I was standing on Turtle Hill on Sunday about noon in front of the Montauk Lighthouse and beside the Lost at Sea Memorial looking down on eight seals close to shore, some floating on their backs, others with just their heads out of water looking shoreward at the few human visitors.

    Johnson Nordlinger, the assistant site manager for the Lighthouse Museum, said she watched the seals surfing the day before, hitching rides on the swells rounding the point. Fishing, surfing, equally expert at both activities, and with no friction between “user groups.” Eating when hungry, wasting nothing. No need for industry, conservation a natural thing.

    Back in about 1974, I think it was, I worked as a deckhand on the Joey, an offshore lobster boat. Its captain, Dave Krusa was, and is, a master mariner and ingenious fisherman. The body of federal fishing laws now known as the Magnuson-Stevens Act was in the process of being written. Foreign fishing boats were about to be kicked outside a new 200-mile territorial limit.

    Unlike the foreign industry, our domestic fleet was comprised of relatively small, owner-operated boats that lived and died upon the altar of supply and demand, with few regulations. The government took pains to help “capitalize” the domestic industry with low-interest loans and grants. The fleet grew. Captain Krusa strongly believed the industry would self-regulate in a Darwinian sort of way. If too many fish were being caught by too many fishermen, then those with less experience and expertise would fall by the wayside, allowing stocks to rebuild naturally.

    Authors of the Magnuson-Stevens Act created management counsels, peopled by scientists, conservationists, and fishermen, to oversee fish stocks found off the country’s coasts. The new regulations would control fishing effort while taking into account the economic well-being of fishing communities.

    Since 1976, when the Magnuson-Stevens Act went into effect, both Captain Krusa’s regulation by natural selection and the Magnuson-Stevens Act’s promised balance between controlling harvests and protecting fishing communities have gone by the board.

    To be fair, the job has become extraordinarily complex, in large part because fish are hard to count, but also because the regulatory machinery, which includes government scientists, battling user groups, powerful conservation groups, and industry representatives, is broken. The result is a wasted resource and damaged communities.

    “If you think Obamacare has problems . . .” was the way Scott Lang introduced the topic of broken bureaucracy before a gathering of commercial fishermen at the Inlet Seafood Restaurant in Montauk on Friday. Mr. Lang is the former mayor of New Bedford, Mass., and the secretary of the Center for Sustainable Fisheries, an organization whose chairman of the board is Barney Frank, the former longtime Massachusetts congressman.

    Mr. Lang was joined at Inlet by the group’s C.E.O., Brian Rothschild, professor of marine science and former dean of the School for Marine Science and Technology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Also serving on the Center’s board of directors is Montauk’s own Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, who put Friday’s program together, and, in the words of Mr. Lang, planted the center’s flag in Montauk. Although Friday’s meeting drew commercial fishermen, Montauk’s recreational fishing fleet has also been hurt by regulations that many feel continue to grow more draconian.

    The message of Mr. Lang and Mr. Rothschild was simple: The Magnuson-Stevens Act does not have to be re-authorized — a process now underway in Congress — it has to be rewritten. Mr. Lang praised Ms. Brady for “tracing the lineage,” following the money from powerful conservation groups to the creation of lopsided policy, a connection that had facilitated inaccurate science and removed the components of the original national standard that protected the economies of fishing communities.

    “There is no reason we cannot have a conservationist system based on transparency. We are going to have a [National Marine Fisheries Service] that’s transparent, that reforms from within. It’s the key issue in this year’s reauthorization,” Mr. Lang said. “The intent of Congress was a balance.” He stressed the importance of vastly improving the science of counting fish. “We have to have the science.”

    Professor Rothschild boiled down the Magnuson-Stevens Act to three national standards: “Don’t overfish,” obtain the “best science,” and “take into account the social fabric” of fishing communities. “We want optimum yield balanced with the needs of the community,” something he said current policy is not permitting, but which is possible given the facts.

    Dr. Rothschild said that the total allowable catches of all the regulated species that make up the Northeast fisheries add up to 140,000 tons per year, while current regulation permit only 35,000 tons to be harvested. “We are wasting fish, and losing tens of millions of dollars.” He said that what is being called “the best available science” is woefully inaccurate. “We are committed to the reauthorization not going forward without rewriting. We have to rewrite it, and we need a national debate that will show how wrong management is,” he said.

