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.

   Fall is coming down the tracks and the asters and goldenrods are taking over the countryside. The two are part of the sunflower family, formerly the compositae, now the Asteraceae. The East End of Long Island is rich in aster and goldenrod species, having more than 20 local species combined. In the world of flowering plants, the sunflower family is the most ubiquitous in species, and one of the reasons for that is the way the different members disperse their seeds.

    The common sunflower or common dandelion represents the family well. A single sunflower, yellow on the outside and dark in the middle, is actually a composite of 50 to 100 flowers. The yellow petals around the perimeter are parts of the ray flowers — one yellow petal, or ray, for each floret. The center is made up of disc flowers, each of which produces a seed. The dandelion is a miniature sunflower, but is constructed similarly. We might just as well call sunflowers and other members of the family “superflowers.”

    The common sunflower that is so popular at the local garden stands is one of the few members of the family that produces large edible seeds. Of course, to get at the meat, one must break through the test, just as one needs to husk the peanut from the peanut hull in order to eat it. Birds such as chickadees, blue jays, nuthatches, and the like use their beaks and grasping feet to get to the goodies. Humans prefer to buy and eat sunflower seeds already loosed from their shells. In carrying away seeds from the sunflower disc to store or eat perched on a limb, birds drop some along the way. Whether stored or dropped, several such seeds go uneaten and germinate a good distance from the sunflower parent. Such means of spreading one’s kin is not that efficient and, perhaps, why the common sunflower and others in the genus, Helianthus, are few and far apart compared to other members of the family which have seeds that are dispersed by wind.

    Asters and goldenrod seeds have a little feathery appendage called a pappus. These pappuses can be in the form of a little parachute, not unlike the feathery appendages of milkweeds, which are not at all closely related to the sunflowers. Such little parachutes like those on the thistles, for example, can waft in a gentle breeze for miles and miles. Since most of these feathery seeds become ripe and are released in the fall when southwesterlies and westerlies prevail, seeds from western Long Island and even from west of New York City can make it all the way to Montauk. It may take several generations or only one to get there from 100 miles away or more. Over the very long haul, the movement of storms from the west, with their attendant westerlies, may account for the relatively greater number of asters and goldenrods here than there.

    Cottonwood trees also produce seeds with “sails,” but their seeds are released in the spring. Maple tree seeds come in pairs, attached to each other in a “samara” with a paravane on each side, when they drop from, say, 50 feet up, the samaras spin like the rotors of helicopters and the seeds motor away from the parent. Ashes and lindens also produce seeds with wings, one to a seed, which helps them disperse their kind well beyond their trunks.

    Not so with the oaks, hickories, and walnuts. Like apples, they don’t fall far from the tree, which would be a very poor means of dispersal if it weren’t for squirrels, chipmunks, blue jays, and other mammals and birds that harvest the nuts and store them in caches or singly to get them through the winter. A lot of these nuts don’t get eaten and germinate come the following spring. The acorn may not fall far from the tree, but it can be picked up and stored a great distance from the tree. This kind of passive dispersal works better for oaks than for hickories and walnuts, as there are many more oak species in North America than walnut species.

    The Rosaceae is one of the largest families after the Asteraceae. It contains the roses, raspberries, strawberries, crabapples, beach plums, cherries, pears, hawthorns, and many other fruit-bearing trees. The fruits the rose family species produce are pulpy and mostly edible, but the seeds in the center are practically indigestible. Just as we stole apples and carried them far away to eat them as kids, spitting out the seeds as we did, the birds and mammals that eat the fruit, defecate the seeds in a myriad of places. Seeds that pass through a digestive track germinate faster than seeds that don’t. Black cherries, also known as wild cherries, perhaps best demonstrate this kind of dispersal.

    One can hardly find a wood, heathland, old field, or scrubland without black cherries. Their seeds get around!

    The Ericaceae, or heaths, such as huckleberries, blueberries, cranberries, and so on follow closely on the heels of the Rosaceae in terms of edible fruit and dispersal of seeds by birds and mammals. Like the fruit in the rose family, most of these ripen in the late summer or fall, are deposited thereafter, and germinate in the spring. Hollies, catbriars, privets, junipers, and many other trees, shrubs, or groundcover plants don’t have nearly as many species, but their fruits are more persistent than those of members of the rose and heath families. They are still clinging to their perches in the middle of winter while the more tasty ones are long gone and serve as food for over-wintering birds and non-hibernating mammals, such as mockingbirds, house finches, wild turkeys, deer mice, squirrels, and foxes.

    It is not by chance that flowering and seed-producing plants evolved in great numbers at about the same time the birds and mammals — the last vertebrates to evolve — were expanding their numbers of species halfway through the Cretaceous period, 80 million years ago. The higher plants and higher animals co-evolved. One fed the other and vice-versa. After all, you are what you eat, and not all of what you eat remains in your body.

I know a lot about nature, but very little about art, especially fine art. A lot of artists, as well as a poet or two, live in Springs. Some of them are not only respected artists but also environmentalists, thus “artist-activists” in my way of thinking. Good for art, good for the environment, good for nature. They feed on each other.

