Of course, the big news is the 44.7-pound striped bass that the surfcaster Ben McCarron caught on Saturday under the Montauk Lighthouse on a bucktail. The big bass puts McCarron in first place in the Montauk SurfMasters spring tournament, and the fish beat the competition in the weekend tournament held from Paulie’s Tackle Shop in Montauk.

    Geoff Bowen’s 21.7-pound striper and Nick Tamorino’s 15.46-pounder stand in second and third places in the SurfMaster’s adult division. Brendan Ferrell leads the youth division with a 13.64-pound bass. 

    There was the rumor of a truly giant striped bass caught by a dragger in recent days. It was reportedly released. The state record stands at 76 pounds, caught in Montauk in 1981. The largest striped bass ever caught is said to be a 125-pounder caught in North Carolina in 1891. Paul Apostolides at Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk said he saw a picture of the dragger-caught bass. He put the weight at about 80 or 85 pounds.

    Surfcasting and just about any other kind of fishing has been hampered by this spring’s unusually cool, wet, and blustery weather. For surfcasters, the north side of Montauk Point has been active in the bluefish department toward the top of the tide.

    Given the weather, there’s not lots to report from the decks of boats, so it’s a good opportunity to describe how this gazetteer hopes to expand the “On the Water” column.

    Fishing will come first, for the most part, but the column will also include news and tales from surfers, sailors, divers, and all manner of water addicts. We will begin with a cautionary tale.

    After a few ragged attempts at trolling under sail from the sloop Leilani toward the end of last summer, the plan was to come up with a strategy to meet the challenges not faced by power boaters. The beauty of trolling under sail for striped bass, bluefish, and even false albacore is the silence of it. No engine noise, no vibration, no exhaust fumes. The drawbacks include handling sail and fishing rod simultaneously, which can mimic a Laurel and Hardy episode, given enough wind.

    Last year a few fish were dropped when this helmsman/angler was unable to turn Leilani upwind to reduce speed quickly enough to give the fish the attention they deserved. The answer could be to reduce reel drag after a hookup to buy time enough to put the boat in irons (bow into the wind to take the wind out of the sails), or better yet, be forehanded and have the mate woman the helm with a carefully designed protocol. Stay tuned.

    Leilani was launched from Uihlein’s Marina in Montauk on Sunday and driven south to her mooring, which went virtually unused last season. Mooring ball and chain seemed okay the day before when the mooring pendants (lines that tether boat to mooring) were made fast to the ball. Leilani’s two-person crew attached pendants port and starboard, jumped into Lake Montauk and began the 75-yard swim to shore after taking care to lower the boat’s ladder so as not to meet the fate of the crew of a sailboat who perished when they went for a swim without providing a way to get back aboard.

    The lake water was warm enough in wetsuits, a nice swim. The captain switched to backstroke to admire his 30-foot Bristol sloop, and . . . “Hey,” followed by a blue string of words. Leilani, mooring ball, and pendants were drifting across the lake toward its eastern shore. The captain became Johnny Weissmuller, gave his mate the cellphone he was carrying aloft wrapped in a plastic bag, and sprinted for Leilani. Fortunately the wind was light, the boat was caught, boarded, and her engine lit.

    An inspection showed that the mooring chain was still attached to the mooring ball, which means the shackle that hitches chain to mooring anchor on the bottom had failed. Lesson learned.

    The Star Island Yacht Club’s 27th annual shark tournament will be held on Friday and Saturday. There will be a captain’s meeting at the yacht club starting at 7:30 tonight. 

   I heard my first whippoorwill in the woods behind my grandfather’s chicken farm in Mattituck at 3 years of age. Once you’ve heard this magical, three-syllable, eerie chant coming out of the dark of a warm summer evening you’re hard-pressed to forget it.

    The whippoorwill is one of seven members of the goatsucker family, Caprimulgiformes (goat-sucking forms), in the United States. Up until the latter part of the 1900s, we only had two species in New York State, the nighthawk and whippoorwill. Nighthawks are the least nocturnal of the group and can be seen migrating south over the East End in late August in the afternoon, while whippoorwills were common breeders here up until the 1990s. Now as with many other Long Island ground-nesting species, they have become absent from many areas and are only sporadic in others.

    No one knows just why the whippoorwill, celebrated in many a popular tune, has so thinned in numbers. Some blame it on development or the growing popularity of residential nightlights, perhaps, even, the years of spraying woods for gypsy moths in the 1950s, 1960s, and later. Last year at about this time, when the evenings were a little warmer and fireflies began to spark, I did a drive-and-stop census of whippoorwills in eastern Southampton Town and East Hampton Town west of Amagansett. In four hours of stop-and-listen counting, I didn’t come up with a single one, whereas in the 1970s and 1980s I heard dozens while making the same rounds.

