People have been asking, “Where have the birds gone?” There are very few birds in my own backyard here in Noyac, An occasional blue jay, robin, Carolina wren, but no steady comers with the exception of crows, which visit regularly beginning at dawn.

    On the other hand, Terry Sullivan, who lives near the water’s edge in Sag Harbor, has no shortage of feathered friends. More often than not his birdbath is filled to capacity.

    Most of the birds are out foraging for insects, fruit, seeds, and the like away from residential areas. That old adage “birds of a feather, flock together” is particularly applicable at this time of year. When songbirds migrate, they fly together, before they migrate, they gather together, feed together, and molt together. Those marvelous spring feathers that are not only perfectly hewn, but also gaudily colorful, are great for courting and defending territories, but by the time August rolls around, tend to be worn out.

    Many of the most brightly colored ones, notably the males of the species, trade in those advertising feathers, for ones that will not only get them to points south, but when there, will make them harder to see among the greens that predominate on their wintering grounds. Thus the bright reds of the male scarlet tanagers and the brilliant oranges of the male Baltimore orioles are traded in for greens and yellows, cryptic colors which will hide them as they forage among the tropical vegetation until spring sends them north.

    Competitive singing mostly has to do with inviting females and maintaining territories in the spring and early summer. Competition ends in August and song gives way to species-specific call notes that are used to keep members of a certain feather together. They are particularly useful come the Christmas count season in December. Birders with good ears don’t have to see the utterer to identify a given species; the call notes are as telltale as the bird’s size, coloration, and form. Indeed, with the advance of high tech gizmos and applications, many Christmas counters now play a given call from their smartphones, evoking a return call from a real bird.

    In late August and September we play host to four kinds of birds, according to their habits. There are those such as the mockingbirds, blue jays, cardinals, house sparrows, starlings, Carolina wrens, and house finches that overwinter here. They look the same in the winter as they do in the spring. A few, such as the mockingbird and Carolina wren, maintain winter territories and defend them with song. Then there are the migrators, ones that leave Long Island for the south and others from farther north that stop over to rest and feed before traveling on.

    Oddly, perhaps, there is a small group of wrong-way birds, southern terns and such, that reach Long Island from the south as they wander north looking for food or, maybe, just checking things out. Some of these are considered “overshoots” or “accidentals” — they’ve gone too far. Others come from the west, such as the western kingbird and the dickcissel.

    Then there are a large number of northern species including songbirds, waterfowl, seabirds, and raptors that annually overwinter here. Among them are three species of scoters, or sea ducks, the evening grosbeak, pine siskin, winter wren, Ipswich sparrow, rough-legged hawk, goshawk, and purple sandpiper, to name a few. There are one or more species for each available habitat — forest, grassland, freshwater, seawater, dunes, beaches, and shores.

    I should add that there is a fifth category of species, some of the members of which refuse to migrate south with their brethren and stay the winter here. Among them are the Canada Goose, robin, towhee, and bluebird. If they make it through the winter, they have an advantage come spring. They don’t have to fight man and the elements to make it back here to carve out territories and begin the nesting season — they’re already here.

    Among these stay-behinds and winter loiterers are birds, such as eagles, that used to breed here but no longer do. The hope is that they will stick around for the four or five years it takes to reach maturity and settle down here in one of our many open spaces. Such has already occurred during this millennium, at least a couple of times. Turkey vultures have started breeding in Montauk, and the American raven as of late now breeds in Hampton Bays.

   Technically, we’re past the dog days of summer (based on the “dog star” Sirius’s proximity to the sun), but since Saturday’s heavy rain the weather has felt doggish and dogfish have been caught from the beach in downtown Montauk.

    Dogfish as well as a small thresher shark, according to Sue Jappell of Paulie’s Tackle, big porgies, trigger fish, and, to complete the picture, dolphins have been feeding close to shore on the schools of squid in the area. At Ditch Plain Beach in Montauk on Sunday, keeper-size striped bass sashayed around legs of Boogie boarders standing in waist-deep water — dog days for sure.

    On the north side of Montauk big, very big bluefish have begun blitzing at Gin Beach and Shagwong Point. They are also schooling in Gardiner’s Bay.

