Upfront is Mecca to surfcasters this time of year, the frontage being the semicircle of rocky beach and headland that surrounds the Montauk Point Lighthouse.

    On Monday morning early, striped bass were being caught with regularity as the sun lighted the white hulls of boats, some close, others farther offshore by degrees like so many stepping stones to Block Island, also lit bright by the sun’s early rays. Casters said black darters, a swimming lure, had done the trick in the dark, according to one, Steve Kramer, but the darters were replaced by bucktails festooned with white or red pork-rind trailers at dawn.

     Steve Van Derlofske, a wetsuited caster from East Islip, was caught between a freelance videographer promising him future YouTube stardom and an offshore rock perch with its promise of striped bass. “What kind of lure is that?” the video man asked, panning his lens the length of Van Derlofske’s rod to the lure in question.

    “It’s a bucktail. Listen, I’ve got to swim to that rock,” the caster said, having chosen fish over posterity.

    Meanwhile, in the Montauk Point State Park’s lower parking area, campers were circled like prairie schooners. Casters who had worked the southeast swell through the night lay about on picnic benches, some dozing, others laying wetsuits out to dry.

    Martin Fischer was suiting up, his wife, Danielle, smiling on the camper’s steel front stoop and praising its comfort as compared to the Bronco they used to spend days in. “We used to go to Hither Hills to shower.” The couple had arrived in the early morning hours from Amityville. “I’ve been coming here since I was six or seven,” Fischer said. “I’ll spend 16 hours in this wetsuit today.” Actually three separate wetsuits, he said. He switched into dry ones every few hours.

    Paul Leo, a friend, had arrived from Farmingdale at 4 a.m., and Donny Rivera, another buddy, had come up from Trinity, Fla. “I got in last night. It’s the first time back here since I moved.”

    Most of the action took place on the north side of Montauk Point, where Allen Vollmer of West Babylon caught the 43.6-pound striper that won two tournaments held Friday and Saturday. One was held from Paulie’s Tackle Shop in Montauk, the other sponsored by the State Parks Department. A bunker chunk did the trick, causing the bass to choose it over the peanut bunker, large spearing, snappers, and mullet, the prey species being offered by Neptune.

    Billy Fisher caught a 37.17-pound bass during the Paulie’s contest, in which 133 casters competed.

    In the ongoing Montauk SurfMasters tournament for striped bass, Klever Oleas caught a 26-pound bass to knock Atilla Ozturk’s 20.6-pounder into second place in the wader division. Fred Kalkstein, an organizer of the SurfMaster tournament and a competitor in its wetsuit division, swam to his favorite rock in one of the Montauk moorland coves on Monday evening only to be “lifted” from it by waves from the intermittent pulse of swells out of the southeast.

    “I got knocked off and swam back out. I made three casts twice. The second time I got lifted off I did backward somersaults. I will be out again tonight,” Kalkstein said on Tuesday morning.

    Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in East Hampton has also been recommending that surfcasters use black darters or any other swimming lure on an outgoing tide in the darker times of day.

    Bennett reported the influx of false albacore continuing in Gardiner’s Bay, although the wind has been adversarial of late.

   As fall rapidly comes upon us and the evening songs of the tree crickets get slower in tempo and lower in pitch, everything else in nature is in motion, motion in all directions, sideways and up and down.

    Monarch butterflies fresh out of their pupae are flying south crossing roads and fields, looking for the ocean beach roadway as they begin their journey west, then south. Many of them will make it all the way to their winter retreat in the mountains of central Mexico.

    Striped bass, bluefish, and sea turtles are lingering and feeding as they slowly mill and move past Montauk Point. Warblers and other songbirds, adults and young of the year, are taking to the heavens on clear cool nights when the air mass is stable and the stars shine bright. They have a built-in astrolabes to guide them in their long journey to tropical lands, just as the ancient mariners had primitive astrolabes and used the same stars to keep them on course hundreds of years ago.

    Except when we see loads of migrating blackbirds and tree swallows moving along, the motion of the bulk of the migrators is almost undetectable. They don’t create a loud roar the way the helicopters, motor vehicles, and motorcycles do as they migrate back to the city after a busy weekend. They slip by, mostly unnoticed except by those few of us who keep track of the birds and follow the fish.

    One hundred and fifty years ago, this time of year would be marked by the passage of dense clouds of passenger pigeons, literally millions of them, wending their way south with the others. Migration is no walk in the park. Fall migrators are often beset by fierce tropical storms, tornados, and other destructive acts of God. It is not easy to imagine that something as small and frail-looking as a butterfly or ruby-throated humming bird can flutter its wings for hundreds of miles over the course of a few days; their trips are not at all like 10K races or even 26-mile marathons, they are extreme in the extreme sense of the word.

    Everything has to be right for them to make it to their far-flung destinations. While daytime migrators such as striped bass, hawks, butterflies, and dragonflies feed en route, the majority of migrators depend upon burning fat reserves, which they have stored up during summer’s post-reproductive period. Most songbirds move at night and keep in touch with each other by calling back and forth. Those birders with excellent hearing (not I) can pick out their plaintive notes as they pass overhead, and not only pick them out but even identify the species uttering them.

    Migrating birds in sufficiently dense flocks show up on radar screens and at times can be seen by those viewing the skies with a telescope or powerful binoculars against the luminescent backdrop of the moon. Tall buildings and structures such as the Empire State Building and the Washington Monument, as well as tall wind turbines, annually take a share of the night-flying migrating birds. On the other hand, they are free from the threat of bird hawks, which depend upon vision to hunt down their prey and which could never survive if they were limited to hunting only in the dark hours.

