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.

    Piers, docks, quays, whatever you choose to call them, Montauk’s Fort Pond Bay has had many over the years. They were built to accommodate commercial fishermen, to test torpedoes, to disembark soldiers, Cunard Line passengers, and more than a few cases of bootlegged booze. One even allowed railroad cars to put to sea.

    Whatever its purpose, build it and they will come — the ones with a fishing rod, a bucket, some bait, and a few hours to wile away projecting a fish dinner as an excuse.

    Duryea’s Dock has been on the bay’s east side for the better part of a century.

    In 1890, Austin Corbin, owner of the Long Island Rail Road, extended its tracks from Bridgehampton to Montauk and conceived, along with the developer Arthur Benson, to make Fort Pond Bay an entry port for passenger ships. A steel pier was built, but the port idea never materialized.

    The dock at Rough Rider Landing used to be the New York Ocean Science Laboratory dock, and before that was Fishangri-la, home to charter and party boats.

    There was the News Dock, a railroad spur that extended out into the bay so that fish could be loaded directly onto Long Island Rail Road trains.

    Another dock was the one that troop ships sidled up to so that soldiers, including Col. Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Ride volunteers, could disembark after fighting in the Cuban campaign of the Spanish American War.

    Old photos show a number of smaller piers that served the needs of a Montauk village located on the bay until the Hurricane of 1938.

Then the Navy arrived and built docks to accommodate the boats that tested torpedoes. When the Navy departed following World War II it left what became known as the “Navy Dock” on the west side of the bay. It deteriorated, but remained a quiet place to fish from for many years. The dock’s tarry remnants were dismantled and a new dock was constructed nearby more than a decade ago as part of the town’s Edward Ecker Park at the end of Navy Road.

    This dock had no grand plan. It was simply meant to be a pedestrian pier, a path out onto Fort Pond Bay, a place to fish from. As a fishing spot, the pier has grown in popularity. Porgies, the occasional fluke, striped bass, and bluefish are reeled up, but the truth is — and not to look a gift horse in the mouth — the fishin’ ain’t that great.

    The Rough Rider Landing dock to the east is far more productive, especially during the spring squid run, but that dock is private. It’s more productive because the water around it is deeper. Fish — especially those who have reason to hide or lurk in wait for prey — like holes. Even the end of the town pier sits in relatively shallow water.  There’s a simple fix.

    Larry Cantwell, who will become East Hampton Town supervisor on Jan. 1, is a fisherman. Yes, there will be other issues before him, a bud­get, airport noise, a plan to hold back the sea, but I’m certain he’ll agree that none is as pressing as seeing to it that the area around the town pier is dredged deep enough to attract squid in time for the spring run. Huck Cantwell knows where his bread is buttered. First things first, and a fish in every pot.

    Last week I wrote from San Francisco, a metropolitan area with an influx of wild animals, including coyotes. Now I am at Nevada City in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas at about 2,500 feet. There is snow on the ground from the once-a-year snow and the temperature hovers at the freezing mark each evening.

    This area was the home of the Maidu Indians, who ended up living and working in Catholic missions typical of the acculturation of the Native Americans throughout California after the Spanish began to settle here. The habitat, except for the houses and yards, is occupied by a panoply of different plant associations dominated by two primary ones, chaparral and pine-oak woodlands. The chaparral — used by both wildlife and domestic farm animals — is a kind of savannah ecotype with grasses and shrubs, especially those belonging to the heath family such as manzanita and madrone, but there are also sumacs, roses, and lots of Asian blackberries. Funny, many of the small trees are easterners like liquid amber and ironwood.

    The chaparral is a fire climax community and runs all the way from northern to southern California in the foothills. It has a long history of burning over by fires started as much by lightning strikes as by human activities. After a fire, it eventually grows back up again, but in a fire’s recent aftermath, it is prone to mudslides and serious erosion during bouts of precipitation. At this moment the grasses are gray from a prolonged drought and there are few wildflowers blooming. California is experiencing a record drought and a drought emergency is about to be declared.

    Nevada City is small and hilly, as is its neighbor Grass Valley, but very lively. There is a trails society just as in East Hampton and Southampton, but here there are as many horses and riders on the trails as hikers and dirt bikers. The association maintains the trails and special pruning care is required so that riders are not hit by overhanging branches.

    I can hear coyotes calling at night, and mountain lion visitations are not uncommon. The black-tailed deer come into yards and cross roads to feed just as deer do on the South Fork. Yes, wild animals are common, as are turkeys and quail, but in the 75 or so miles between here and San Francisco, I spotted nary a road kill. Such a finding is especially odd as this is the rutting season for the deer. Either the drivers are extremely adept at missing wildlife, or wildlife are more savvy here than on Long Island.

