Native plants not only produce stuff that you can eat, but also attract insects, so if you convert a lawn into a natural habitat and include different native plant communities — we’ll call them micro communities — you will increase diversity of the resident fauna to the max.

    More and more local people are doing this.

    Natural habitats with native Long Island plant communities attract native birds that live and breed in those communities. A number of native plants produce edible fruit and seeds for those native species that are either fructivorous or graniverous, or both. Eastern bluebirds, for example, are not seed eaters, but prefer fruit. Catbirds have similar dietary preferences. On the other hand, when feeding young, they are also insectivorus.

    Many naturalists and ecologists have contributed much to the idea of supplanting lawns with habitat gardens. After all, if it weren’t for our English and French antecedents we wouldn’t have lawns at all.

    Native Americans didn’t plant lawn grasses. Unless you have the stomachs and digestive systems of cows, horses, sheep, or goats, you can’t make a nutritious living eating grass. There are, however, native grasses which do not require mowing, which are attractive, and which provide edible seed for birds and other wildlife. And just think of all of the gasoline or electricity you will save in not having to mow back and forth, up and down, around and around every weekend like some of my neighbors, not to mention the benefits of not having to listen to the roar of those two-cycle engines.

    The celebrated American ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote during the Depression and the dust bowl days about American plants that were drought resistant and habitat friendly. On Long Island we have our own Aldo Leopold and her name is Karen Blumer. Several years ago she authored “Long Island Native Plants For Landscaping: A Source Book.” The book was just that, a source for those who wanted to convert their high maintenance lawns into low maintenance wildlife habitats, and it amassed a following. Karen is a longstanding Long Island naturalist and an ardent environmentalist. She has come a long way since the publication of the book and now is revising it, making it even fuller and better for those of us who are Blumer followers.

    Well versed in plants to begin with, she has taken on the redevelopment of several despoiled habitats, either directly or indirectly. When the Suffolk County Water Authority wanted to create a pleasant natural atmosphere for their wells, building, and water provisioning apparatus at their site on Accabonac Highway, they called on Karen. She was also instrumental in getting the contractors who replanted some of the sullied Brookhaven National Laboratory grounds in Upton to use not only native species but local genotypes, “prov­enance” species, as well. Thus the laboratory planted local sweet pepperbushes, a native wetland-edge species with aromatic white flowers, instead of importing them from New Jersey.

    When East Hampton Town had a dilemma at Sammy’s Beach on Gardiner’s Bay after the contractors in 1999 created a hole the size of a professional football field, she suggested to me that the town use American beach grass to replant the area, and not any old beach grass such as the United States Department of Agriculture’s prize Cape America cultivar, but East Hampton beach grass, instead. Thus a large amount of local beach grass was pulled, carted over to Talmage Farms in Riverhead, and multiplied into more than 120,000 plants in a summer’s time, after which it was planted at Sammy’s Beach, in large part returning the area to its former self.

    One of her newest approaches to the problem of replacing fields of Eurasian mugwort, mile-a-minute weed, Japanese knotweed, Asiatic bittersweet, Tartarian honeysuckle, phragmites, and the many, many other invasive plants that have taken over large areas of Long Island so that they are more European and Asian than American has to do not so much with planting natives, but letting them grow back in what is called “succession.” She has found, as have I, that many habitats that have been overrun with invasives still have the ability to spring back to their former selves when the invasives are removed.

    It turns out that in most cases — even in the case of phragmites, or common reed, which form large monoclonal stands like another tall grass, bamboo — that the footprint of the replaced native community is not entirely obliterated. It lives on in the form of seeds, shoots, roots, and other vegetative matter that we collectively call propagules. It just needs to be liberated, in which case removal of the invasives is a paramount first step. In a little plot around an artificial pond on the east side of Lake Montauk, I found that Karen’s theory holds water. Cut down the phragmites (the only plant evident prior to the construction of the pond) and what did my wondering eyes behold? The immediate return of native sedges, grasses, wildflowers, and groundcovers.

    Replanting a native habitat to replace a once-native habitat can be very chancy. You almost have to tend it like an ornate garden, which I have painfully discovered on other disturbed plots which didn’t turn out so well. Think of the complexity even a tiny native wetland, say a cranberry bog or shrubland, has built into it over time. Each member plant exists at the pleasure of all of the other natives in a close-knit symbiotic fashion. It’s not easy for even the most gifted gardener or landscaper to recapture such intricate complexity. But once the bad guys are removed, give it a little time and you will be fondly surprised by the outcome.