    It is simply mind-boggling that a bird such as the Arctic tern can migrate from one pole to the other in a matter of a few weeks. In every flock there a few iconoclasts, ones that choose to “stay and fight” rather than fly away to where it is warm and cozy. Robins and bluebirds are migratory species with members that frequently buck the prevailing trend; they stay close to home, rather than chance a long flight south.

    For certain individuals it comes down to a matter of risk. Do I risk the hazards of night flight, akin to piloting by instrument, or do I risk running out of food and freezing? If I were a bird, I think I would be one of those robins or bluebirds that would go against the tide. When winter rolls around each year I absolutely never entertain the desire to flee to a warm place, except when the warm place is a fireplace, wood burning stove, or furnace floor grate not more than a few feet distant.

   Migrating birds in sufficiently dense flocks show up on radar screens and at times can be seen by those viewing the skies with a telescope or powerful binoculars against the luminescent backdrop of the moon. Tall buildings and structures such as the Empire State Building and the Washington Monument, as well as tall wind turbines, annually take a share of the night-flying migrating birds. On the other hand, they are free from the threat of bird hawks, which depend upon vision to hunt down their prey and which could never survive if they were limited to hunting only in the dark hours.

    It is simply mind-boggling that a bird such as the Arctic tern can migrate from one pole to the other in a matter of a few weeks. In every flock there are a few iconoclasts, ones that choose to “stay and fight” rather than fly away to where it is warm and cozy. Robins and bluebirds are migratory species with members that frequently buck the prevailing trend; they stay close to home, rather than chance a long flight south.

    For certain individuals it comes down to a matter of risk. Do I risk the hazards of night flight, akin to piloting by instrument, or do I risk running out of food and freezing? If I were a bird, I think I would be one of those robins or bluebirds that would go against the tide. When winter rolls around each year I absolutely never entertain the desire to flee to a warm place, except when the warm place is a fireplace, wood-burning stove, or furnace floor grate not more than a few feet distant.

   It seems tuna of all kinds and sizes have decided to approach Long Island in great numbers. Carl Darenberg of the Montauk Marine Basin, a man who’s been around sport fishing his whole life, said the run of bigeye tuna experienced by hundreds of fishermen last week was the largest he had ever seen.

    Fishermen descended on Hudson Canyon last week to take as many as 200 bigeyes and even more yellowfin tuna. John Hart on the Montauk boat Wrecking Crew returned with a 247.6-pound bigeye and a number of yellowfin. Captain Hart and others reported as many as 100 boats working the canyon.

    Michael Potts, captain of the Blue Fin IV charter boat, reported finding “football” bluefin tuna south of Block Island on Monday. His party landed three of them ranging from 15 to 17 pounds all on light tackle. They also caught a number of false albacore.

    And, speaking of falsies, light-tackle aficionados report a virtual invasion of the fish otherwise known as little tunny. Like all tuna, false albacore have superior eyesight. For that reason, the schools have so far been concentrated in Gardiner’s Bay.

    Large swells generated by Tropical Storm Nadine — the same storm that generated some of the best surfing of the season over the weekend — have clouded the water nearshore on the ocean side. The swells have subsided, and fast-paced angling for false albacore should improve in the coming days.

    “The albies are coming, the albies are coming. They’re all over the place,” Capt. Ken Rafferty shouted from his light-tackle guide boat on Monday afternoon. “The spot is anywhere between Plum Gut and Montauk,” he said. Rafferty was finding falsies and very big bluefish around the Gull Islands. Dr. Bob Rubin and his son Mark were successfully working the water around Silas Rock on an outgoing tide.

    The Montauk SurfMasters fall classic began on Saturday but Nadine’s big swells kept surfcasters from working much of the south-facing beaches. Fred Kalkstein, an organizer of the fiercely contested competition, described the action around Montauk Point as spotty. Fishing “up front” should improve through the week. There are plenty of striped bass around.

    The SurfMasters tournament has 15 casters competing in the wetsuit division, 28 in the wader division, 14 youths, 12 to 17 years old, and 10 kids ages 7 to 11.

    “They were biting their heads off all day,” was how Scott Leonard of the Star Island Yacht Club described the striped bass fishing on Monday. “They bite their heads off when a storm is coming. All the boats limited out, bass from small to big, 15 to 40 pounds on eels at all the spots — Great Eastern, the Elbow, Pollock Rip. Bluefish everywhere. Surfcasters are catching them already. On Sunday morning there were about 85 trucks at the Point. They were catching bass up to 22 pounds,” Leonard said.

    On the eerie side, news comes that on Friday Lighthouse Beach on Cape Cod was closed after a fish-tagging team tagged a 20-foot-long female great white shark as it was leaving Chatham Harbor. The largest great white ever recorded was a little over 21 feet long. On Cape Cod, all east-facing beaches remain closed along the Orleans-Chatham line from Nauset Beach to Monomoy. The presence of seals explains the presence of the big predators, experts say.

    According to a reliable source, an East Hampton bayman who did not want to be identified set a gillnet in Montauk a little over a week ago and returned to find three species of shark including a 10-foot-long great white.

