It was a frigid, blustery, sleety, snowy morning when the participants in the 84th Montauk Christmas Bird Count left the comfort of their homes on Dec. 14 to identify and count the birds in a 15-mile-diameter circle including Montauk, three quarters of Amagansett (including Napeague), Springs, and Gardiner’s Island. Some of the counters were participating in their 30th or more Montauk count. These Christmas counts were an alternative to hunting birds with guns and began in the very first years of the 20th century in New York City. This was the 114th consecutive year of such counts, which occur every year at this time throughout the entire United States, parts of Canada, Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America, as well as venues outside of the Western Hemisphere.

    Angus Wilson, a physician based in New York, Karen Rubinstein, and Peter Polshek were this year’s count leaders, or “compilers.” A whopping 46,608 birds belonging to 110 different species were recorded from before dawn to well after sunset. A new species for the count, the Ross’s goose, was observed on the Montauk Downs golf course. The 110 species recorded closely matched the average for the last six years of 110.5 and were a pretty good number for such a foul-weathered day.

    There were 31 counters this time around. The youngest was Hannah Mirando of Montauk, who went with her father, Michael, and Vicki Bustamante to record the birds east of Lake Montauk all the way to Montauk Point. She and her father saw the only Virginia rail on the count and her sharp eyes picked out two great blue herons. Hannah started studying birds when she was but 5 years old. Last spring she reported a painted bunting at her feeder, a very rare record for Long Island.

    Other unusual birds for this time of year were a great egret, greater yellowlegs, and Wilson’s snipe. While there were no crossbills, evening grosbeaks, pine siskins, or other northern birds seen, there was a record number of snowy owl spread across the count area — 11! Five of them were counted on Gardiner’s Island including one that had snatched a duck. (See The Star’s front-page story.) There was also a northern shrike spotted in Napeague, one of the two American species of “butcher birds,” so called for catching mice and suspending them on thorns, then eating them.

    Three bald eagles were tallied on Gardiner’s Island by the Rubenstein sisters and Mary Laura Lamont. It is the fifth count in a row during which Mary Laura has found a pair of bald eagles on Gardiner’s Island and further proof that at least one pair has begun breeding there. It should be noted that the last pair of bald eagles to breed in the Long Island area did so on Gardiner’s Island in 1936. One can’t help but wonder if the new ones are somehow related to that pair, but I strongly doubt that the earlier pair left any DNA around with which to make a comparison.

    Among the other raptors recorded were three rough-legged hawks and a Cooper’s hawk. In this millennium, the Cooper’s hawk has begun breeding in various parts of Long Island after a longish absence. The rough-legged hawks breed well north of here. Ed Johan had a merlin (or pigeon hawk) land on a telephone pole on East Lake Drive in Montauk.

    Only one species of alcid, or auk, was found, but in goodly numbers — 55 — off Montauk. Waterfowl were plentiful. There was perhaps a record number of scoters, 30,160 of them and all three species. There was also a large number of common eiders — 1,725 — yet not a single king eider. Ducks are quite colorful, and one of the prettiest, a harlequin duck, turned up in the waters north of Montauk west of the Point.

    There was a shortage of songbirds and woodland birds. The Vicki Bustamante party had a hermit thrush and three cedar waxwings, very few sparrows, and no yellow-rumped warblers, generally a staple at this time of year. However, the record 10 Ipswich sparrows, a very uncommon, pale-colored bird, counted in 1999, was tied in the Dec. 14 count.

    They breed on Sable Island in the Atlantic off northeastern Canada and like to stay in the beach grass on dunes, which best matches their coloring, while here in the winter. Snow buntings showed up on Gardiner’s Island but nowhere else.

    One hundred and fourteen years of Christmas count records have proved to be very valuable in charting the ups and downs of this and that species. In the first years of the count, a passenger pigeon or two was observed before becoming extinct a few years later. Let us hope that the counters across the continent in a world torn by eternal strife do not follow in the passenger pigeon’s steps. Hannah Mirando’s first-time-around participation is at least one indication that such an outcome is highly unlikely.

    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.

    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.

    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!

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.

