If only Robert Moses, New York’s supreme 20th-century planner and doer, could revisit one of his first parkland acquisitions, Hither Hills State Park, and take a look as the gem of that park system, the Walking Dunes, he would feel very confident that his decision was well made.

    The decision to purchase and preserve that land in 1926 must have been greatly influenced by the Walking Dunes and the woods and pristine pond beyond, not to mention the ocean and its white sand beaches. There were three walking dunes then. Lined up in a marching row southeast to northwest, they followed the track of the East End’s prevailing northwesterly winds.

    The first was about to spill onto the Long Island Rail Road line, built a mere quarter of a century earlier. The second, close behind, and the third was just starting out and about to cover a handful of pitch pines standing in its way. The Walking Dunes were already desert-like enough to be used in the 1920s to film parts of the silent movie “The Sheik,” but they must have gotten a tremendous boost from the 1938 Hurricane, which destroyed Montauk’s fishing village on Fort Pond Bay, as well. In the last three decades, the dunes have moved forward only a few feet or so, but have maintained their impressive height along the leading edge.

    If only Mr. Moses could see them as they stand in March of 2013 he might be astounded. In less than two years, a fourth walking dune has crept in, and it is already taller than the other three. A week ago, Wednesday, while examining the long-standing cranberry bog with Karen Blumer and Vicki Bustamante, we were almost overcome. There it was, almost de novo, a new walking dune carved out of the sands of northeastern Napeague. It was a perfect parabolic dune, just as the others had been at one time.

    The head of it was a smooth uplifted knob edged on both sides by swept-clean flanks of similar aspect and dimensions. Looking back from the highest point to the northwest, we saw a perfectly smooth bottom, devoid of any vegetation — a cradle as it were — which gave rise to the elevated cusp upon which we were standing. Except for our prints, which were being rapidly covered over by a stiff breeze, the knob, flanks, and belly were spotless, smooth, and all of the same off-white hue.

    It was only a nubbin when we last visited the bog in September, now it was a full-fledged “walking dune,” marching forward double-time. Since it formed on the Napeague Harbor side of its older sibling, it will not overtake it or fill it in, but at its current speed, it should push forward of it in a matter of a few years. Its roommate has almost stopped dead in its tracks, as its belly has reached groundwater and is fully grown over with cranberries, other wetland plants and a few young pitch pines, browned over by Sandy’s wrath. There is very little dry sand that is not tied down by vegetation to feed its continued movement.

    Myron L. Fuller and other early geologists who studied Long Island’s dune system were duly impressed by how much some of the dunes had moved. In East Hampton Village, dunes from the east side of Georgica Pond migrated inland more than a mile to beyond where the railroad tracks now run. From Two Mile Hollow Beach, where the road by the same name runs, dunes migrated all the way to where the railroad tracks and Springs Close Highway meet.

    These last two sets of dunes were spawned by southwesterlies pushing ocean beach sand inland. The walking dunes are moving Napeague Bay sand in the other direction.

    On the north side of Montauk Highway, along the middle of the Napeague isthmus, are a bunch of isolated hillocks rising up from the wetlands there. They were also moving inland from Napague’s ocean beach sands, but they were stopped in their tracks long before the road and the railroad to Montauk were constructed. It’s tough going for a dune to travel over wetlands, particularly so when it’s being pushed by northerlies in the winter and southerlies in the summer. It ends up going nowhere.

    The Napeague isthmus was formed only a few thousand years ago by the re-entrance of eroded sands drifting and blowing shoreward to it from the morainal bluffs in Montauk and Amagansett on the east and west. Geologically it is relatively young.

    There’s a strong probability that in less than 100 years Napeague Harbor’s water level will rise to the degree that it fills in the Walking Dune swales and even reaches beyond to Fresh Pond in Hither Woods. The landscape on the East End is always changing, and as long as we have Irenes, Sandys, and ferocious northeasters, it always will. That’s one of the great delights derived from living here and having the nail-downed concreted-over great city of New York 100 miles in the distance.

    Keeping a weather eye can be a challenge in these parts, especially as the seasons change. Anglers who have begun the process of getting rods, reels, boats, and trailers out of mothballs might also think about getting back in touch with the weather gods.

    Even boaters who have spent decades in East End waters get the occasional unpleasant surprise, particularly on the popular fishing grounds that stretch from Gardiner’s Bay through Block Island Sound to Montauk Point and beyond. Tidal currents and wind, especially when they oppose each other, can turn a sea of glass into a maelstrom within minutes.

    On Sept. 1, 1951, the badly overloaded party boat Pelican capsized when a squall with a 30-knot wind out of the northeast collided with an outgoing tide just north of Montauk Point. That day opposing wind and tide created waves estimated at 15 feet in the tidal rips. Forty-five passengers and crew died.