    And speaking of sharks, the angler who caught a six-foot brown shark from his kayak a quarter mile off Napeague last week was Dr. Marco Seandel. It took him an hour and-a-half to bring the shark to the kayak. It was released.

   In 1999, an area two times the size of a football field was dug out of Sammy’s Beach in East Hampton to accommodate dredge spoil from the Three Mile Harbor inlet and channel. The hole was big enough to accommodate nearly 100,000 cubic yards, but the dredge job produced less than a fifth of that.

    Four years earlier, Sammy’s Beach was named in the East Hampton Town Code as one of the four original “nature preserves.” The construction of the dredge spoil pit scarred the nature preserve badly and half of the town’s populace, including residents from nearby communities, was up in arms about it. It may have cost the Democrats the 1999 election, as the late Cathy Lester was voted out and Jay Schneiderman of the opposition party became the new town supervisor in January of 2000.

    Ms. Lester set up a working committee to try to right the situation before her departure and the town received a grant of $137,000 from New York State to help with Sammy’s restoration. The committee formulated a plan with three main objectives in mind. The first was to return the beach and dunes to the original topography. Suffolk County, which was responsible for the dredging, paid for that heavy equipment work, which came to about $200,000, and was completed by the end of the year. Ironically, the contractor that was paid to dig the hole, was later paid to fill it in and return Sammy’s Beach to its original topography.

    Secondly, an unpaved marl road for four-wheel-drive vehicles would be constructed down the center of the site from the terminus of Sammy’s Beach Road to the west jetty of Three Mile Harbor’s newly dredged inlet. Such a road was constructed and then bordered on each side from one end to the other with a split-rail fence.

    The last phase of the reconstruction was the most difficult and, from an engineer’s point-of-view, the most speculative. The entire disturbed, re-contoured area would be revegetated with native beach and dune vegetation in such a way as to create the original look and feel of the nature preserve before desecration. The state grant would cover most of the expense. It was also decided that the native vegetation used would be gleaned from similar habitats, including what was left of Sammy’s Beach, so that the species would be as similar to East Hampton in genotype as possible.

    The bulk of the replacement vegetation was to be American beach grass, which was plentiful and which would keep the replenished dune sands from blowing into Three Mile Harbor during the winter. In the summer of 1999 East Hampton Town staff collected some 20,000 beach grass plants from different parts of the town and carted them over to Talmage Farms in north Riverhead, where Ellen Talmage and her workers planted them in a farm field prior to the fall so that they would start actively growing in their new and temporary habitat.

    Town staff studied the Sammy’s Beach flora remaining on undisturbed parts using transect analysis and other means. A list of more than 50 native Sammy’s Beach plants was generated. Meanwhile, a local gardening firm, Botanic East, run by Ron Jawin, submitted the lowest quote for raising some of these plants, such as prickly pear cactus, bayberry, Virginia rose, and the like, after gleaning them from their natural town habitats. In a 1999 floristic study there were a few southern native species of interest found. One was a blue-green beach grass, marram grass, a species in its first stage of Long Island colonization. I had first discovered this grass growing in Mattituck in sands edging Long Island Sound in 1991.

    In the spring of 1990, Ms. Talmage was successful in growing about 120,000 beach grass plants from the East Hampton originals at a total cost to the town of about $22,000. Warren’s Nursery of Water Mill submitted the lowest bid, and the entire disturbed area, save for the road, was planted in May and June of 2000 with the Talmage-grown plants and then some. At first the planted area looked like rows of corn, but as the plants spread by the sprouting of underground rhizomes, the empty spaces filled in nicely.

    A little later, Ron Jawin and workers from Botanic East planted the plants that they had raised in several circles scattered throughout out the recovery plot. It was a dryish summer. The Botanic East plants were watered regularly but, nonetheless, didn’t do so well. On the other hand, the beach grass grew like gangbusters. All the while diamondback terrapins used the spot for laying eggs, while piping plovers and least terns raised several young to fledging. But even in the fall of that year, the planting resembled a big unmowed lawn, nothing like it was prior to the hole being dug.

    Year after year, Sammy’s Beach came back by degrees. The hews and cries died away. Residents of the Sammy’s Beach community and those from nearby took it upon themselves to police and clean up the area. The road to the jetty proved so successful that the old trail that ran through the wetlands edging Three Mile Harbor was cut off without serious repercussions. I and others would visit each year to check the recovery process; it was slow but progressive.

    After an absence of a couple of years I returned only last Friday as a retired citizen with a companion to monitor the situation. I was frankly amazed at how successful the recovery had been. All of the plants were in bloom or fruiting. The prickly pears were thick with fruit, figidini in Italian, the flowers of the falcate-leaved golden asters were peaking and produced a broad yellow haze that blended nicely with the blues of the marram grass. What was even more amazing is that during the 12-plus years of grow-back very few alien plants had managed to find a niche, the replanted area was practically free of invasives.

    American beach grass adores shifting sands, the marram grass prefers more stabilized situations. In the interim, although not intentionally planted, it now had become the common grass, but it worked as well as the former. Eastern red cedars had sprouted up here and there, at the very eastern end which had not been disturbed, the leaves of a low-slung bigtooth aspen, a long-lived survivor of many a storm, trembled and murmured in the southerly breeze.

    We took the southern route back. The old track had completely filled in with high marsh species, sea lavender, pickleweed, sea blite, marsh elder, saltmarsh aster and the like, a few of which are considered New York State rarities. The road since closing had filled in by itself, observing Karen Blumer’s rule, don’t plant it if it is disturbed, let it grow back on its own and the natives will win out.