    There is an overriding theory in physics known as entropy: Energy is continually moving from a higher state of order to a lower one. Ski down a hill that starts out steep but ends in a long flattish plain and you’ll eventually come to a stop. You’ve reached an end entropic state. Having come to a standstill, should a cataclysm all of a sudden remove the ground from under the plain, you would freefall down until you hit solid rock. You will have reached a second end entropic state. The Energizer battery eventually runs out of juice, no matter how resolute the marching bunny. What the TV ad doesn’t tell us is that it took more than twice as much energy to create the Energizer battery than it yielded before it died. Given enough time, everything runs down!

    The oceans are a perfect example. They are fed by the runoff meltwater from retreating glaciers, which stand higher in altitude than sea level. Water runs downhill, a principle that was standardized by the Golden Greeks, as well as Aesop, but which has been known since before the evolution of modern man. Yes, when sea’s level rises it has more potential energy than before, but it took more energy to raise it than it would yield if let out.

    We get our energy mainly from the sun in the form of radiation, namely, visible light, which is converted to many different energy types — heat, electricity, carbohydrates, and the like. All of the energy stored in the coal, oil, and natural gas residing in the earth’s crust was derived from sunlight trapped by chlorophyll and other plant pigments that convert water and carbon dioxide into organic chemicals. As long as there is sunlight and plants and plant cells to capture it, radiant energy will be converted into other energy forms for use by humans.

    It is quite clear to almost everyone by this time that if all the ice in the form of glaciers, such as the massive ones in the Antarctic and on Greenland, melts, sea level would rise around the world by yards, not just by feet or inches. Early in Long Island’s 15,000-year history, sea level was more than 100 feet lower than it is now. That’s how long the world’s glaciers have been melting and giving up their water to the sea.

    At the end of the ice sheet’s last advance southward in the Northern Hemisphere from its northern base, Long Island’s south shore was on the order of two miles farther south than now. There was a tenuous land connection between the Jersey Shore, Staten Island, and Long Island, now widely separated by the Hudson and East Rivers. Early Long Island humans and wildlife could move along such a wide shore in either direction that it became a much-used migratory route. Since the construction of the Montauk Lighthouse in the first years of the 19th century, the ocean has cut into the land more than 200 feet, lately at a rate of two to five feet per year. Montauk and Block Island are the eastern remnants of the so-called terminal moraine, an assortment of rocks, sand, clay, silt, and organic materials called “till” that stretches all the way west to New York City’s bedrock. In central Long Island it is known as the Ronkonkoma moraine and is situated well north of the south shore.

    Once the glacier stopped its advance and began to retreat to the north, its meltwaters ran easterly to the Peconics and south to the sea, carrying with them fine soil particles to form alluvial fans that ultimately became flattish productive farmland. The sand particles didn’t travel as far south as the fine soil and were deposited in a belt south of the moraine that ultimately became populated with pitch pines and scrub oaks, know popularly as the Long Island Pine Barrens. Finer particles, or loess, blew in to make the soils behind the ocean loamier, more fertile, and more arable, such as the celebrated arable Bridgehampton soils covering much of the land behind the ocean between Shinnecock Bay on the east and Napeague on the west.

    After the retreat of the glaciers that dropped the terminal moraine, a second advance created the Harbor Hills moraine that runs along Long Island’s north shore from King’s Point on the west all the way to Orient on the east. When it retreated, it left behind the string of large boulders, or “glacial erratics,” that line the south shore of Long Island Sound. The glacier’s finer particles washed south, especially so on the North Fork, all the way to the Peconics, creating arable soils equal in agricultural value to the Bridgehampton ones.

    Not all of the meltwater from the two glacial advances ran to the seas. Much of it moved vertically downward through the sandier, more permeable soils, creating thick layers of subterranean freshwater, the groundwater that makes up Long Island’s three freshwater aquifers. When taken together the aquifers can be 1,000 feet thick in some central Long Island spots. If we could date the origin of much of that water, which is free of mineral and organic matter, we might find that some of it is thousands of years old. The layers are not static, they seep slowly toward the seas, the “sinks,” at rates rarely faster than a foot a day.

