This story begins at the East Hampton Town Airport, circa 2000, while I was serving as the town’s natural resources director. The town had received a grant to construct a fence around the airport at no small cost to keep deer off the runways. A deer vs. plane collision spurred the town to take steps to prevent similar accidents in the future. The contractor put up a wonderful fence. Only one problem, the deer could walk down the road from either the north or the south and enter the airport at their leisure the way vehicles and people do.

    I was familiar with the effective cattle guard grates placed on many roads in California and various other western states, including the ones on Highway 1, the main coastal artery running from California’s border with Mexico on the south to its border with Oregon on the north.

    I priced them out. A Utah company built reinforced ones for roads at a cost of around $15,000, not counting shipping. This seemed a reasonable cost, as the fence itself cost nearly $500,000. Two cattle guards might prevent deer from entering at will.

    The town superintendent of highways at the time gave me a loud “no,” worried about the possibility of pedestrian and bicycle accidents that might occur and the expensive liabilities that might ensue. An alternative plan was put into action — the town got a state nuisance permit, administered by my office, to take deer on airport grounds day or night. Deer continued to enter airport fields. Some of them were dispatched by nuisance hunters, to wit, members of the town police.

    Animal control has always been somewhat of a problem in East Hampton and on the South Fork in general. Nuisance trappers and exterminators dealt with the raccoons, opossums, foxes, squirrels, and rats, but their state licenses didn’t cover deer.

    Birds around airports could also present problems. At about the same time the fence was installed, I took a tour with an inspector from the United States Department of Agriculture’s office that handled nuisance wildlife at airports. When the she saw the numerous bluebird boxes which had been put up along the fields’ edges by Karylin Jones and myself three years earlier, she admonished me and said they should be removed. They never were (my fault), and more were added periodically in future years, leading to a healthy build-back of the bluebird population, which by the 1980s had been reduced to a few South Fork pairs. As far as I can tell, there has never been a collision between a bluebird and an airplane at the airport.

    The same department recently began shooting snowy owls at Kennedy airport during a bumper fly-down from the Arctic tundra beginning in November. Complaints were lodged from several quarters, including other federal entities, and the shooting program came to a standstill, replaced by a trap-and-removal program. The bluebird incident was the first time I became aware of the U.S.D.A. having such a role, as it seemed that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would do a better and more humane job at it. But when I later realized that the U.S. Geological Survey does most of America’s surveys of fish and wildlife, I realized how the U.S.D.A.’s role in wildlife control could have come to be.

    In the area of animal husbandry and farming, the same U.S.D.A. advised farmers to use lead arsenate in the 1930s and ’40s to deal with weeds and vermin, as that salt was a combination pesticide and herbicide. Today, half the nation’s farm fields, including those in East Hampton and the rest of the East End, have high arsenic and lead concentrations as a result.

    Now their sharpshooters are about to take on the deer here using high-powered rifles with night scopes and silencers. (No need to wake up the residents in the middle of the night; they have to go work the next morning.)

    There is a perceived deer problem. I guess there is some truth to the notion when you consider the size of the Long Island deer population in the World War II 1940s and its number now. That is one of the reasons the East Hampton Group for Wildlife hired a wildlife population consulting group, led by a wildlife specialist, Frank Verret, to undertake a scientific population count of the town’s deer early in the spring of 2006. The Natural Resources Department assisted them. The team spent two weeks here and counted 3,293 deer. Then the town hired a consultant to undertake a second deer count in 2013, this one from the air using special cameras and night-vision observations. This count tallied 877 deer throughout the town. Both counts were science-based and both are considered to be accurate snapshots of the East Hampton deer population in two different years. What could account for the drop in population from 3,293 to 877, a 73-percent decrease, over a span of seven years?

    I will try to explain. In 2005 there were only four parcels in East Hampton Town, other than those cooperative stated-county-town areas such as Hither Woods, where deer hunting by shotgun and bow and arrow were allowed, the largest of which was the Grace Estate nature preserve in Northwest. My office was in charge of all of the town nature preserves at that time, and when I discovered hunters hunting on town lands where deer hunting was prohibited, I had the department put up no deer hunting signs.

    Well you can imagine the uproar that arose from Montauk Point to the town line on the west. Such uproar caught the attention of the town board and a councilman took it upon himself to deal with the situation. He instructed the Natural Resources Department to look at all of the town’s nature preserves, which today number more than 400, and see which ones could meet the criteria for legal big game hunting — 500 feet from a road or buildings. We put together a list of 34, including the four already listed in the town code, and the board enacted a local law expanding considerably the town-owned acreage open to deer hunting.

    Yes, lots of deer succumb each year to vehicle hits, a few other drown or die from sickness, but I am fairly certain that local deer hunters and licensed nuisance hunters such as those covering the airport are largely responsible for the large drop in numbers. I was a hunter myself early on and I am not opposed to licensed hunters taking deer on town lands because they know what they are doing and hunt for meat as much as for sport. Our local hunters are as skilled as our local fishermen and in a very big way control the overpopulations of waterfowl such as Canada geese and mallards, as well as deer, cottontails, turkeys, and other upland game.