   Sighs, and other expostulations of relief from the summer hordes, are being heard on either side of Block Island Sound, and from locals getting down to the pleasures of early fall, including the annual spate of fishing tournaments.

    The last glacier dumped the same rock skeletons that form the rolling hills, ponds, and kettleholes of Block Island as it did to make Montauk. They say we were connected way back when. Over the weekend strong ocean swells generated by Tropical Storm Leslie coursed between here and there, with striped bass and bluefish schooling in the shallows to feed on all manner of small prey.

    Light-tackle casters took up positions along the channel into Block Island’s New Harbor, or paddled their fishing kayaks just outside the harbor mouth, where feeding blues were boiling on Sunday afternoon. Fourteen miles to the west, casters were finding bass up to 35 pounds under the Montauk Point Lighthouse, with steady action during the night beginning a week ago. 

    Atilla Ozturk reported seeing terns and gulls hovering over the shorebreak all along Napeague on Monday morning, a sure sign that the small fish hunted by striped bass and bluefish are in the wash, and a good sign for those entering the annual Montauk SurfMasters fall classic surfcasting tournament.

    The tournament will begin at noon on Saturday. The deadline for submitting applications to the West Lake Marina or the Star Island Yacht Club is 10 a.m. that same day. 

    Speaking of Star Island, Scott Leo­nard, the go-to guy for fishing tackle, won the striped bass part of a multi-species tournament held from the yacht club on Friday and Saturday. The winning bass was a 47-pounder reeled up on Friday from the Top Gun boat, which also caught the second and third place stripers, 43.5 and 42.2 pounds. Leonard said Top Gun was fishing at the Great Eastern spot and in the Pollock rip using live eels and croakers.

    Star Island also weighed in over 30 bigeye tuna in the 150 to 218-pound range. The first and second-place fish in the bigeye tuna competition were a 219-pounder caught on the Fish’n Addiction and a 197-pound bigeye from the Bolshevik boat. The White Water boat brought back a bigeye weighing 186 pounds for third place.

    The boat Tonto won the yellowfin tuna contest with a 66-pounder. The Done Deal boated 65 and 64-pound yellows for second and third places. The first and only finisher in the shark division was a 176-pound mako caught from the Deeper boat. The tuna were caught in Hudson Canyon far to the west, a long haul unless you own a boat capable of speeds over 60 m.p.h.

    The yacht club had a separate bluefish division. Instigator took first and second places with 12.8 and 11.8-pound blues. Lil Marlena took third place with a bluefish weighing 9.8 pounds.

    Not to be outdone, the Harbor Marina on Three Mile Harbor held its 14th annual snapper derby on Sunday. In the 3-to-8-year-old competition, James Bradley, 6, took it all with a 4.1-ounce baby blue. Sarah Marie Dern, 12, took top honors in the 9-to-12 division. Her snapper weighed 4.9 ounces, and Khloe Goncalves, 14, caught a 7.3-pound snapper bluefish to win against all comers in the 13-and-over division. Contestants got to make fishprints out of their catches if they chose to get inky. 

    Coming up is the 11th annual Montauk Redbone Celebrity Tournament, Sept. 19-21 from the Montauk Yacht Club. This is a benefit tournament to raise money toward a cure for cystic fibrosis. The tournament targets striped bass, bluefish, and false albacore using light tackle and fly rods. Contestants look for the three-species “blitzes” that occur this time of year.  

    Ken Rafferty, light-tackle and fly-fishing guide, reported bluefish finning “like sharks” off Gardiner’s Island near Eastern Plains Point. He brought Stephen Talkhouse employees out on Friday to catch the blues. Rafferty said he would bring his bigger boat to Montauk for the fall run of false albacore.

    And, if the usual humdrum kinds of fishing no longer excite, you might take a look at George Lombardi’s YouTube video called “Stalking the Man in the Gray Suit,” shot while he was fishing from his kayak off the ocean side of Napeague. “The Man in the Gray Suit” is the Australian way of saying, “Shark!”

   Norman Taylor was a well-traveled botanist and the curator of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. In 1923 he published a monograph on the flora of Montauk, subtitled “A Study of Grassland and Forest.” He probably picked Montauk because it was largely undeveloped and had the second largest prairie on Long Island, and it was topographically varied and bathed with seawater on three sides. Montauk had just about every kind of habitat found elsewhere on Long Island with the exception of pine barrens. It had stuff along the ocean that the rest of Long Island’s oceanfront expanse lacked, namely, tall bluffs, stuffed with clays and glacial erratics.

    Behind the bluffs was a dwarf forest, a heath land, not unlike those for which Ireland and the British Isles are known. Many of the area’s early European inhabitants, who came from heath lands in the Old World, identified these spots as moors.

    In Taylor’s time Lake Montauk was still the largest freshwater pond on Long Island. It sat between extensive “downs” to the east and west. Hither Woods was just recovering from almost 200 years of woodcutting and grazing, and was still dotted with grasslands. The only mature forest, per se, was the Point Woods, which covered most of the south half of Montauk west of the Lighthouse.

    Because the glacier and its aftermath had deposited so much clay over the land, the soils were impervious. Water from rains mostly ran off in ditches towards the ocean, Lake Montauk, Oyster Pond, Big Reed Pond, and Fresh Pond, thus the name “Ditch Plain.” Much of the precipitation was trapped in depressions, kettle holes and such, creating numerous little ponds, swales, and flattish meandering wetlands.