    Once pure, over the course of the last 200 years, large portions of the upper aquifer layers have become infiltrated with various pollutants — pesticides, petroleum residues, industrial chemicals, human metabolic wastes such as urine, medicines, and the like. Water from precipitation recharges the aquifers to the degree that during very wet periods the top of the upper glacial aquifer, the closest to the land surface of the three, will reach to approximately 70 feet above sea level. Lake Ronkonkoma, Long Island’s largest freshwater body, is a case in point. It is situated in the center of the Ronkonkoma moraine and its water level is nearly identical in elevation to the water table, i.e., the very top of the aquifer.

    There will be another ice age, but in the very distant future. Until then, we will have to abide by global warming and observe the changes in the flora and fauna as the temperate zone becomes more tropical and the tundra more forest-like. Just as a supertanker or aircraft carrier can’t stop on a dime, it is impossible to stop the rising of the seas; we can only adapt to the rise. Therein lies the question.

    What do we do? Retreat inland to higher ground? Raise the edge of the coast to keep up with sea level rise? If we could stop making war and killing each other, cut down on our carbon emissions, and plan for future millennia, we might be able to mitigate some of the most injurious impacts. Otherwise, we’ll have to start over, perhaps, on a habitable planet yet to be discovered.

    Last week I got a call from Orla Reveille, who holds sway over at the Viking Dock in Montauk. She told me to slide by and pick up a book, “The Forsberg Empire,” a memoir by Capt. Paul G. Forsberg “as told to Manny Luftglass.”

    It tells the story of what has indeed become an empire, not the Roman or robber baron kinds, but a fleet of fishing boats that since 1936 have ferried fishermen offshore to the empire of the sea with its mammals, birds, fish of a thousand varieties, and its reefs, canyons, and dozens of moldering wrecks where fish tend to congregate, many of them identified and explored by Captain Forsberg, his father, his sons, and his grandsons. The Viking Fleet celebrated its 75th year in 2011.

    I have fished on Viking boats many times over the years in spring, summer, and winter, when the heated hand railings Captain Forsberg invented by sending hot engine exhaust through pipe handholds made hunting cod bearable. The book, available at the Viking Dock and via Amazon.com, is a fascinating portrait of a pioneering family. When I think Viking, I think of the day I was so cold and seasick that I saw through Pablo Picasso’s eyes. Let me explain:

    The misery did not take place on the Viking Starship, the boat I had intended to take offshore after cod in the depths of winter. I went aboard early to stow my gear, then left the boat to grab coffee and sandwiches at Gaviola’s Market across the street. I got talking, didn’t hear the all-aboard horn, and missed the boat. I watched the Starship turn past the Coast Guard station and disappear along with my heavy coat, extra sweaters, and gloves. Oh well.

    So, I’m getting into my car to head home when Dennis Gaviola suggested I join him on the King Wayne. Capt. Wayne King said he was going to be fishing near the Starship. He’d bring the boat alongside and put me aboard with my gear. Okay, great.

    Not great. The weather deteriorated. The swell had built offshore. There was no way the King Wayne was going to go alongside the Starship. It was freezing. I had no coat, no gloves, no heavy sweater, and was therefore consigned to a bunk below deck with no blanket and no horizon to justify the boat’s movement to my inner ear in the ever-growing seas. Mal de mer, the bane of a seaman’s existence, set in. And not just seasickness, but cold seasickness, with hours to go before we returned to Montauk, and with intermittent puffs of the King Wayne’s diesel exhaust flowing down the open companionway.

    Now, I have spent a good deal of time offshore, sometimes queasy, but mostly fine, even in heavy seas. There are people who never get seasick, but they are relatively few. My theory is that each of the others of us falls victim to different types of movement. Some get sick by a boat’s side-to-side roll, others the stem-to-stern rise and fall. On that day, the sea brought both movements to bear on my stomach, to my very being.

    There were a couple of mad dashes up the companionway to the cold railing where, while “chumming,” I could see the Viking Starship with my warm coat below, so near and yet so far off our starboard beam, a mirage of comfort. Then, it was back down to cold hell where I shivered and listened to warmly dressed anglers topside hooting and laughing as they brought cod after cod over the Wayne’s railing.

    The Picasso moment occurred after about three hours as I lay on my back watching square panes of sunlight cast down the hatchway move about the bulkheads and ceiling as the boat rolled. By this time, I’d gone beyond nausea. I was hallucinating.

    In a flash, I understood Cubism, the freezing of movement and light into shards of color, emphasis on freezing. Pure genius. The thought elicited a grim chuckle, caused me to transcend my predicament — well, for a minute or two. Who says a liberal arts education is useless?