    The wild animals here also carry deer ticks of a different species than the East Coast deer tick, but these ticks can carry the same spirochete that causes the same kind of Lyme disease as on eastern Long Island. There are white-footed mice here to serve as reservoirs for the spirochetes just as on Long Island. Oddly, however, there are no reported cases of babesiosis or erlichiosis in the area. Those parasites have yet to hit California in any significant numbers. Also there is not much in the way of chiggers here, but people with chigger bites show up at clinics now and then, so it won’t be long before they are here en masse. The vegetation is perfect for them.

    We have two common native conifers on Long Island, the pitch pine and eastern red cedar. There are at least 15 common conifers here. The most common are statuesque ponderosa pines with reddish scaly bark and digger pines, presumably named after the Digger Indians that occupied part of California, a name given to them by white explorers and settlers. The ponderosa was the name of the ranch in the long-running TV show, “Bonanza.” They are my favorite pines.

    There are also some coast redwoods, lots of western red cedar, Coulter pines with humongous pine cones, lodgepole pines, Douglass firs, two or three other varieties of firs, and the same number of different spruces. The shade produced by these evergreens precludes any groundcover to speak of. You won’t find much in the way of huckleberries or blueberries growing on the needle-covered ground. The soil is red because of the iron content and it is adobe in composition. It could be used to build adobe houses, huts, and the like, as in Mexico and parts of the Southwest — but not here, apparently because there is so much lumber available.

    This was gold country in the days of the forty-niners, and some people still pan for gold recreationally in the nearby Yuba River, a tributary of the American River, which begins on the California-Nevada border and runs all the way downhill and westerly to the coast.

    Lake Tahoe, situated partly in Nevada and partly in California, is an hour and a half away by automobile. The entire foothill area all the way to Lake Tahoe in the Sierras is the Hamptons of Northern California. It is heavily visited in season by San Franciscans, Oaklanders, and the nouveau riche from Silicon Valley. Somehow, even so, it is much more peaceful and tranquil than the South Fork during the summer season and the visitors are very polite on average. My son, Christopher, and his wife, Julie, moved here from Los Angeles with their autistic son and they are as much in love with the area as my wife, Julie, and I are.

    Someday we may retire here, notwithstanding that the Pacific Ocean is a good 70 miles away and my veins are filled with seawater, not blood.

    Funny how thoughts cascade, one tumbling into another like stones down a bluff face. This one particular tumble began when Glenn Grothmann of Paulie’s Tackle fame mentioned that herring were being caught from the pier on Montauk’s Fort Pond Bay last week, lots of them.

    So, that Christmasy thought — pickled herring is a Christmas mainstay in some households — made me think of how Montauk’s old-timers recalled frost-fishing along the beach out in front of Montauk’s original downtown on Fort Pond Bay.

    Frost-fishing consisted of grabbing a pail and gathering whiting whose schools were so thick that a number of them would be beached as the tide dropped. They were flash frozen by the winter wind and then collected for smoking. Smoked whiting was, and is, another Christmas treat.

    This happy thought fell directly upon the season, how we tend to think about the past, our gains and losses during the year gone by. This time of year, the evening news presents the obligatory cascade of famous folks who have bit the dust between Decembers, and this made me take stock of location.

    I’d walked down the beach at Ditch Plain and was standing in front of the bluff where the old Reinstein estate sat until Peter Beard moved its windmill portion. The rest was razed in the face of inexorable erosion.

    Pieces of the grand house’s foundation continue to tumble to the beach. I lived in the house for a few summers in the late 1960s or early ’70s — I can be forgiven for not recalling the exact years — and realized, as I stood looking up at where I conceived the house had been, that I was wrong.

    If I wanted to find where the house had been I’d need to turn around facing the sea and gaze up into the empty sky. My memories — some really good ones — were there, but the geography, the mansion’s global position, now belonged to the briny.

    This thought led me to recall the library in the top of the windmill. The shelves were built by a ship0wright, angled to compensate for the windmill’s sloping walls so that despite the slope the books sat vertically upon them, a masterful job swallowed by Neptune.

    On Sunday, I visited Turtle Cove, the crescent beach just west of the Montauk Lighthouse. The surf was exceptionally good. One surfer had positioned himself in the lineup at the spot known as Alamo, a tricky takeoff immediately south of the Light where the tide features prominently during a big swell.

    Alamo got its name from the huge, battlement-like chunk of concrete that now lies at the foot of Turtle Hill, the Light’s promontory. I remember when it sat atop the hill. It was part of the Eastern Shield, the system of coastal fortifications and gun emplacements erected during World War II. 

    The Alamo has become part of the rock bulwark constructed to protect the Lighthouse from the sea, to hold back time, whose passage seems more evident in Montauk.

    It’s a physical thing. Even if we don’t take conscious note of it, it’s there. It sinks in. Maybe that’s why the hamlet’s community is close-knit. Erosion has a bright side if it helps us appreciate our days.