    Back to the Lighthouse, the seals, and the statue. Times change. The statue shows a fisherman in his boat hauling on a rope. It’s dedicated to those lost at sea. Where will the statute stand that’s dedicated to fishermen lost in Washington?

    As for the seals, they were once a relatively rare sight around here. They continue to increase in number much to the chagrin of surfcasters who watch them chase fish from their lures and inshore netters who haul their gear only to find their catch bitten in half. Seals will survive. It seems when it comes to balancing industry and community they are fitter than we.

    Woods, before Lyme disease, were the child’s other playground. Shimmy up trees, play cops and robbers, hide and seek, and all the time aware of the trees, leaves, bushes, open spots, learning ecology without knowing it.

    I entered such a woods on the first day of November. The scarlet oaks were still ablaze in a plethora of shiny reds, the ground underfoot was covered with freshly loosed leaves and almost as pretty, leaves were spinning and turning over as they fell like snow, it was a magical childhood moment even for this 78-year-old writer.

    The South Fork is full of woods of different kinds and different colors. There is Hither Woods or, as Dan Rattiner used to refer to it, “the Great Spooky Woods,” Point Woods in view of the Montauk Light, the Stony Hill Woods in Amagansett, Northwest Woods, west of Three Mile Harbor, the Wainscott pine barrens, which cross the border into Southampton, the morainal woods in north Bridgehampton and Water Mill, the North Sea-Tuckahoe woods, which end in the Shinnecock Hills, and countless smaller patchy ones scattered here and there.

    But I was on the North Fork, which is covered with farmland and all of its woodland if taken together — from Jamesport on the west to Orient Point on the east — would barely equal Hither Woods in size. I was in the largest of the North Fork’s motley assemblage, Moore’s Woods in the Village of Greenport, named after an early Southold Town settler. It can’t be bigger than a few hundred acres, but it has almost everything that a woods should have, and much that no woodland on the South Fork has.

    Moore’s Woods was oft-visited by Long Island’s most revered naturalist, the late Roy Latham, who lived on a potato farm in Orient. Roy covered all of eastern Long Island, on foot, on horseback, in Tin Lizzies, and, in the last semester of his long life, in pickups and modern cars and sometimes even by boat. He was not only a farmer, but an authority on Long Island’s flora and fauna and its rarities, its Native Americans, and much more. He collected and published widely and the bulk of his stuff is safely squirreled away in the New York State Museum in Albany. (I use the word “safely” loosely as that fine institution is steadily going downhill and may not survive the century.)

    Moore’s Woods is one of the easternmost outposts of the famous Appalachian hardwood forest that stretches from Georgia and Alabama all the way to northeastern Canada. It is one of the largest deciduous forests in the world and in modern ecology books is considered a distinct biome, like the oceans, prairies, deserts, and tundras. It sits on the remains of the clayey soils and till left by the retreating glacier that created Long Island’s second moraine, the Harbor Hill moraine, and is a little over 10,000 years old. In the beginning it was tundra. Later it was part of the taiga, or northern coniferous forest that stretched around the northern hemisphere and covered much of North America, Siberia, and northern Europe.

    Evidence of such a coniferous past was uncovered by Latham, himself, who in the early 1920s wrote about a remnant group of fir trees still eking out a living along Orient’s northern edge where it meets the Long Island Sound.

    Moore’s Woods is now almost 100 percent Appalachian in makeup and includes tree species such as the American ash, shagbark hickory, hop hornbeam, tulip, swamp white oak, and northern red oak, which you would be hard pressed to find on the South Fork. It also has most native trees found on the South Fork, such as scarlet oak, black oak, American beech, pignut hickory, black birch, witch hazel, and sassafras.

    It is famous in New York State for its orchid flora, in particular the cranefly orchid, Tipularia, which was one of Latham’s favorite plants and which is found nowhere else in New York State. This rare plant has a most unusual survival strategy. It flowers in the spring and leafs out in the fall. The green-above, purplish-below leaves spring up in late summer and remain viable until just before flowering stems push up. Thus, the plant has already fruited and dropped its tiny seeds by the time the leaves begin show. Even if they are browsed by deer, the dropped seeds will produce a new crop by the time spring rolls around. In most of our orchids, such as the lady slipper, the flowers and leaves appear together and both are foraged at once by deer, rabbits, and the like. The five people I traveled with on that Friday counted 46 of them, while only a few years back, one member of the group had counted 163.