    Nine-year-old Julia DeMeritt hooked into a 13.5-pound chopper blue on Sunday aboard Capt. Ken (Ahab) Rafferty’s light-tackle charter boat. She fought and landed the fish by herself. In recent days, Rafferty has been fishing east of Little Gull Island, where he found stripers in the 10-to-15-pound range. He also reported schools of false albacore.

    Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett seconded the false albacore report, saying he was surprised when he hooked a falsey that was less than a foot long. “I thought they were cocktail blues. I remember eight years ago they came in real small, the same way, because the water temperature was pretty high.”

    “It feels like we could be blasted by a hurricane any day. A year ago Thursday we got clobbered, and two years ago the same week,” said Bennett, who keeps a daily log of fishy, terrestrial, and extra-terrestrial events. Oh, and Bennett reported a “bumper crop of bottlefish,” blowfish, in Accabonac Harbor.

    Scott Leonard of the Star Island Yacht Club reported “big bluefish everywhere, on the north side, the south side, from here to Block Island and back.” He said their presence was due to a mind-boggling amount of prey, “large bunker, peanut bunker, white bait, and squid. There are a lot of weakfish too. People are catching them by accident while fluking.” He suggested targeting the weaks by live-lining squid or snappers. He said he had seen weakfish (one of the more beautiful and tastiest fish in the sea) up to seven pounds.

    The West Lake Marina reported that Russ Masciotti, fishing from the Lady Fin, caught a 42.55-pound albacore tuna, a yellowfin tuna, and 18 mahimahi while trolling in West Altantis Canyon on Aug. 14.

    Over the weekend at the Montauk Mercury Grand Slam held from Uihlein’s Marina in Montauk, Capt. Richard Etzel on the Breakaway captured first place and a brand-new Mercury outboard engine with 147.50 aggregate points. His party caught a 34.45-point striper on the first day, a 32.60 striper the second day, bluefish weighing 7.8 and 13.75 pounds on Saturday and Sunday respectively, two fluke, a 6.8-pounder on the first day in the rain, a 9.2-pound fluke on day two. The Breakaway also caught the largest black sea bass of the tournament, a five-pounder. Sal Zatkowski on the Oak took second place, and Richard Rade on the Maria E finished in third place.

    The Montauk Marine Basin is now an automated radio check host station, Sea Tow Services International announced last week. Boaters in Montauk Harbor and surrounding areas of Block Island Sound can check their V.H.F. radio signal by calling channel 26.

    This helps the Coast Guard to free up channel 16, the channel monitored by the Coast Guard, by reducing non-emergency communications.

    Automated radio checks are broadcast on V.H.F. channels 24 through 26 depending on the region. To find the dedicated check channel in a particular area, boaters need only visit seatow.com/arc, enter their city, state, or ZIP code, and find their location on an interactive map.

    A new species of glass frog recently discovered in southern Peru — the 7,000th known amphibian species — has been named after Andy Sabin of Springs, a herpetology enthusiast and president of the South Fork Natural History Museum.

    Centrolene sabini, or the Sabin glass frog, was found in a small stream in the Kosnipata Valley in Manu National Park, almost 3,000 meters above sea level. The inch-long frog is electric green, with partially translucent skin, small yellow dots, and a yellow underbelly. It has green bones and a long call consisting of 8 to 14 notes.

    Dr. Alessandro Catenazzi, a researcher and professor at Ganzaga University in Washington, made the discovery. Finding a new species of amphibian, he said, can be both encouraging and misleading. “We have both an increasing number of known species . . . and an increasing number of threatened or extinct species, a portion of those same 7,000 described species,” Dr. Catenazzi said last week. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, approximately 40 percent of amphibians are extinct or at risk of becoming extinct.

    Decline in amphibians has been used as a good indicator for suffering ecosystems, which makes the high number of at-risk or extinct amphibians a cause for concern. “The dramatic loss of amphibian diversity is due to a combination of factors, such as habitat destruction, emerging diseases, introduced species, [and] environmental change,” Dr. Catenazzi said. Identifying new species is encouraging but steps to protect their habitat can be difficult due to deforestation and rising carbon emissions.