    I’m going to appreciate mine by going down to one of Montauk’s several tackle shops and buying a herring rig. Then to the town pier at the end of Navy Road where the old Navy Pier used to be — but that’s another story — where I will catch a mess of herring and pickle them to preserve the memory, all of them. 

   Three thousand miles away in San Francisco, and the first bird I see is Corvus brachyrhynchos, the common crow, the same species that we have on the South Fork, doing what it does best here and there: raiding nests, making a lot of noise, attacking hawks and such, and in turn being chased by small birds like blackbirds away from nesting sites. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    San Francisco is just as pretty as when I left it in the 1960s but much more expensive. While it is still much safer than New York with respect to walking the sidewalks and taking subways in the late evening hours, it has problems of a different kind — animals that were once wild but have now become citified. At my son’s house in a busy hillside residential neighborhood, West Portal, there are raccoons, gophers, skunks, opossums, rats, mice, and, oh yes, the occasional red fox. All coming and going in a neighborhood dominated by lots smaller than a quarter acre, lots where the houses are as large or larger than the attendant lawns and gardens.

    In the canyons, coyotes lurk and howl at night when they go on the prowl to see what they can find in the way of leavings for late suppers. Red-tailed hawks and red-shouldered hawks soar, while gangs of ravens, rivaling the crow flocks in size, maraud and plunder. It’s a veritable jungle out there.

    It’s fall here, but the evergreen trees outnumber the deciduous ones and a lot of woody and herbaceous plants are still very much in flower. The scent of eucalyptol permeates the air throughout the city. I wonder if it is healthful or otherwise? The natives don’t notice it, apparently it is so ubiquitous that they have habituated to it psychologically. Australian species of eucalyptus, blue gums and such, greatly outnumber the native species, and some of them tower well over 100 feet in height.

    There are pocket parks everywhere. I visited one, Sigmund Stern Grove, a short distance from my son’s home, with my son, Jim, his wife, Vicki, and their dog, Lucky, on Saturday. There were lots of bird species flitting around, several of which, such as the goldfinch, robin, hermit thrush, and golden-crowned kinglet, are also found in the east, but many of which are strictly western, including the Stellar’s jay, black phoebe, acorn woodpecker, Oregon junco, and chestnut-backed chickadee, to name a few. The white-crowned sparrow, which is seen more and more frequently in the east, is the most common sparrow, and we saw many. It goes without saying that the European starling, which is worldwide in distribution, is also found in San Francisco and throughout the rest of California.

    Sigmund Stern Grove is also a dog park, one of the first in the nation, so you have to watch where you walk. The dogs that visit the park habitually all know each other. Some are friends, some avoid each other. They are found in all sizes and breeds, many of which are decidedly mixed, bordering on mutts.

    A fence borders the park’s small lake, except where the ducks are being fed. In my visit, there were ruddy ducks, mallards, coots, pintails, and a few white domestic ducks. A young great blue heron stood motionless with neck folded and head drawn in, in its non-hunting mode. Vicki informed me that out here great blues eat as many rodents as fish, some the size of gophers.

    There is a farm trust out here that is very much like the Peconic Land Trust of eastern Long Island. There is a big effort to preserve agricultural open space for farming north of the city. San Francisco is pretty much built out in the way that New York City is. There are very few vacant lots, so in order to build on a lot you have to remove what is there. San Francisco is famous for its Victorian houses with semi-round facades, and tries to save as many as possible  from razing and condominiation.

    When I lived here, the majority of cars would come into the city from the north across the Golden Gate Bridge, from the east across the Bay Bridge, and from the south up California’s most well-traveled road, Route 101. San Francisco  was a visitor and tourist magnet as well as an employment center, and workers from bedroom communities north, east, and south drove in to the city in the morning, out at night. Lately, because San Francisco is now a bedroom community serving, especially, the needs of expanding Silicon Valley, the traffic is now largely outgoing in the morning and incoming in the late afternoon and early evening.

    It will be only a matter of time before a mountain lion or two and perhaps a black bear move in. Some of the residents are fearful, but thus far the city is safe and the people and interloping animals cohabit quite nicely. In the case of my son’s house, Lucky takes care of any intruding gophers, digging them out and devouring them shortly after they move in. On the other hand, the small front yard of the dogless house across the street is replete with gopher mounds.

    I never was much of a city boy and I value wild animals and birds as much as I do humans, so the more the merrier. After all, before the whites came to occupy San Francisco, most noticeably during the California Gold Rush years of the middle 1800s, there were Indians and wild animals, and before that, just wild animals. Strangely, there are very few deer, the coast subspecies of the mule deer, but as soon as the word gets out I’m sure their population will begin to build.

    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.

       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?

    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.

    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.

    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.