    On Sunday night I covered 69 miles of choice whippoorwill habitat in Noyac, Bridgehampton, Water Mill, Tuckahoe, North Sea, Hampton Bays, Flanders, Quogue, and Westhampton. I was out from 8 p.m. until 11:40. I made 40 stop and listens and heard not a single whippoorwill. On the same night Vicki Bustamante, her son Chris and his girlfriend, Jennifer, covered Montauk all the way to Napeague and came up empty-handed or, should I say, empty-eared. Vicki has ears as acute as an owl’s; if a whippoorwill called, even under its breath, she would have heard it.

    It was disappointing, to say the least. I resolved to check for them on the following night, and so I found myself driving 54 miles making 31 stops, beginning at around 8 p.m. at the west overlook at Hither Hills and ending up on the Barcelona golf course east of Sag Harbor at 11:15. While Sunday night was breezy, Monday night was exceedingly still, to the degree that a fog had developed in the southern quarter of East Hampton.

    I heard my first whippoorwill song in five or six years at that first stop. At my next stop, the end of Napeague Harbor Road, where the Walking Dunes are situated, I heard another whippoorwill. I was beginning to think I was in whippoorwill heaven. I made a fourth stop near the Long Island Rail Road tracks on Napeague Harbor Road. I heard a goatsucker singing all right, but it wasn’t a whippoorwill, it was a Chuck-will’s-widow, another Caprimulgid with an onomatopoetic name that precisely matches its song. Chuck-will’s-widow is a southern member of the family that began breeding on Long Island and points north in the 1960s. Four stops, two whippoorwills and one Chuck-will’s-widow, I thought that my hypothesis that these crepuscular and nocturnal birds had all but disappeared would prove to be ill conceived.

    On to Napeague Meadow, Cranberry Hole, Lazy Point, and Shore Roads in north-central Napeague. Bingo! At stop number six at the junction of Lazy Point Road and Crassen Boulevard, there were not one but two whippoorwills calling back and fourth from the south and the north. I had only made six stops and had already heard five goatsuckers.

    But that was that for a long while. The next 16 stops in Amagansett, Springs, and Northwest were met with silence, although there were some deer and a raccoon to keep my interest up. Stop number 23 on Swamp Road a bit west of Northwest Landing Road in Northwest landed one more whippoorwill call and that was that.

    If I count the two whippoorwills calling last Thursday evening reported by Bob Caspar who lives at the end of Northwest Landing, it makes seven in five days. There are still Wainscott, Sag Harbor, and North Haven yet to go; maybe I’ll reach 10, but nothing like the old days.

    There were a lot of residential nightlights, a lot of motor vehicle whines, and a lot of new construction in progress on both nights. It’s too early to say for sure, but it may just be that whippoorwills are on their way out on eastern Long Island. After all, we had ruffed grouse well into the 20th century, and long before then, a lot of heath hens, and not a few Labrador ducks. By the same token, wild geese and wild turkeys are not so wild any longer here on Long Island and deer and raccoons are almost as common as summer people.

    Let’s talk about the smell of fish. It’s often scorned, but the objectionable redolence is usually the result of proteins gone bad, spoiled. The truth is, fish fresh out of the water smell sweet, fish in the water sweeter still.

    How does one smell fish that are swimming, you might ask. The answer is, one must live beside the ocean in the foggy months of spring when the schools first arrive from their faraway winter haunts. In the days when foreign factory ships were permitted to undertake joint ventures with Montauk’s and Shinnecock’s fleets of small draggers, the sweet smell of squid being hauled aboard in the cod-ends of nets was carried ashore, transported in the soft fog.

    The joint ventures are long gone, yet noses fine-tuned to the scent can tell when the schools of squid and other species are in session. The same people who wrinkle their noses at the thought of fish, will inhale deeply, say “Ahhhhhhhh, I love the smell of the sea,” which this time of year is in fact the smell of fish and the garden of marine grasses and phytoplankton they inhabit.

    And speaking of squid, there has been a relative absence of it this spring. Some blame the early and bountiful arrival of bluefish that like to chew their way through squid schools and scare them from Gardiner’s Bay, where they are traditionally caught by trappers. When the bluefish arrive en masse, squid skedaddle. Trappers don’t catch them, marinas and tackle shops can’t buy them, and fluke fisherman can’t cut them into enticing strips for bait. Squid caught by draggers has a tendency to get beaten up.

    The West Lake Marina in Montauk has squid bait for fluke fisherman. Chris Miller said that his boaters were catching fluke and striped bass with regularity. He added that charter captains were telling him larger stripers up to 40 pounds had moved into the area.