    “The whole world’s environment is in trouble,” and even locally, “here in East Hampton, we’ve lost 95 percent of toads over the years,” Mr. Sabin said last week. In addition to his involvement in the South Fork Natural History Museum, which he helped found, Mr. Sabin has established the Sabin Conservation Fund and, in Russia, the Sabin Conservation Award, which acknowledges outstanding achievement in nature protection.

    He funds the Andrew Sabin International Environmental Fellowships, which provide up to $35,000 to selected students, as well as the Sabin Sustainable Venture Prize at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment for “a product, service, project, or program that advances a more sustainable way of life.”

    Through the South Fork Natural History Museum, Mr. Sabin often leads walks in search of local reptiles and amphibians.

   Something is happening. Our most common creepy-crawling amphibian, the red-backed salamander, Plethodon cinereus, is beginning to go missing.

    I just got back from a five-mile hike along the woodland trails maintained by the Southampton Trails Preservation Society in the outbacks of Bridgehampton, Noyac, North Sea, and Water Mill. I looked under lots of fallen limbs and tree trunks, but could not find a single salamander. In the past, you could usually find one or two under any fallen tree bole, old board, or brick-sized rock in any of our local woodlands, especially those with an ample covering of leaf litter.

    For some unknown reason they are becoming few and far between.

    This little three-inch long salamander can be mistaken for a newt, especially the reddish colored juvenile that lives upland, not in the water. On the South Fork almost every one is grayish, thus the local name “lead-back.” On the North Fork where I grew up, they are dark red on top with a dark stripe down each side of the body running head to tail. Males and females are almost indistinguishable.

    Perhaps their most peculiar characteristic is the absence of lungs. They breathe through the moist skin of their mouths inside and out. Remove one from its moist environment and it’s a surefire goner unless kept wet. Unlike the other Long Island salamanders, the female redback doesn’t go to water to breed, she merely lays four or more eggs under a log or in a burrow, then stays around to guard them until they hatch. The hatchlings are just like their parents, only much, much smaller.

    I came to know of this wonderful little creature by serendipity.

    During World War II, we preteens were into digging foxholes and building makeshift forts. We fought each other with play guns. One of these foxholes came in handy. I was 9. My little gang of three had a hut in Mattituck’s pitch pine and oak woods close to Mattituck Creek. We got word beforehand that a larger gang led by the Presbyterian minister’s son was going to raid us. They were older, bigger, and three times as many. So rather than defend our hut, we hid in a foxhole 100 feet away covered with thatch and leaves that somewhat matched the forest floor. They came. They wrecked the hut in an hour’s worth of banging and bashing. During lulls in the banging we could plainly hear their loud voices threatening what they would do to us if they caught us. They were dissing us as cowards for not showing up and defending our turf.

After an hour or so, they departed and we climbed out of our hole. I chanced to look down to see that we didn’t leave anything behind and saw what looked like a big earthworm on the dirt bottom, except that it had legs. I climbed down and caught it. It was my first run-in with a red-backed salamander. I took it home and my father said it was probably a newt. It was several years later that I came to know it by its proper common name, and later by its scientific name.

    It’s only lately that I have begun to worry about it, especially in view of the world’s diminishing populations of this and that amphibian and, locally, the disappearance altogether of the southern leopard frog. It is probably not insecticides, as they are no longer applied in deep woods.

    Several possibilities come to mind. Firstly, the red-backed salamander doesn’t take kindly to acidic environments. For the last 50 or more years our rains have become increasingly acidic as their droplets contain residues of sulphuric, nitric, and other acids gleaned from factory smoke and vehicle exhaust. Fish and aquatic insects suffer the consequences of acid rain, why not salamanders? Secondly, the opening of the hardwood forests by gypsy moth caterpillars and inchworms in the first years of the new millennium allowed the upper soil layers and leaf litter covering them to dry out, not good for organisms that breathe through their skin. The most likely scenario in my mind, however, is the rise in numbers of the wild turkey, first introduced on the South Fork in the winter of 1992.

    You may have noticed on your woodland walks how turkeys completely tear up the leaf litter searching for this and that thing to eat. They eat any number of slugs, snails, earthworms, insects, spiders, and salamanders, as well as acorns that they happen to find on the forest floor during their ravagings. They are not gourmets.