    The catastrophe resulted in closer regulation of recreational fishing boats. Of course since then the science and availability of marine weather forecasts have improved a great deal, but there are risks in placing all of one’s trust in electronic gizmos and only one source for weather forecasts.

    Chief Petty Officer Jason Walter, in command of the Montauk Coast Guard Search and Rescue Station, said there is often a big difference between the wind velocity as forecasted by the National Weather Service for Montauk waters and the wind as experienced when rounding Montauk Point on a spring or summer afternoon.

    Bill Goodman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Upton, explained that the marine forecasts from NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the National Weather Service) for near-shore Montauk were largely based on conditions found at the agency’s offshore buoys, one 25 miles southwest of Montauk, another just west of Fishers Island. During the recreational fishing season they do not take into account the sea breeze.

    “The sea breeze is always stronger near shore. The sun heats up the land. The land is warmer than the ocean water. The heat of the day induces a flow from the cooler sea. It can be significantly stronger than the prevailing wind offshore,” Goodman said. “This is beyond our ability to predict.”

    Because of this, as well as myriad other variables, experienced mariners and the Coast Guard rely on a number of Web sites, each with its own computer modeling systems. “Everyone reports a little differently,” Chief Walter said. “We go to the National Weather Service, wunderground, and others and try to find a happy medium. Sometimes they’re all wrong. The blizzard in February, for instance. The winds out here were stronger than predicted, stronger than Sandy, between 60 and 70 miles per hour.”

    He also reminded boaters that the first 10 channels on their V.H.F. radios transmit marine weather, each channel designed to serve a specific area.

    Michael Potts, captain of the Bluefin IV charter boat with a lifetime of experience navigating the waters around Montauk and Block Island, said he plans his trips using at least three sources. On fishweather.com (or oldfishweather.com) “you can look at the wind at Block Island Airport or Montauk Airport forecast every hour for a week ahead.”

    Captain Potts also recommended wunderground.com and swellinfo.com, a site designed for surfers but which gives detailed information about swell size and direction and wind speed and direction forecast five days into the future.

    “It shows what the surf on the beach is going to be — glassy, semi-glassy, choppy — and then a picture of the ocean a hundred miles offshore, swell size, direction overlaid with wind bars every six hours for a week.”

    The charter captain said he uses the aforementioned sites to fine-tune the standard NOAA marine weather forecast. “A little map comes up. You choose your area, say between Montauk and Rhode Island or south of Montauk to Block Island. Click on a square and it shows you weather for the next five days. What happens is, it says the wind will be gusting to 30 knots, then you go to the other sites and it shows you the wind will be 5 to 10 knots until 1 in the afternoon, so I can get a day’s fishing in.”

   Skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, is a plant of the Northern Hemisphere and a species that occurs throughout most of North America except for in the South and West. A flowering plant in the Jack-in-the-pulpit family, it is one of the first plants to flower each year and thus is a true harbinger of spring. The second half of its scientific name refers to its fetid smell, not unlike the effluvia emitted by a defensive skunk or the scent a red fox uses to mark its territory.

    It also occurs in eastern Asia, suggesting that it came here from there, or came there from here by way of Beringia, the land bridge across the Bering Strait connecting Siberia with Alaska over which early Mongolians traveled to North America during the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago.

    In part of its range, its malodorous habits give it another name, polecat weed. In California, Oregon, and Washington, it is replaced by a look-alike, yellow skunk cabbage, but just like our local one, you note its presence before you come upon it. It has a similar skunky odor. The flowers, on the other hand, are sweet smelling, and when they are the only blooming flower in town early emerging honeybees frequent them. However, it was a surprise to me when I discovered by way of a friend that deer browse on them. If the plant were not a perennial, that would be a problem, but it is able to survive such foraging and bloom again the next year.

    In our area, skunk cabbage sends up its leaves and begins to flower when the garden daffodils, crocuses, and hyacinths are still waking up. These last are somewhat frost tolerant, but not to the degree that the skunk cabbage is. Once it spreads it unfurls its leaves as early as the first week in February. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow, even freeze, it’s a survivor. It’s one of those few native plants that has an antisfreeze that keeps it going through bitter cold.

    Maybe, that’s what I tasted when I put a handful of the yellow skunk cabbage in my mouth to demonstrate to my Chemeketa Community College biology class in Oregon in 1972 that it would make a nice salad. One bite and I couldn’t open my mouth for five minutes. It was as astringent as alum. Like the deer, I should have tried the flowers. I might have gotten an A instead of an F for my demonstration.