    Russell Stein, a former resident of Montauk and ex-East Hampton Town attorney, aptly called Montauk a “Swiss cheese,” owing to its perforated land surface. Geologists called it “knob and kettle” topography.

    Not counting algae, liverworts, mosses, mushrooms, and the like, Taylor recorded over 400 different plant species, many of which were pressed and deposited at his botanic garden and are still housed there today. Vicki Bustamante and I are tracing his steps to see how the flora has changed since his time.

    Except for First, Second, and Third Houses and an inn near the Lighthouse, the only other structures of note were the Life-Saving Station at Ditch Plain and the four sisters designed by Stanford White on the bluffs to the east of the station. Taylor could stand on the top of Fort Hill northeast of Fort Pond and see clearly all the way to the Lighthouse. There was nothing but grasslands to block his view. He remarked how in late summer these grasslands were pink with a thick covering of sandplain gerardia blooms.

    Ironically, a little more than 70 years after his study was published, less than 100 of the plants were left, and a species once plentiful had been reduced to such a low number that it became the second New York State plant species to be declared federally endangered.

    The grasslands — what’s left of them — are also still home to several plants now considered almost as rare by the New York State Heritage office in Albany. These include the bushy frostweed, which can be found on the Nature Conservancy’s “Montauk Mountain” west of Fort Pond, and the New England Blazing Star, which graces Shadmoor Park. Taylor also found the “cloudberry,” a rare species of blackberry that is alpine in habit. It hasn’t been recorded since, but we are hopeful that a few will turn up. The closest living ones to Montauk are high up on Mount Washington in New Hampshire and other northern New England and Canadian peaks.

    Montauk is also orchid-rich. It has at least seven different species and several species of native lilies, including the trout lily, Turk’s Cap lily, wood lily, and Canada lily, but you have to do a lot of scratching here and there before you’re able to find one.

    Montauk is probably the richest area in the country with respect to shad coverage. It has four different species, the common one with multiple stems, Amelanchier canadensis, the smooth shad, Amelanchier laevis, the intermediate in height shad, Amelanchier intermedia, and, lastly, the diminutive Nantucket shad, Amelanchier nantucketensis. The next nearest spot for them is Nantucket Island, where they were first discovered.

    Over the last half-century or so some southern species have taken up residence in Montauk. These include the southern red oak and the Hercules’ Club, a scruffy tree with pretty white flowers and numerous thorns to keep the deer away from the flowers and leaves.

    The oak and American holly association is very rare on Long Island and much like some oak-holly communities along the Jersey shore. Montauk is fern-rich, too, especially in the wetlands and water edges associated with Big Reed Pond in the county park. There are at least 10 different fern species in Montauk, including the rare Massachusetts fern and Interrupted fern.

    The Walking Dunes west of Hither Hills are a miracle in themselves, with two species of orchids and a host of bog plants dominated by cranberries.

    Parts of the dunes resemble the sunken forest of Fire Island, as the sand is continually moving to the south-southeast and the pitch pines and other trees and shrubs in its path are being slowly buried. One of the rarest orchids in the western hemisphere is a mere stone’s throw away from these dunes.

    Since Lake Montauk was opened to Block Island Sound during the occupancy of Carl Fisher in the 1920s, Fort Pond has taken its place on the Long Island leader board of freshwater ponds. It is second in size behind Lake Ronkonkoma. With sea level rise, it is steadily creeping up. It has a little island in its northeast area, once called Brush Island because it was covered with woody plants. It now is largely underwater and all of the woody plants are dead. The only American basswood tree that Taylor was able to locate in Montauk happened to be on this island, along with some other broadleaved tree species.

    Taylor’s list includes less than 10 species that are foreign or exotic, perhaps even invasive. Only a few of each, however, were found, including barnyard grass, trees-of-heaven, yarrow, bindweed, Kentucky bluegrass, chickweed, and a few others. No Asiatic bittersweet, Japanese knotweed, mugwort, dandelion, Tartarian honeysuckle, mile-a-minute weed, lamb’s ear, Japanese black pine, Eurasian phragmites, Japanese honeysuckle, and the like.

    Vicky and I have been keeping track of the invasives as we go along. So far there are at least 50 on the list, and some, like the phragmites, have taken over whole plant communities. On Sunday Vicki reported that she had found black swallow-wort at Shadmoor, a new one for Montauk and one that can take over the world if left to play.

    If Norman Taylor were with us today, he might not believe what he experienced. If he were alive and botanizing Montauk in July or August of 2012, he might have tossed it in. If you’re a naturalist, it’s better to be early than late.

    In the words of Chris Miller of the West Lake Marina, “the fish have moved back to Montauk.” Miller was speaking of striped bass, big ones. There was a 50-pounder brought to the scales and a number of stripers in the 30 to 40-pound range.

    After last fall’s shortage of large fish, organizers of the annual Montauk SurfMasters Fall Classic hope the bass stick around for a while.

    Because the striped bass migration looks to have begun early, the tournament will begin and end one week sooner than last year. The hard-fought contest to see who can catch the biggest striper (and bluefish for young entrants) will start at 12:01 p.m. on Sept. 15, and will come to a close at noon on Nov. 25.