Two of the first artists to move to Springs all the way from New York City, were Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. They ended up on the edge of Accabonac as much by chance as by preference. It wasn’t so much the bucolic setting, and in particular, Accabonac Harbor, that Pollock was drawn to, but, as he told an admirer who asked why he picked the house in Springs, “I just wanted to get out of the city.” In 1956, only a year after the move, the setting became paramount, a barn that stood directly between the house and the harbor was moved to the wooded north edge, the view of the salt marsh and the tidal waters beyond was forever linked to the house, its east-facing windows, and Pollock and Krasner’s art.

At that time a few horses and cows still roamed the salt marsh feeding on salt marsh hay, an early staple for settlers’ livestock. Salt marshes served as grazing lands and a source of winter hay. Springs was mostly woods, there were very few residents, and, as one middle-aged male Bonacker told me recently, when the Little League started and Springs wanted to play in it, it was hard to find nine boys to field a team. Springs has changed considerably since then, but it has resisted the gentrification dominating most of the Hamptons. Accabonac Harbor has held out through thick and thin, and its salt marshes are thriving as well as any on the South Fork. No more cattle, maybe an occasional horse or two, but new ruminants have moved in — white-tailed deer — and they are just as pretty.

The ugly head of Eurasian phragmites has cropped up here and there in the last 30 years. There is not a salt marsh on eastern Long Island that has been spared. In fact right around the corner to the north, a thick patch of phragmites stands tall in march formation, ready to move on to the Pollock-Krasner wetland as soon as conditions are favorable and no one is watching.

On Monday I visited the Pollock-Krasner site for the fourth time this year so that I could keep track of the comings and goings in the wetland flora and that just upland of it, much of it ornamentals, having been planted early on by the new occupants. What was particularly striking, not just Monday, but in all the previous visits is the zonation of the vegetation leading to the salt marsh from the back of the house.

The backyard grades down gradually and evenly 200 yards or so before you come to an arm of the harbor reaching inland via a “mosquito” ditch, one of the 17 miles of vector control ditches along both sides of the harbor that were dug by hand during the Great Depression.

The upland is conventional grass, grading into dry meadow dominated by broomsedge, a taller version of little bluestem that is slowly replacing the latter grass in many parts of the South Fork. Next comes the high marsh zone, characterized by salt marsh hay, spike grass, and glasswort, after which saltwater cord grass makes up the low marsh running 100 feet or so to the mosquito ditch with its tidal water. Because each side of the ditch is a littler higher than the grade of the marsh, a result of leaving the dirt removed during the ditch’s construction more than 75 years ago, high tide bush, or marsh elder, a hearty, salt-tolerant shrub, lines each side, ready to take on the phragmites should it try to advance.

Groundsel bush, a woody member of the sunflower family, forms a hedge between the upland junipers and the high marsh on either side of the meadowlands. It is thick with flower buds, which are just about ready to pop out into grayish-white tiny flowers, the last wave of flowering to occur in the harbor’s watershed before Halloween comes along and the trees and most of the shrubs lose their leaves.

There is a wrack line of phragmites stems and bits of jetsam well landward of the high marsh zone, a remnant of Sandy’s visit. It is in the Pollock-Krasner House’s history that Hurricane Carol in the summer of 1954 pushed water all the way up to the foundation. Inasmuch as the grade between house and harbor waters is so slight in pitch, by 2050 the salt marsh edge will have advanced toward the house another 100 feet or so, as sea level is expected to rise by 11/2 feet by then. Fortunately, at the Pollock-Krasner site, as for a sizeable chunk of similarly sloped land around Accabonac Harbor, the wetland’s move landward will not be impeded by trees and other obstructions.

On Monday, in the company of the photographer-artist Antonia Pisciotta, I examined the marsh zones closely, as there was much more to please the eye than wetland grasses. The glasswort, or samphire, was turning bright scarlet, little salt-marsh gerardia a half-foot tall were displaying their tiny magenta flowers tucked between grass stems. This little plant, a close relative of the endangered sandplain gerardia of Montauk, does very well in the harbor’s high marsh areas. Scattered among them are two species of salt-marsh asters, one with very short white petals (or rays), which is an annual, the other with white daisy-like flowers and fleshy leaves, a perennial. The former is on the state’s threatened list, the latter is on the endangered list.

Most of the marshland in front of the Pollock-Krasner House is in the hands of the Nature Conservancy, which began acquiring valuable wetland and upland habitats, including treed hummocks, around Accabonac Harbor more than 40 years ago. Long before East Hampton Town had a preservation fund to buy land, it had a program to buy small building lots. Randall Parsons headed that committee while he was a councilman in the early and mid-’80s when East Hampton began to buy parcels around the harbor. The Peconic Land Trust has also been in on the act and they own outright or have conservation easements on several parcels, including the one on Old Stone Highway that served as the residence of the late Ward Bennett up until the late 1990s.

Acquiring the land for public use in perpetuity is one way to protect the harbor, which is not only an aesthetic knockout, but a valuable repository of fish, shellfish, and wildlife. However, letting the phragmites take over much of the wetland species and even allowing some native trees to take over the dry part of the meadow is a problem. Flood tides help to beat back the phragmites’ and other upland vegetation’s push seaward, but are not frequent enough to do the job completely. Livestock used to keep the dry meadow cropped and treeless, but the deer are not as good as the livestock. They don’t eat phragmites and bamboo, nor do they eat mile-a-minute vine, Japanese knotweed, Asian bittersweet, or mugwort.