    He also spoke of the frustration caused by the healthy number of big black sea bass that are being caught. Trouble is, they have to be released. The season does not open until July 10.

    A group of anglers from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection fished their regular spring tournament out of the Montauk Marine Basin over the weekend. The pool-winning striped bass was an 18.75-pounder caught aboard Capt. Jim Krug’s Persuader III. Janet Zinkhan on the Soaker was high hook with two keeper-size (over 28 inches) stripers. The group partied post-tournament at the marina’s Hula Hut.

    Ken Rafferty, a light-spinning tackle and fly-fishing guide, reported that striped bass fishing has picked up in Gardiner’s Bay around the island, and around the corner at Cedar Point and Shelter Island. He said he went fishing alone a few days ago and found an eight-pound weakfish at Cherry Harbor on the west side of Gardiner’s Island. He caught it on a pink Sluggo, basically a lead-head lure that trails a pink rubber ribbon. Weakfish like pink he said, which is why he is in the process of tying pink flies for his fly-rodding customers.

    A number of sources are crowing about the number of porgies in Gardiner’s Bay. To hear Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett tell it, you could practically walk on them. And they’re big. Bennett said he can tell by the larger, number-two size of the porgy hooks he’s been selling.

    The standings in the Montauk SurfMasters spring tournament are as follows: Geoff Bowen is in first place in the adult division with a 21.7-pound striper. Nick Tamborrino’s 15.46-pounder has him in second, with Adam Flax in third place with an 11.62-pound bass.

    Brendon Farrell is alone on the board in the youth division with a 13.64-pounder.

   Sunday saw a break in the Memorial Day weekend weather. Downtown Montauk was jam-packed, a perfect time to escape into the deserted Montauk outback, as Vicki Bustamante and I are retracing Norman Taylor’s epic 1923 monograph on Montauk’s plants, “The Vegetation of Montauk: A Study of Grassland and Forest.”

    In 1923 there were only a handful of invasive plants in Montauk, but things have changed dramatically in that regard, one of the reasons we are re-describing Montauk’s flora. Removed as it is so far from urban New York and its eastern suburbs, we are hoping that the number of native plants still far outnumber the Eurasian ones and that Montauk has a long way to go before it is sullied beyond repair.

    We took the trail into the Oyster Pond woods that stems from the Montauk Point State Parkway, a few hundred feet west of Camp Hero. Over the course of five afternoon hours we had the place to ourselves, except for four other walkers and two bike riders. No distractions other than a low-sailing turkey vulture and the songs of ovenbirds, wood thrushes, catbirds, Baltimore orioles, redstarts, red-eye vireos, and Carolina wrens. We made good progress as we took one path after another, covering at least half of the woodlands and wetlands adjacent to the pond waters.

    Many of the plants were in bloom. There were four different trees bearing white flowers, three hawthorns and the alternate-leaved dogwoods. Most of the trees had fully leafed out, with the exception of the tupelos, which are typically the last each spring to become fully foliated. There are several spectacularly tall and wide oaks and tupelos in eastern Montauk, one black oak that had been knocked apart by Sandy and thereafter sawed off to within four feet of the ground ringed out at 100 years or so old. In other words it had just gotten underway a few years after Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders’ Montauk stay.

    Because Oyster Pond had remained open so long after late October’s Sandy visitation, some saltmarsh spartina grasses were establishing in newly drifted sand adjacent to the phragmites stands. There were new patches of saltwater cordgrass, saltmarsh hay, and spike grass, all common components of Atlantic coast salt marshes. However, the wall of phragmites still stood firm and tall and spring’s new green shoots were already more than four feet high and looked as healthy as they have in past years. It would take more than Sandy to dislodge this foreign invader’s ownership of the periphery of Oyster Pond.

    Oddly, many of the trees common to Hither Woods and the rest of East Hampton could not be found among the Oyster Pond woods. Missing were sassafras, chestnut oaks, pignut and mockernut hickories, flowering dogwoods, gray birch, bigtooth aspens, eastern red cedars, pitch pines, and white pines. Interestingly, many of these missing trees are found south of the state parkway in the Point Woods, but are missing to the north.

    The history of the repopulation of Long Island’s flora after the retreat of the glaciers that created the Ronkonkoma and Harbor Hills moraines is one written from west to east, and south to north. Many of the earliest trees — spruce, hemlock, red cedar, paper birches, and aspens — retreated to the north. Hardwoods and softwoods poured in from the south and the Appalachian forests to the west. For example, pitch pines, Long Island’s most ubiquitous native pines, are still traveling east. They’ve gotten as far as the west side of Hither Woods just a little beyond the walking dunes.