    I am also for contraception, which has come a very long way since the Fire Island deer control program of 1995, which I participated in and videotaped. Until the authorities choose that route, if we let the town’s hunters continue to balance out the deer population by allowing deer hunting in both the town and village, in my opinion, there is no need to repeat a scene reminiscent of those many carried out by the Nazis in Europe in World War II or by Stalin in the Soviet Union prior to that time. The Movie­tone news clips and newspaper photos of which still burn in my mind.

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

    On Feb. 8, the Atlantic City Boat Show will present a series of seminars on striped bass fishing. Greg Myerson will be there with the plastic mount of the striper he caught in August 2011 off the coast of Connecticut. At 81.88 pounds, and angled according to the rules of the International Game Fish Association, Myerson’s lunker bass was, and remains, the world-record catch.

    There is a photo of the angler holding the fish horizontally in his arms, the broad tail draped over his arms down to his thigh. So big was the fish, that if the photo had been backlit so that man and fish appeared in silhouette it would look as though he were carrying a mermaid that was sleeping or had died a tragic death.

    Luck had nothing to do with it. Myerson was born to fish. At age 8, he plucked the feathers from his grandmother’s dead parrot to fashion his first lure. As time went on, he became addicted to striped bass, and in this he is not alone. He studied their habitats and hunting habits. He learned that lobsters are among their favorite foods, and this is where it gets a little weird.

    Myerson suspected that bass were drawn to lobsters by the sound they make as they move along the ocean floor. If he could mimic the sound, he might be able fool big bass. Instead of matching the hatch, he would match the rattle of lobster armor. In order to capture it, he placed a stethoscope to the side of an aquarium to listen to the scuttling of crayfish. Here’s where it gets weirder.

    How to replicate the sound? There must have been a great number of attempts, but by deduction, the angling Sherlock found that crack vials, with the right number of BBs placed inside, produced the same click and rattle as a lobster striding along the bottom in full battle dress. I know what you’re thinking. No, Myerson claimed he found the small vials at his job site. In any case, he succeeded in creating and marketing a sinker/lobster-rattle combination.

    I find the back story to Mr. Myerson’s record catch somewhat troubling. For instance, how exactly did his grandmother’s parrot perish? And, of course, the ease with which discarded crack vials came to hand is a serendipity that speaks volumes about society at large.

    According to Myerson, the big bass was caught using a live eel as bait. As East End fishermen know well, eels are also high on the striped bass menu.

    It’s not clear whether the crack-vial sinker was part of the fishing line’s terminal gear on that moonlit night in August of 2011, but if it was, if the wise old fish was tricked into believing it had come upon the ultimate prey, a freakish, Frankensteinian lobster-eel, a Gorgon, I fear it’s proof that what goes around comes around — a bad omen.

    You see, the Gorgons of Greek mythology were monsters covered with impenetrable scales, hair of living snakes, sharp fangs, and a beard. They were said to live in the far west, near the sea. They guarded the underworld, and those who beheld them turned to stone, or these days — and in the case of the world-record striped bass — plastic. Can you hear the clink and rattle of crack vials?

    Last Saturday, as a part-time participant in the New York State Waterfowl Count for the first time in years, I accompanied the Rubinstein sisters, Vicki Bustamante, and 12-year-old Hannah Mirando from Montauk. Readers may remember that Hannah also was a key observer in the 100-plus-year-old Montauk Christmas Bird Count held on Dec. 14 of last year.

    It was a pleasant day with an on-again, off-again stiff west wind. Our party’s territory consisted of Hook, Georgica, Town, Wickapogue, Fairfield, Kellis, Sagg, and Poxabogue Ponds and Bridgehampton’s north-south chain of ponds ending with Short’s Pond by the Atlantic Golf Club just north of Scuttlehole Road.

    It was also a big day for waterfowl hunting. Some of us were fooled by sets of geese and black duck decoys that we studied via our scopes and binoculars for longish times before we realized they were not the real thing — they didn’t move! About 2 in the afternoon, I was the lone observer at Kellis Pond just west of the Bridgehampton Commons when a flock of about 100 Canada geese flew in from the west, circled around and approached goose decoys on the west edge of the pond. Three of them made a pass at the decoys and were about to set in when three blasts from a blind on the edge of a shore resounded, one goose fell, the others all took off to the east. I stayed to watch a Labrador retriever emerge from the blind, swim out about 100 feet, and retrieve the downed goose.

    As per usual on such counts, Canada geese stole the show. Our party counted at least 9,000 of them, the biggest collection feeding in the grass farm field along the east side of Beach Lane in Wainscott where they numbered 3,504.

    Hook Pond had 1,750 and Shorts Pond another 1,200 or so. The latter venue was the last examined and geese kept settling in all the time, raising a loud cacophony from both the water and the sky above.

    There were 12 pure white snow geese grouped together among the horde of Canadas on the pond; they were quiet, apparently napping. When it’s not frozen, Shorts Pond and the two little ponds on the opposite side of the road are always productive in the winter and Saturday was no exception. There were also at least 10 green-winged teals, three American coots (not ducks), two American wigeons, three black ducks, 31 mallards, and 1 black duck-mallard hybrid.