    The deadline for applications is 10 a.m. on the 15th. Applications can be downloaded from montauksurfcasters. com and are also available at Gaviola’s Market, Star Island Yacht Club, and West Lake Marina. The entry fee is $260 for the adult men’s wader and wetsuit divisions. The women’s fee is $160. There is no entry fee for the kids and youths divisions.

    As usual, there will be two main categories, wetsuit and wader. No boats, prams, rafts, balloons (they can carry a line far offshore on the right wind), kites (the same), flippers, poling, swimming, drifting, floating, or trolling to access any rocks, sandbars, reefs, or rips. The following rocks are off limits, Weakfish Rocks, Jones Rock, Bluff Rock, Bragan’s Rock, Northbar sandbar, and Whistle Rock.

    “The beach came alive this week. Bass over 30 pounds in town last night on bunker chunks,” said Scott Leonard of the Star Island Yacht Club (a SurfMasters tournament weigh station along with the West Lake Marina). By “town,” Leonard  was referring to the south-facing beaches in downtown Montauk.

    He reported bluefish “up front” at the Montauk Point Lighthouse, as well as a superior fluke-fishing trip Saturday on which three compadres caught 13 keeper fluke, the smallest weighing six pounds. With a bag limit of four 19.5-pound fluke per person, per day, it goes without saying that one of the fluke had to be returned to the briny.

    Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reported bass at Camp Hero State Park over the weekend, and a bunch of small weakfish on the ocean side of Napeague. Sand worms and clams lured the weaks.

    West Lake Marina reported a 42-pound bass caught at the spot known as the Elbow on an eel early Monday morning. Frank Dalli was the angler on the Carla Maria boat. 

    Michael Potts, captain of the Blue Fin IV charter boat, has been doing some very productive summertime cod fishing. Potts reported catching between 50 and 60 cod in the 5 to 15-pound range with regularity. He also predicted the big ocean swells generated by Tropical Storm Leslie far out in the Atlantic will “screw me up big time.” The seas are sure to keep most boats at bay.

    “I had a charter that wanted to try for cod the second week of August. I started southeast of Block Island and worked down and caught at several spots near Coxes Ledge.” Potts reported that Bob MacBarb of East Hampton wrestled a 25-pound cod off the bottom, and Jon Diat of Sag Harbor caught a 15-pound pollack on a diamond jig. “Excellent cod fishing,” Potts declared.

    A friend was remarking on the steely beauty of Fort Pond Bay just after dusk on blue-moon Friday. He said it reminded him of how the water looked in the opening sequence of “Jaws,” when the girl flung off her clothes and swam out to the buoy.

    A 1,600-pound great white shark washed up dead at South Shore Beach in Westport, Mass., over the weekend. The same day, authorities closed the beach at Nauset Beach in Cape Cod after several great whites were spotted close to shore.

    A rumor has been floating around that a gill netter who set off Napeague in recent weeks hauled his gear after a two-hour set and found four species of shark, a thresher, brown, sandbar, and the scariest, a 300-pound tiger. Efforts to confirm the rumor have been unavailing, but geeeez!

   Summer is winding down, but not with a whimper. It’s been a hot one, yes, but also one free of gypsy moths and cankerworms, and the woodlands as of this date are fully foliaged and resplendent in spots. We are blessed on Long Island with almost one of every kind of habitat in America’s lower 48, with the exception of deserts and alpine forests, and the East End has most of them, so it is an ecologist’s dream, at least this ecologist’s dream.

    Some of these habitats are largish in extent, such as the central pine barrens dominated by pitch pines and oaks. Some are smallish like the dwarf pitch pine forest in Westhampton west of County Road 31. Many are tiny like the cranberry bogs in Napeague. Put them all together and they comprise a colorful crazy quilt when photographed from the air.

    Putting the aquatic habitats — salt, brackish, and fresh — aside for the moment, North America has 8 major dry land habitat types, or biomes: deserts, prairies, transitional coniferous forest or taiga, eastern deciduous forest, southern pine woods, western and southwestern chapparal-shrublands, montane vegetation, and the great northern tundra. If we include Mexico we can add tropical forests. All of these are characterized by distinctive floras and faunas, however, none are etched in stone.

    For example, under the influence of global warming the tundra underlain by permafrost is melting away. Only 10,000 years ago much of Long Island was covered with glacial ice, it took less than 1,000 years to melt away. A couple hundred million years earlier tropical plants grew where the tundra is now. It could very well happen in another 100 million years. Even in our lifetimes we have seen significant changes in the boundaries of some of these biomes. These changes may be speeding up.

    On Long Island we once had the largest bona fide prairie in New York State. It was known as the Hempstead Plains and was inhabited by prairie chickens, the heath hen, now long extinct. Only 15 acres or so remain today, and they are not what they used to be. What used to be a bustling grassland in terms of wildlife and vegetation, is now a bustling, mostly paved area of commerce and residential life occupied by the Nassau Coliseum, Roosevelt Raceway, airports, tract housing, and much more.

    The second largest Long Island prairie was in Montauk. It stretched from Fort Pond to Montauk Point. It was flat in some places, like the Montauk Downs golf course west of Lake Montauk, and hilly to the east. The Shinnecock Hills just west of the Shinnecock Canal was a third Long Island prairie. It is rapidly growing up with taller vegetation, much of it invasive, and also has houses, golf courses, and a college campus. The golf courses are the closest in appearance to the original Shinnecock grasslands and still contain many of the prairie species of grasses and shrubs that once covered the entire area from Hampton Bays to Tuckahoe. There are plans afoot to restore undeveloped parts of it to its former stead.