    I wonder, could Pablo have had a bad experience at sea? Did it drive him to abstraction? My fellow gazetteer, an art historian and critic, the late Robert Long, would have known.

    I have not missed the boat since.

    The cold and howling winds kept boats at bay for the most part, but early last week, Ed Rennar was fishing off the south side of Montauk and caught what might have been a record blackfish. The fish lost some of its weight living in a live tank for a day before being weighed at the West Lake Marina, but the monster tautog tipped the scales at 10.65 pounds nonetheless. Captain Rennar said it probably weighed closer to 12 pounds when it was first brought aboard.

    The Montauk SurfMasters Tournament for striped bass ends on Sunday morning, still time to adjust the leader board.

    As it stands, Mike Milano, Richie Michelson, and Sam Doughty command first, second, and third places in the wader division. John Bruno holds the first and only place in the wetsuit division. Mary Ellen Kane is in first and second place in the women’s division. Christine Schnell holds onto third. Brenden Farell, Philip Schnell, and James Kim look like they will finish in that order in the tournament’s youth division.

    Hither Woods was hither to what? To mainland East Hampton, with respect to the Point Woods just east of the Lighthouse? While much of Montauk has changed, Hither Woods has stayed the same; it’s never been developed.

    Ecologically it has run the gamut from tundra to heathland to oak hickory forest to grassland to savannah and back to oak hickory forest with a smattering of American beech, American holly, and a very large smattering of mountain laurel. In pre-Columbian days it was most likely an important hunting-gathering area for the Montauketts.

    When the Town of East Hampton came into being, the governing body, or town trustees, had the “proprietors” caretake Hither Woods, first for lumber and firewood, secondly as a grazing land for most of the town’s livestock. After it was de-wooded, it became perhaps the largest grassland on the South Fork for a time. Sheep, cattle and the like would be led out to Hither Hills across Napeague in the spring to graze and led back to winter quarters on the mainland in the fall.

    Grazing petered out in the early 20th century as East Hampton and Montauk underwent modernization, and the woods began to grow back. By the time Norman Taylor published his monograph, “The Vegetation of Montauk,” in 1923, Hither Hills was half grasslands, half woodland. Decaying trunks of fallen eastern red cedars, one of the pioneer species leading the way to woody regrowth, still dot that landscape today, but you would be hard pressed to find a living one.

    Twenty-five thousand years ago there were no Hither Woods, no Hither Hills. Then the glacier came down and dumped a lot of debris on the sea bottom, creating the Montauk peninsula before it began to recede 5,000 years later. If you Google the satellite image for Hither Woods you will see a series of east-west parallel lines of vegetation. They represent the tops of ridges and the bottoms of troughs. As the glacier rode up on the debris that it dropped, it continued south in fits and starts, creating so-called high spots and low spots in an alternating array, creating the “push moraine” described by Myron Fuller in his pioneering study, “Geology of Long Island, New York,” published in 1913. Such a formation is unique to Montauk and part of western Suffolk County. Thus, the name “Hither Hills,” rather than “Hither Hill.”

    After Arthur Benson purchased Montauk from the town trustees in 1885, the land lay fallow except for a house built here and there next to the ocean. Robert Moses, the father of New York’s state park system on Long Island, took interest in the western part of Hither Hills, including the ocean and dunes on its southwest, and it was purchased from heirs of the Benson Estate in 1926 to become Hither Hills State Park, the cornerstone of the Montauk State Parks array.

    Two-thirds of Hither Woods remained in private hands. The Curtiss-Wright Corporation owned a large chunk of it. In the early 1980s just about all of Montauk excluding parklands was up for development. When the East Hampton Town Board re-established the Planning Department eliminated in 1982, it set to work under the aegis of the planning board analyzing the various Montauk development plans. It accelerated its efforts in 1984, when the new town board led by Supervisor Judith Hope came into power. At that juncture, developmental plans for Hither Woods, Culloden Point, West Neck, Shadmoor, and the Sanctuary, more than 1,500 acres of raw, unsullied land in Montauk were all on the drafting table at the same time.