A very large silver maple — a kind of natural monument to Pollock and Krasner — stands on the north edge of the meadow not far from the studio. It was a sapling when the couple purchased the house. Now it is 16 feet in diameter. Jackson passed away in 1956, while Lee, an equally adept artist, held out till 1984. Before she passed on, she deeded the l.56 acres with the house, studio, shed, glacial erratics, and other accoutrements to the Stony Brook Foundation, which owns it and oversees it to this day. In 1994, largely as a result of the work of the present day museum director, Helen Harrison, the Pollock-Krasner House received National Historic Landmark status, one of a handful of such sites in East Hampton Town, including the Montauk Lighthouse, which was given landmark status last year.

When you visit the museum, take in the marvelous view, as well. In Pollock’s and Krasner’s absence, the community of Springs artists continues to grow and prosper, if not monetarily, at least in spirit. Accabonac Harbor and its surroundings are partly responsible for the wonderful art they produce.

    Another week without ticks, while the tree crickets are still filling the night with their monotonic stridulations. Blowfish are back after a relatively long hiatus (I know why, but I won’t tell), but the winter flounder are still but a few. Scallops are scarce, slipper shells are having a banner year. The hickory nuts are dropping like flies. The acorn crop isn’t half bad, at least on the shoulders of the South Fork moraine. The scarlet, black, and white oak acorns that are now falling on our roofs were two years in the making. The chestnut oak acorns only take a year to mature. Pitch pinecones are waiting for a fire to unleash their seeds, while the Northwest white pinecones shed the seed without any help. Myriad things are coming and going and that’s the way fall should start out.

    Notwithstanding the ever-looming presence of phragmites, the salt marshes, both tidal and supratidal, have done well this year. There is a hearty crop of salt-marsh hay, but no cows to eat it as there were in the 18th and 19th centuries. The deer have taken up the vacuum left by the livestock. Their 10-inch wide trails weave here and there across the marsh, where the deer find ample forage and, simultaneously, freedom from ticks. Below, seaward of the intertidal zone, eelgrass beds continue to wane. The one in the East Hampton Town Trustee sanctuary along the east side of Napeague Harbor is hanging on for dear life, trying to make it to the next opening of the east channel.

    There is some kind of mysterious relationship between phragmites stands and eelgrass beds. All of those South Fork harbors and tidal creeks that have very large stands of phragmites along their edges have almost no eelgrass. Lake Montauk’s eelgrass beds are largely depleted. Northwest Creek has an absolutely bare bottom, while Accabonac Harbor and Three Mile Harbor are nearly grassless. The former was just dredged, the latter, three years ago. After the Shinnecock inlet’s last dredging, eelgrass flourished. We’ll soon see if letting more water in and out with each tidal cycle will stimulate the return of eelgrass in Bonac Creek and Three Mile Harbor.

    About six years ago, Three Mile Harbor’s very large longstanding bed of eelgrass on the west side of the Hand’s Creek Road end and the Duke estate vanished as if overnight. No one has yet explained the die-off. It happened in the water ski area and where docks and their pilings are removed and reinstalled by barges in mid-fall and mid-spring. The churning of the water ski boat props and jetting of pilings in and out every year kicks up a lot of silt and other obnoxious materials, not to mention the bottom scraping by the barges. This is obviously not good for eelgrass plants, the roots of which extend into the bottom sediments only a few inches.

    Disturbing the bottom in these ways is not only anathema for eelgrass, but bad for a lot of other marine plants and animals as well. Eelgrass is the most valuable bottom habitat along the entire Atlantic Coast, and it should be tended to in the same manner that Mary Mary, quite contrary, assiduously tended to her garden.

    After the hordes retreat to their urban abodes at the end of each summer, it is a time for quieting down, a little meditation, and thoughts of the future, especially of the coming spring and planting seeds for the next summer and fall harvest. Instead of the willy-nilly approach to harbor maintenance and tidal creek cleaning, why not do as the farmers do? They let the good soil rest during the winter, while preparing for the next season of growth. Regular maintenance is the answer to a lot of our problems both on land and in the water. The late Norman Edwards, an East Hampton Town trustee, was a champion of such dedicated care. Too bad past administrations let a man of such wisdom and forethought down. Now he is gone but the valuable lessons he left us with are still relevant.

    Yes, the hordes are gone, now is the time to get with it!

    I believe in wormholes, invisible funnel clouds that now and then lift us to other places or, as happened on Friday, just other times.

    Should have seen it coming. An archaeological fair held over the weekend at Second House, the house that cattle were driven past for summer grazing upon Montauk’s vast grasslands back in the 18th and early 19th centuries, brought visitors back to a time even before Second House when arrow and spear points were wrought from the white quartz dropped here by the last glacier that receded about 10,000 years ago.