    If prepared properly, skunk cabbage is quite edible. In their “Flora of the Northeast,” Dennis Magee and Harry Ahles provide a recipe. To paraphrase, the root or rhizome is edible after peeling, cutting into thin slices, and drying for six months. The same applies to the young leaves, when tightly rolled, cut up, and dried for six months. In either case, for those hikers and campers who are very hungry, the recipe won’t be of much use. The two authors also say that powder made from the dried rhizomes can be used to make a tea or applied to wounds to dress them, again, not much use to a thirsty guy in a swamp or one who has just cut his hand on a bull briar.

    They must exude a plant pheromone, as well, one that keeps most other plants from growing in their midst as they form a tight carpet which can cover more area than your living room. The foul odor may serve as a deterrent to some, an attractant to others, those organisms that would feed on the flowers, the pollen, or the seeds. In terms of looks, skunk cabbages are not unattractive. Their leaves are variegated with purples, greens, and yellows. They would go nicely in one of those rain gardens the greenies are heralding for catching roof and lawn runoff and removing its chemicals.

    I don’t know anything about propagating them. Both the rhizomes and seeds may need the right soil mix and a special growth environment. Vicki Bustamante, who is able grow almost every local native plant species from a seed, cutting, or other propagule, is going to try. It may be easier to grow them than eat them. One shouldn’t have to wait six months to judge the outcome.

   The Ides of March, the days on and around March 15, were the start of the new year on the ancient Roman calendar. It was considered a propitious time full of promise unless you happened to be Julius Caesar, or the old men back in ancient Greece — long before Medicare — who were first dressed in animal skins, then beaten, and finally driven from town to celebrate the expulsion of the old year.

    One way or another, the two sides of Ides are felt by everyone, routinely by charter and party-boat anglers who have gotten used to feeling at turns optimistic then betrayed and beaten by a Byzantine regulatory system. In the case of fluke (summer flounder), some anglers are driven from their native New York by New Jersey’s more liberal catch limits.

    This will not change in 2013, much to the dismay of Montauk’s charter fleet. Because of a larger quota given New Jersey by the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council, based on historic landings, that state’s conservation department has decided to permit anglers five fluke measuring at least 17.5 inches long per day, from May 18 to Sept. 16 — very appealing to UpIsland anglers. But wait. . . .

    For the first time ever, it looks as though other coastal states that never seem to fill their annual fluke quota may agree to pass a portion of their share to the Empire State. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, whose job it is to divvy up New York’s perennially smaller quota among users, would have offered anglers a reduced catch. The size and bag limits would have remained the same, four 19.5-inch fluke per day, but the season would be shortened, running from May 17 to Sept. 4 instead of May 1 to Sept. 30.

    The possibility of “lending” New York quota is being discussed among Mid-Atlantic Council delegates, and if the give-back comes to pass, New York may be able to keep the size limit the same, but extend the season by over a month, from May 1 to Sept. 30.

    “There’s a high probability of borrowing 72,000 pounds of fluke from another state,” said Tom Jordon, T.J., of the Gone Fishing Marina in Montauk and a member of the Marine Resources Advisory Council. “If so, fluke will remain status quo for this year. But there’s a small possibility we’ll get even more and they would contemplate a slight loosening of regulations, possibly even lowering the size limit by a half-inch.”

    A half-inch doesn’t sound like much, but it could make a big difference to a number of day-tripping party boats that don’t venture too far offshore when larger fluke are found.

    Jordon said fishermen were probably looking at catch reductions in the popular black sea bass fishery.

    Ken Morse of the Tightlines shop in Sag Harbor reported an absence of fishing activity in his neck of the woods, but spent a few minutes decrying the D.E.C.’s decision to keep the winter flounder fishery open despite the dramatic absence of the species in local waters.

    “I’m in the business and I can’t promote it. The state should shut it down. I recommend, don’t go flounder fishing. Go to a stocked pond. They’re beating on a species that’s beaten down,” Mr. Morse said, going on to remind anglers that trout season begins on April 1 with local freshwater bodies in Southampton and parts west stocked by the D.E.C.

   Who was it that said you can make naturalist into a scientist, but it’s almost impossible to teach a scientist to become a naturalist?

   Darwin, the author of the “Theory of Evolution,” was a naturalist. The term naturalist, meaning one who observes and studies nature, has been around since at least 1587. The word scientist, one who practices science, didn’t come into vogue until about 1834. Darwin, if he were alive today and referred to himself as a naturalist on his curriculum vitae, would have a hard time finding a job in a credible college or university. Naturalists paved the road to modern science, but don’t refer to yourself as one while at a gathering of academic biologists, chemists, biophysicists, biochemists, ecologists, physicists, geologists, meteorologists, climatologists, astrophysicists, botanists, and nano physicists, etc., etc.

    Yet before the Big Bang theory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, or Stony Brook University came along, it was the naturalists on Long Island that described our flora and fauna, our aquatic and marine life, our weather and our firmament. Interestingly, these 19th and early 20th-century lovers of nature were driven by curiosity, not by grant money or academic advancement. When a professor of science retires, he or she is given the title of professor emeritus, when a naturalist passes on — naturalists never retire — he or she is referred to as the late so-and-so.