    In the 1940s and 1950s, counts such as ours yielded many more black ducks than mallards. On this day mallards outgunned blacks, 253 to 159. Like Canada geese, lots of mallards breed locally and stay around during the winter, while only a few black ducks breed this far south. The Nature Trail on David’s Lane in East Hampton yielded the most mallards, 165, along with 4 mallard-black hybrids, while the largest collection of black ducks — 86 — were at Fairfield Pond in Sagaponack by the ocean off Daniel’s Lane. (I wonder if they get a kick out of hanging in the shadow of Sagaponack’s and the South Fork’s largest mansion.)

    Canada geese outnumbered all of the other waterfowl — some 26 different species — taken together by almost 12 to 1. They are by far our most common waterfowl on the South Fork, apart from the sea ducks such as the scoters, more than 40,000 of which were tallied on the Montauk Count. On Saturday, however, they were lacking. Our group counted only 156 scoters belonging to all three species.

    As for the mergansers, the species with the highest number was the hooded merganser. We counted 60. Red-breasted mergansers, or sheldrakes, which are generally the most frequent of the lot, came to only 54, while common mergansers accounted for 8, all of which were in their usual hangout, East Hampton’s Hook Pond. There were 82 ruddy ducks, 65 of which were in one of their favorite spots, Wainscott Pond; another 17 were found in Sagg Pond. Buffleheads, which do well in all kinds of water bodies tallied 37, with the most — 24 — counted in Sagg Pond. No brant, scaup, redheads, wood ducks, long-tailed ducks (or oldsquaw), or common goldeneye were observed, no doubt because our territory didn’t include any of the Peconic Estuary’s waters.

    Other duck species becoming more and more uncommon with each passing year are the canvasback, blue-winged teal, shoveler, and pintail. Only four, two, two, and one of each were seen, respectively. Perhaps the day’s rarest finds were the five white-fronted geese seen at Pots and Kettles and the two tundra swans (a k a whistling swans) on Hook Pond.

    Speaking of swans, 69 mute swans were counted in five ponds, the most — 45 — in Sagg Pond. What is this cockamamie idea that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has in mind with respect to the mute swan population? Some authorities want to eliminate them from the wild in New York State by 2025. I’ve been keeping a close eye on this swan’s South Fork population for close to 40 consecutive years now. If anything, there were at least three times as many of them around in the 1970s than there are today. They don’t migrate and except when inland water bodies are frozen solid, they are easy to find and easy to observe. They are one of the country’s largest birds.

    Who really cares that they are exotic? They’ve been here since the Civil War, and that’s a very long time. They don’t multiply like Canada geese, which, incidentally, are quite native. They are what ecologists call “naturalized.” Let them be, I say! They are an entrenched part of the freshwater ecosystem.

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Larry Penny can be reached at [email protected].

    I suffer from multibibliophrenia, an often debilitating condition caused by reading several books at one time. I can’t help being seduced by attractive cover art or rave review blurbs even though I know I’ll be cheating on the book I’ve already opened and committed myself to.

    Guilty pleasure is pleasure nonetheless, however, and most recently I have been engaged in serial liaisons with Raul Hendrickson’s “Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He loved in Life, and Lost,” “Beautiful Ruins” by Jess Walter, “All for a Few Perfect Waves” by David Rensin, and last, but far from least, “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking.

    The beauty of multibibliophrenia is, for wont of a better description, cross-pollination. For instance, “All for a Few Perfect Waves” is a biography about Miki Dora, the black knight of Malibu, nicknamed Da Cat, a graceful wave rider and surfing anti-hero who railed against the commercialization of surfing, and who was not above a little cat burglary and credit card fraud to fund his world travels.

    “A Brief History of Time” is Stephen Hawking’s heroic attempt to bring the latest in pure physics within reach of the 99.9 percent of the rest of us challenged by long division. He gives us Aristotle’s view of the universe, then Galileo’s, and Isaac Newton’s laws, and then Albert Einstein — and that’s when it got interesting because Albert figured out that the speed of light was the only constant, which meant that space and time were not.

    He explains the dimension of space-time, how it’s curved, and how the inner workings of the sub-atomic universe — which hold the secrets to our place in outer space — sometimes act as particles, other times like waves. Waves. I knew it, and so did Miki Dora.

    I’m sure Ernest Hemingway suspected as much as he piloted his boat Pilar out into the blue waves of the Gulf Stream from Key West, Bimini, and Havana with friends including Archibald MacLeish, John and Katy Dos Passos, Bror Blixen, and Isak Dinesen. Hemingway was a fisherman, one of the first big-game fisherman to hunt the giant bluefin tuna that migrated close to shore off the coast of Bimini, and massive marlin off Cuba. Hendrickson tells of Hemingway’s love for Pilar, of the sea, of living, which he squeezed the life (including his own) out of. A beautiful ruin.

    Jess Walter’s “Beautiful Ruins” is set on the Mediterranean coast of Italy in a tiny town inhabited by fishermen and the Adequate View Hotel, whose proprietor gets caught up in a love affair between a beautiful actress and Richard Burton (Eddy Fisher had flown to Rome in hopes of winning his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, back from Burton) during the filming of “Cleopatra.” Equally tragic and comic, the plot turns around a handful of fascinating characters with the author skewering Hollywood in the process.