    On the other hand, the demise of the redback might be more mysterious. Could it be radioactivity drifting here from Asia? Could it have something to do with Plum Island, much blamed for environmental maladies such as tick diseases and red and brown tides that strike us on eastern Long Island? According to James Gibbs and the five other authors of “The Amphibians and Reptiles of New York State,” issued in 2007, the red-backed salamander is probably the most common salamander in New York State and, possibly, the entire Northeast. Let’s see if it will make a comeback.

    If you’ve been in the ocean lately you know it’s hurricane warm, high 70s, a bit frightening for anyone who’s been around these parts for any length of time. It also means the Gulf Stream is making its presence known.

    Not surprising then that pelagic migrators of all kinds, including mahimahi, billfish, and tuna, have appeared offshore. Late at night on Aug. 7, John Mazzella and crew slid into the Montauk Marine Basin dock with a big blue marlin. The scale was locked in the office, but the fish was estimated to weigh at least 800 pounds.

    Last Thursday, the boat Mono Myth returned to the Star Island Yacht Club in Montauk with a 206-pound bigeye. The owner, Mike Goodwin, angler Grant Goodwin, and Max Goodwin caught and released five yellowfin tuna, and a blue marlin estimated to be at least 300 pounds.

    The West Lake Marina reported that the Gotta Fly boat returned on Aug. 8 with a 144-pound yellowfin tuna and mahimahi up to 52 pounds. Two days earlier, the Michelle II brought back a 318-pound thresher. The crew had released a mako. The Michelle II was fishing less than 12 miles offshore. The Susie E charter boat out of West Lake also found a big thresher, a 317-pounder, last week in the same general area.

    On Aug. 7, Harry Ellis of Montauk ventured to the outer edge of the Butterfish Hole (about 12 miles south of Montauk Point) on his Island Girl boat. He was armed with a six-foot Ugly Stick with a Penn 430 reel and light, six-pound test line. He was casting a three-quarter-ounce bucktail that a mahimahi found alluring.

    “Every time I went to gaff it, it took off like a freight train. After about a half hour of fighting the fish, getting it up to the boat four times only to have it take off again, I was able to gaff it and pull it over the rail. It was one of the most fun fish I have caught so far,” Ellis said. The mahi weighed 16 pounds.

    Closer to shore the fluke fishing sagged a bit following the low-pressure system and rain that pushed through over the weekend. Yesterday the fluke started to bite again, according to Scott Leonard at the Star Island Yacht Club. Leonard said there are striped bass aplenty in the rips off Montauk Point, and bluefish up to 15 pounds everywhere. He said the north side, Shagwong Point, Gin Beach, even inside the Montauk Harbor inlet were alive with blues.

    Surfcasters are finally starting to find themselves within range of bluefish, and, according to Paulie’s Tackle Shop in downtown Montauk, casters continue to find big porgies casting hi/low rigs baited with clam strips just behind the shore break all along the south-facing sand beaches.

    Porgy lovers can fill their coolers from the waters around Gardiner’s Island. Bring the soy sauce and wasabi for some porgy sushi alfresco.

   Scott Faulkner said aboard his lovingly restored 1939 Elco cabin cruiser at Three Mile Marina the other day that when he first came across the Mary Lloyd it was shrouded by canvas in Jim Bennett’s storage and maintenance yard next to the Springs School.

    “I had always seen the bow sticking out — it looked to me like an interesting package under the tree that you wanted to open but couldn’t.”

    Bennett had not long before sold him a 28-foot double-ended 1944 Navy lifeboat, originally meant to be rowed, to which a little deck house and an inboard diesel engine had been added. “It was a very sweet little boat,” said the well-traveled former commercial diver, magazine photographer, and parascending instructor (he’s been a pilot since he was 19). “It was named Patience, which was apt, for it could only do seven knots.”

    The veiled Elco (standing for the Electric Launch Company of Bayonne, N.J.) — originally named Blue Skies, but which Faulkner renamed after his mother — had been left at the Bennett yard by an estate to settle an outstanding storage bill, he said, a transaction rather common in the boat world.

