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.

   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 getting to be that time of year again, that time when we love fall at its most colorful moment. Fall has been creeping up on us since the last day of summer. Summer birds have been leaving for the south and northern birds have been stopping by on their way south while others have been arriving to spend the winter here.

    Spring is wonderful, too. It’s the time when the flowers come out — the shads, dogwoods, beach plums, bird’s-foot violets, lupines, mountain laurels, and so on. Fall has varicolored leaves, but also pretty flowers to boot — the asters and goldenrods. If you do crossword puzzles, as I do obsessively, you will know immediately that a five-letter word for “fall flower” is aster. For some unknown reason the 10 or so different species of white, blue, and purple asters on eastern Long Island invariably wait until the middle of August before they dare to bloom.

    The many local goldenrods start flowering at about the same time. First comes the early goldenrod at the end of July, then the blue-stemmed, rough-leaved gray, Canada, sweet, grass-leaved, gray, lance-leaved, and other goldenrods, ending with the ubiquitous and perhaps most faithful one, the seaside goldenrod.

    If it weren’t for the goldenrods and asters, the bees and butterflies would find themselves with little to do during the last month and a half of summer. If it weren’t for the seaside goldenrods with the wonderful scientific name, Solidago sempervirens, the migratory butterflies, in particular the monarch, would have little reason to visit Long Island on their way south to their wintering grounds in the mountains of Mexico. Ironically perhaps, the seaside goldenrods have never been more splendid, but this September and October have been almost completely monarch-less.

    While the asters and goldenrods paint the lower layers of the landscape, the trees paint the upper layers, and beyond them the mostly blue sky highlights the leaves and the flowers. Fall is far along, as the trees with leaves that turn the earliest, the horse chestnuts, tupelos, shads, black locusts, and sassafras, have already parted with most of their leaves, and the dogwoods, which have been blood red for almost a month, are trying to shed their leaves before they all turn an ugly brown. Pray thee, the oaks and hickories come along just in time to continue the display. Yes, New England, the Adirondacks, and the Appalachians are sought out year after year for their panorama of different hues that stretches from one end of the horizon to the other, but Long Island is not all that bad as far as fall color goes. It’s generally fine, absent early northeasters or tropical storms such as Irene at the end of August in 2011.

    The oaks — scarlet, black, white, chestnut, pin, and bear — are also vying for the beauty prize. The scarlet and pin oaks are almost always the winners. They generally peak in the last week of October and begin shedding while the pumpkins are at their orangest, just before Halloween and the first hard frost. Don’t rule out the vermillion and burgundy reds of the Virginia creepers and that old bugaboo, poison ivy. It and the poison sumac are the prettiest when they are the most poisonous. This year they could peak earlier as they are well on their way to achieving full color.

    Each year, come fall, Kurt Weill’s “September Song” becomes my anthem. It’s a sad lie, but sad can be beautiful. When its last note has ended, I turn to another fall song, one that is uplifting, “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go. . . .” I’m sure that most of you can sing, leastwise, hum the rest.

    “Beam me up,” said Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, although it seemed he was already over the fulsome moon on Monday. Striped bass had been moving his way through the week on their migration from the ocean beach at Hither Hills in Montauk west along Napeague and still farther west to Wainscott and beyond.

    “I had a 30 to 35-pound bass in the surf, had it in my hands. A wave hit me. I fell on my ass, broke the line and lost it at my feet. Special! I’m too old and fat. It was unreal. The water was full of ‘moonfish,’ ” apparently, bass brought his way compliments of a moon tide. “Had a school of 30-pounders in front of me with no one around. Wow!”

    Bennett was fishing near the White Sands motel on Napeague, and said the bass were hitting shiny lures, called tins.

    Surfcasting has been a bit iffier on the beach in Montauk. Some years, striped bass attack the Montauk Lighthouse like lemmings in reverse. Other years, they stay in the tidal rip currents off the Point before coming within casting range farther west.

    It’s too early to tell if the latter pattern will continue to the end of the recreational bass season on Dec. 15. It’s not to say Montauk has been devoid of bass. And, speaking of tins, Steve (the Perv) Kramer told a Montauk fish tale befitting the approach of All Hallows Eve. He said he’s come to believe in the reincarnation of fishermen. Not a total reincarnation (cue the Halloween eerie music); only hands and a persistent pulling pierce the veil. 