    American hollies are common in Montauk and there are some giant ones in the Oyster Pond area. They apparently snuck in from the south, most likely along the glaciated lands that once reached a mile or more out into the sea and connected with Staten Island and New Jersey.

    The opportunist plants moved in quickly, especially after World War II, as eastern Long Island became more and more populated with humans. Road edges, paths, and trails are the first to be taken over. Thus as we walked from the highway to the pond, the exotics became less and less, but were still formidable in number by the time we reached the pond edge.

    There were chickweeds, mugwort, garlic mustard, plantains, multiflora rose, Asiatic bittersweet, Japanese and Tartarian honeysuckles, phragmites, and a host of other greedy intruders just waiting for the next big storm to hit and clear more land to provide new inroads for their divide-and-conquer strategies. Of the 150 or so plant species that we recorded on Sunday afternoon, at least 30, or 20 percent of them, were exotic invaders.

    This time around, we didn’t find any Japanese knotweed, but we know there is some there. Mile-a-minute weed has already reached Montauk and in another year or two will be covering much of the native foliage the way it is doing in the Morton Wildlife Refuge in Noyac. Giant hogweed having already settled, western East Hampton can’t be far behind. On the other hand, five of the native plants we found on that Sunday were completely new to my Long Island vocabulary. Fortunately, Vicki, who lives a stone’s throw from Oyster Pond and has been in and around it many times, knew their names. You learn something new each time you set foot in the same wilderness, and Sunday, I learned several somethings new. Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

   Bruce Palmer oversees things at the East Hampton Town’s recycling center in Montauk, directing people with tires to the tire bin, people with old grills and lawnmowers to the metal container, checking for scofflaw dumpers dumping without benefit of a 2013 sticker — all these things with a mind that drifts seaward at times.

    Palmer is a surfcaster of the first order. On Sunday, late morning, with a northwest wind doing a good impression of October and with some sideways rain adding insult to the badly injured Memorial Day weekend, Palmer directed a man hoping to recycle a broken wheelbarrow, a man who was also in search of a fishing forecast. The conversation went something like:

    “Any fish?”

    “Yesterday, North Bar, mostly small,” meaning striped bass, “and plenty of bluefish. They were all over the place. All sizes.”

    There followed much praise of blues, for their fight, and, Palmer and the wheelbarrow recycler agreed, as table fare. Talk turned to surfcasting reels, and then to fishing line, the braided kind that has gained favor in recent years over good old monofilament. Palmer prefers braid, the Power Pro brand to be specific. “It stacks better on Van Staal reels,” he said. But, what about knots and snarls?” Wheelbarrow asked, having seen some disastrous tangles in the wind and close casting during the fall bass season beneath the Montauk Lighthouse.

    “Tension is key,” Palmer said, the exact words used by Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk a bit later in the day. Apostolides suggested the Fireline brand for casters using Penn reels, but in any case, he agreed with the recycling center’s overseer that tension was key. The line had to be wound onto the reel with the right tension to avoid snarls and bird’s nests when casting.

    They both cautioned that braided line had no stretch, no give. Monofilament is more forgiving. With braided line, it’s important to set the reel’s drag carefully to save the heartache of losing a big fish. The big advantage is casting distance. Watching a boiling school of striped bass pass by on the tide just out of casting range can make Ahabs of all but the most philosophical anglers.

    Speaking of which, Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, waxed upon the full moon that shone on the South Ferry slip on North Haven over the weekend. The moon summoned big striped bass, he said. “I heard one guy caught a 32-pounder. They came in with the moon right before the blow,” he said referring to the weekend storm. “In the middle of the day, they were catching 30-pound fish jigging bucktails,” Bennett reported.

    Bennett said moonlight was also responsible for “a bunch of giant bluefish” in Accabonac Harbor as well as fluke outside the harbor in Gardiner’s Bay caught from the beach by floating squid baits offshore. Bennett also praised the moon for generating good striped bass production along the south side of Napeague. “People use clams this time of year.”

    Bennett said that nearly half of his customers are Spanish speakers — “I’ve been studying for the past six months. I can understand some, but don’t speak it very well” — who had become adept at catching porgies for the table. “They enjoy it. Bring their family, their kids. They fish with sandworms, sharp hooks. They’re right on it.”

    There’s bait fishing and then there’s fly-casting, its opposite. Edward Shug­rue and his nephew Max Herman landed their first striped bass of the season in Three Mile Harbor casting a chartreuse Clouser fly. The fish was released.

    And then there’s surfcaster Paul Knorr who landed a 30.72-pound bass in Montauk one week ago today to prove that the spring bass run has indeed begun.

If you’re a child, tween, or teen, summer is a time for work and play away from the confines of the classroom. I wouldn’t trade my boyhood and its summer for all the gold in Captain Kidd’s chest. Growing up in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s on the North Fork was all that a lad could wish for.