    “I remember the day in 1992 I was told I could look at it — the carrot had been dangled — squirming up through the canvas draped over the stern and peering in. It was,” he said, brightening, “like discovering a long-lost love, something preordained! I was instantly brought back to 1939, to the days when they made things beautifully. I thought, ‘This baby’s got class!’ Of course I didn’t have the money, and so I went to the bank and got a cash advance on my credit card and bought it.”

    An affection for boats had always been with him, he said in reply to a question. “I had 40 models in my room . . . square riggers, schooners . . . I loved the beauty of sailboats, it’s just that I never found myself owning one, it was always motorboats.”

    And now, with the restored Mary Lloyd, he’s got the best of both worlds — much more comfort than a 30-foot sailboat would afford and the lines, white oak framing, cedar planking, and mahogany trim of the Great Gatsby era.

    Moreover, “people pay how many millions for this view,” he said as a visitor and he sat in the shade of the Mary Lloyd’s ample salon deck at Three Mile Marina the other morning, looking out across Three Mile Harbor as a turtle popped up its head and a swan glided by. “A few of us are lucky enough to have it for a song. . . . These waterways and tranquil bays around here are some of the most beautiful in the world.”

    “And there’s so much landfall . . . Connecticut, Rhode Island, the North Fork, Block Island, Fishers Island. . . . We’ve gone from Manhattan to Nantucket and to all points in between, but this wasn’t meant for blue water sailing. It’s a lake, bay, and river boat.”

    Luckily, his English-born wife, Sara, likes living on a boat too. They met in 1997 at a party on an updated Narrows boat of the kind that plied England’s canals in the 1800s. He was at the time based in London and traveling the world as a magazine photographer. “It wasn’t until two years later, however, that we began going out. I was always enchanted, but never quite able to land the fish.”

    “We were married right here in Coecles Harbor,” she said one recent bright weekend afternoon during which the Faulkners, with their children, 9-year-old Mali and 6-year-old Frank, took a few others out to celebrate Ed Gifford’s 51st birthday.

    “We weren’t anchored,” said her husband, who is licensed to marry people himself nowadays. “I turned the key off. Justice Hannabury, who has since died, said it would only take a couple of minutes. We had six or seven aboard — everyone else was at the Ram’s Head dock nearby. We had a party afterward at the Chequit.”

    This is the first year that the Faulkners have offered charters, figuring that the Mary Lloyd might as well pay for itself. He has a Coast Guard-certified “six-pack” captain’s license that permits up to a half-dozen guests. Half-day, full-day, sunset (“the most beautiful to be seen on the East End”), or wedding cruises are being offered. “Catering for any occasion, formal or informal, can be arranged,” their Web site, marylloydcharters.com, says.

   A month ago on a record hot Thursday, I attended a “poisonous plants” course conducted by Susan K. Pell, Ph.D., at the New York Botanical Garden. It was my first visit to that institution and one that turned out to be directly related to the vegetation in my Noyac yard.

    I had wondered for more than 20 years why many of the plant species have been consistently untouched by the deer that routinely visit the yards of my neighbors.

    It turns out that about two thirds of my plants are poisonous. Half of these are native to the South Fork, and half are exotic, mostly Eurasian in origin. One wonders if the deer in most cases already know which is which. In at least a few cases they learn. As spring progresses and this and that poisonous plant develop side by side with the non-poisonous ones, the deer will experiment. One day they will take the tops off many native spotted jewel-weed or touch-me-not, Impatiens capsensis, which is lush and succulent and on the face of it looks as if it would provide a good meal to any herbivore that happens by. Thereafter, they will invariably leave them be.

    They never try the vinca, or periwinkle, an exotic ground-hugger that covers half the front yard. Nor will they nibble on the common import lily-of-the-valley, which covers the other half. The latter contain glycosides that can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, irregular heartbeat, and more, similar to the glycosides found in the ornamental foxglove, which contains digitalis, a chemical used medicinally in the past to treat irregular heart rhythms or as a diuretic.