    Remember that some of these native plants species are hundreds of times older than Homo sapiens in origin; they have a built-in self-knowledge that is hard to replicate.

    While the summer cornucopia of fish continues to spill forth with an abundance found nowhere else on the coast, anglers have been heard to moan about how hard it’s been to find small porgies to use for bass bait. “They’re all the size of hubcaps,” one angler complained.

    It’s true. Porgies, otherwise known as scup, seem to be getting larger and larger, as though their genetic material has been contaminated Godzilla-like by atomic radiation.

    Tom Jordan at the Gone Fishing Marina was asked why the scup are so big. Simple, he said. “It’s a burgeoning population. They’ve been on the rebound for the past 10 years. More fish means more survive to grow bigger.” The old supply-and-demand downside for commercial porgy fishermen is, of course, the price. Fewer fish, higher price. More fish, lower price.

    Depending on whom you talk to and when, fluke fishing is either great or slow, bass fishing is so-so or fantastic. Jordan echoed reports of big striped bass being caught in the rip currents around Montauk Point. Gone Fishing Marina weighed in one 50-pound bass during the week, one over 50, and a number of bass in the 40-pound range. The big bass are falling to live porgies and live eels.

    As for fluke, Kathy Vegessi, the Lazy Bones party boat’s first shoreside mate, said on Monday that the struggle for our favorite flat fish last week turned into a Monday morning trip that landed 14 keepers over 19.5 inches long. Vegessi also reported “tons of sea bass.” Fifteen of the delicious eating fish (over 13 inches long) can be caught and kept each day.

    This summer the Flying Point Surf School is offering the only fishing camp in the Hamptons. Shane Dyckman is the founder of the camp, which seeks to solve what’s been called the “nature deficit” suffered by growing numbers of kids by getting them off the sofa and onto a boat.

    The camp offers instruction in basic spin-casting and fly-fishing equipment, fish ecology, and responsible, conservation-minded angling. More information can be obtained by going to flyingpointsurfschool.com, or by contacting D. Ava Locks at [email protected].  

    The classes will probably not include a tutorial on chumming, but there will be plenty of that on Friday, Aug. 3, and Aug. 4 during the 20th annual mako/thresher shark tournament held from the Star Island Yacht Club. The captains meeting is scheduled for next Thursday night starting at 7:30. Boats can be entered up until the night of the captains meeting. The entry fee is $600 per boat.

    On Friday, Capt. Paul Forsberg, owner of Montauk’s Viking Fleet of party boats, addressed the Congressional Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, Oceans, and Insular Affiairs in Washington, D.C.

    Captain Forsberg asked Congress to amend the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act to allow recreational fishing for striped bass in the area between Montauk and Block Island known as the Block Island Sound transit zone.

    Charts showing the location of the zone are available at most Montauk marinas. Not everyone is in favor of opening the zone to bass fishing as only larger party boats have the size to hang out there, especially at night. Nor does the proposed amendment address whether market fishermen would get the right to fish in the zone. It is now off limits to both sport and commercial fishermen.

   The Coast Guard Auxiliary Flotilla 18-02 is offering a boating safety course at the American Legion Hall on Bay Street in Sag Harbor on two Saturdays — Aug. 4 and Aug. 11.

   Both classes are required in order to earn a New York boating certificate. The cost is $50. Interested boaters can register and ask questions by e-mailing cgaux­[email protected] or calling Tish at 516-818-0347.

   There are a lot of things I would like to see for the first time before I give up the ghost. I have a list of them — five pages long — that I keep adding to. On occasion Saint Serendipity takes me to one not on my list.

    Such was the case last Friday when I ended up with four botanists at the Shinnecock Indian Reservation south of Hill Street in Southampton. We were to work with a trio of Shinnecock women interested in the reservation’s flora. Two of us, Vicki Bustamante and I, who didn’t know quite where we were all going to meet, ended up at the Shinnecock Nation Cultural Center and Museum sequestered between seven or eight smoke shops at the edge of the highway.