    Naturalists never used the higher education bromide “publish or perish.” That’s because they were never given tenure, they never practiced their art for money, yet many naturalists, say, Henry Thoreau, published and published. Our own East Ender Roy Latham, who continued to observe, collect, and write about Long Island’s natural history into his late 80s, even after he became legally blind, was one of them. When I recently visited the State Museum in Albany and saw how many of the thousands of plants there he had collected, identified, and neatly pressed (transporting them all the way from his home in Orient to the state capital), I was flabbergasted. Each pressed plant had its own ID tag pasted below giving the species, date of collection, place of collection, and other important information which is part of every natural history museum’s tradition.

    At times I call myself a scientist, at other times, a consultant, but deep down I am a naturalist, following my nose, as was and still is the naturalist’s modus operandi. Now two individuals have come along and, in a kind of revival, have created a school for naturalists with courses and a certificate of graduation at the end of it. They are hell bent against letting the art of the naturalism die. Mindy Block is a longstanding Long Island naturalist, author, and the wife of the late Ray Corwin who, himself, was a naturalist, and did such a wonderful job running Long Island’s Central Pine Barrens forest for so many years. She and a partner, Tebbe Butler, have put together the Quality Parks Master Naturalist Program, a series of all-day Saturday classes beginning in April and ending on June 2.

    The classes as they appear in order cover the following topics: Long Island explorer, Long Island wildlife, Long Island geology and plant communities, trails, greenways and living sustainably, and marine ecology. There will be longstanding naturalist instructors in addition to Mindy and Tebbe conducting the courses, and at the end, diplomas will be awarded during a graduation ceremony. Registration information can be found at qualityparks.org.

    Yes, the Island has been raked over from the East River to Montauk Point and Fisher’s Island many, many a time by birders, herpetologists, mammalogists, entomologists, botanists, ichthyologists, invertebrate zoologists, and geologists, but by my accounts, we have only scratched the surface. As climate changes, so will the biota of Long Island.

    Many, many habitats Island-wide are sick and dying. They need the green thumbs and observational powers of trained naturalists to heal them and make them well just as doctors and nurses heal sick patients so they can re-enter society, function, be good parents, and make a living. Habitats were here first. They even preceded the Island’s various Native American groups. It wasn’t­ these early aboriginals who laid waste to the environment and its many wonderful natural creations, it was us. Master naturalists can help heal not only their environment, but themselves, while also looking out for the future of the natural world.

   One more storm and then spring’s a-poppin’. In Noyac on Friday daffodils and daylilies began to sprout. Two weeks ago skunk cabbages were in bloom in Morton Wildlife Refuge in Noyac and at Big Reed Pond in Montauk. As of last Friday, deer ticks, both the blackish males and reddish-backed females, were crawling onto shoes, socks, and trousers in the shrub lands in Montauk east of the lake.

    For the past week cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, and Carolina wrens have been singing up a storm. Our year-round resident birds brave the cold for the opportunity to breed ahead of those coming up from the south. It’s a crapshoot of sorts. They breed ahead of the others, but there is the chance that early spring storms will wipe their nests and nestlings out.

    “Spring is getting a wiggle on,” as my mother used to say.

    Great horned owls are already feeding their young. In two weeks the ospreys will be returning. One or two will show up in less than a week. Piping plovers will follow on their heels.

    Male red-winged blackbirds and grackles have been putting up a chatter for two weeks now. For some reason they come up a week or two earlier than the females. Robin males also arrive first, but it’s hard to tell the snowbird robins from the ones that stayed with us throughout the winter. Since Feb. 20 they’ve been checking out the weedy road shoulders and larger lawns. It’s the early robin that gets the worm, and after last week’s rain melted the snow, little brown chimneys of dirt on local lawns announced the first emergence of night crawlers and red wrigglers.

    Alewives, what few are left in our marine waters, are massing in the harbors and bays at the mouths of streams running out of ponds such as Big Fresh Pond in North Sea, Jeremy’s Hole in Sagg Swamp, Mill Pond in Water Mill, and Scoy Pond in East Hampton’s Northwest. They’re the closest fish, behaviorally, to salmon and sea-run trout that we have on the East End. Long ago we had the Atlantic salmon nosing about come spring but those days are gone forever. Some of the alewives will be bearing well-developed freshwater clam larvae on their gills, which will be released into the alewives’ breeding waters to then settle down and start long lives as sedentary bivalves. Do these bivalves-to-be come back to the same ponds in which they were spawned? Science is still trying to answer that question.