    Let’s just say that in Kramer’s opinion, there are times when the other side, the hereafter, is connected to the present by way of fishing line. He explained, in gravelly voice, how he’d come to this conclusion:

    He had purchased Percy Heath’s beach mobile, a Chevy Blazer, after the renowned bassist’s death in the spring of 2005. He transferred the Blazer’s wheels and tires to his own beach mobile. While working on the Blazer, he found an old lure. It was a scarred Hopkins tin, obviously beaten around by Montauk’s rocky bottom, that Percy had given a coat of green paint.

    Last week, the Perv was casting the hand-painted green Hopkins at Ditch Plain Beach in Montauk. “There was perfect whitewater, and I see a fish come up. I cast the green tin on eight-pound test line with my seven-foot stick.”

    The lure produced a 20-pound striper. “But it wasn’t me,” Kramer said, the implication being that the fish was actually caught by the same hands that had added sweet bottom to the swing of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and that had reeled in countless fish over the course of many years in Montauk.  

    When told the story outside Paulie’s Tackle shop, Marshall Helfand, a longtime fishing buddy of Percy’s, didn’t bat an eye. “Come here,” said he. “I’ve got something to show you.” Into his gray beach mobile Helfand reached. A dramatic pause, and then a lure was presented on outstretched hand. It was a white bucktail with a green leading edge, the white hair plucked from a deer’s tail flowing off behind. It was flatter than round, made of molded lead with a little keel along the bottom that gave the lure an enticing sashay, judging from Helfand’s demonstrative hands.

    “It’s a killer,” he said. “Old Bob Michelsen made them.”

    Robert Michelsen, who was there in Montauk’s golden years of surfcasting in the 1950s and early ’60s and whose son is currently in second place in the Montauk SurfMasters Tournament, died a couple of years ago. To the Perv’s and Helfand’s way of thinking, he lives on via the deadly sashay of at least one of his flat, green-tipped bucktails. Who knows?

    By the way, the fishing has not ceased on the bay side. Edward Shugrue III of East Hampton reported: “I ran around all day on Saturday in Montauk to find nothing, only to find a 29-inch keeper bass inside Three Mile Harbor on Sunday morning. Nice sunrise too. Goes to show, ‘the grass is always greener, and there’s no place like home.’ ” 

    This season there appears to be no place like the bottom. Boaters are bottom fishing for black sea bass (13-inch minimum length, 8-per-day bag limit), porgies (10-inch size limit, 30-per-day bag), and blackfish (16-inch minimum, 4-per-day bag limit). The porgy and sea bass seasons will remain open, without interruption, until Dec. 31. Blackfish angling will end on Dec. 14.

    Acorns falling on the roof, isn’t that a phrase from a popular song? Acorns have been falling on my roof since the last week in September. Most of them get caught in the gutter and are easy picking for jays, squirrels, chipmunks, white-footed mice, and raccoons. Long Island’s forests are derived primarily from the eastern deciduous biome centered in the Appalachians. While key Appalachian states like North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania have more oak species than any other states or other countries, Long Island has its share.

    Several oaks are in the white oak group, including the white, swamp white, chestnut, post, and dwarf chestnut oaks. Other species are in the black oak group, the black, red, scarlet, bear, black jack, and pin. Lately the Southern red oak has crept into Montauk, almost unnoticed. Native pin oaks are quite scarce. The other day I happened upon a group of five on the north side of Swamp Road in East Hampton’s Northwest Woods while looking for a stand of persimmons. The only other pin oaks I have encountered on eastern Long Island were in the Village of North Haven.

    Oaks are noted for their sturdiness and are prized woods for furniture making and flooring. After the scourge of gypsy moths followed a scourge of canker worm moths in the early 2000s, an army of dead leafless oaks stood for years on the South Fork before crumbling and falling to the ground. A few are still standing, but most are long gone. Just as the acorns of white oaks were prized over those of black oaks for making various foodstuffs used by the local Native Americans, the leaves of white oaks were favored by the gypsy moth larvae and cankerworms over those from the black oak group. Consequently, more than 90 percent of the killed oaks were white oaks, several of them more than 100 years old and two to three feet in diameter. It’s a pity that very few of them were salvaged for lumber before succumbing.