    Speaking of which, I saw “Wolf of Wall Street” Monday night. It’s one of the most bloviated, gratuitous, unedited, pandering, derivative pieces of junk to come out of Tinsel Town in some time — a waste of Leonardo DiCaprio’s great talent. By contrast, and also playing at the East Hampton Cinema this week, “American Hustle” is the real deal. Sorry, just had to get that out. Guess winter’s got me multicinemaphrenic too.

    It’s cold. We can’t go out on the water like Hemingway on Pilar or Da Cat on his surfboard. We must turn inward and travel through book-wormholes in Hawking’s space-time continuum to 1930s Havana, 1960s southern California, and the Mediterranean.

    And Hawking writes about how Einstein’s theories prove that time passes more slowly the farther you get from Earth’s mass. The higher you are, the younger you are, relative to your age if you stayed grounded. But I think that’s only legal in Colorado.

    Two weeks and 109 years ago, Roy Latham and his farmer brothers undertook the first East End Christmas bird count centered in Orient. On Dec. 28, 2013, the Orient Christmas count was re-enacted for the 100th-plus time. None of the original cast of characters is still around to take part in this century’s Christmas counts. After the Lathams did it for 50 years or so, Paul Stoutenburgh took it over and carried it on for the next 27 years. Finally, 20 years ago, Mary Laura Lamont, who rangers at the William Floyd Estate and Fire Island National Seashore, became the count compiler and has run it ever since.

    While in Latham’s day there were only five or six birders covering the entire 15-mile diameter count circle, on the 28th there were a record 55 observers, as many women as men. They tallied 118 different species, only one less than the count record for 1997-98 and about 10 more than were counted on the Montauk count two Saturdays earlier. On the Montauk count there was a fierce snowstorm. The weather was well above freezing for the Orient count. There was a stiff southwesterly wind, however, and looking into it through binocs and scopes presented a challenge. Better to look downwind at such times.

    The Rubinstein sisters, Barbara and Karen, and I covered the waters and the land around Cedar Point County Park in East Hampton’s Northwest. Other South Fork parties covered Sag Harbor, Barcelona, North Haven, and Noyac, especially the Morton Wildlife Refuge. Sea ducks, gulls, starlings, and crows always total the most, but this year American robins joined the most numerous ranks. At least 1,000 were counted. My group tallied 150 or so and as far as we could tell, they were all males. The sexes segregate until it’s time to stake out territories and breed.

    When you take a walk in the vicinity of some mature eastern red cedars, from which the county park derives its name, you will find very few gray cedar berries among the green branches. Blame the robins for that. One hopes that there are enough holly berries, bayberries, and other winter fruit to last them until the worms pop out of the ground come spring. That same fruit supports a winter population of bluebirds and cedar waxwings, thus the “cedar” in their name.

    Another thrush, the official state bird of New York, the eastern blue bird, was also well represented. We saw four in the old Camp St. Regis athletic field off Mile Hill Road and almost every other party had at least one or two. The most bluebirds were seen in the Nature Conservancy’s Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island.

    There were two phoebes on the count, one that we saw along with the four bluebirds. Phoebes are flycatchers and almost exclusively insectivorous. How they managed to stay alive and look healthy at a time when almost no insects are active is puzzling. It is doubtful that they will be able to make it here until spring.

    This is the winter of the great snowy owl fly down. Altogether five were seen on the count. Mary Laura Lamont’s party covered Plum Island, where there were two. They were watching one when two peregrine falcons, male and female, kicked up a fuss nearby. It turns out that they were taking turns diving and screaming at a second snowy owl, which was cowering behind some driftwood. Finally, when it could no longer bear the harassment, it picked up and flew off towards Gardiner’s Island against a strong headwind. It got halfway there and turned around and came back, with the peregrines chasing all the while.

    A “count bird” is a species that has never been recorded on a previous count. There were three this time around, a rufous hummingbird on Plum Island and four red knots. The red knot is that sandpiper species that migrates to the arctic to breed in the late spring, then returns south come midsummer. They feed almost exclusively on horseshoe crab eggs along sandy shores on the way up, and that is one reason why horseshoe crabs are protected along most of the Atlantic Coast but especially in New Jersey. A third count bird was the black guillemot, spotted near Plum Island.

    We saw very few American goldeneye — “whistlers” in duck hunters’ lexicon, as they make a pulsating whistling with their wings when they fly, not unlike mute swans. They can be one of our most common sea ducks in the winter. This year two very rare-to-this-area Barrow’s goldeneyes, which breed mostly in northwestern America and Iceland, were counted in the Sag Harbor area. Also two of the world’s tiniest auks, or dovekies, were observed, one in the water off Sag Harbor, another in waters of the Morton Wildlife Refuge.