You could work from the time you could walk, run, and count to 100. I plucked chickens on my grandfather’s farm when I was 6 and after. Then I picked raspberries, strawberries, peas, sweet corn, string beans, and tomatoes until I was 13. Then came harvesting potatoes when I became a teenager. In those years Suffolk County raised more potatoes than any other county in the country, including those in Idaho and Maine.

Aside from working on farms, there was mowing lawns, raking leaves, shoveling snow, carpentry, pumping gas. Almost all youngsters who could work did work. There was always something to do to make money.

When summer was over there was school. School was fun too, very little pressure to succeed in those days. No child was left behind. The manual arts and business training were as big as academics. Yes, we had the Regents and quizzes and a little homework, but we didn’t plan beyond high school. More boys upon graduation joined the military, and only a few went to college. Whether you were smart or slow, there was very little pressure to succeed or outdo or even keep up with your fellow classmates.

That’s why I enjoyed so much Clarence Hickey’s recent book, “On the East End: The Last Best Times of a Long Island Fishing Community.” Corky, as he was affectionately known when he worked at the New York Ocean Science Laboratory in Montauk in the early 1970s, was an ichthyologist and marine biologist by training, a fisherman by choice. He hobnobbed at sea with trap fishermen and haul seiners. He caught, identified, ate, and dreamed about fish and fishing in the way that real fishermen, the kind that still ply East End waters for this or that fish, squid, lobsters, clams, oysters, or scallops still do and do well.

For most out-of-towners it takes years to adjust to living on the South Fork — it’s an us-and-them place, the Bonackers’ world. But not for Corky. He took to it right away. And the marine lab where he worked was the biggest of its type in New York, bigger than the one at Stony Brook and bigger than Southampton College’s. I know. I was teaching marine biology and sea-related topics at the same time Corky was doing science and hanging out with the baymen. If properly managed, promoted, and funded, it would have competed with the Wood’s Hole laboratory in Massachusetts and Scripps Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

Perhaps his favorite fishing partner was Jimmy Lester, one of the many fishing Lesters who worked East Hampton’s estuarine and ocean waters. Jimmy maintained fish traps in Fort Pond Bay and Block Island Sound, not more than a stone’s throw from the Montauk lab. There were almost always fish to be caught there, and very often they were exceptionally unusual, such as the 64-pound tarpon removed from the pound in 1974. The proximity of the Gulf Stream to Montauk (as well as to the rest of the East End) brought many subtropical and tropical fish to Long Island shores.

Bringing a haul seine ashore or dipping a net into the pound of the fish trap was invariably accompanied by some kind of surprise: a tarpon or wahoo or bonefish or channel bass or lion fish or any of a dozen other species that most Long Islanders who are occasional fishers have never seen. Lately it’s been endangered and threatened marine turtles, which their captors are ever so happy to record, release, or have the Riverhead Foundation come and retrieve. It’s not our fishermen who are destroying the stocks and the rare fauna found among them, it’s pollution and the foreign fishing fleets.

“Men’s Lives” by the late Peter Matthiessen was one of the first books to extol the virtues and manifold experiences of the local fishing population. My own experiences with them spell out a similar fondness. They are true as blue and one can almost touch their souls by reading the Matthiessen book or the one by Clarence Hickey. By the same token, a trip through the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett gives a similarly wonderful account with the tools of the trade and black-and-white photographs of the fishermen nicely laid out and mounted thanks to the work of Ralph Carpentier, a local artist who created most of the original exhibits.

It was in the 1970s that the fishermen that Corky writes about turned their fishing gear into the plowshares of environmental politics. They demanded that East Hampton’s political electees slow down the frenzied-pace developers who were gobbling up the open lands, converting farms into condominiums, building McMansions, and poisoning the marine waters. They were eventually successful, but at what cost? Several have had to sell their modest houses and move away to a place where the cost of living is much less and the living is easier. The ones that remain are literally eking out a living or beginning to sink under. They continue to fish because it’s in their blood.

The research that the Montauk Ocean Science Lab did was immensely valuable in this respect, as Mr. Hickey and his fellow scientists charted the local seas and their contents more thoroughly than had been done in the past by any institutional or governmental body. That’s precisely one of the reasons that the laboratory eventually failed. The state withdrew its financial support, the several Long Island colleges that formed a supportive bloc, such as Dowling and Southampton Colleges, were busy with their own ambitions, while Stony Brook University, with a base on Long Island Sound but none on the second largest ocean in the world, was waiting in the wings for the tide to turn in its favor. And it did.