    The deer stay away from pokeweed, a foreigner from the tropics, all of the parts of which are poisonous in mature plants, but not to catbirds, robins, and thrushes, which come by in late summer and early fall to reap the purple berries. They also leave the poison ivy alone (I wish they wouldn’t), and pay no attention to the bittersweet or daffodils. You may have noticed where daffodils spring up or are planted on shoulders of local roads, they always seem to bloom without interference from the deer, even though, as on Stephen Hand’s Path, they graze the grasses and forbs growing in between them.

    I have no tomato plants, which deer seem to leave alone where they are planted widely in South Fork farm and garden plots, but I do have other members of the tobacco genus Solanum, just about all of which are toxic if ingested. The deer don’t touch the two poisonous nightshades that inveigle their way between and overtop many of my native wildflowers every year. Several insects prey on the Solanum species, while almost all mammals, except perhaps for Homo sapiens, steer clear of them.

    I don’t think my several varieties of asters and goldenrods are poisonous, but they do not score high on the lists of preferred deer foods. One native plant which the deer totally avoid, to the degree that it has totally taken over my back yard, is white snakeroot, Ageratina altissima, the foliage of which contains tremetol, which makes cow milk and steer meat poisonous once ingested. On the other hand, deer like to browse the fresh spring growth at the tips of the yew branches. Yews contain taxane, which causes a bunch of maladies when ingested, but also contain taxol, a chemical that has been used to treat certain cancers in humans. Are the yew-eating deer defending themselves from developing cancers or are their metabolic systems immune to the poison?

    Queen Anne’s lace, Daucus carota, a foreigner which is common throughout our area, is quite poisonous when eaten, I was surprised to discover. After all, it is the ancestor of the edible carrot. If you’ve driven along the Sunrise Highway between Westhampton and Southampton Village lately, you will see waves and waves of three-foot tall Queen Anne’s lace in full bloom. Deer abound on the shoulders of the Sunrise, but apparently they’ve come to realize that Queen Anne’s lace will give them a tummy ache.

    The orange milkweed, or butterfly weed, common milkweed, and dogbane in and around my yard are also eschewed by the deer. They contain the poisons that make the monarch butterfly, whose larvae feed on them, distasteful to almost all would-be predators.

    Deer don’t eat my mountain laurel, hollies, or lady ferns, all of which contain toxins. I have other native and non-native plants in my yard. But one thing has become quite clear over the 31 years I’ve resided at this address: The plants that are outright noxious and poisonous to deer passers-by are thriving. It’s all I can do to keep them at bay. In the bigger picture, one can imagine a day in the distant future when only poisonous plants and those with thorns thrive and almost all of the edible ones, except on farms and botanical gardens, will have perished. If only we could train deer to eat phragmites. Wouldn’t that be grand?

    Thirty-three boats brought 13 mako sharks — the largest a 148-pounder — to the scales at the 20th annual mako shark tournament held from the Star Island Yacht Club over the weekend, but it’s the number of large sharks being caught and seen relatively close to shore that has folks wondering.

    While fishing for porgies in Gardiner’s Bay, John Rade, a veteran commercial rod-and-reel fisherman, witnessed a white shark leap from the water chasing prey. Last Thursday, Mike Young was fishing for fluke from the Lazy Bones when he hooked into a thresher shark that gray-hounded across the surface before breaking the 30-pound-test, braided line. The thresher was caught in the north rips off the Montauk Lighthouse.

    Trap fishermen with pound nets in Gardiner’s Bay have found at least three relatively large sharks, two identified as sand tigers, and one blue shark in their traps. The sharks were caught in the same area in which a young great white weighing an estimated 200 pounds was caught, also in a trap, in July of 2003.

    Nat Miller, an East Hampton Town Trustee and a bayman, said the trapped sharks were caught at Albert’s Landing in Amagansett south of Accabonac Harbor, and at Water Fence off the beach at Hither Woods in Montauk.

    “It’s just warm. It’s crazy. Gardiner’s Island has seals year round. There’s always sharks in these waters. The white sharks breed in shallow water. The water’s warmer this year. They come closer to the beach, and there are bunker, porgies, bluefish” to draw them in, Miller said.

    Nancy Kohler, a shark biologist from the National Marine Fisheries Service laboratory in Narragansett, R.I., said, “It’s not unusual to see sand tigers. They are around this time of year. It’s common. A blue shark, however . . . it’s either the temperature or food bringing them in.”