    While our party searched extensively for longspurs and snow buntings on the sands of Cedar Point spit, we came up with only one of the latter. However, on the North Fork snow buntings turned up in goodly numbers; at least 219 were counted. Two great egrets, one on each fork, decided to hang around and test the severity of the New Year’s winter. The four red-necked grebes, two on each fork, and the male and female harlequin ducks were a nice find. Disappointingly, however, there were no pintails, wood ducks, or teal on this year’s count.

    One looks at the large number of robins, the two egrets, the two phoebes, and the rufous hummingbird recorded, as well as some other warm-area birds, and wonders if we are not seeing signs of global warming right here on eastern Long Island. Maybe they are evolving to better stand the cold with each generation. While the egrets and blue herons can still find minnows to eat as long as the waters don’t freeze up solid, hummingbirds are nectar feeders. Where are the flowers with nectar to feed on?

    The results of all of the end-of-year counts, now a worldwide happening, give us the big picture of how birds are faring in general and which species are doing well, which worse. In the 1950s and 1970s when I went on these counts, there were many more men than women. It is promising that in the new millennium there are now as many female observers as males. Who knows, the next great field guide to the birds may well be authored by a woman.

    The following, by Capt. Ed Gifford, a licensed sea captain of East Hampton, whose “Glory of Sail” photos of classic ocean racing yachts can be seen at the Bruce Tait and Associates office on Bay Street in Sag Harbor, is an account of the first leg of his voyage aboard the sloop Coro Coro from Portsmouth, R.I., to Tahiti.

    In June, a shipmate friend of over 25 years, James Johnson, of Aspen, Colo., asked me to check out a boat he had been keeping his eye on, a 74-foot Royal Huisman Shipyard sloop, for a possible passage to Tahiti.

    So, on his behalf, I visited the shed at the Hinckley Yacht Yard in Portsmouth, R.I., where I found Coro Coro [its name deriving from the Scarlet Ibis’s call], a spectacular yacht of traditionally long and graceful lines, which had been languishing there for a few years without a captain and crew to put her through her paces.

    My friend bought her, and she was launched on Dec. 6. The next morning we started whipping her into shipshape for the first leg of our voyage to Tahiti, which would take us from Portsmouth to Saint Maarten in the eastern Caribbean, a 1,550-mile passage.

    On Dec. 23, we had a break in the weather, between a diminishing southwesterly and an approaching cold front from the northwest that promised 35-knot winds. We left Portsmouth in a dead calm just as a blinding fog was lifting. It wasn’t exactly the parting of the Red Sea, but a major stroke of good luck given the gale force southerly winds and the freezing northerly we were expecting.

    Moderate northerlies delivered us into the Gulf Stream, where I awoke Christmas morning at sunrise to the brightest, most colorful double rainbow I’d ever witnessed. It was a gift because being out in the North Atlantic in late December is a lonely business.

    It was bumpy in the Gulf Stream as we rolled side to side. A 20-pound basket of fruit — oranges and apples — literally exploded in the main cabin in the dead of night, a startling detonation that had me, asail in the square-rigger realms of Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey and Jack Sparrow of “The Pirates of the Caribbean,”  thinking that the powder locker had ignited. I was appeased somewhat on hearing the oranges and apples rolling on the floor in rhythm with the waves, but I was angry with West Marine, which had sold us the fruit basket, as well as foul-weather gear, for $400, and sea boots, all of which leaked — the foul-weather gear with the first wave to come over the bow, and the sea boots the first time the cockpit filled with water. Being wet in the North Atlantic’s subfreezing conditions is a dangerous propostion.

    We made an unplanned pit stop in Bermuda, which is more or less on the way from New England to the Caribbean — 635 miles from Portsmouth. We’d made it to Bermuda in four days — a decent time.

    A charming British seafaring island nation, Bermuda is surrounded by a treacherous reef. We cleared customs and immigration, drank some Gosling’s rum, cleaned the boat, did the laundry, bunkered fuel, had a nice dinner, and were out by 0600 hours the next morning, heading south into a controlling high pressure that was positioned south of us, its northeasterly winds gusting to 30 or more knots, which created an impressive stern wave in our wake. It is interesting to note that we were on a port tack the whole way, an uncommon occurence that eliminated maneuvering and made it very comfortable for the sailors — I was one — who had berths on the starboard side of the boat.

    On New Year’s Eve, I caught a 10-pound dorado — a few days earlier my shipmate David Smith, a Rocky Mountain fly fisherman, had caught a 12-pounder, his first-ever saltwater fish, which he cradled in his arms as its stunning iridescent blue and gold coloring faded with its life.

    As the old year ebbed away and the new one approached, we sailed through an ocean dark save for the glow that came from our phosphorescent wake under a stunning canopy of winter stars and constellations. 

    With the new year, we thanked Coro Coro for her protection thus far and drank a toast to those who help themselves in this world.

    Having eventually left the controlling southwesterly, we found the easterly Christmas trade winds a few days out of Bermuda, which gave us a great sailing angle for the final part of our passage to Saint Maarten. These easterly winds, which circle the globe, will take us through the Panama Canal and eventually into the deep South Pacific and Tahiti.

    We arrived in Saint Maarten on Jan. 2, after a nine-day passage. We are at the dock now, working 12-hour days, seven days a week, fixing, maintaining, etc. — a seemingly never-ending preparation for the next leg of our journey of discovery.