    Quite a stroke of good luck. I’ve been to a lot of museums, including some Amerindian ones in my 78 years, not all of which were situated in the United States. If I wrote them all down it would take several pages, so I won’t. We have several right here on the South Fork. However, the one that Vicki and I happened to bump into by chance was one of the top five in my eyes, an exquisite collection of Indian artifacts, taxidermied animals, wampum shells, dioramic paintings, costumes, and other items that, to be truthful, boggled my mind. Here it was, right under my nose since 2001, and I didn’t know it existed.

    We were in luck that day, as Elizabeth Haile, one of the museum’s board members, and member with me of the board of the Peconic Sustainability Institute, happened to be on hand to show us around. The museum’s curator and originator, David Martine, was not in, but Elizabeth did a fine job. Doesn’t it cost more than $10 to attend a movie at a local movie house where you might spend a little more than an hour watching car chases and gunfights? It costs a measly $5, one Abe as it were, to spend hours and hours here finding out what our bona fide natives and their culture was, is, and will be like.

    The building is log cabin-like and built in the tradition of early American buildings and ships, timbers put together with dowels. It was first constructed by Native Americans on a reservation in upstate New York, Oneonta, it seems, from local white pine, shaved of bark and fitted together with pegs. Then, it was deconstructed by knocking out the pegs, packaged, shipped to its present site, then resurrected with the same care to detail, structural engineering, and aesthetics.

    Eleven years later it is a precursor to a model Shinnecock village, complete with wickiups, palisade fences, tribal council and meeting house, gardens and lots more, which are to begin construction soon behind the museum. Ironically, perhaps, the Shinnecock village will rise at the same time that the Stony Brook Southampton site nearby — which as Southampton College was an integral part of the Long Island University system for more than 40 years — is mostly sinking.

    Later, the four visiting botanists were led on a tour by three Shinnecock women through part of the reservation near where it borders Shinnecock Bay. I had visited the reservation for the first time at least 20 years earlier with Sara Davison, Bill Miller, and the Nature Conservancy to erect an osprey nest pole. I was happy to learn that ospreys have done quite well there since then.

    During the small motorcade to the tour spot, I thought I was back in the little berg across the Peconics where I grew up, Mattituck (meaning Long Creek in Algonkian). It was situated between two smaller bergs, Aquebogue and Cutchogue (also Algonkian). Lots of trees and fields, almost no litter, modest, well-kept houses, rural, rural, rural, and more rural. And no sign of the hustle and bustle that so stridently marks the non-Indian Hamptons culture beyond the borders of the reservation, one that begins at the east end of the Shinnecock Canal bridge and ends at the Montauk Lighthouse. Nowhere else on Long Island, I thought to myself, could be as pastoral and peaceful.

    We managed to identify a lot of wild plants — herbs, grasses, vines, trees, and shrubs — in an area less than an acre in size. Some were quite rare, like the dwarf chestnut oak, Quercus prinoides, and a few of them I had yet to observe on the remainder of the South Fork. Oh, yes, the Shinnecocks have not been spared the inroads made by phragmites, mile-a-minute weed, mugwort, and other invasives, but, except for the phragmites, they didn’t seem as common here as outside the reservation.

    All in all, our hosts were very cordial, curious, and fun to work with and be around. They were teaching us as much about nature’s gifts as we believed we were teaching them. Surely, the place was replete with such. Driving out of the reservation the last 100 feet, we passed some newly flowering orange butterfly weed in full bloom, a lovely farewell to a wonderful day.

    Two days later I was extolling the wonders of the reservation and magnificence of the museum to Lois Markle of Hither Hills in Montauk. “You mean you’ve never gone to the museum before?” she asked. “I go there whenever I can!” I felt a bit embarrassed and subsequently moved it to the top of my list.

   The sloop Leilani ventured west out of Montauk Harbor on Sunday to the waters off Eastern Plains Point on Gardiner’s Island in search of the dinner plate-size porgies said to lurk in the area.

    A two-hook porgy rig, clam baits, bucket, fillet knife, cutting board — all the ingredients for a successful venture were on board. Leilani tacked into a weak west wind and a stronger outgoing tide — slow going.

    After an hour of motor sailing, her anchor was dropped at a spot just south of the point in about 40 feet of water, very slow-moving water. In fact, the boat had arrived just in time for slack tide. For fish, slack tide is like a submarine siesta.