    The South Fork has its own pine barrens of sorts, beginning in North Sea and running along the terminal moraine all the way to upland Amagansett, and thence to Montauk’s Hither Woods by way of the Napeague isthmus. Pitch pine is the dominant conifer, partially replaced in the Northwest section of East Hampton with white pine, the only other Pinus species native to Long Island.

    Elements of the great eastern deciduous forest, akin to the Appalachian forest, which runs from Georgia and Alabama into New England, are well represented here. Six species of tree oaks and three of hickories, as well as walnuts, tulips, black cherry, sycamores, tupelos, dogwoods, sassafras, hop-hornbeam, and a poplar growing here on eastern Long Island, are part of it. Further west and north, Long Island has a few trees that we don’t have, such as sugar maple and liquidambar. The white-tailed deer thrives in these kind of broad-leafed deciduous forests, as does the gray squirrel, ruffed grouse, and wild turkey.

    Tidal marshes, with their characteristic zonation, are a fourth major type of habitat on Long Island and are very well represented on the South Fork. Typically they consist of different zones, salt-water cord grass or intertidal marsh, salt marsh hay zone landward of the cord grass, and a shrub-dominated marsh boundary edge consisting of groundsel bush and marsh elder. Perhaps the largest intact salt marsh on the South Fork is the one in the hamlet of North Sea south of Scallop Pond.

    We don’t have lakes per se, but some of our ponds are mighty big, such as Fort Pond in Montauk, the second largest freshwater body on Long Island. These have two types of vegetation, aquatic vegetation such as water lilies and leafy pondweeds, which grow in and under the water, and edges of emergent reeds, rushes, and sedges. Unfortunately, a Eurasian genotype of the worldwide species, Phragmites australis, or common reed, has taken over many of these wetland edges, especially along the less shaded shores of Fort Pond, Hook Pond, Wickatuck Pond, Wainscott Pond, and Old-House Pond, to name a few.

    This same obnoxious “weed” has also invaded the brackish marshes of Georgica Pond and Scallop Pond, as well as cranberry bogs and small wetlands in the dune swales associated with the Peconic Estuary on the north and the Atlantic Ocean on the south. It is often accompanied by other invasive marsh plants such as purple loosestrife, also Eurasian in origin.

    Our swampy wetlands dominated by red maples and tupelos such as Crooked Pond and Scoy Pond in East Hampton’s Northwest, Fresh Pond and Hidden Pond in Montauk’s Hither Woods, Big Fresh Pond in North Sea, and Sagg Swamp in Bridgehampton, shade out the would-be phragmites intruders. They are the least sullied of our freshwater wetland habitats.

    Dune plant communities dominated by American beach grass, beach pea, marram grass, seabeach goldenrod, and beach plum are also extensive on the South Fork, especially along the ocean, but also here and there on the edges of Peconic, Gardiner’s, and Napeague Bays and Block Island Sound. On Napeague these dunelands have become heavily populated with Japanese black pine at the behest of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s former plant distribution program. Fortunately, they are shorter-lived than the native pitch pines and subject to a variety of diseases caused by borers, nematodes, moths, and other organisms as well as fatal damage at the hands of tropical storms and northeasters. In one Napeague spot recently named South Flora on the side of Montauk Highway, a dune form of pink lady slipper orchid grows, to my knowledge the only ones of its kind growing on a Long Island duneland.

    A particular kind of inner-dune flatland habitat is situated on the south side of Cranberry Hole Road, running along the north side of Napeague. It is like no other duneland on Long Island or north or south of Long Island. I call it a dune plain and it is covered with a thick carpet of beach heather and bearberry, a few shrubby bear oaks, lichens, and fine-stemmed grasses. In a few lower spots it has little boggy wetlands. In one spot surrounded by pitch pines, it is home to the rare pale crested orchis, Habenaria cristata pallida, which grows nowhere else on Long Island or New York State, except one small patch in Hither Woods on the other side of Napeague Harbor. The dune plain deserves special recognition by the New York State Heritage Office, which keeps track of state rarities.

    Then there is the shore vegetation that is found along the higher seagrass wrack lines at almost all of our marine beaches. The dominants here are sea rocket, beach clotbur, sea-blites, wormwoods, saltwort, seabeach sandwort, orache, and the like. Here we occasionally find the rare seabeach knotweed and the federally endangered seashore amaranthus from the south.

    Finally, in Montauk, along the ocean, are some of Long Island’s rarest plant communities. Here, three miles of windswept bluffs with plants growing on the bluff faces as well as the bluff tops have a unique flora found nowhere else on Long Island, with such rarities as the orchid Arethusa and a diminutive subspecies of the yellow-flowered sundrops. There are no other ocean bluffs on Long Island or, indeed, the Atlantic Coast all the way to the tip of Florida.

    A little inland from the bluffs, we find the heathlands, known locally as the Montauk moorlands. They are dominated by shads, purple chokeberry, highbush blueberry, arrow woods, southern and northern. In grassy and weedy spaces away from the small trees and shrubs in this dwarf forest, we have the federally endangered sandplain gerardia, and the New York State-rare New England blazing-star. Shadmoor and Amsterdam Beach Parks are wonderful examples of Montauk moorland, bluff-top, and bluff-face plant communities.

