mandatory reporting is seen as vital to obtaining an accurate picture of stock abundance.

    Fishermen and managers will also tackle an even thornier issue on the last day of the conference, that being the “observer program,” a system of putting government spotters (paid for by the fishing industry) on board fishing boats to validate what fish are caught, how many are caught, how they are caught.  

    Fisheries management, the protection and utilization of critters that live unseen in their natural environment, is part science, part wizardry, and always frustrating to fishermen and managers alike. It is also vitally important to the East End’s economic well-being. Montauk welcomes the council meeting. Its full agenda can be found on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Council website.

    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.

    “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].

    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.”