    The predator-prey equation has resulted over millions of years in painting the underside of midwater species in light colors to allow them to melt into the lighted background of the surface to be less visible to predators swimming below. For the same reason, sharks, for instance, have darker dorsal sides that fade into the bottom murk, the better to hide from predators swimming above looking down.

    The hunting strategy of many species involves hanging in a protected spot and waiting for a tidal current to bring the food to them. It’s a classic bushwhack approach. Pick a place, a depression or an outcropping of rock or coral, and let the tide bring your dinner in the form of smaller fish, especially those that ride the tide, not strong enough to swim against it.

    A fish figures, why bother feeding if I have to swim after my food? I’ll just relax until the tide turns. An angler who knows this will do the same. Unfortunately, the sky on Sunday afternoon began to take on a bruised appearance. Time to hoist the anchor and skedaddle on a broad reach in the breeze that had stiffened to 17 knots just as the tide turned.

    David Blinken, a fly-fishing guide, was working a big school of bluefish off Gardiner’s Island on Monday. By cellphone he said his party was catching blues in the one-to-five-pound range with surface flies, poppers, with floating line on six-weight rods. “For the kind of sight fishing I do, I like when the tide is lowest, just before the ebb ends and just after the flow begins. Last week it was spectacular on either side of slack tide. My preference is for low water, better for concentrating fish and bait.”

    Chris Miller at the West Lake Marina in Montauk said the slowest tides of the month were about over. “The bite should start to increase. Fish are opportunists. Tide makes the bait congregate. Striped bass are very impressive. They can catch a porgy, and porgies are fast,” he said, but prefer not to expend the energy when the water is not moving.

    “They do feed at night when the tide is weak,” Miller said. But this could be because they have a stealth advantage in the dark, he suggested.

    The exceptional fluke fishing at the spot off Montauk known as Frisbees slowed in recent days, probably the result of a bluefish invasion scaring the prey away, Miller reported. West Lake has also been seeing boats returning from Block and Atlantis Canyons with bigeye and yellowfin tuna. Mahimahi have been taking trolled lures and should be coming closer to the beach in the warmer-than-usual ocean water.

   In many respects, sound and hearing in nature are just as important as sight. In those species that are more nocturnal than diurnal, sounds and the ability to hear, and differentiate, them is crucial to their survival. Whether an animal species is active in the day or at night, there’s a greater than 50 percent chance that it perceives sound waves or senses vibrations, another form of sound.

    There is still much to be explained about the origin of a special configuration of sounds — music — in humans. There are ancient instruments fashioned from bones, reeds, or other matter that date back to the very dawn of Homo sapiens. Drumming may be the oldest form of human music. Some primates drum — the gorilla beating his chest is a good example — but none of the contemporary primates other than humans sing, though several howl. Howling may have given rise to the first song.

    Bird song is older than human song and in many respects is as tuneful and melodic as human song. The nightingale of Eurasia is a fabled singer. Here in the Northeast we have some fabulous bird songs, as well. Take the hermit thrush, for one. Its song, an organ-like spiral of ascending notes, is considered to be among the most lovely of all native bird utterings. Only 20 years ago, one could still hear them just before dusk singing in East Hampton’s Northwest, especially in the Grace Estate.

    There is a catbird in my yard that literally sings for its supper. It whines and moans its atonal string of rarely repeated notes, reminding me to put the blueberries out on the patio table each day. I do, and he stops singing and starts absconding with them one by one until, in a matter of minutes, they are gone.

    All birds make different sounds. They use their larynx and their pneumatic system of air tubes. Woodpeckers do the same, but they also telegraph their messages — “this is my territory, keep out” — by rapidly drumming on a resonant surface such as a hollow tree or the metal flue pipe from a furnace.

    Almost all mammals utter sounds, but, save for humans, the sounds they make are short in duration and not at all musical. Canines howl, felines growl, meow, or purr, ungulates moo, and so on. The songs of whales are musical, at least to some ears.

    Some reptiles, such as turtles and snakes, hiss, while some, like the geckos, chatter, but most are silent. The crocodile bellows, baby crocs squeal, rattlesnakes make sounds with their rattles. Most reptiles are active during the day, but amphibians — frogs, toads, salamanders, and the like — are more likely to be active at dusk and at night than during the day. Salamanders are largely quiet, but the frogs and their allies are quite vociferous, especially when it’s dark.