    Let’s face it. The South Fork not only has myriad different habitats and microhabitats, much of which has already been salted away in perpetuity, it’s a botanist’s and a naturalist’s playground. To keep it so, we must defeat the inroads already made by phragmites and other exotic species, while simultaneously keeping the destructive hand of man at bay. As the 350-year-old East Hampton Town Trustees and 400-year-old Southampton Town Trustees are wont to say, it all belongs to the “freeholders,” and we are the freeholders.

   This can be an eerie time of year. Despite the 80-degree ocean temperature, or maybe because of it, we feel fall just under the horizon. One contributor to the pre-fall feeling is the false albacore, or little tunny. Each year schools of falsies arrive like clockwork, drawing light-tackle anglers to the East End.

    Capt. Ken Rafferty, who runs a light-tackle and fly-fishing guide service out of Three Mile Harbor and, come fall, Montauk, reported that his first albie catch of the season occurred on Monday.

    “There we were,” he began in typical Rafferty style. “East of Little Gull Island. We saw them last week, but by the time we rigged up, they were gone. This time we saw two schools. I had two rods rigged up. We saw them busting, so Michael Salzhauer began working the rod with a little white fly. You have to retrieve them fast. Albies’ eyes are so sharp, you have to suggest bait running. They go after it and can’t help themselves.”

    Rafferty also reported that after a hiatus caused by overly warm water, striped bass had returned to Gardiner’s Bay. “And, bluefish are really big. They don’t show. No birds diving. You can see them finning at slack tide.” Rafferty reported schools of smaller bluefish in the four-to-five-pound range farther east near Water Fence and Fort Pond Bay, Montauk.

    To the west, Ken Morse at the Tight Lines shop in Sag Harbor reported “loads of weakfish. The best run in years. There are a lot of small ones, but with a bag limit of just one, there are plenty over 16 inches,” the minimum legal size. These days Sag Harbor is also blessed with the presence of a vast number of blowfish. “I had one customer who caught 14. There are a lot of kingfish,” he said, referring to a species that looks like a Spanish mackerel. Morse said the harbor had a glut of porgies “and the snappers [baby bluefish] are incredible.”

    The Tight Lines shop will be closed Mondays and Tuesdays after Labor Day.

    Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk reports that surfcasters working the waters around the Montauk Point Lighthouse are finding small bluefish. The south-facing beaches are producing striped bass on occasion for those casting needlefish or darter lures. Bait fishermen are finding blood and sand worms to be productive on Montauk’s north side. The surprising porgy action that surfcasters have been enjoying from south-facing beaches has slowed, probably because of the recent east winds.

    Although the fluke fishing has slowed, it ain’t over. Kathy Vegessi of the Lazy Bones party boat reported that, on one trip a week ago, three anglers caught fluke in the “double digits” — 12.1, 11, and 10-pound doormats. The fluke-fishing season ends at the end of September for sportfishermen. Vegessi also reported sea bass, big porgies, and “beautiful” weakfish caught from the Bones.

    Speaking of black sea bass, the Star Island Yacht Club reports that Robert DeLuca, fishing from the Yolo, caught a huge 7.5-pound sea bass on Sunday. Star Island also reported that Dr. Steve Sachs returned from the Fish Tales section of Block Canyon with a 212-pound bigeye tuna over the weekend, and Jerry Passaretti found yellowfin in the 40-to-60-pound range.

    Chris Miller at the West Lake Marina confirmed the action in the Fish Tales. He said Greg Zwirko on the Kennebunk returned with a 53.3-pound yellowfin tuna caught there by an angler, Cathy Teller. The Kennebunk crew also caught 18 mahimahi and 6 triggerfish while fishing close to a pot buoy. A swordfish in the 100-pound class also swam by the boat, not realizing it had been hooked. It soon found out and put up a fight before shaking the hook.

   John Ryan Sr. had, when the summer began, wanted very much for the East Hampton Volunteer Ocean Rescue Squad to come to a meeting of the minds with the resorts along the Napeague strip, which are not required by the Suffolk County Health Department to post lifeguards if they prohibit ocean swimming.

    Soon after a spectacular save in front of the Driftwood ocean resort just west of Hither Hills State Park in June, a save owing to the quick and effective initial response by a cabana boy, J.C. Barrientos, Ryan said Barrientos, who was not a certified lifeguard at the time, should not have been put in that position.

    He added that while he didn’t want to adopt an adversarial stance, he was hopeful that the resorts and homeowners associations along the strip between Amagansett and Montauk could be persuaded to amplify measures that would further ensure the safety of workers and swimmers. “If you put up chairs and umbrellas on the beach, you can’t keep people out of the water even if there are signs that prohibit swimming,” Ryan said at the time.

    “There’s still a risk — I’m disappointed the ocean rescue squad hasn’t done anything,” he said when questioned briefly following the East Hampton Volunteer Ocean Rescue Squad’s Gardiner’s Bay swims Saturday morning.

    In a separate conversation, Ryan’s son, John Jr., who heads the lifeguards here, said he too regretted that there hadn’t been a parley with the ocean resort owners to date. “The summer’s just flown by.”

    On the subject of saves, he said 30 or 40 swimmers had been pulled out of rip tides at Amagansett’s protected Atlantic Avenue Beach last week, and that on Aug. 4, also at Atlantic, the crew overseen by Ed Reid had saved the life of an elderly, semiconscious male. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation had been used, and, ultimately, a shock to the heart was applied with success in an ambulance on the way to Southampton Hospital.