    Fruiting trees, the oaks among them, evolved hand in hand with the birds and mammals, beginning more than 100 million years ago in the last years of the dinosaur dynasty. Birds and mammals eat the fruit, defecate the hard pits, the pits fall on the ground, and another generation of trees is started to feed another generation of birds and mammals well into the future. Sweet fruit — blueberries, huckleberries, black cherries, beach plums and the like — is very rarely cached, as it ferments and goes bad if left for more than a few days in the open. Its “stones” are deposited a few days after being eaten, mostly in the summertime.

    Nuts, say those from hickories, walnuts, beech, and oaks, don’t ripen until the end of summer and are enveloped in a tough rind so that they last a long time on the ground without going bad. The rind of the acorn is its cup, thus only a half a rind. You see squirrels running across the road with nuts as big as walnuts and hickory nuts in their mouths, many of which will be stored for winter eating.

    Acorns on the other hand, are frequently eaten on the spot, especially by chipmunks and squirrels, but many are hidden away, as well, oftentimes in such quantities to last all the way to spring. If you take a few minutes to observe blue jays and squirrels picking up acorns and hiding them here and there, you might also observe an interesting interaction between the two. I watched the other day as a blue jay picked up an acorn from my backyard and placed it in one of the 50 or so plant pots, some with plants, some without, residing there. Then it plucked the acorn back out and went to another spot.

    A half hour later a squirrel came along shaking its tail vigorously, went to the pot where the blue jay had been, but didn’t come up with an acorn. Then it proceeded to go from pot to pot, apparently, searching for the edible loot, but came up empty. Or it could have been that the squirrel was also hiding its acorns in the flowerpots. When you think about it, the acorn stored in a flowerpot is more easily found come January than one stored in the ground.

    But it becomes a problem when both jays and squirrels are using the same pots to store their acorns. One or the other may lose out.

    Walnuts, hickory nuts, and, to a degree, acorns are round. They roll. If dropped from trees on a hillside, they will tend to move downhill over time, either to be eaten or end up starting new trees. In the spring, three years ago after a big acorn crop in Noyac, I noticed several little black and scarlet oak seedlings germinating in the earthen shoulder of Noyac Road in front of my house. The road slopes down as it passes my house, the acorns had apparently rolled down from trees up the road a bit, then were covered by snow from the snowplows, and after the snow melted in March began to sprout.

    Recently, I learned that acorns in the white oak group begin germinating in the fall shortly after dropping to the ground, while those in the black oak group don’t germinate until the following spring. This could be a survival mechanism based on taste. Since the white oak acorns are preferred, if they didn’t germinate until spring, they would be picked before the others. If they germinate right away, there’s a good chance that they will have a root in the ground and an opening shell and will already have become unpalatable.

    But the black oak-group acorns have a different adaptation to survive. They don’t have a good acorn year every year. When they do have a good year and a multitude are cached in soil to be eaten later, many go uneaten, and germinate come spring. In other words, the blue jays and squirrels have been planting them unintentionally, rather than merely hiding them. Or is it that jays and squirrels have evolved side by side with oaks for such a long time that they are not only concerned about getting through another winter, but also looking out for future generations and their survival and procreation? Plant now, eat later, much later.

    The different oak species are also competing for top billing. The whites are trying to get ahead of the black by germinating earlier. But even among the whites there is competition. The chestnut oak, for example, takes only a year to produce a ripe acorn, while the others take two years. This is a big year for chestnut oak acorns. The Trout Pond preserve and the rest of Noyac are full of them. Theoretically, the chestnut oaks could take over the farm, as they are twice as productive as the others, but this is not the case. They are just another oak as far as oaks go, certainly not the top-dog oak species by a long shot.

    There is so much we don’t know about the natural world, which, in many ways, is a good thing. Nothing wrong with a little mystery or sense of wonder.

    Take the unusually bright fall colors on the East End this year. I suspect it has to do with the equally unusual absence of a strong northeast storm or brush by a passing hurricane to salt the trees and turn them brown.

    And take the early appearance of scoters, sea ducks, hanging out in large rafts, chasing each other, and cooing not far from shore. Could it be that our lack of storms has allowed mussel beds and bottom vegetation to flourish? Has this drawn the sand eels and other prey species? Could the lack of storms be the reason striped bass on their western migration have been cruising close to shore, within casting distance, along the south-facing beaches of Napeague, Amagansett, East Hampton, and beyond?

    Throughout the past week, the surfcasting has been exceptionally good along the sand beaches. Caravans of beach mobiles have followed the schools with the tide. Casters have reeled striped bass ashore in the 10-to-20-pound range with regularity despite the warning of last week’s naysayers who insisted, “It’s over.” And the fish have been eating well.