Thanks to Jim Monaco and Harbor Electronic Publishing of Sag Harbor for continuing to publish books about Long Island’s natural wonders. And thanks, Corky, for the wonderful text and photographs and for reminding those of us who experienced it in the last century how uniquely wonderful life on the East End was.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

   I was at Morton Wildlife Refuge the other day when one of the private ferrying helicopters flew over on its way to East Hampton Town Airport. It’s hard to tell how high it was, but it seemed much lower than 2,000 feet and it made quite a racket as it passed over my head and, incidentally, over one of the osprey nests we put up around 1988 on the Jessup’s Neck spit. The ospreys were back. The female was sitting down low on the nest, and it was hard to tell if she was affected by the noise and vibrations as much as I was.

    Every time one of these choppers goes over my house in Noyac, stuff on the little shelf next to my bed where I write “Nature Notes” each week vibrates in syncopation with the rapidly turning rotors. I live on a busy street, Noyac Road, which is the number two gateway to the Hamptons and the motorcycles and passing trucks also kick up quite a fuss. I imagine that the blue jays, grackles, and robins that nest in the yard are mindful of the noises, from both below and above their roosts, but I don’t know how they react to them.

    I do know, however, that since the in-and-out helicopters have been active, certain birds have disappeared as breeders from the woodlands traversed by these fancy egg-beaters, and others have become quite scarce as breeders. For example, the breeding whippoorwill population has shrunk to near zero from a high of 25 pairs. I no longer hear hermit thrushes sing their pre-dusk songs, which some say are the most melodious of all native American birds. Ovenbirds and towhees, which used to be common on the forest floor, have become scarcer and scarcer with each passing year.

    Not too long ago, there was a time when only light, private planes flew over my house and the whippoorwills, hermit thrushes, ovenbirds, and towhees didn’t seem to mind. But on weekends during the height of the bird-breeding season in the new millennium, one can easily imagine what it is like to live in Afghanistan. Fortunately for me, my hearing is somewhat impaired. While these helicopters and jets are very, very loud to my ears, they must be screaming loud to those who are normal hearers and almost catastrophic to those with an acute sense of audition.

    Then I think of the piping plovers that pipe their plaintive notes along the shores. Certainly calamitous helicopters passing overhead were not part of their early evolution, nor were the annual summer fireworks shows, most of which take place on the very beaches where they nest. Acts of God such as thunder claps and lightning were part of their early evolution and while such phenomena along with heavy winds and heavy rains have interrupted breeding in piping plovers, ospreys, terns, and other local species, these were only episodic and were not nearly as frequent as helicopters.

    In fact, there has been very little scientific research into the impact of very loud noises on birds and other wild animals — especially on their breeding success — just as there has been very little research on the impact of the U.S. Navy’s underwater sound tests on dolphins, whales, fish, and other sea creatures. It seems that where weapon research and warfare are concerned, little heed is paid to the impact of bombs, missiles, mortar rounds, artillery, and mines on wild animals and the ecological communities they are a part of.

    Apart from the everyday natural hazards that wild fauna and flora have had to contend with daily since each one evolved many thousands of years ago, the added weight of all of the anthropomorphic insults is enough to push many over the edge into the abyss of extinction. The box turtle is an excellent example. Before motor vehicles and paved highways came along, the box turtle was almost an impenetrable fortress when it tucked in its neck and pulled shut its ventral armament. But cars and trucks came along to do what very few natural predators could, and the box turtle was no longer impenetrable.

    What we seem to be missing here, too, is that the North and South Forks are still quite rural. Most people who live here would prefer to hear nature’s sounds — birds singing, the rustle of the wind, or the lap of the waves on the shore — rather than the roar of helicopters, leaf-blowers, and unmuffled motor vehicles. You may tell me we can’t live in the past; I say we can and, in some respects, we may just have to.

   The lilacs are in bloom, a sure sign that the fish local Indians called squeteague, and later dubbed tide runners, sea trout, or weakfish, have arrived right on their ancient schedule.

    Just as trees leafed and perennials flowered during the past week, the varieties of fish we expect to show up each spring took their places. Rumor has it there’s an unusually strong showing of weakfish in and around Accabonac Harbor. Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported weakfish are being taken around Sag Harbor, up in Sag Harbor Cove, along Long Beach and Cow’s Neck. “We haven’t had weakfish in Gardiner’s Bay for years,” Bennett observed.

    Because the water is only about 52 degrees, a good 10 degrees colder than this time last year, pound trappers are seeing plenty of bluefish, flounder, and fluke (summer flounder), but few bottlefish (puffer fish) and almost no squid.

    This is a blow to squid fishermen, who come out of the woodwork this time of year with their lamps, buckets, and squid jigs to get covered in squid ink while angling into the night on Fort Pond Bay.