St. Barthelemy, French West Indies

    A late-afternoon tropical squall has passed through with a vengeance as though to erase the illusion, no, the truth, that this place is one of Nature’s finer creations despite its reputation as ground zero among Page Six’s archipelago of celebrity haunts.

    It’s a dry mountainous place with cacti, salt ponds, and a preponderance of wild goats, terrestrial turtles, and lizards, all of it surrounded by blue Caribbean sea. The Carib Indians called the island Ouanalao, “Lizard Island.” The roads are narrow and steep. Yesterday, while climbing one, our rented car approached a goat that was crossing. Defying gravity, the animal bounded up the side of a near-vertical cliff, raining small rocks onto our roof as it went. Pelicans soar. Small finches say shhhhh in the branches.

    The French language, more musical to my ears, perhaps because of my ignorance of it, complements the island’s sounds: the constant trade wind that inspires tall grass, latania palms, and beach grape to whisper and rattle their presence day and night. The waves hiss and thud on the shore, a blowhole sighs, and the sun is hot.

    La Select is an open-air bar, dockside in Gustavia, the island’s capital and harbor to some of the grandest yachts in the world. The watering hole is a salty, multilingual place frequented by locals and yacht crews and situated at an intersection of streets with stores whose contents could pay the national debt of several nations.

    Back to the rocks bouncing off the roof of the rented Hyundai like arrows off medieval body armor:

    It’s a fact, uncomfortable perhaps, but a fact nonetheless, that the beauty of St. Barth is protected by an armor of massive wealth. True, the French run a tight ship, but up until 2007 the island was a tax-free zone. For most of its history, the island was forgotten. Early on, its Carib natives dabbled in cannibalism, certainly a deterrent to settlement. It had little arable land, precious little freshwater, and so was virtually immune to French, English, and Dutch colonization. France wound up with it and Napoleon traded the island in exchange for warehouse space in Sweden during his Russian phase, but after a few years, Sweden gave it back as useless. In recent times, the international wealthy claimed the island for its beauty, for sure, but mostly for what it lacked — taxes.

    In place of resorts that have homogenized other islands into Disney versions of the Caribbean experience, beautiful villas cling to St. Barth’s precipitous mountainsides like its own tenacious goats. What hotels there are, are small, elegant, and casino-less.

    Of course there’s a downside, an underbelly. Despite the transforming efforts of human beings, nature rarely surrenders what comes naturally. The island still has little fresh water. For a time in the early ’70s, champagne was literally cheaper than water. What water it does have — except for the untold gallons of it imported in plastic bottles — comes via oil-guzzling desalination plants, many discretely custom fitted, Oz-like, to individual villas to supply the rain forest side of tropical splendor. 

    There are a few chinks in the armor of the mighty Euro. There would have to be for me to be here. Wine is relatively inexpensive and so is food at the super marché. Accommodations are another thing. Unless your pied a terre is free, you, and most of the world cannot afford to live here.

    One refreshing chink is La Select. The rum is cheap and the tables give one a catbird seat for the parade of yacht denizens, Russian oligarchs, French financiers, gods of Silicon Valley, and yes, Hollywood stars. 

    I’m sipping a Mount Gay, thinking of the island’s reefs, its surf, lizards, wild goats, diving seabirds, and glorious sand beaches, and so as I watch two women gliding down the Rue de Revolution (you can’t make it up) wearing diamond-studded Rolex watches, Louis Vuitton signature LV totes, strings of Bijoux la Mer Tahitian pearls, nips and tucks and see-through linen pants and blouses, I don’t think conspicuous opulence, I think St. Barth body armor. What the hell, let them eat cake.

    At Thanksgiving time I was with my wife, Julie, staying in the Bronx looking after her mother, Grace, who is 94 years old and was recuperating from an illness at Providence Rest at the edge of East­chester Bay just south of Pelham Bay Park. We parked in a restricted area and I stayed in the car with the motor running while Julie made a last-minute visit before we headed back to Sag Harbor. It was in a residential neighborhood called Country Club and mid-afternoon.

    I was watching two eastern gray squirrels hunt for food in the largish treed yards of two residences. The gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) is a member of the rodent family that ranges from the tip of Florida and south Texas all the way up to Alberta, Ontario, and the Canadian Maritime provinces and west from the Atlantic to the Dakotas, Kansas, and Nebraska. Gray squirrels are tree dwellers and the great prairies must have slowed their progress. They never got to the Rocky Mountains and never to California. The western gray squirrel, Sciurus griseus, probably got there from Asia by way of the ancient land bridge, Beringia, which linked Asia and North America during the height of the ice age when sea levels were lowest.

    These squirrels were very busy going here and there, climbing up and down trees when my eye caught something black moving at the edge of the house. It was a cat, and then I saw another. The cats and squirrels didn’t pay much attention to each other and at times were motionless side by side.

    Then I saw another black animal, presumably a cat, but a smaller one, and when I screwed up my eyes and took a closer look, it turned out to be a squirrel. It was joined by a second and except for their inky coloration they were of the same size as the gray squirrels and carried on similarly. I began to realize that I was a voyeur to the famous melanistic gray squirrels of New York City’s East Side and eastern Westchester County to the north.