    Fred Kalkstein, an organizer of the ongoing Montauk SurfMasters tournament, reported what he witnessed on Sunday:

    “A week ago the schools stopped to feed at Napeague. Sunday afternoon, about 4 o’clock, right at Napeague State Park I see a lot of trucks. Forty or 50 to my right, 20 to 30 to my left. They were fishing bucktails and metals. A guy would bring in a fish that would normally weigh 15 pounds and it probably weighed 18 or 20. They were fat, looked like footballs.”

    The fast and furious fishing has resulted in quick changes on the SurfMaster’s leader board. The action is particularly hot in the women’s and youth divisions. In recent days, Mary Ellen Kane caught a 19-pound bass and quickly topped that with one weighing 21.6 pounds. Christine Schnell, last season’s top female competitor, wrestled in a bass weighing 19.12 pounds. Griffin Kim, fishing in the youth division, nailed an 18.3-pound bass, but his brother James Jr. bested him with a 19.12-pounder, and shortly after that, Brandon Farrell topped the board with a 23.04-pound striper caught on the rod he won in the spring SurfMaster tourney.

    By contrast, there were no changes in the wader and wetsuit divisions, although the laugh of the week came at the expense of the wetsuiter John Bruno who was chased from his rock perch by seals.

    And what part are bunker, herring, and other large prey playing in all this? Starting last spring, large schools of bunker were seen in Fort Pond Bay. Are the oily fish back because the harvest of the Omega Protein Company of Virginia, the only menhaden fishing firm left, has been reduced by the federal government? But if the striped bass are feeding on bunker or other large prey, where are the gannets?

    The spectacular diving birds with black-tipped white wings, blue, dagger-like bills, and the ability to swim deep after their prey, have been relatively scarce this season. The answer, according to Chris Miller of the West Lake Marina, is that bunker are not showing up. “I didn’t see many peanut bunker [menhaden fry] this summer at all. Sand eels are here and in a big way. I swam through shoals of them. It was like I was in bait balls,” he said, referring to the spherical swarms small fish form to make the school look like something bigger in order to fend off predators. Miller is an experienced free diver with a poetic flare. He described one dive during which he swam to the bottom and looked up to observe “a beautiful vision, a ceiling of sparkling white bait.”

    If sand eels are the prey of the hour, then they have moved shoreward to the delight of surfcasters and the opposite of delight to boating fishermen who describe the offshore bass fishing as lackluster.

    Blackfish (tautog) fishing is spotty as well, although Miller said he can fix that. He’s selling hermit crabs, “blackfish crack,” he called them as he poured a half-bushel into a basket for a charter captain on Tuesday morning.

    “Better than green crabs” — the usual blackfish bait — he said, maybe because fishermen remove the hermits from their adopted moon-snail homes. From a fish’s point of view it would be like having someone shuck pistachio nuts for you, or peel grapes.

    On Sunday the South Fork Natural History Society hosted memorial service for the late Christopher Roberts, who passed away in August. Chris was a long-standing naturalist, musician, D.J., TV show producer, and landscaper who also worked for me in the East Hampton Town Natural Resources Department on and off. There was nothing environmental that he couldn’t master in a short time, be it wetland mapping, plant and animal identification, nature preserve caretaking, oil spill cleanup, or what have you. He was especially adept at identifying bird species by their appearance, color, flight characteristics, and vocalizations. He headed up the 2004 East Hampton Town breeding bird census, the second such comprehensive survey since 1994. Chris was an eco-friendly guy and a long-term participant in SoFo’s many programs.

    Among the attendees were his two sons, McCartney and Ben, both of whom appear to be following their father’s ecological bent. During the ceremony, part inside, part outside, one of the other attendees, the 2-year old granddaughter of Phil and Mary Miller, East Hampton residents and friends of the family, was entertaining some of us with a large pretty-colored oak leaf that she had picked up on site and was proudly brandishing, a perfect symbol for the day’s event.

    It made me think of the time when I was 8 and lived in Mattituck across the bay and would spend entire fall afternoons trying to catch oak leaves as they fell from 40 or 50 feet up and twisted and turned in the breeze on the way to earth, one of which so caught my eye that I named it Freddy and took it home with me. It was a floral pet of sorts and it laid by my pillow night after night during the remainder of the fall until it disintegrated into a hundred bits.