    A stone’s throw from the fair, at the eastern end of Old Montauk Highway, the same road used by the cattle of yesteryear, a man pulled an ocean kayak to the side of the road on Thursday afternoon. It had a “For Sale” sign on it. The kayak lay on the shoreward side of the road. On the seaward side of the old highway, terns were seen working over schools of migrating striped bass and bluefish. It’s then that the wormhole set down, causing the kayak and paddle to be purchased for a song and loaded onto the pickup.

    The next morning, as the wormhole continued to whorl, the kayak was launched from Ditch Plain beach along with a six-foot-long boat rod. The sea held not a breath of wind with nary a swell. It was unusually hot for October. As the kayak moved offshore, it also moved deeper into the past with each stroke of the paddle, until the plastic yak became a dugout canoe.

    All through the previous week of exceptionally fine weather, the mosquito fleet of small boats carried light-tackle and fly-fishing aficionados along Montauk’s south coast. They were visible on Friday just beyond, and yet the sound of their engines was unable to penetrate the wormhole. The paddler tucked the butt of his fishing rod under both legs, its tip pointing out to the side like an outrigger, its line spooled out and trolling a silver lure with green tube through the slick, otherworldly calm eastward toward Cavett’s Cove. Minutes passed, or were they years?

    Then, up ahead birds screamed and picked at the surface. About 20 strokes to reach them, and with a violent tug, the rod bent, the paddle was shipped and the dugout towed — a Montauk sleigh ride — by a large striped bass.

    That one shook the hook, but two others were caught, one of them released. The wormhole delivered the other along with the intrepid provider to shore. It then disappeared, leaving a sore back and shoulders to remind the paddler of what fishing was before the disquieting arrival of infernal internal combustion.

    These days it’s the surfcasters’ time to become arm-weary. Bass and bluefish have started to hug the shore on their migrations. In the Montauk SurfMasters tournament for striped bass, Mike Milano jumped into the lead over the weekend with a 38.08-pounder. As of Tuesday morning, Richie Michelsen’s 37.64-pound bass was in second place with Klever Oleas’s 21.22-pound catch in third. John Bruno holds onto first in the tournament’s wetsuit division with a 37.22-pound bass. Mary Ellen Kane remains at the top of the leader board in the women’s division.

    The wow of the day around Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk on Monday was the story of the Spanish-speaking gentleman who caught a striped bass up near the Montauk Lighthouse using a chunk of bunker as bait. The wow part was that the fish weighed 44 pounds after being gutted, which put its actual weight near 50 pounds.

    Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported bluefish and bass all along the ocean beaches from Napeague (a 50-pound striper was said to have been caught at White Sands on Napeague) to Wainscott (a 40-pounder was taken there). Shad could be the reason why.

    Bennett said he caught 20 shad on Sunday, early morning, west of Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett. He reported big porgies being caught off the Navy dock — that is the traditional name of the town pier at Fort Pond Bay (it replaced a dock that was indeed built by the Navy when torpedoes were tested).

    Montauk’s Viking Fleet of party boats proved that an aggressive tuna bite remains ongoing offshore. Both the Viking FiveStar and the Viking Star returned with yellowfin tuna over the weekend. Swordfish were also caught.

    Stuart Vorpahl, an East Hampton Town historian, doesn’t have an office on the town’s campus of historic buildings. His office is in his house on Muir Boulevard in East Hampton. He knows his history, but in a community where the attention is often directed to the situation at hand, history has a very small role to play, if any at all, and thus Stuart is rarely called on to reiterate the local past, which he knows by heart.

    Stuart is a jack-of-all-trades, as well. He was a Coast Guardsman, he’s a fisherman, welder, can fix just about anything broken and keep it going, and he is good at raising chickens and ducks. He’s also an ardent observer of nature. More than a month ago, he and a friend were shingling his house, and after work while the sun was setting a strange thing happened. He was checking out two swordfish swords, which were still curing outside the house, when all of a sudden, a large bug flew in low, made a beeline to one of the swords, and landed. Another and another followed suit shortly after the first, and they all began to work over what little gristle or flesh they could find on the sword.

    Stuart realized something extraordinary was in progress. He observed the insects carefully. They were some kind of beetle, jet black with four bright markings above, two on each side. But the thing that stirred his curiosity the most was that the antennae were each tipped with a tiny red ball no bigger than a grain of beach sand, but big enough to see in the failing light. He captured two of the three and called me to tell me about the unusual happening.

    A little more than a week ago, he brought the critters over for me to take a look at. He arrived with a little transparent plastic dish, some tissue paper folded over inside, a lid tightly sealing the contents.

    He folded the paper back and there were these two marvelous beetles. I’ve seen a lot of insects in my 77 years, but nothing like these. I had prepared for his visit by pulling three insect guides from my nature collection, one of which was devoted to beetles. It wasn’t until we opened a guide to California insects that I had picked up at Point Reyes National Seashore about six years ago, that we found what we were looking for. The two curious insects were “burying beetles,” presumably male and female.

    I knew enough about burying beetles to know they were considered rare in New York. Various entomologists had told me about their quests for this species here and there and the quests always ended beetle-less. We went directly to the computer, and bingo, there was a nice spread on the species by the State Department of Environmental Conservation. Near the top of the first page were two short phrases in bold red: “New York Status: Extirpated” and “Federal Status: Endangered.” Enough said.