    Elvers three or four inches long leaving the “glass” stage, becoming pigmented, will be swimming up the same streams a week or two later. They have to surmount dryish spots, wood snags, phragmites and all sorts of gauntlets to make it to headwater ponds where they, just as the clams, will grow up into adults. Obstacles in their watery path are no match for them. After all, they come more than 1,000 miles to get here, all the way from the Sargasso Sea!

    Andy Sabin observed adult tiger salamanders entering their Southampton breeding ponds as early as Jan. 15, but the other mole salamanders, the spotteds and blue spotteds that breed in the spring, are just coming out of their winter hibernacula now. When you hear the first spring peepers — those tiniest of Long Island frogs — begin to sing near the end of the month, you will know that the salamanders, which are silent, will be there with them sharing the waters, courting and laying and fertilizing their eggs in the same two-week time span.

    Ironically, at the very same time, the tadpoles of our fourth mole salamander, the marbled salamander, having been conceived in September, will be approaching metamorphosis time, leaving the water for a terrestrial existence as the other three species’ tadpoles are just getting started.

    The snakes and turtles will come out of hibernation a little later. If they get caught above ground in freezing temperatures for more than a few hours it could be curtains. Diamondback terrapins emerge from mud in salt ponds, snapping turtles from their winter hug-the-bottom still-life existence.

    The mammals are shaking off their winter sluggardliness. In two weeks you will see woodchucks sitting up watching the cars go by on the Sunrise Highway. Chipmunks will pop their noses out of their winter burrows and smell the air. Raccoons and opposums, which have been slumberous through the hardest parts of winter, will get up and get going. Pregnant females will be looking for birthing spots in chimneys, deserted sheds, hollow trees, under decks, and so on.

    Flowers will start to pop when the spring peepers begin to sing. Witch hazels have been blooming for almost a month. Members of the mustard family, the brassicas, both native and exotic, will follow along with the trailing arbutus. Then come the shads, dogwoods, cottonwoods, bird’s-foot violets, star flowers, and wood anemones. To paraphrase Shelly, “when winter comes, can spring be far behind?” Fasten your seat belts, folks, spring’s a-comin’ and it won’t stop for no one.

   Last Thursday, Karen Blumer, Vicki Bustamante, and I went north to Albany. After leaving Long Island it was bedrock all the way north along the Hudson River. The advance of the last ice sheet of the Wisconsin glaciation purportedly carved out the river basin that is over a mile wide in some places and stretches a good 200 miles. It is oriented north to south, so it makes sense that a quarter-mile-high glacier coming from Canada would be capable of making such a deep gouge and simultaneously creating the Palisades along the west side. As the northern hemisphere warmed up and the glacier retreated, its melt water filled the cavity, which then flowed south into New York Bay.

    I hadn’t been off Long Island for more than a year and so it was a special treat to plant my feet on solid ground. Whatever happens to Long Island under the coming siege of rising seas, warming atmospheres, and larger and more frequent storms will spare most of New York north of West­chester County. Upstate, the Atlantic Ocean’s tides will reach farther and farther up the river as sea level rises, there will be floodings of numerous rivers and streams, but solid rock formations wash away very, very slowly, not quickly like the sandy soils of which most of Long Island is composed.

    Global warming aside, it was blustery cold, a wind chill that stabbed the body with pain and agony whenever we had to leave one building and go to another.

    Our destination was the state capital and its museum, one of the oldest in the nation, ranking right up there with Philadelphia’s. The museum’s collections started more than 200 years ago, but the historic museum has been replaced by a modern multistory structure that sits on a pedestrian subsurface tiled concourse, which runs for more than a quarter mile under the city and which sports a grand assortment of shops and eateries.

     Most of one entire floor, the fourth, is filled with wall-to-wall cabinets in a maze of steel containing 200,000 pressed plant specimens, some collected as far back as in the early 1800s, and representing all of the state’s many habitats, even those that are now completely urban and suburban, but were once wild. Long Island is well represented. We were looking for plants collected from the East End, particularly the ones collected by one of Long Island’s preeminent naturalists, the late Roy Latham. Whether by motor vehicle, horseback, bicycle, or boat, Mr. Latham roamed the North and South Forks and the islands in between beginning in the early 1900s for a quarter of a century, observing and collecting specimens, everything from unusual fish taken from Peconic Bay pound nets to orchids collected in hidden-away fens on Gardiner’s Island.

    Each pressed plant had a label typed out on a piece of paper, sometimes scraps of paper, by him. The two main repositories for Long Island flora collected early on are the  State Museum in Albany and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Roy Latham was no academician squared away in an ivory tower, his work supported by government grants, he was the last of a breed going all the way back to the ancient Greeks called naturalists. He supported himself and his family by potato farming in Orient. When he wasn’t farming he was out and about studying the flora and fauna. Darwin was a naturalist.