    Bruce Sasso of Stuart’s Seafood in Amagansett said the shop shipped 499 boxes to the Fulton Market over the weekend, most of it caught in pound traps. “Eighty-five percent were blues in the three to five-pound range, 10 percent were flounder and fluke, and 5 percent were porgies,” Sasso said. He said he thought the absence of bottlefish and squid was due to the cold temperatures, and, now that the bluefish are in thick, because squid fear the marauding schools of hungry blues.

    Surfcasters working the south side report seeing the long and thin bluefish, the so-called “runners” that charge the south side well ahead of the pack, looking haggard from their migration and very hungry. Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk reports only small striped bass being caught so far, but there are plenty of them. 

    The leader board in the Montauk SurfMasters spring tournament remains empty. Paulie’s has just announced a season-long fluke tournament, an idea proffered by Gary (Toad) Stephens, a fisherman feared by fluke. The entry fee is $25.

    There are some fat fluke in the ’hood. On Mother’s Day, Peter Spacek, The Star’s pleasingly irreverent cartoonist, paddled his kayak nearly a mile offshore of Ditch Plain in Montauk to hook a nine-pound fluke using a thawed strip of cod he’d caught the week before from a New Bedford party boat. 

    Speaking of cod, news has come that a German angler, Michael Eisele, has landed a 103-pound cod, 5 pounds heavier than the previous record, on a fishing trip off Norway.

    Montauk’s Viking Fleet of party boats welcomed the new Viking FiveStar last Thursday. Capt. Steven Forsberg Jr. drove the boat up from Tarpon Springs, Fla., where she was fitted out in Viking “Admiral” Paul Forsberg’s backyard. 

    Paul Forsberg said the 65-foot, offshore sport boat, complete with 12 comfortable berths, full galley, and shower, was built to explore an untapped niche in the sportfishing world. He said he felt certain the beamy tuna and billfish hunter (don’t forget tilefish, cod, and whatever other species the Forsberg team decides to target) would appeal to groups of friends, or co-workers, who didn’t mind paying a bit more for uncrowded, overnight fishing trips to the offshore canyons.

   Spring is definitely here, there is no going back. The oaks, hickories, red maples, and sassafras are unfurling their leaves, March’s dull and dreary landscape is behind us. The month of May promises to delight all of our five senses, especially those that deal with vision, scents, and hearing. Helicopters and unmuffled motor vehicles be damned, we will not let them destroy our vernal pleasures.

     Funny how, when we are surrounded by nature’s beauty, The New York Times Style section gets bigger and bigger with each Thursday and Sunday edition. While I don’t find it aesthetic at all, I have found an aesthetic use for it — it is perfect for pressing plants. When the Style section yellows in a year or so, the flattened florescence inside will no longer be three-dimensional, but it will still be beautiful to behold.

     A scientist by training, a naturalist by choice, I have a hard time thinking that science alone can explain so much beauty. Take the male cardinal, for example. Why is it redder than red? The rose-pink patch on the male grosbeak, does it have to be that appealing in order for the species to survive? Birds are attired in uniforms as Catholic schoolchildren are, only their uniforms are much more spectacular, even outlandishly so. Each New World warbler now passing through on the way north is exquisite in hue and line. The few that stay and breed are just as beguiling. What artist could paint one better?

     The coral reef fishes of the tropical seas are astoundingly beautiful. Sea anemones and jellyfish are also beautiful. Butterflies are, too. Just about every living thing in nature, plant or animal, has a beauty of its own. Look at a paramecium or a dinoflagellate under a microscope; each is equally impressive.  Scientists tell us it is all a result of millions and millions of years of evolution, but I wonder. Primates come along and develop retinal cone cells for color vision and humans perfect them, and thus aesthetics becomes more and more important as the human culture twists and turns through the ages.

    Autumn leaves are a delight, so are blue waters and purple sunsets. Humans can perceive all of this wonderment, but they themselves are quite plain compared to flowering plants, songbirds, butterflies, and coral reef fishes. We wear designer clothing, fuss with our hair, go to spas, do yoga, eat right, work out, get sufficient sleep, but when compared to those other organisms, we still appear quite pale and unattractive. World-class models and Miss Americas are nice to look at but don’t hold a candle to a goldfinch, clownfish, tiger swallowtail, or bird’s-foot violet.

   What would the world be like if all the birds were dull gray, all the fish were black, there were no colorful spots or stripes to adorn nature’s treasures? What if songbirds didn’t sing and the only bird sounds were nasal caws and chucks?  Would Monet have bothered to paint so many brilliant landscapes, would Bee­thoven have written the Symphony Pastorale? What if flowers were drab and didn’t smell nicer than most perfumes? Would we surround ourselves with beautiful gardens?