    True to form, Stuart sensed that these beetles were remarkably different than all the rest he had run across in his 60-odd years of pursuing this and that, and different they were!

    If there were three, there must have been more. If it weren’t for the two swordfish swords curing in the backyard, the American burying beetle would still be considered extinct in New York State. It seems that the red-tipped antennae are adapted for homing in on the odors produced by carrions. That accounts for the straight-line low-trajectory dash to the swords. Flying low and in failing light, they are not likely to be picked out by a predator.

    As we read further, we were very much impressed by Stuart’s find. They feed on dead mice and other decaying vertebrates. They lay their eggs on the carcasses after maneuvering them into a hole. How do they do this? They lie on their backs under the carcasses and propel them forward with their feet until they reach their appointed destinations. When the larvae hatch, the adults feed them little pieces of the carcass, in the way that birds feed their nestlings. Quite a cultural advancement for a being as primitive as a beetle, wouldn’t you say?

    Are they back? We can’t be sure. What did them in? Pesticides? Diseases? Poisoned rodents? If they are back, and back in East Hampton, it would mean that East Hampton Town has three federally-endangered species (the others being sandplain gerardia and seabeach amaranth). Not every community has someone like Stuart Vorpahl, who would observe this extreme rarity without batting an eyelash. East Hampton is lucky that it does.

Ode to Stuart

    Yes, yes,

    With his bride by his side

    He’s come to reside in

    Bonac, a very short ride

    to the tide where the creek

    opens wide

    Finest kind

    I wish I were fluent in Spanish, not only so I could trade tongues in what is now our bilingual community, but so I’d be able to read “Don Quixote de la Mancha” in the original. That aging crusader, just itching for a joust, is Everyman, or at least — it dawned on an observer standing beneath the Montauk Lighthouse looking seaward early Friday morning — Every Fisherman.

    A description of the scene would be better rendered in Spanish. From what I know of the language, it would be better able to express the tragicomic sight of surfcasters staring offshore at a cloud of hovering and diving gulls, the sea whipped white by the powerful east wind, its light-green surface gilded by dawn’s golden rays — los rallos dorados de la manana.  

    I have an old edition of the Cervantes masterpiece with a wonderful illustration of the Man of La Mancha looking wistfully, myopically toward a distant windmill, lance at his side. “If only the fish would come closer, to do battle, to be won” — was the surfcasters’ common prayer, uttered silently, unbent fishing rods at their sides.

    Making it worse were tales of the big fish landed the day before under the Light. Day after day of strong east winds had kept boats in the harbor, but surfcasters could see from the clouds of diving birds what was going on in the rip currents only a few hundred yards offshore.

    Big bass did visit the Montauk moorland coves over the weekend, especially at night, and were also along the hamlet’s ocean beaches and west along Napeague at the beach called White Sands in particular, but this time of year, surfcasters look for the awesome display of thousands of striped bass chewing acres of bait within casting distance of shore.

    On Monday morning, Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle offered a submarine view of what had occurred in recent days. “The big fish are in the rips feeding on sand eels. There’s all kinds of bait — mullet, snapper blues, shad, bunker, sand eels, even croaker — but without bluefish. . . .”

    He went on to explain how big schools of bluefish herded schools of prey toward shore, to pin them up against the coast where it was harder for them to escape the bluefish feeding frenzies. Bluefish are like the Cuisinarts of the sea, chomping, shredding, masticating their prey, the scraps sinking where striped bass typically wait with mouths agape.

    Apostolides said on Monday morning he believed the blues had no reason to push prey ashore because of the bounty offshore. “Every bird in Montauk is on the rips this morning,” a Paulie’s customer reported.

    A visit to West Lake Marina a short time later seemed to confirm it. The Lacy Grace had just returned from her early morning charter trip with a couple of nice-size stripers and a tote full of bluefish. “The blues were eating the chrome of the jigs,” reported the mate. 

    So, with hordes of bluefish in the area, it should be just a matter of time before they chase the bass within casting range of surfcasters.

    In the meantime, the leader board in the Montauk SurfMasters tournament: Mike Milano, Ritchie Michel­sen, and Kleven Oleas stand in first, second, and third, respectively, in the wader division. John Bruno has the wetsuit division locked. In the wo­3men’s competition, Mary Ellen Kane leads, with Christine Schnell nipping at her heels.

   The plan was to sail the sloop Leilani to the porgy grounds on the east side of Gardiner’s Island from Montauk Harbor on Sunday, preparing clam baits along the way. We’d done it before: stayed the night at an anchorage in the cove on the north side of the island, and feasted on grilled porgy washed down with a glass or two of wine, making the return trip the next morning.

    With a strong southwest wind, Sunday seemed a perfect day for the trip. It was more west than south and this demanded a course north of Eastern Plains Point, our destination, but hey, what’s the rush? The thing about sailing is the silence, long stretches of time with no sound but the wind, the ping of a line playing on the mast, the groan of a wooden cabinet below deck, and Gardiner’s Bay rushing along the hull. 