    The ride up and down was just as enriching as the visit to the museum and a side trip to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, where the state’s Natural Heritage Program and its staff of biologists is maintained.  Crossing the Tappan Zee bridge is almost as exciting as crossing San Francisco’s Golden Gate. The river is no stone’s throw across, one wonders how in the days of the Revolutionary War the Americans were able to fabricate a heavy iron chain, long enough to stretch across from one side to the other at West Point, and strong enough to stop British frigates in their tracks.

    Both sides of the Thruway are dressed with native state trees, maples, oaks, poplars, birch, beech, white pines, hickories, tulips. We were passing through the Transitional Conifer-Hardwood forest, the northern extension of the Appalachian forest. There were trees everywhere, some reaching to more than 100 feet high, except where the sides of the roadway were bounded with sheer rock faces, 20 to 75 feet high, and sporting arrays of very long icicles and occasional wire fences to trap boulders should they be loosed from their purchase and otherwise fall to the pavement.

    We counted all of the birds, the few mammals, mostly deer, that we observed, and noted the hundreds and hundreds of patches of roadside phragmites, the genotype from Europe that competed with the native trees. The raptors were the most engaging. It seemed that in just about every mile of travel there was a red-tailed hawk perched on a branch with its whitish breast facing the sun. A few were soaring in circles and one or two dove at something on the shoulder, a mouse or a shrew perhaps.

    For the redtail it’s an easy life, but also a risky one. A couple that tried to feed on the edge of the pavement ­didn’t make it and went in the books as road kills. A few turkey vultures circled overhead and at one point three black vultures went by in a straightish line. The most ubiquitous and abundant birds along the way were, of course, starlings, they were especially abundant around entrances and exits where one could get gas and something to eat.

    Every underpass had its flock of pigeons, a half-dozen to as many as 15.  They were flying or roosting, depending upon their mood. One wonders if all these feral pigeons, immigrants from the Old World, will over the course of many American generations and evolution in the wilds revert to the European wild type and all come to look the same.

    The prized bird species of the trip was the pileated woodpecker, a bird as big as a crow, and one only very rarely seen on Long Island. One flew across from east to west half the way up to Albany. It was only the second one observed during a lifetime of 77 years, at least 65 of which have been spent keeping a sharp eye out for birds.

   Monday morning, the yard covered with a thick blanket of snow, but hints of global warming — six male robins and some starlings visited the privet and sniped the dark berries one by one. They were at it yesterday as well. The berries looked black, but when digested and defecated, they left deep purple stains in the snow. Privet berries must be emergency rations for berry-eating robins, which never feed on seed or suet.

    Each year more and more robins show up in local midwinter bird counts. They are invariably males. The females with less colorful breasts must all go south. It has not been determined if these winter robins breed locally, as cardinals, titmice, red-bellied woodpeckers, and mockingbirds do, or if they arrived from farther north.

    Having both migrating bird species in the wrong place in the wrong season speaks to climate change. But so, too, does certain changes in plants. In the last few years some remarkable changes have occurred among the Long Island grass species. The weather must have something to do with it, but there may be other causes working behind the scenes.

    Up until a few years ago when you rode along roads with open fields or shoulders on both sides, especially on the Sunrise Highway and Long Island Expressway, you were bound to see little bluestem grass among the non-native grasses. A two-foot high native that is tawny to mauve, slender and flexible in stature, and standing up proudly well into winter, it is one of the original grasses of the Long Island prairies, those where the Long Island Coliseum and airports now stand in western Suffolk County and Nassau County, as well as at the Shinnecock Hills and in Montauk, where extensive grasslands at one time covered more than 50 percent of the hamlet of Montauk.

    Lately however, the little bluestems have been replaced by two other grasses, broomsedge (Andropogon virginicus) and purple love grass (Eragrostis spectabilis). The first is straw-colored to tawny and taller than little bluestem, the latter is less than eight inches tall and is purple. It has a special mechanism for expanding its range not seen in many grasses.

    It turns out that little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) is in a group called cold-weather grasses. On the eastern seaboard it ranges far north, throughout New England and into Canada. Apparently, it was one of the first grasses to colonize Long Island after the glacier melted and retreated to the north about 10,000 years ago, before which Long Island’s surface was like a tundra. Dune bluestem (Schi­zachyrium littorale), a much rarer and much taller sibling cold-weather grass species found along the duny edges of salt marshes, also ranges north to Maine along our coast.

    Little bluestem likes cold winters, moist weather, and soils that are not sparing of nutrients. When many Long Island agricultural fields went out of cultivation, little bluestem gladly stepped in and became one of the dominant “old field” species. Things are changing rapidly, however. Broomsedge has been taking over its former territory, forming pure stands and outcompeting little bluestem. In Brookhaven Town, Southampton Town, and large areas of East Hampton Town, broomsedge is now the dominant grass. Little bluestem is making its last stand in Montauk where broomsedge is still uncommon.