    Some frog songs, such as the soft monotonic tremolos of the gray tree frog, are quite pleasing to the human ear. On the other hand, one would hardly say that the very low “jug-o-rums” of the night-calling bullfrog or the banjo twangs of the green frog are melodious. Toads buzz and wheeze, frogs have a variety of calls, but the amphibious call that stirs my cockles is the one uttered only after a prolonged rainstorm. Years can go by without hearing it.

    Such is the song that Barbara Adams played for me over the phone using her cellphone’s recorder and playback function: the nasal cawings of a thousand ravens or crows, eerie and provocative. Ravens and crows don’t call at night. Spadefoot toads do, but only after very heavy rains.

    Yes, she had recorded the calls of the eastern spadefoot toad, one of the rarest of our native amphibians and the one with the loudest call, the one that stays underground for years, and only comes out to breed in temporary pondings created by soaking rains, such as the three to five-inch one that accompanied Tropical Storm Andrea as it swept through on Friday of last week. Accompanied by the high chirpings of spring peepers, spadefoots were calling throughout the weekend from the dunes along Bluff Road in Amagansett and on Napeague, near where the editor of this newspaper resides.

    After mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians, comes the most primitive vertebrate group of all, the fishes. Many fish make sounds and a few even “sing,” that is change notes during their delivery. One of them, the oyster toadfish, utters the famous “boat-whistle” song, which is so loud that it can be heard above the water’s surface by those with acute hearing. It’s mostly a night singer like the amphibians and it used to be quite common in local estuarine waters. It’s a favorite gourmet item on some Asian restaurant menus and thus has become quite scarce locally in the new millennium.

    A close cousin, the “midshipman” male of California coastal waters, utters a monotonic drone that can last for an hour or more without a pause. The male uses his song to attract a female to his lair in the rocks, and when she comes, he is so pleased to see her that he lights up, turning on all of his photophores in a spectacular display of light and sound leading to courtship, ovulation, and fertilization. The houseboat community in San Francisco Bay at Sausalito is kept awake at night by the low-pitched droning. At the same time, the fish’s arrival is celebrated each spring with a special day, thus its new common name, the “California singing fish,” has replaced the former one.

    One more night song is of note these days, that of the 17-year cicada adult. Staten Islanders are already lying awake at night listening, or trying not to listen. We will be spared, if that’s your desire, but in another month keep your ears open for the all-night chorus provided by the snowy tree cricket. Owing to the recent heavy rains and the lushness of the foliage, it should be deafening.

    The sloop Leilani ventured east from Montauk Harbor early in the afternoon on Sunday, arriving in the cove off Oyster Pond at dead high tide. White clouds of screaming terns hovered and dived over schools of fish.

    It’s not practical, of course, but fishing under sail is at once a peaceful (a relative term) and an exciting way to go, especially trolling quietly through schools of feeding fish. Light-tackle and fly-fishing boaters often make the mistake of charging up to a school. Engine noise and the racket caused by anxious anglers screaming and fumbling for their gear usually drive the fish down.

    By contrast, a sailboat can ghost up to a school, the equivalent of wearing soft leather moccasins while stalking deer. It’s the hookups that can be a challenge. With a big fish on, in any wind over five knots the boat must be rounded up into the wind. Best to have an experienced mate. Paul Forsberg Sr. has been known to troll for tuna far offshore on the ketch-rigged Viking Freedom. He calls the experience “the sound of silence.”

    Word is, the Freedom will remain down south this summer, but Forsberg, admiral of Montauk’s Viking Fleet of party boats and the Block Island Ferry, will be leaving Florida on Aug. 1 to bring the Fleet’s new Viking Fivestar, a luxury head boat, to Montauk.

    The upscale charter boat is licensed to carry 44 passengers (for an occasional sunset cruise), but when fishing, it will carry only 12, the number of comfortable berths on board. The Fivestar is designed for three to four-day fishing trips offshore. The 65-foot-long vessel, with a 20-foot beam, has an 8,000-pound fish hold for tuna and deepwater tilefish fishing. 

    “When you’re out in the canyon, you want a decent boat under you,” Forsberg said from his base in Florida on Monday.