    Leilani trolled a tin in hopes of a bass. The mate was on the bow with her binoculars. The wind off the sea, partially blocked by Hither Hills, grew as it blew unhindered across flat Napeague into the bay. And it backed, coming more southwest. Leilani would have no lee off Tobaccolot as hoped.

    The planned starboard tack disappeared with the wind change and Leilani’s “iron wind” was brought to life. She motor-sailed close-hauled the final mile to the point at the south end of Tobaccolot Bay. Sails were doused and Leilani turned broadside, allowing the porgy fishermen to lower their lines and drift as though on a raft floating downstream in the Mississippi.

    But, it was after three in the afternoon and the wind had increased to near 20 knots. There would be time for only one drift, with the peace broken by the need to shorten sail for a comfortable return trip. Leilani had drifted north off Eastern Plains Point with no bites but that view of the island’s rolling hills, big oaks, and grassland where time stopped centuries ago.

    Time to go. The mate was reeling up her line when it struck. A big, fat, silver and pink porgy was lifted onto the deck. It was declared a “poor thing” by the mate, who begged its forgiveness and put it in the bucket for dinner. With mainsail and jib reefed, a 19-knot wind and a tide going her way, Leilani bounded home with a following sea and a lone porgy that was the icing on the cake.

    It would be nice if fishing had not become a competitive sport, but it seems everything we do has morphed into a competition, something to bet on, profit from, get over on, as though Nature herself had turned pro. Seems like the urge to provide has gotten twisted in the age of farmed fish and genetically engineered staples.

    There are fishermen, and fishing guides, who insist on experiencing the world, and presenting the world, that accompanies the actual angling. Saltwater Sportsman magazine recently named Paul Dixon of East Hampton one of the top 50 charter fishermen in the nation and the only one from Long Island. There are sure to be a few objections to this last point. Dixon runs To the Point charters for fly-fishing and light spin-tackle anglers.

    Captains were chosen by virtue of their “longevity,” the diversity of the fish they target, their commitment to conservation, and their “showmanship.” By showmanship, the mag apparently means making the experience memorable, which theoretically would put Ahab and his followers in the running. Fishing with Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, is memorable, especially in the fall when he runs his “cast-and-blast” charters out into Gardiner’s Bay, geared up with a fishing rod for striped bass and a shotgun for the sea ducks.

    Capt. Ken (Ahab) Rafferty said this week that “fishing is intense.” The light-tackle and fly-fishing guide reported “giant bluefish all over Montauk on the south side in close. Stripers are being landed at outer Shagwong, but you have to work hard to find them. I’ve received reports of false albacore between Rhode Island and Montauk, and albies in Montauk waters, too.”

    The fall fishing tournament season is nigh. The Montauk SurfMasters tourney begins on Sept. 14. Applications to join in the action will be accepted until 7 p.m. on Sept. 13, no later. The entry fee in the adult wader and wetsuit divisions is $260, $160 for the women’s division. There are no entry fees in the kids and youth divisions. The leader board will be displayed on the tournament Web site, montauksurfmasters. com.

    The State Department of Parks and Recreation will kick off its annual, two-day Montauk Classic surfcasting tournament on Sept. 20. Application forms can be obtained by calling 321-3510. There is a $15 entry fee.

    The striped bass seem to have made their August creep to points north and east, but they will be back on their fall run in time for the tourneys. Meanwhile, the fluke fishing has been spectacular, the best in years off Montauk and in Gardiner’s Bay. The fall sea bass season promises to be exceptional — yum! — with a great showing in May and June and even through the summer when the bite generally slows.

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, has announced its intention of reducing the number of bluefin tuna “bycatch discards,” that is, bluefin caught by longline gear in the swordfish fishery and longlines set for other tuna species. Comments from the public are being sought. More information can be had by calling Connie Barclay at 301-427-8003. The draft plan to reduce bluefin bycatch can be found online at nmfs.noaa. gov.

    Speaking of tuna, Chris Miller of the West Lake Marina in Montauk reports very few yellowfin and albacore in the Fish Tails section of Block Canyon, but a consistent bigeye bite. The Three G’s boat returned to the marina on Monday with a 244 bigeye, a small swordfish, one yellowtail, and an albacore tuna.

    The first to identify the mystery fish, whose photo appeared in last week’s Star, was Richard Peltonen of Montauk. He said it was a ladyfish, a species also known as a skipjack, a jack-rash, or a tenpounder. They are usually found in tropical and sub-tropical waters. A runner-up caller was Gus Washburn of East Hampton, age 10, who yelled “Yippee” into the phone when he was told he was right.

    Last week’s reporting on the results of the Montauk Grand Slam held from Uihlein’s Marina left out the name of the winning captain and angler in the recreational division. The Coffee Break was captained by William Callas, who was out with his longtime fishing buddy Rich Lanzillotta.

   It wasn’t that long ago in the history of the United States that small communities made the world go round. Urbanization took a back seat to farming, fishing, hunting, and gathering fruit and vegetables from the wild. You would be hard-pressed today trying to survive in a big city if you had to grow, catch, and gather your own food. Yes, New York City and all the other big ones have a few things to glean from the parks, wires, streets, sewers, and transportation tunnels, but in a place where there are many more people than there are squirrels, rats, and pigeons to feed them, things would turn mighty desperate and quickly if markets, restaurants, and sidewalk vendors all shut down.