    One could plainly see that the black squirrels were as much at home as the gray ones in that microhabitat of trees and lawns less than 200 yards from a tributary of Long Island Sound. There wasn’t much interaction between the grays and the blacks, but every once in a while one of the cats would take a swipe at one of the black ones.

    It turns out that the two colors keep to themselves with respect to reproduction, although in some other locations scattered across the Midwest and East some grays and blacks hybridize to give birth to brownish squirrels. According to several studies, two black squirrels never give rise to gray progeny; two grays never bear black young.

    In some Midwestern populations where black squirrels have been introduced, the blacks have been out-reproducing the grays to the point where they outnumber them. Certainly the New York ones are native, as are many of the other local black squirrel populations. It is said, but never has been documented, that the original Kellogg, of Kellogg’s cereals, introduced black squirrels on the campus of Michigan University in order to eradicate the red squirrels there. They are so highly prized in other areas that they have become the official mascots of Haverford College in Pennsylvania and Kent State University in Ohio. The latter institution has a special Black Squirrel Day celebration annually. Even the Harvard of the West, Stanford University, has a thriving population of black eastern gray squirrels. Apparently, they appeal to college kids.

    There are some pre-settlement accounts stating that black gray squirrels were already here when the first European white colonists arrived. Black gray squirrels have been introduced in several English communities and are apparently doing quite well. The British Isles’ gray squirrel population, itself, was a result of early introductions.

    The success of the black squirrels is puzzling. There is a rule in mammalian ecology coined by Constantin Wilhelm Lambert Gloger in the early 1800s. It states that the more tropical the population of a given species or group of species that has a wide range, and the more tropical the individuals, the darker the members of that population.

    Bears are a classic example of Gloger’s Rule, as are polar bears and foxes. In the far north they are white, while their relatives much to the south are brown, even black.

    This rule apparently doesn’t apply to gray squirrels, as they are darker here than in the south.

    On the other side, it has been argued by some that the blacker the hair, the warmer the mammal in colder climates. Dark bodies absorb more solar rays than light bodies. It has also been postulated that there were more black squirrels here in the early-17th century than now because the area settled by the Europeans was largely forested, thus dark, and later became cut over, exposing squirrels to more openness which would favor gray over black in evolution. Interestingly, of the four squirrel species in the genus Sciurus in the United States, the West Coast gray squirrel, confined to the very dark coastal coniferous forests from south to north almost all the way to Canada, is gray, not black.

    I searched my foreign mammal books and could find no accounts of black gray squirrels in Asia, Europe, or Japan, where squirrels of the genus Sciurus are common and range widely. Many of those squirrels are brownish, but not black.

    A few black gray squirrel sightings in Sag Harbor have been reported to me over the years and I once noted a black road-kill squirrel near Otter Pond in Sag Harbor. However, to my knowledge there are no enclaves of black gray squirrels resembling anything like the Country Club population and that of Stuy­vesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in New York City.

    Let’s hear it for black gray squirrels!

    It will be hard to top the prediction first made in this very column in the spring of 2012 for the Big One, Sandy, which came in the last days of October of that year, but here goes.

    It’s been a quiet year, 2013, but expect a tumultuous change and another Big One come 2014. It won’t be as big, but it will hit while South Fork municipalities, the county, state, and feds are still deciding what to do about Sandy, so it will cause an equal amount of damage.

    The Eurasian invasive species, phragmites, or ditch reed, will begin a long-anticipated retreat from various salt marshes as has been happening over the last four or five years for the Napeague marshes on either side of Napeague Meadow Road in Amagansett. Phragmites in fresh marshes on the South Fork, however, will continue to prosper.

    After a hiatus of 12 years, gypsy moths and canker worm moths will begin their comeback. Look for largish areas of hardwood trees bereft of foliage come June and July.

    Nitrogenous wastes from septic urine disposal will continue to seep into coastal ponds, tidal creeks, bays and harbors. The ocean won’t be affected as much as the estuarine waters of Great South Bay, Shinnecock Bay, and much of the Peconic Estuary. Efforts to abate the growing problem will continue, but will not make much of a dent, especially if the homeowners on the north side of the Great South Bay have their way and the breach caused by Sandy is filled in. Better that humans urinate on the ground, say, in the woods, like the other wild animals do.

    The rise in sea level will accelerate as the glaciers melt faster and faster. As a result, fresh ponds such as Fort Pond in Montauk and all coastal fresh marshes such as those surrounding Napeague Harbor, Fort Pond, Hook Pond, Wickapogue Pond, Sagg Pond, and the rest of the coastal ponds between Montauk Point and the Shinnecock Inlet will experience expansion landward while the water levels will rise accordingly as they are buoyed up by the denser salt water intruding beneath them.