    There is not a lot of money to be made beholding nature. In fact, those of us who are so enthralled by it that we find little time to earn a good living or excel in one of the thousands of vocational pursuits available to Homo sapiens, have often been written off as indolent and undermotivated, slow and lethargic, even lazy. Ferdinand the Bull was given to lying about and sniffing his pasture’s scents and ogling the flowers that wafted them, when he was supposed to be training for serious competition in the arena.

    No, we humans were blessed with these unique senses to appreciate beauty, especially nature’s beauty, and not to blunt them or repress them in order to leave a large mark in the workaday world in which we toil. We compete, belittle, bully, fight, and kill each other when we should be enjoying the raptures that nature has to offer.

    We should all wake up and smell the roses, especially the ones in our own backyard.

   Like the swallows to Capistrano (although I’ve read development has interrupted their instinctual return of late), Steve (The Perv) Kramer rolled into the Ditch Plain parking lot a few days ago from his winter haunts in Florida with a neatly trimmed beard. He is called Perv for no reason darker than his penchant for the odd, ribald observation. This does not make him a bad person.

    To prove that the spring run of striped bass had arrived in Montauk he held out his hands, cut and bleeding from handling and unhooking the early arrivals, most of them young — the young ones being especially thorny. Most of the action had been at the small jetty whose rocks have been jumbled into several un-jetty-like piles by Hurricane Sandy and the northeasters that followed over the winter.

    I have a theory about why the rats, as small stripers are known, school at this particular spot each spring. The location of the jetty, or what’s left of it, corresponds to where the shoreline of the South Fork takes a 20-degree turn to the north. It’s an elbow.

    On the west side of the elbow the bottom is sandy. On the east side the bottom is a rock reef that stretches all the way to Montauk Point. Now, in most places along the East Coast, striped bass are known as rockfish because it’s where they prefer to feed. I believe the early arrivals migrate west-to-east along the South Fork over sandy bottom.

    When they hit the Ditch Plain elbow and its rocks they gather to feed on mussels, the little black snails the French call rosettes and the Italians call babalucis. They feast on crabs and other rock denizens as well as any finned creatures that happen along. Kramer has been using a small bucktail with red pork rind.

    Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reports bass “all over on the south side,” especially the beaches to the west of Montauk. Small tins and bucktails are doing the trick, and, according to Paul Apostolides, for those who prefer throwing bait, sandworms are “clobbering the fish.”

    Meanwhile, draggers working the backside, offshore of Ditch Plain and towing along the coast to the west, have been welcoming fluke, the summer flounder. They are permitted 140 pounds per day — not a lot. Despite the hearty east wind over the weekend, at least one party boat was doing the same. Those catching fluke for sport are enjoying a far better shake from the State Department of Environmental Conservation than they got last year; a four-fish bag limit for fluke at least 19 inches long.

    Tanya Miller at the West Lake Marina reported “quite a few boats” headed out after fluke on Saturday despite the wind. Most huddled off Montauk’s iconic radar tower, a majestic relic of the cold war built to detect incoming I.C.B.M.s launched by the Soviet Union bound for the Big Apple. Thankfully they never flew. “There were a lot of short fish, Miller said, “but everyone came back with a few keepers. A lot of action.”

    “Yesterday afternoon I had five guys fishing. We had 15 keepers, the largest five and-a-half pounds,” Michael Potts, captain of the Blue Fin IV charter boat, reported on Monday. He also reported that cod fishing had gone to the dogs, meaning dogfish, the bane of codfishermen and about every other kind of fisherman too.

    The Shark’s Eye, a no-kill shark tournament scheduled to take place on July 27 and July 28 from the Montauk Marine Basin, has begun to generate excitement. It’s attracted the attention of the National Geographic Society, which has expressed an interest in filming the event, according to Carl Darenberg, the Marine Basin’s owner. A major television network, which Darenberg said he could not identify until it formally commits, is also interested.

    The country music star Craig Morgan will perform, and feelers have gone out to get Jimmy Buffett to help make the first-ever no-kill shark tournament a community event. Buffett keeps a sportfishing boat in Montauk Harbor during the summer months. Also on hand will be the Paxton Brothers, who run charter shark-diving trips and are involved in shark conservation.

    Darenberg said organizers had come up with a strategy to prove that a catch is indeed legitimate, in recognition of fishermen’s tendency to, er, exaggerate. Participating boats will be given a secret number known only to the fisherman and organizers, which must appear on a chalk board when photos are taken when a shark is released.

    Fishermen interested in participating in the July Shark’s Eye tournament have been encouraged to contact Carl Darenberg at the Montauk Marine Basin. “This is the future,” Darenberg said.