    In the past, ethnic groups migrated as much to find food as to find freedom. The sizes of rural communities were determined as much by the available resources — food, water, shelter materials — as they were by choice of neighbors and closeness to relatives. Today, via programs like the Peconic Bay Region Community Preservation Fund, we put away a lot of passive parklands and nature sanctuaries for safekeeping. It’s not just a matter of the open spaces and concomitant view-sheds that we are salting away; it’s the resources.

    When the original town fathers, say, the trustees, split up the land into chunks (after purchasing it from the local indigenous people for a pittance), the idea was to allot enough land to each would-be freeholder to provide enough lumber, firewood, arable soil, well water reserves, and the like to raise a family. It wasn’t until the 1900s that large lots began to be split up into tiny lots as small as the less than quarter-acre one that I and my wife, Julie, share in Noyac.

    You can hardly raise a cow or pigs on a quarter acre, but you can raise chickens should the local ordinances allow it. You can even have a small garden, but one would find it hard to grow enough food on such a small plot to last for more than a month or so.

    The open space that belongs to everyone in the community also serves as a “commons” to ensure survival in a rural setting. The forefathers were wise in making sure that the bay and creek bottoms and the waters above them could be used by everyone for the harvesting of clams, oysters, mussels, crabs, fish, and other seafood. The old rule about only taking oysters during the “R” months was good for all in the community, because oysters spawned in the months without an R in their names, which ensured reproduction for future years. One by one little rules were established so that the resource would last indefinitely.

    Side by side each town, village, and hamlet shared the resources among themselves. If someone got greedy and took more then their share there was hell to pay. Domestic pigs were allowed to roam in the woods to feed on plants and acorns, chickens “free-ranged” hundreds of years before the term became part of our everyday vocabulary. Churches preached sharing and leading a good life. There were very few crimes, very few criminals, almost no murders. People got together to build barns, work the land, catch fish, and the like. One might say that all the farmers markets that have sprung up locally and around the country lately are vestiges of those early times.

    Whaling and fishing from shore was one of those cementing community ventures. Just as it takes a lot of volunteer firefighters to put out a house fire, it took a lot of hands to harpoon a whale from near shore or bring in a large net. Haul-seining was the final act of such cooperation and sharing of effort. Practically every man in the community helped pull the quarter-mile-long nets in before there were motor-driven winches, but even after their introduction, 20 men or more would participate in a haul. Young boys would work alongside their fathers and in that way would be initiated into the fishermen’s lot. When fishery science took over and the beaches were filled with regulators, haulseining died an agonizing death and baymen were forced to go their separate ways.

   Fortunately, the land is there in case calamity strikes and we need to go back to it. In the meantime, why not practice for an Armageddon that may never come. “Be prepared.” Every Boy Scout knows that one. Learn to fish, learn to clam, maybe even hunt. Pick wild berries. The blueberries are just about gone, but beach plums are ripening as are the wild cherries. I know one local fellow who makes bread out of white oak acorns each year. Many locals make delicious wine from wild elderberries and fox grapes. Cranberries are developing nicely. Pick and glean, glean and pick, but always obey that old canon: “Don’t take more than you and your family and/or neighbors can use.” Extras can go to the food pantry or the birds.

    You would surely be surprised to find out just how many things out there in those wide open spaces are edible, how nutritious they can be, and how good they can taste. Those that are not edible can often be used as palliatives or healers. Some can serve both needs. I’ll never forget the lady from Montauk who used to work in the East Hampton Town assessor’s office. She got bit by a brown recluse spider and turned to an age-old remedy: She took two green potatoes, mashed them up finely into a puree, then applied that puree directly to the spider bite as a poultice. She left it on overnight and by morning the bite had faded away. I gave the recipe to my sister in Cutchogue after she got bittens by a brown recluse. A poultice worked for her as well. A poultice made from the tuber of Apios americana, or groundnut, which gave Sagaponack its Algonkian name, would probably work, too.

    And, oh yes, be especially careful when gathering mushrooms. Many are edible, but several, such as the most toxic of the amanitas, will knock you off in less than an hour after you eat them.

   The great migration south is about to begin. It will include millions of birds, millions of fish, many different bats, and quite a lot of butterflies and dragonflies. Although at the boreal latitudes, many mammals, including two species of caribou, use their legs to march long distances, in the temperate zone where we are, migration is a matter of wings and fins. Shorebirds, terns and ospreys, to name a few, have already started down. Some of them go thousands of miles, deep into South America, a few like the Arctic tern, all the way to Patagonia.

    There is a lot of exposure accompanying migration. Just as driving 1,000 miles on roads and highways in uncharted territory increases the chances of an accident severalfold over compared to driving back and forth around one’s neighborhood, the vulnerability for migrating animals and insects traveling long distances is increased exponentially over that for all-year residents such as house sparrows and blue jays that are mostly stay-at-homes.