    As for the thresher caught on a fluke rig: “Big threshers come close to pup, but they usually pup in May or June.”

    And what about the white sharks of “Jaws” infamy? “If they take up year-round residence it could be a problem. They are spending more time in this area. Seems like now there are 200,000 gray seals living on Cape Cod. It’s become a mecca for them. We’re going to see predators following them,” Kohler said. Cue the “Jaws” theme.

    “They like to eat marine mammals,” she said. Great whites have traditionally fed on dead, young, or sick whales, a fact that Capt. Frank Mundus, Montauk’s “Monster Man,” discovered and used to his legendary advantage. But, with the influx of seals, the adult whites may be moving closer to shore. “They are not changing their habits. We are just seeing a different aspect of their feeding. They take seals down because that’s what’s there,” Kohler said.

    Winner of the Star Island tournament with the 148-pound mako was the boat My Rock, captained by Mike Hegarty. Chuck Lamitie was the angler. The Tomi Chris boat, with Tom Russo at the helm, landed the second place, 147-pound mako reeled in by Warren Hensel. John Trzcinski won his battle with a 142-pound mako to take third place for the Thor 2 boat and Capt. Dave Meberg. Humans seem to be winning, so far.

    The porgy fishing around Gardiner’s Island continues to excite. The scup may be a bit smaller, but during an outing on Saturday afternoon off Eastern Plains point, double-headers were common. Rocky bottom in about 20 feet of water also draws sea bass and false albacore in late summer. With everything else ahead of schedule, no one should be surprised if the falsies show up early.

   As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, “What’s all this fuss about chickens?” 

   Having been born and raised next to my grandfather’s chicken farm in Mattituck, where he tended a flock of up to 5,000 chickens, I am quite partial to them. You might say the first bird species I learned was the once-wild fowl, Gallus gallus, or in this case, white leghorn, and the first bird I ever heard sing was the rooster.

    On Monday I took my grandchildren from San Francisco to see the old homestead. It was still there almost in its original form, but the chicken farm next door was now occupied by myriad greenhouses, 20 or more. I had known something was up when I Googled it on Google Maps in April, and all I could see from the air were lots of rectangular glassy looking buildings laid out side by side.

    Mattituck was as rural as the Midwest in the 1940s and 1950s — farm fields end on end, little fishing boats plying the waters of Long Island Sound and Peconic Bay. For a boy growing up it was the best it could be. I would gladly trade the sound of the motor vehicles that buzz by my house now at 1,000 per hour or the sound of the helicopters flying back and forth for the occasional crowings of a couple of roosters.

    At night we might hear a plane go over or a couple of cars go by, but mostly we listened to the night music of tree crickets, katydids, whippoorwills, and barking dogs. One could almost imagine how nice the Native Americans had it 400 years earlier.

    My family had chickens — barred rocks — Muscovi ducks, goats, and pigs, and very big vegetable and flower gardens. We canned, we pickled, we cured, we smoked, we shucked, we ate fresh. On weekends we clammed or fished. In other words, we were a typical rural eastern Long Island family. We lived to survive, not to entertain or make it into the pages of Better Homes and Gardens.

    Well, here we are on the South Fork 60 years later and things have changed. Real estate is bigger than farming and fishing, horses have replaced cows, there are more automobiles and boats than you can shake a stick at, and very few vegetable gardens and few chickens. The wild turkeys and deer are the only things that keep us from becoming completely citified. When I worked for East Hampton Town I got lots of complaints about both.

    One wonders what would happen if the economy keeps sinking and we find ourselves carrying on like a third world country, eking out a day-to-day find ourselves carrying on like a third world country, eking out a day-to-day existence and hanging on with our finger nails. A McMansion will not ensure survival as much as a little Bonac house. Those who have a garden, who have chickens, who know how to clam and fish, will get by. Those who don’t will be dependent upon those who do and will not be in a position to complain about roosters crowing.

    I don’t have any chickens in my Noyac neighborhood, but if I did, I would welcome them with open ears. I get by with the crickets and katydids and the multi-pitched barking of neighbors’ dogs. When they go so will I.