    Freddy Shay, a mate with the Viking Fleet, was buying groceries at the Montauk I.G.A. the other day and at the checkout counter reported excellent fluking of late.

    Viking runs two half-day trips per day from 8 a.m. until noon and 1 to 5 p.m.  There is also a Hungry Man trip that sets out Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays after striped bass, black sea bass, porgies, just about anything with fins.

    On Sunday, the crew of the Leilani realized the schools the terns were pestering held bunker, a species too bony and oily for table fare, and not likely to respond to a Kastmaster lure. They are likely to attract striped bass, as they have been doing during the week.

    For this reason, the sloop began trolling a small bucktail heavy enough to sweep below the bunker where feeding bass tend to lurk. Unfortunately, no one informed the bass of the ideal sail-trolling setup.

    Boaters continue to find the bass, with live bunker bait, chunked bunker, and live eels doing the trick. West Lake Marina reported that Ed Shaw on the October Fest has been consistently catching and releasing big bass — 49 pounds is a big bass — using live eels at night. Early last week John Steadman on the Main Squeeze brought back a 50.75-pound bass he attracted with chunks of oily bunker.

    The marina is home to the boat Perfect Catch. Captain Rick Gullia found one at the Great Eastern spot on July 2 using live eels. The bass weighed 58 pounds.

    West Lake is also home to Bryan Fromm’s Flying Dutchman. Fromm likes the offshore canyons. During a July 2 trip he caught three bigeye tuna up to 175 pounds, as well as a yellowfin weighing between 40 and 50 pounds. Earlier, the Dutchman found another bigeye that weighed in at 150 pounds.

    Meanwhile, surfcasting has not been good. Is it the warm water or bunker schools that have kept striped bass beyond casting? Perhaps a combination of the two, or a mystery something. In any case experienced casters have about given up, according to Fred Kalkstein, an organizer of the Montauk SurfMasters tournaments.

    Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported stripers being caught along the ocean beach in Amagansett, but in the teen sizes. Bennett reports keeper fluke are being caught off Napeague on the bay side, “12-inch porgies just about anywhere and deer in all yards eating everything.” 

   I’ve never heard anyone utter anything nasty about butterflies. About moths, yes, but not butterflies. In just about every other animal group, particularly within the many insect families, there are hordes of species — bedbugs, mosquitoes, yellow jackets, termites, carpenter ants, deer flies, weevils, locusts, what have you — that have been called every curse word in the book. But butterflies have been spared. Why?

    For one thing, they are all nectar eaters. They don’t bite us or other creatures. They don’t infest our houses, don’t get in our hair, don’t splatter against our windshields, and don’t spread human diseases.

    Or is it because they’re just too damn beautiful, too damn colorful, such graceful fliers? The fact that they are proficient pollinators may be a much more subtle reason for our love of them. Take the painted lady, for one. A human painted lady is generally held in low esteem, not so for the one that flits over our gardens flying from flower to flower. I can’t find a single pejoratively named butterfly in the guidebooks. Even the caterpillar that pupates into the painted lady butterfly is exquisitely patterned in yellow bands, between which bright red and white spots mingle and meander from head to tail.

    In fact, early on many caterpillars were given different scientific names than the butterflies they became because their colorations were so striking. Only when the lepidopterist followed a given caterpillar through metamorphosis into adulthood did problems with differing nomenclatures clear up. Butterfly larvae, even though they may be found eating some of our most precious plants, do not have the bad reputations that many moth larvae have earned. One need merely mention gypsy moths or inchworms in some quarters to produce scowls on those within earshot.

    Even grade school kids know the names of many butterflies, but very few moths. They can tell a tiger swallowtail from a monarch, a sulphur from a cabbage white. Butterflies have a way of attracting one’s attention, and once you’ve seen an exotic looking one the image sticks in the mind.

    I live in a little, quite commonplace house in Noyac with a very small yard. Yet, this summer I have had a regal fritillary, a quite rare butterfly and an extremely aesthetically pleasing one, dropping in every other day. Is it because I have some violets, the host species for their caterpillars? I only see one at a time so chances are slim that there’s a reproductive pair lurking in the shadows.