    It turns out that broomsedge and purple love grass are warm-weather grasses. They get as far north as Cape Cod in Massachusetts but not to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. These two can handle poor sandy soils well, and eschew long periods of freezing weather and droughty conditions. Last summer was droughty and broomsedge thrived as never before. After Irene, with its highly desiccating gale force winds passed by in late August 2011, purple love grass became dominant along many of the major highways, forming a pleasing purple haze for miles on end.

    It’s not just global warming that is abetting the spread of these two grasses. They both bloom in late summer, and don’t shed their seeds readily, sometimes not until the following spring when germination time comes around. The love grass has a special attribute for spreading. It dries up into a loose ball about six inches in diameter after fruiting and becomes a tumbleweed, rolling over flat unimpeded surfaces as fast as the wind will take it. In the early fall when the winds are still warm and westerly, it travels east. I was standing on Cranberry Hole Road on Napeague in October of 2011 and watched one roll past me at more than five miles an hour. It traveled east some 100 yards before it passed out of sight.

    The seeds of broomsedge are held tightly within the inflorescence and it takes a lot of work to separate them out. Victoria Bustamante who specializes in gathering seeds and fruit from native Long Island species has spent many an hour extracting a few handfuls of seeds to germinate in her greenhouse. But once extracted, she says, “all you have to do is sprinkle them on bare earth slightly moist and they germinate overnight.” Highway mowers that begin mowing major Long Island roads as early as May can easily pick up and spread stalks with seeds attached and move them along before dropping them.

    Deer feed on little bluestem, but have yet to take to purple love grass, which is scratchy, and broomsedge, which is dry and stiff. That may be another reason for the recent success of these two newish grasses in our area.

    One thing is certain, whether it be climate change, storms, wildfires, foraging competition, or some other chain of events, species both animal and vegetable will continue to change in range and population numbers. Some common ones will become scarce, the way deer were in the mid-20th century, some will flourish, as broomsedge and phragmites are doing now. Each species has different needs, and as we humans rapidly change the landscape, water, and the air around us, some will take advantage of it and some will fall by the wayside.

   Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania and Staten Island Chuck didn’t see their shadows on Saturday while Malverne Mel and Holtsville Hal did. It’s hard to believe that Pennsylvanians and Staten Islanders will be blessed with an early spring, while we Long Islanders will suffer prolonged winter, as we are relatively close to those areas and prevailing climate conditions stretch for hundreds of miles. What weather conditions eastern Pennsylvania has, we should also enjoy.

    Groundhogs and woodchucks may differ as weathermen, but they share one major attribute, wherever they may roam they are one and the same species, Marmota monax, and except for beavers, they are the largest rodents in North America. And, along with the eastern chipmunk and bats, they are the only truly hibernating mammals we have on Long Island. If they had anything to say about it, notwithstanding their appearances in the newspapers and on television every February, Phil and the rest of them would almost certain prefer not to be roused from a sleep that would otherwise extend into April for 15 seconds of fame.

    According to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the name “woodchuck” comes from the Ojibwa Indian word, otchig, which also applied to two members of the weasel family, the fisher and the marten. The Cree Indians called groundhogs and the like otchecks. “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” was a standard limerick line in my kindergarten days in Mattituck on the North Fork.

    We recited the jingle before we saw the woodchuck in real life. I was 8 when I saw this largish brown furry animal with large buckteeth approach me from inside my grandfather’s chicken yard. I was on one side of the wire fence, it was on the other side. It studied me as much as I studied it. I had no inkling at the time that I was looking at a woodchuck, a quite friendly one at that, and the only one I ever saw until I saw another nine years later come out from under a pile of branches on the dairy farm down the street from my house in the Oregon Road area of Mattituck. That one became a regular and I would visit it often.

    The next woodchucks to cross my eyes were in a field north of Riverhead in Northville, close to the old Iron Pier on Long Island Sound. It turned out that in the mid-1950s the population began to build rapidly, the way the deer population began to build in the 1960s. In those days people didn’t hunt woodchucks, they weren’t much good for eating, their pelts didn’t fetch a farthing, and rifle shooting in the field was banned on Long Island.

    However, during my Cornell years upstate in dairy farming country, woodchucks were common and they were a solid fixture in the “varmint” category. They would be shot with .22-caliber rifles in a sport called “plinking” and left where they fell. It wasn’t until 1974 when I came back from the West Coast to teach at Southampton College that I began to notice woodchucks through a biologist’s eye.