    Old McDonald had a farm, E I E I O, and on that farm he had some chickens — with a cluck, cluck here and a cluck, cluck there, here a cluck, there a cluck, everywhere a cluck, cluck. . . . See if you can finish it.

    As we know, time and tide wait for no man, or woman for that matter. There’s really nothing that can be done to stem the first part of the old saw, but being aware of our semidiurnal tide schedule is crucial for sailors, fishermen, surfers, and habitual beach walkers.  

    For this reason, Peter Spacek, an artist, illustrator, and the person responsible for The Star’s weekly Startoons, has created a must-have T-shirt for the tidally dependent. Spacek has printed a fresh batch of Ts that feature four months’ worth of tide charts on the front, complete with corresponding phases of the moon.

    So there you are on the deck of your boat. The fish will start biting on the turn of the tide, but you left your Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book at home. It looks like slack tide, but looks can be deceiving. How long will you have to wait? Should you move? Your guests, who have driven here from upstate, are getting antsy.

    Then you remember you’re wearing Spacek’s tide shirt. You don’t even need to slip it off to read (and in the process reveal the Budweiser tumor you’ve grown over the winter), because Spacek has printed the charts upside down. All you have to do is look down, pull your shirt away from your waist (skip this step if your belly is large enough), and voila! Your friends will think you’re one with the sea, pure salt. Just be careful not to spill coffee or ketchup on it or you could miss the tide.

    Spacek also has Ts with the tide charts on the back and a ruler up the front with the minimum sizes of popular species clearly marked. The shirts are available on line at ditchink.com, at Gone Local in Amagansett, and at the Curiosity shop in East Hampton.

    Sue Jappell down at Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reported surfcasters making wonderful but unlikely catches along Montauk’s sand-bottomed ocean beaches. Porgies, some in the two-to- three-pound range, are being landed, along with the occasional fluke, striped bass, and bluefish.

    “Twice, tourists have come in and I’ve outfitted them with rigs and they’ve come back with one of each kind I told them about. One person with a high-low rig had a fluke on the bottom, a porgy on top,” Jeppel said on Monday. She reasoned the bottom feeders were probably attracted to an extensive mussel bed lying within casting distance from shore.

    There have been a few reports of green bonito in the ’hood. Greenies, for those of you who don’t know, are often mistaken for false albacore. They too are bullet-shaped mini-tunas, somewhat smaller, but they arrive earlier than the falsies, and unlike the albacore the greenies make for delicious eating. They are arguably among the very finest eating fish in the sea.

    Anything pushing bait along the surface in the immediate future could well be a green bonito. They share, with false albacore, sharp eyes. Tins and other small lures should be retrieved very quickly.

    Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported sightings last week. Ken Rafferty, light-tackle and fly-fishing guide, agreed that “it’s a perfect time for them. The problem is, they mix in with the bluefish. They’ve such good eyes that you can’t use wire leader, but if you don’t use wire, the bluefish will take the lure. Don’t cast without wire leader unless you see an actual school of them.”

    The light-tackle guide said the schools of bunker that were seen in eastern Gardiner’s Bay and Block Island Sound seem to have moved west to around Shelter Island. “When I see a school of bunker, I cast a surface plug across the top. Big bluefish come up thinking it’s a wounded bunker. I used to go out every day searching for a black hole,” Rafferty said, speaking of the dark mass that marks a bunker school.

    Brian Fromm returned from a two-night trip in the offshore canyons on Monday with a big-eye tuna weighing 173 pounds. The boat also had 15 yellowfins that dressed out to about 50 pounds each.

    “There’s a nice amount of striped bass around. Friday was stupid for midsummer. We had a 45 and a 48-pound striper weighed in. Most were in the 20-to-30-pound class. All big fish, and all caught on live eels. Every drift, every rod bent. You see that at times in September and October,” said Chris Miller of the West Lake Marina in Montauk.

    Harvey Bennett said fluke continue to be caught off Napeague. He said he was given two giant fluke fillets the other day. “They were like two feet long and about 18 inches wide. The fish had to be 15 to 16 pounds. Garlic, salt and pepper, olive oil, and lemon.”