    One way to minimize the chance of predator encounters by birds is to migrate at night rather than during the day. While owls are adept nighttime predators — they are usually looking for mice, rats, and small mammals to feed on — bird hawks don’t fly at night. The chief worries for the night migrants are meteorological in nature; however, in 20th century a new obstacle to night migration was created, this one anthropomorphic in origin. Encounters with skyscrapers in large cities across the globe account for thousands of bird deaths during times of migration. Toronto has the distinction of causing the most losses, but New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, D.C., and so on are not far behind.

    Think about it, ever since the end of the last ice age, for at least 10,000 years or more, birds have been migrating north and south annually, mostly at night. One hundred centuries of clear unobstructed sailing back and forth over the same routes and then one year, boom, tall buildings appear out of nowhere and birds start falling like flies. In addition to the hundreds of looming edifices now in the path of any one of the main north-south migratory routes, there are thousands of windmills and cellphone towers making migration through unlighted skies a real problem. It takes many, many generations to change a pattern of instinctive behavior that is thousands of years old!

    So, why not migrate during the day? If you are a small bird or insect, you better be careful, for hawks and other expert avian predators will be waiting for you. Better have some kind of protection or it’s curtains for a lot of you. At least for one species, the monarch butterfly, protection comes from having an unsavory taste. Both males and females are identically bright orange and readily detectable from above or below as they move south toward the overwintering grounds in Mexico’s mountains. Some may be blown off course by stiff winds, but very few are taken by predators. They taste simply awful.

    Monarch butterfly eggs are laid on milkweeds, which contain a sap that is not only acrid tasting but poisonous as well. Almost no herbivorous mammals, such as cottontail rabbits and deer, have use for milkweeds. The larvae of monarch butterflies and milkweed beetles, however, prefer them. As they eat and grow larger, they store those unpalatable chemicals in their body tissue and when they pupate and emerge from their pupae as flying adults, their body tissues still contain them. That is why the milkweed beetle is also spectacularly marked bright red and black. It’s called warning coloration: “I am a monarch butterfly, I am a milkweed beetle, you can see me clearly, come and take a bite.” Predators have learned not to.

    In fact, red is a standard warning color for many diverse creatures. The West Coast newt, Taricha torosa, is a good example. Eat a little bit of this salamander and you’re liable to become deader than a doornail. It’s like eating a death angel mushroom. The velvet ant, in actuality a wingless wasp, has a potent sting. Fortunately, it is bright red and black, and so is usually uncontested. The female black widow spider is another good example. The western species have a red hourglass on the underside of the abdomen, the eastern ones, including the ones on Long Island, have a red rear end or red spot just above it. “Stay away, I’m warning you,” the red mark says for the spider. (The male is much smaller, not poisonous, and nondescript in coloration.).

    Bats are adept at catching flying insects in the dark, so it makes sense that they would migrate at night, nibbling along the way as they fly to their winter quarters in caves hundreds of miles away. One local exception is the red bat, which every year crosses Long Island on its way north in the spring and south in the fall, flying during the day. Its redness is a kind of mimicry. It is not poisonous or bad-tasting itself, but why take a chance? The viceroy butterfly, which occurs farther to the west, is almost identical in coloration to the monarch. It mimics the monarch and is mostly safe from predation. However, viceroys, which stray to areas where monarchs never exist, are another matter. They are easy game. Fortunately for viceroys, monarchs have a very widespread distribution in North America. The lionfish, which strays into our marine waters during the warmer months, is quite red and quite poisonous. In human society, red also serves as a warning color. Which came first: the red warning signs of humans or those of insects, salamanders, fish, and bats?

    The human species is one of the few in which the female is generally more attractive than the male. Female clothing and accouterments such as lipstick and hairdos, bikinis and high heels, jewelry and perfume heighten their attractiveness.

    The opposite is true in songbirds, however. The males are mostly knockouts and the females drab. Moreover, the males sing better than the females, which are mostly silent except for chips and peeps. It’s a simple case of differential survival. It’s easier for a bird predator to spot and catch a prettily clad male than a dull-colored female. In nature just as in human cultures, you can pay a price for too much vanity.

   While the brown recluse spider is an exception, most poisonous animals are vividly colored or advertise their toxic state in other ways. Take the poisonous coral snake of the Southeast. Its red and black banding is quite obvious. The scarlet king snake has the same coloration and is harmless. But unless you’re an expert ophidiologist, I’d avoid both. The gila monster’s yellow and black beading over its body is scary. Bumblebees are bright yellow and black. They don’t want to sting you. They’ll die if they lodge a stinger in you, but they will if cornered.

    On the other hand, some poisonous animals do not possess warning colors; they have other means of saying “beware, beware!” The rattlesnake rattles, the cobra rears up, flattens its collar, and hisses. Long Island’s own eastern hognose snake doesn’t have a rattle, but it hisses and shakes its tail in the sand mimicking the two poisonous snakes. If that doesn’t work, it rolls over and plays dead, an altogether different kind of defense mechanism, which is used by opossums and several other species.

    The blowfish, or northern puffer, blows up when cornered, becoming almost unswallowable to most would-be predators. The squids and octopi secrete a blinding ink.

    There are all sorts of ways of protecting oneself without having to go to war. When I was a young boy, my mother advised me to act stuporously when traveling on subways in New York. Nobody will hit on you if they think you are weird. I wonder if that stills works today?