    Latham found one of these beautiful little orchids on a trip to Montauk in the 1920s. Almost 100 years later we are hoping to relocate it, as Montauk’s flora is turning out to be the richest and most unusual on Long Island, perhaps in New York State.

    My mother was raised on a farm in Nedrow, N.Y., just south of Syracuse. For many years, she taught what was called home economics — sewing, cooking, the basics — at Division Avenue High School in Levittown, where I grew up. The community was made up mostly of families transplanted from the city.

    At the beginning of each school year she found it necessary to start from scratch by asking for a show of hands to make sure everyone in the class knew where eggs came from. There were always a few who believed they came from the store, with no known connection to chickens.

     The other day, my daughter told how a patron of the restaurant where she works gave her a wide-eyed description of the “wildlife” he’d seen from his car while making what must have been a first-time visit to our area from more concrete environs. 

    He’d seen rabbits, he told her, and deer, and a strange skinny dog, reddish with a fluffy tail. My daughter informed him the skinny dog was probably a fox, news that excited him still further. He might have driven off the road if he’d come across a parade of wild turkeys.

    It’s a sight that’s become wonderfully routine in recent years, but still surprises, given how quickly the once-native birds have multiplied since their reintroduction during the winter of 1993-94. The population has become robust enough to justify a cull.

    The hunting season for wild turkeys opens on Saturday and runs through Tuesday. The bag limit is one bird of either sex during the four-day hunt. The birds will go from our local woods to the Thanksgiving table without the need to address the urban quandary: Which came first, the chicken or the store?

    Our connection to the natural world is a blessing that must never be taken for granted, or squandered. Sir Walter Scott’s “It’s not fish your buyin’, it’s men’s lives” referred to the hard work of fishermen, but when we buy a weakfish caught in a local pound trap, or scallops scooped up in a bayman’s dredge, it’s a transaction that affirms — like pulling a striped bass from the ocean to release or to eat, or watching a deer nibble your nasturtiums — our connection to this place.

    The South Fork Natural History Society reminds us that the full moon on Sunday is the one Native Americans called the full beaver moon, time to set beaver traps to supply fur for warm coats in winter. We wonder if the lone beaver discovered last year living in Montauk’s Fresh Pond is still around.

    Striped bass certainly are. The fall run of bass has not provided the kind of spectacular feeding frenzies of the last couple years, but it has remained consistent. During the past week surfcasters found bass all along Napeague ranging in size from small “rats” to fish in the teens and low 20-pound range.

    The standings in the hard-fished Montauk SurfMasters Tournament for striped bass are as follows: In the Wader division, Mike Milano holds onto first place with a 38.08-pound bass caught on Oct. 5 followed by Richie Michelsen with a 37.64-pounder caught on Sept. 23, and Sam Doughty who caught his 26.36-pound striper on Oct. 20. John Bruno keeps his hold on first place in the wetsuit division by virtue of his 37.22-pounder.

    In the women’s division, Mary Ellen Kane commands first and second with 21.6 and 19.35-pound bass. Christine Schnell is in third place. Her bass weighed in at 19.12 pounds. The youth division is headed by Brenden Farell with a 20.04-pound bass, followed by Philip Schnell in second place and James Kim in third place with 19.52 and 19.12 pound bass respectively. James’s fish must not have eaten as many sand eels.

    Surfcasters and private boat fishermen reading this column should be aware that state conservation officers have been checking to see if you are carrying your recreational fishing registry cards. The free registry cards, which replaced a short-lived license requirement in March of 2011, are mandatory. The license requirement was quashed after East End townships sued and their right to permit fishing without “lett or hindrance” (a required license) was upheld.

    The Southampton Town Trustees reported on Tuesday that a few fishermen had been fined for not having their cards. The East Hampton Town Trustees were expected to discuss the issue during their Tuesday night meeting.

    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.

    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.

    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!

    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.

    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.

    “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.

    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.