    Then-Councilman Randy Parsons led the effort to put the lands into parklands while Suffolk County and New York State pitched in, and the northeastern part of Hither Woods was purchased cooperatively by all three governing bodies in a precedent-setting action. Within the following two decades, the rest of Hither Woods became the Lee Koppelman County Preserve, the Sanctuary became a new state park, most of Culloden Point became a town nature preserve, West Neck was purchased by Suffolk County, and finally, Shadmoor became Shadmoor Park, a nature preserve purchased by the state, county, and town in another three-way collaboration.

    Hither Woods was largely burned over during a drought in the spring of 1986, when sparks from a passing Long Island Rail Road train set off a fire that killed two-thirds of the standing trees, the ones that had starting growing about the time Teddy Roosevelt’s Roughriders were quarantined in Montauk in the first years of the 20th century.

    It’s been growing back in the 27 years since then. Some of the new trees have reached heights of 40 to 50 feet. It appears tranquil from the highway or vantage points on its many trails, but there is a mighty internecine struggle in progress, with one group of trees trying to usurp another. The American beeches are beginning to get the upper hand, turning what was formerly mostly an oaken woods into a beechy one. Beeches spread by sucker roots and sucker shoots, the way quaking aspens do. They also secrete chemicals that inhibit the growth of many tree and sub-shrub species. Where the beeches have taken over, the ground — save for a coating of beech leaves — is bare. American hollies are also gaining a toehold.

    One large section of up-and-down land in the northeast area of the woods that is laden with gray lichen-covered erratics, some as big as a bus, is almost completely vegetated with mountain laurel, some standing 15 feet high. They are extremely healthy, almost 100 percent green with very few viral or fungal blotches. On Saturday in the waning hours of the afternoon, Vicki Bustamante and I were lost in Rod’s Valley, where the laurels are predominant. It was getting dark and becoming quite eerie. Great-horned owls were calling, the wind was rattling the branches. I began to conjure up a scenario with a crazed Jack Nicholson carrying an ax, jumping out on the trail in front of us yelling, “Here’s Johnny!” No wonder that Dan Rattiner, in one of his early local maps, referred to Hither Woods as the “Great Spooky Woods.”

    Of great interest was Ram Level, a grassy opening in the middle of the woods where the rams used to be pastured separately from the ewes. It hinted at what Hither Woods looked like throughout most of the 1800s. What used to be a couple hundred acres of prairie had been reduced to less than an acre. It was about five times smaller than when I last visited it in late 1999. It was, and hopefully still is, home to some of New York State’s rarest plants, including the bushy frostweed for which Montauk is famous. A few very large white oaks very much alive, with canopies 50 feet or more in diameter, presided over the grasses and forbs. Vicki had never been to Ram Level before and made a vow to return in the spring when the bushy frostweed and other rarities would be holding forth.

    I also came upon several individuals of a rare-to-Long Island rhododendron species that someone had reported in Hither Woods many years ago but which had eluded my grasp until Saturday. I had found this species on Mashomack on Shelter Island with Jean Held while studying at the Nature Conservancy preserve for the Museum of Long Island Natural Science in 1980. Pinxter is the name — it blooms pink in late May. In another 50 years or so Hither Woods will have taken on a totally different appearance, as the old-growth trees begin to predominate and pitch pines begin sneaking in from the west. They are already well established in the Walking Dunes on the west edge of Hither Hills. One thing won’t change in the remainder of this century, however. The woods that only 30 years ago were to be cleared and covered with hundreds of houses will now stay forever wild.

    Huzzahs to the East Hampton Town Board of 1984 and the friends of Montauk, who started the land preservation push. Otherwise, the black knights of the “Reign of Terror” would have prevailed and we would have become just another part of Long Island.

       As we continue on into the tech era, after digging out from the post-industrial era, I wonder, what comes next? There are thousands of new patent applications for thousands of new inventions every week. Very few of them will ever see their way to market. Just about every past invention and every one in progress is in some way derived from from nature. Nature’s inventions are not intentional; they arise by gene mutations, adaptation, and natural selection via the process of evolution. For every success there are hundreds of failures. But when a good one comes along, say, the air-breathing lung from a line of fishes and the earliest amphibians, it radiates into several permutations, which give rise to several different but parallel evolutionary lines.