    I was also reminded of the Saturday before, when I toured East Hampton from the Southampton town line to Napeague checking out and rating the color of foliage using a scale from 1 to 10 that I had developed over the decades since the 1980s. The colors were a moment short of peaking, but even so, almost all of the roadside trees rated 8 and above. It was almost a perfect fall for such a survey and I didn’t want to wait another day as I was reminded that that Storm Sandy had wiped away last fall’s colors a few days before they were about to peak, ending my survey before it began.

    East Hampton has preserved more land as permanent native habitat than any other Long Island municipality. Almost all of its back roads are wooded and the trees come in many different shapes, heights, and kinds. Northwest is dominated by white pines, pitch pines, oaks, hickories; Wainscott by pitch pines and scrub oaks; Amagansett by beech, oaks, sweet birch, and a host of others. It turns out that while the foliage along Swamp Road, Old Northwest Road, Red Dirt Road, and Accabonac Highway rated as high as 8.5 on my scale, the Old Stone Highway foliage between was the most colorful, reaching a mark of 9 at many points.

    All the while, during the hour-and-a-half-long survey, the leaves were falling at a rate that would leave several of the trees bare by the following day. I was rating and counting them in the nick of time. In 95 minutes of driving, covering 37 miles of back roads, I tallied 476 falling leaves, at which rate some 7,200 would be gone from their perches by Sunday morning. The road with the most falling leaves turned out to be Stony Hill Road, slightly over a mile long, dirt surfaced and badly rutted halfway along, and flanked on both sides by beeches, oaks, hickories, and very few houses. In that short distance, I counted 53 leaves falling while driving from north to south. The winds along Stony Hill Road barely reached above 10 knots and so it would appear that those 53 falling leaves were more than ready to leave their twigs.

    Listening as my vehicle passed over and cracked open acorns and hickory nuts, I also carried on a different sort of survey on my journey. I must have cracked thousands of them from beginning to end. Thus, as autumns go, based on foliage aesthetics and nut production, this is one of the best. You can bet that the squirrels, several of which were active on the shoulders as I passed, and turkeys will take advantage of such a bumper crop. It’s a pity that squirrels don’t see colors, but turkeys certainly do. I wonder if they enjoyed the foliage as much as I. There is a lesson here, I suppose, seen from the squirrel’s point of view: Aesthetics are nice and certainly of major importance, but food comes first!

    Surfcasters were arm-weary from casting and tongue-tired from telling tales of Friday’s big wind, big surf, big white water, and big striped bass along the south-facing beaches from Montauk through East Hampton.

    Gulls hovered and soared over walls of white water that stormy day. Shiny tins with green tubes were the lures that matched the sand eels that have kept migrating stripers feeding and fat.

    It was not easy fishing. A large ocean swell pushed sideways by a 20-knot southwest wind built a west-to-east current into a river by Friday afternoon. It was the kind of sweep that kept casters choosing between a few steps seaward to make a deeper cast and the real possibility of being swept off their feet. 

    Big bass in the 20-to-30-pound range were in the maelstrom, thick at times, making for the kind of day that the East End is famous for among those who enjoy casting lures — as well as caution — to the wind.

     What is that exactly? It’s hard to drag the philosophical out of fishermen, although it’s certainly there. Days like Friday will be remembered not only because of the fish, but also because catching one, especially a big one, somehow validates the entire scene, the confluence of natural phenomena: black scoters on the wing offshore, the powerful surf, the onshore wind that defied the casters’ arms to penetrate it, the rain squalls, and the sky that morphed through those 50 shades of gray before the sunset ignited a blazing red, orange, and purple finale.

    It’s a selfish instinct perhaps. It shouldn’t be necessary. During those dry spells when cast after cast goes untaken, a fisherman might feel incomplete, somehow removed. It’s the violent tug, the powerful pulse of a hooked fish on the line that caps it, permits one to feel, as well as see, the day.

    Same with surfers. By Sunday morning in Montauk, along the Napeague stretch, and beside the Georgica jetties in East Hampton, a cold, offshore wind had cleaned up the big swell. Of course, you could stand on the beach and appreciate the light green of the breaking waves or you could don your wetsuit (a light one given the unseasonably warm water), paddle out, and feel the light green of the breaking waves. And, as you sat on your board waiting for the next set of waves, you could also appreciate the gulls hovering over the bass chomping away on sand eels just below you. What a glorious time of year. 

    Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, called it one of “the greatest bass runs in years. People from as far away as London, Santa Barbara, Pennsylvania, and Maryland have been coming in truckloads.” Bennett reported a few 40-pound fish taken at Georgica Beach in East Hampton. He also reported hearing of good blackfish and porgy fishing.

    Capt. Tom Cusimano of the Sea Wife IV charter boat in Montauk was on the same page, blackfish-wise. He and the folks at the Star Island Yacht Club reported excellent bottom fishing at the usual haunts, off the coast of Fisher’s Island in particular.

    About a week ago, a gunboat rolled through downtown Montauk on a trailer heading east. It was dark pea green, the color of the winter sea, about 25 feet long with two-foot-high shutters that could be lowered to become gun ports, about four on each side. It looked like the Monitor or the Merrimac. The boat, which has been seen laying for sea ducks off Montauk Point in the past, looked as though it can accommodate about six hunters.

    The season for hunting sea ducks, a group that includes scoters, eiders, harlequin, and pintail (formerly known as old squaw), began on Oct. 26 and will run until Dec. 8. The split season will open again on Dec. 28 and go until Jan. 12. Seven sea ducks per day may be taken. Only four may be scoters, and the beautiful harlequins are off limits. Late October brought scoters aplenty. Bennett said shotgun ammo is on sale at his shop.

    In the United States Army we used to leave the barracks at 6 a.m. and fall in, i.e., line up for the daily accounting. After everyone said, “Here,” the platoon sergeant would say, “All present and accounted for, sir” to the company commander, and we would fall out and go about our business of “hurrying up and waiting.” There was always someone missing from one or more of the platoons and that would cause some consternation among those wearing the “scrambled eggs,” the brass.

    Well, the winter birds have been showing up in good numbers, and while I can’t yet say, “All present and accounted for,” any day now their ranks will have become complete.

    Except for the winter-winter birds, the few that don’t show up until winter deepens, the present bird population, kinglets leading the way, is large and varied. Does it have something to do with the exquisite, Sandy-less autumn of 2013, I wonder? The one thing I am sure of is that the elections had nothing to do with it. Politicians and birds are not common bedfellows.

    It’s time to clean the squirrel-proof feeders (none of which are ever completely squirrel-proof) and put them up. Yes, there are a lot of fruit and seeds left over from the summer, but the birds have come to depend upon the handouts, particularly so the upscale ones like the black sunflower seeds, and we don’t want to disappoint them.

    It’s also time to get out the Peterson’s or the Sibley’s because the birds are in their winter colorations and, except for a few, won’t sparkle out their identities as they do in the spring and summer. By now call notes have replaced songs and if your ears aren’t waxed over like mine, you will be able to pick out the birds by their distinctive utterings. But be careful, there are some polished mimics out there and you could easily mistake a blue jay for a red-tailed hawk or an osprey.

    Some of the birders I hang out with are also techies. They not only pack binoculars and spotting scopes, they have sophisticated cellphones, iPods, and such that have pictures, calls, and songs of different birds, including some from Europe, Asia, and South and Central America. The in-the-field birders of today are as well prepared as Navy Seals. In the annual Christmas bird counts these days, I find myself being best at driving other birders around and tallying the birds they call out.

    The Christmas counts don’t start until mid-December, but already expert birders are staking out birds like chipping sparrows, orange-crowned warblers, dickcissels, and the like in hopes that they will stick around until count day. On lots of counts the prize birds are often found at feeders. By count day, the experts know every feeder in the territories they are assigned to.

    Every count has a compiler. All of the different counts in each state and country, now almost worldwide, are compiled on spreadsheets and sent to an Audubon Society office. The counts are posted online. Many are still annually published, so one can get a fairly accurate representation of the status of the global bird population while surfing the net.

    Because the rules have tightened for counting birds, your find might be challenged, in which case you might have to write a description of what you saw (and heard), or, better, submit a digital photograph to the “authorities.” This is serious stuff! Some birders, having had their birds removed from the list by an arbitrator, have been so nonplussed that they’ve given up an annual count that they have participated in for years and years on end.

    Lastly, the birds themselves are tolerant and forgiving. They know how to take care of themselves and abide by the birders tromping through their winter territories once a year. They will even cooperate at times, responding in kind to their species’ call notes or songs or moving to a perch so that one gets a better view.