    The scions from the bald eagle pair nesting on Gardiner’s Island, the raven pair nesting on the Hampton Bays water tower, and the turkey vultures nesting in Montauk will begin to nest locally as well and by 2020 will have established stable Long Island populations. They will be joined by peregrine falcon young from the adult pairs nesting on top of a Nassau County building and the tall bridges spanning the East River and Hudson River. Cellphone and radio transmitting and receiving towers scattered around offer stable nesting sites. Don’t be surprised if the first pair of eastern Long Island falcons to nest in Suffolk County nest near the top of the long-standing communications tower on Napeague or the top of the non-functioning radar building at Camp Hero State Park.

    The South Fork red fox population, which is rebuilding as we speak, will almost reach its peak before succumbing to the mange that thinned its population to near zero in the late 1990s. Commensurately, cottontail rabbits, rats, voles, and white-footed mice will become scarce. The local raccoon population, which is presently peaking, will succumb to a distemper endemic of the kind that decimated its population in the early 1990s.

    Hunters, not sharpshooters hired by the United States Department of Agriculture, will decrease the local deer population, hopefully to be followed by the use of contraception. The lone star tick population will continue to grow, while the black-legged, or deer, tick population will continue to diminish. As the rodent population falls, cases of Lyme disease and babesiosis will decrease accordingly.

    The local fishermen will continue to ply their trade and make a modest living despite all the rules and regulations governing their activities. They are the soul of Southampton and East Hampton towns.

    Until we stem the noise of helicopters and the ambient nightlights from McMansions and businesses, whippoorwills and hermit thrushes will stay away, ospreys will suffer and piping plovers won’t do so well, especially in combination with the fox buildup.

    After eight years of major disappointment, East Hampton Town will once again be properly governed, Montauk and townwide beaches will become a tad more peaceful in the summertime, helicopters and jets will be grounded, and we will be able to see the stars at night and listen to them sparkle.

    I believe I’ve discovered the identity of the first person to ride Montauk’s waves, at least on a surfboard, and also where the surfing took place. Before I proceed, I would like to recognize this as one of those Columbus-“discovered”-America claims.

    We know from 17th-century eyewitness accounts that the local Indians fished from canoes, even chased whales with them. It is inconceivable they did not use ocean swells to help propel them back to shore. And, surely they enjoyed the push — surfing defined.

    This said, I believe it was a man named Richard Lisiewski who first rode a surfboard in Montauk. The year was 1950. The Korean War was raging.  Lisiewski was in the Army stationed in the metropolitan area. The Jersey Shore native is now 86. Memories begin to fade at that age, but with the help of his son Michael, who runs a surf shop in Brighton Beach, N.J., Lisiewski recently recalled how he came to surf Montauk.

    That he marched to the beat of a different drummer is an understatement. In 1949, he became obsessed with the idea of surfing. Michael Lisiewski said it was unclear if his father had watched surfing demonstrated by one of the sport’s early prophets. Duke Kahanamoku himself, “the father of modern surfing,” visited New Jersey and Long Island not long after the turn of the 20th century, and there were others who planted the Hawaiian seed here after the Duke.

    However the bug bit, it bit hard. Richard Lisiewski found the plans in Popular Mechanics magazine for a wooden semi-hollow board from a design pioneered by an innovator named Tom Blake. A Kook Box, as the boards became known, was built with the help of one or two of the crafty types who frequented the family-owned tavern. Michael Lisiewski said his father was adept at securing leave from his Army duties, so he stuffed his 12-foot-long, 100-pound surfboard into his Cadillac convertible and hit the road.

    He drove to Montauk because he knew about Camp Hero, which was an active Army base at the time, complete with antiaircraft batteries. The batteries drilled using live ammunition fired at drones towed across the sky out over the ocean, scaring charter boat customers in the process.

    Apparently, his comrades in arms at Camp Hero welcomed the soldier-surfer. He remembered riding waves in a very rocky area, which the beach and reef at Camp Hero certainly was — and is. In 1953, the Army turned the installation over to the Air Force so that by the 1960s when Montauk started to become a popular surfing destination, Lisiewski’s pioneered spot had become known as “Air Force Base.”

    He also remembered a beach with cabanas, obviously the ones at the Montauk Beach Club, created by the developer Carl Fisher in the 1920s and located on the beach in downtown Montauk. So, it’s possible Lisiewski was also the first to ride the waves at the beloved surf spot named Atlantic Terrace after the hotel that overlooks it. The soldiers at Camp Hero allowed him to keep his board on base. He returned again and again.

    In 1961, Lisiewski formed Matador Surfboards, one of the first modern foam-board businesses on the East Coast. Several of his old Kook Box boards can be seen at the New Jersey Surf Museum.

    Speaking of Kook Boxes, an enduring mystery regarding the history of surfing in Montauk was a young man’s discovery of an old wooden semi-hollow board, covered in seaweed and barnacles, washed up in one of Montauk’s moorland coves in the 1970s. The board was given to Lee Bieler, a Montauk surfer who once owned the popular Blue Parrot bar and restaurant in East Hampton and it hung for many years on the wall behind the bar.

    The board, a large ding in its wooden rail repaired by the renowned shaper Billy Hamilton, now graces the wall in Bieler’s house in Princeville, Kauai.  The question is, whose board was it? Where did it come from, and how long had it been in the ocean? If it was a seed, it has taken root big time.