       One of the most well known of such revolutions in nature is seen in Darwin’s finches populating the Galapagos archipelago. It is almost taken as a fact that a pair of finches from South America populated the Galapagos early on and, by way of separation onto different islands over time, evolved into several different species with several different niches. Most finches have relatively heavy beaks for crushing nuts and seed, but some of the Galapagos finches have evolved fine beaks for probing into small holes and crevices to get insects.

       While early reptiles were perfecting their scales, one of the earmarks of modern reptiles, a few were simultaneously “inventing” feathers. No feathers, no flight, well, at least not in birds. Some birds — the ratites — gave up their flight feathers and developed strong and long legs for walking and running. One of them was the elephant bird, or moa, of New Zealand, standing seven feet high at the shoulders. Its gigantic size has never been duplicated, though African ostriches come close to their extinct cousins. Funny, different ratite species are found in Africa, South America, and Australia (and a few others parts of Oceania), as are three different species of lungfish — disjunct remnants of a common Pangea origin, the biologists would have it.

       Insects also developed flight early on. The number of flying insects outnumbers the non-flyers by more than 1,000 to 1. Mammalian bats were the last to develop flight, and though they’re jerky, they’re good at it. We didn’t invent the flying machine until the end of the 19th century. Some birds, insects and bats fly as far as world jetliners do. And they leave no carbon footprints! Nature is pretty good at inventing things.

       Take some simple long-lived Homo sapiens inventions, the hinge for example. While some plastics have lately been fastened into hinges for containers and so forth, the metal hinge has been around since the early A.D. years, but the bivalve shellfish invented the hinge much earlier, 300 million years or so ago. Think of the quahog for a moment: It can live 50 years or longer. It develops the hinge in its first year after metamorphosing from a swimming larva, and it keeps (and continually) repairs the same hinge over its life span.

       Man didn’t invent music. Birds have been singing in various keys, tonal and atonal, for 40 million years or more. Dolphins sing a variety of songs in the seas. Insects chorus but not with their mouths. Thus nature developed instruments — stridulators in insects, air bladders in fishes, expandable gular pouches in amphibians, and so on. Male ruffed grouse don’t have much of a song but they beat their wings on the ground or a log to produce a drumming which can be heard from hundreds of yards away to attract females.

       How about the gyroplane, helicopter, or hovercraft? Its origin is almost as old as the airplane. Did Igor Sikorsky get the idea from watching hummingbirds and dragonflies, or was he a student of Leonardo da Vinci? The first two have been moving up and down, back and forth, side to side, and so on for millions and millions of years, and when they do so they are much, much quieter.

       I got a flu shot two weeks ago. My doctor used a hypodermic needle or syringe, ouch! The female mosquito has had a darn good syringe since before the evolution of modern man. When she sticks me with it I don’t feel a thing.

       Echolocation helped win World War II. We’ve all heard those pings in the movies as the anxious sweating submariners below tried to figure out how close the destroyers were above them. Sonar! We didn’t invent it, bats did. They send out sound waves that reflect back from flying insect to pursue and catch them in complete dark. A hearing-impaired bat is a dead bat.

       Landscaping and garden pruners and loppers? If you’ve ever been bitten by a lobster or a blue-claw crab you can appreciate the origin of these tools. What about bows and arrows, slingshots, and other projectile shooters? The archer fish at the Long Island Aquarium and in nature can accurately shoot a stream of water several feet high from the surface to knock insects down from branches and other perches.

       The spitting cobra can spit in your eye from 20 feet away. Never sneak up on an octopus or giant squid from behind.

       Monkeys are lousy walkers so they invented the swing. Long-distance migrators, some fish and many birds that fly at night, have had a GPS since migration became an annual way of life. Unfortunately daytime migrators, such as the federally protected golden eagles, depend on sight. That’s why more than 50 of them have been killed by wind turbines in the last 10 years or so.

       As far as trapping and catching implements go — fishnets, clam rakes, Havahart traps and the like — spiders have some of the best equipment of all. In the early evening the yellow, brown, and black garden spider, Argiope, can spin a beautiful cylindrical web two feet in diameter with trip line and all in a matter of hours. It can take it down the next morning in the same amount of time. The trapdoor spider adds a special device to its web to spring open at the slightest insect intrusion. Sea anemones aren’t bad trappers, either, and what about the Venus flytrap and the pitcher plant?