    By then they had become rather common north of Riverhead and in fields and highway shoulders in western Southampton Town and eastern Brookhaven Town. Beginning in the 1980s in late spring through early fall, a motorist traveling along the L.I.E. or Sunrise Highway west of Hampton Bays through the Central Pine Barrens was bound to encounter a woodchuck or two. They dug their burrows in the banks behind the road shoulders and fed on the vegetation in the shoulders. Road kills began to show up regularly along those highways as well, as the grassy medians became a regular part of their foraging territories.

    Nuisance trappers tending to complaints about raccoons and opossums began trapping woodchucks as well. One of Long Island’s longest-standing nuisance trappers and a close friend of mine, the late Pearson Topping, specialized in woodchucks. It was by way of my visits with him that I first found out that woodchucks are excellent climbers, just as the other of Long Island’s two hibernators, the chipmunks, are. Beavers, on the other hand, don’t climb trees; they cut them down.

    It wasn’t until the late 1990s that woodchucks began to show up on the South Fork. It was just a matter of time before they expanded eastward. No one knows how they got here. Did they swim the canal or cross one of the bridges? But they did get here, and by all accounts are doing quite well. The first ones reported to me showed up south of Bridgehampton near the ponds around Mecox Bay. About five years ago I got a call from a former supervisor of East Hampton Town, Bruce Collins, who lives off of Cedar Street in East Hampton. One was in his yard and he took a photograph of it.

    I have yet to get a report of woodchucks having made it across the Napeague isthmus to reach Montauk, but more than likely come spring, one will be standing up in some Hither Hills spot next to its borough looking every bit like a big prairie dog. What will the Montaukers name it? Montauk Max, or Montauk Mary if it turns out to be a female? Next to its borough looking every bit like a big prairie dog. What will the Montaukers name it? Montauk Max, or Montauk Mary if it turns out to be a female?

   It was gently snowing with big and little flakes on Monday morning when I went into the living room with my coffee to see if Noyac Bay had frozen yet. I was greeted by a flutter as something whizzed past my head and ended up on top of one of the Venetian blinds where it twitched nervously. The twitching little body, white stripe over the eye, and cocked tail gave it away immediately — a Carolina wren. Poor thing, it didn’t like the freezing cold and falling snow any more than I did.

    Some seven years ago the same thing happened. A Carolina wren popped in and sang its shrill repetitious song. Inside my house the song was as loud as the helicopters that fly over, but, I’ll admit, much more melodious. The wren was setting up its territory, as Carolina wrens often nest in old sheds, barns, under decks, and the like. After all, the little guys are from the deep South; they don’t enjoy the cold. That time I merely opened the door to the outside and he flew out. In this last case, I hesitated. It was nasty out, but I made a tough decision, the wren would probably fare better outside than in. I opened the front door and he flew out with gusto.

    That’s the chance you take if you’re a southern species and you’re pioneering in the north country. Of the several American bird species that have extended their range to the upper latitudes during the last century (and are full-time residents), the Carolina wren is the smallest and most likely to succumb to frigid Januarys and Februarys. Indeed, there are years when the various Long Island Christmas bird censuses only pick up one or two of this bird.

    By the turn of the 21st century, these southerners had become more ubiquitous than many of those winter inhabitants that turned up on the first Christmas bird counts almost 100 years ago. The mockingbird, the cardinal, the white-breasted nuthatch, red-breasted woodpecker, and the Carolina wren would be only very rarely encountered when I was a boy growing up on Long Island in the 1940s.

    And it wasn’t global warming that invited them northward. It was the natural bent of all species to further themselves and their numbers, just as we humans have come to occupy every inch of continental land and almost every island across the face of the earth and now number more than 7 billion. A species that is not expanding is on the way to extinction. These birds came first and then it got warmer.

    Birds in deep southern climes breed all year round. They sing all year round. It is no coincidence then, that our local mockingbirds, cardinals, and Carolina wrens sing their territorial and courting songs in the winter as if they were still in the southlands.

    One February morn in my final semester at Cornell University in Ithaca in 1961, I was awakened by the lucid monotonal notes of a male cardinal singing outside my married-student housing window. Then I heard the same notes coming from inside. I got up, looked, and found that the inside whistles were coming from my 15-month-old daughter, Angela. Lying in her crib on her back, she was dueting with the red bird outside her window, and the red bird was answering back accordingly.

    I tend to be a stay-at-home, but many humans are pioneers in spirit. Americans from Europe went west in their new country long before Horace Greeley told them to do so. Some birds are the same way. The finches that got to the Galapagos Islands in the South Pacific came east from the South American mainland. For a while they had the island chain all to themselves and so they radiated into several different species, each one developing a different niche, as Darwin so precisely described in the middle of the 19th century.

    We call today’s adventurous humans trekkers. They are always on the move, going there, going here. One or two don’t return after each trip. They settle down far from home and become stay-at-homes like me.

    As for the Carolina wren, “Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the morning,” unless it is to be in Sag Harbor in the summer after successfully outlasting another difficult winter.