       Who first invented the woven basket made from reeds and grasses? Not early man. Many songbirds such as the catbird, oriole, robin, and red-winged blackbird are expert weavers. They could make their basket nests watertight, as some expert aborigine weavers could, but a watertight nest would have zero reproduction potential. These birds also exercise common sense.

       Swim fins come from frogs and waterfowl. The former threw in the “frog kick” as well, while paddlewheel boats partly owe their origin to the latter. Knives are very old in the making, dating back to 6,000 B.C. and earlier. If you have ever been spurred by a rooster (I have) or a turkey, you will know the inventiveness of nature.

       I’ve only scratched the surface. We’ve learned only recently that elephants know how to point. Sign language, anyone? We humans are clever, there is no denying that, and we are certainly inventive, but so is nature. If we only took the time to observe and examine it and all of its wonderful inventions maybe we would we not be so big on ourselves. Fur coats? Did someone mention skunk?

    It’s not uncommon to be awakened by cannon fire this time of year on the East End. Duck hunting season began on Thanksgiving Day. Open season on Amazon drones could be just around the corner.

    “Cannon” was the word that came to mind when this former hunter first felt the recoil of a 12-gauge shotgun my father gave me at the age of 12.

    I still have the gun, a side-by-side, double barrel, twin-trigger Remington. It was my dad’s gun handed down when he thought I was ready to go deer, rabbit, partridge, and pheasant hunting usually on land owned by a farmer south of Syracuse, near where he grew up. The first thing I shot was a glass jug my father picked as a target. The jug evaporated. My shoulder was sore for a week.

    Strange to say, but I discovered the gun had a personality that, under my dad’s tutelage, I learned to like, and to respect.

    I killed a deer with the old Remington when I was 15 during a hunt with my father and uncle. I was sitting on the side of a hill above a small apple orchard that had gone to seed, a likely spot for a deer to browse. Dad was proud and, as tradition demanded, smeared my cheek with blood. I’d come of age.

    Does that sound weird, primitive? It didn’t at the time. I remember looking in the mirror when we got home, dog-tired. My face told me I’d taken a life. I was humbled. We ate everything we shot, and we never shot more than we were prepared to dress.

    I stopped hunting, not in answer to a moral dilemma, but because for me it had been about being in the woods with my dad. Would I have liked it as much if we’d gone into the woods with cameras? Yes, I believe I would have, but then again. . . .

    What is it in us? Is it some old survival gene that wants to hunt something even when our larder is filled with store-bought food? And what of the urge to kill and eat something beautiful, powerful, regal, majestic, and all the other adjectives we use to describe wild animals? Does the old gene tell us their essence can be possessed in this way? Are we what we eat?

     On Sunday, I spoke with two duck hunters, Montaukers in their 20s. I asked them why they liked hunting ducks. They said they liked being out in nature. “I like seeing all the species that come here,” said one. “To get away from the television,” said the other. He meant to escape the all-pervasive screens separating us from the real deal. The hunters stressed that they always ate the ducks they shot.

    Both said they feared that the “next generation” shot only for “the rush.” They worried that shooting without a full appreciation of a rural world fast disappearing, without that paradoxical mix of fulfillment and humility that comes from taking what you know is a precious life, without a fundamental connection to nature was just shooting — knocking things out of the sky, or worse.

    People don’t hunt for their physical survival any longer, at least around here. They hunt and fish to keep their spirits alive — survival just the same. But does our spiritual wellbeing need to depend on the sacrifice of ducks? Yes and no.

    Responsible hunters tend be conservation minded, reasoning that nature is best defended against encroaching “development,” against a technologically screened-in world, by those who bind their spirits to it with guns. At the same time, bird watchers don’t see the logic in killing nature to appreciate it.

    There may be a way to solve this paradox and put those who just like to knock things out of the sky to work. Ducks might soon breathe easier.

    Two weeks ago “60 Minutes” reported on Amazon’s plans to use drones to deliver packages. If the mega-company’s C.E.O., Jeffrey Bezos, is to be believed, there will soon be flocks of Amazons invading our peace. The day after the drone segment, a friend and former hunter said he was going to dust off his shotgun. I’m not sure if he was kidding. I’m buying stock in Remington.