    Butterflies can be few and far between. You almost never see bunches of hem. The most common ones on the South Fork, except when migrating monarchs are passing through, are the cabbage whites. They are one of the few invasive butterflies, as they are interlopers from Eurasia and, like their vernacular name, produce larvae that feed on members of the brassicas or mustard family. During this millennium they have become more and more common along the edges of many local roads, perhaps because the equally invasive Eurasian garlic mustards have carpeted many of those roads’ shoulders in the same space of time.

    There are “butterfly years,” certain years when this or that butterfly species is commonly seen. In late May and early June there were an awful lot of red admiral butterflies around. Many pairs were mating across Barcelona, for example. Their larvae feed on nettles, false nettles, and hops, the last two of which are found here and there on the South Fork. Chris Roberts tells about the time some 25 years ago when he was sailing on Gardiner’s Bay and red admirals were flying across in droves. That must have been a red admiral butterfly year.

    The first butterflies to emerge each spring are the ones that overwinter in leaf humus, the mourning cloaks. They come out as early as mid-March in some years. They are large and obvious and the only butterflies seen when they first appear. Their wings are dark with yellow trailing edges and blue spots between the dark and the yellow.

    Tropical butterflies are even larger and more colorful, but ours don’t have to play second fiddle to them. Why is one group of the lepidopteran family so gaudy and bright, while the other group, the moths, are comparatively drab? It’s probably because butterflies are most active during daylight hours, when colors and bizarre patterns can be seen from a great distance, while moths are mostly nocturnal.

    But bright and gaudy colorations can be protective as well. Think about the many species of coral reef fishes and their dazzling colors and patterns. Some reason that it is precisely these colorations that protect them from the likes of groupers, snappers, and barracudas. They are so obvious that they fake out the would-be predators, dashing away before the bigger fish can draw their guns from their holsters.

    We know that the bright colorations of some butterflies protect them from predator birds. Monarch larvae feed on milkweeds, the sap of which can be toxic. They store the poisons up and they are incorporated in the adults during metamorphosis. The bird or toad that bites into the monarch gets a toxic hit, as it were, enough to remind either not to do it again should a similar opportunity arise in the future.

    The wobbly flight that butterflies are famous for also gets them out of many predatory situations. It’s hard to home in on something flying through the air bobbing up and down, turning quickly this way or that. Whether it’s due to its color or wobbly flight, the butterfly outsmarts the predator more times than not.

    Butterflies are generally much scarcer than birds and moths. But it only takes one or two to light up one’s day. As summer winds down and fall approaches, how many of us turn our attention to the migratory flight of the monarchs? It’s been a good year for milkweed; maybe it will be good for monarchs as well. Can you imagine? Crossing Long Island Sound and flying all the way from Canada to the middle of Mexico, then rendezvousing en masse on a special mountain there? Nature is full of such near-miraculous goings-on. Butterflies play leading roles in many of them.

    In the meantime, visit the Long Island Aquarium in Riverhead, and you’ll be treated to a spectacular display of both variegated tropical fish and equally variegated butterflies flitting about above them. It’s a must!

   The big striped bass are here. Star Island Yacht Club has reported that three bass over 50 pounds were weighed in during the past week.

    Scott Leonard, who runs the tackle section of the Yacht Club’s store, caught a 60.4-pounder on June 26. On Friday, Mike Ajello, fishing aboard the Susan A, reeled up a bass weighing 56.3 pounds, and on Sunday Anthony Vaccaro caught a 50.7-pound bass.

    Scott Leonard said all the big bass were caught drifting live bunker deep in the rip currents off Montauk Point. The live bunker were brought to the bottom via a “banana drail,” a banana-shape lead weight with hook attached.

    “They’re eating everything,” Leonard said of the bass, but concentrating on bunker. “There was a shot of them on the north side all last week, and in front of the Lighthouse,” Leonard said of the bunker schools. “The bass have been staying on the bunker coming down from the west.”

    Chris Miller of the West Lake Marina said the marina’s scales had been receiving the same weighty fish. On Sunday, Larry Chancey was fishing aboard his brother’s Chancey Charter boat and landed a 57.15-pound bass. And again on Sunday, Rick Gulia, aboard the Perfect Catch charter boat, came back with a 58-pounder. Both fish were caught live-lining eels.

    Peter Correale, who hunts bass with a spear gun, shot a 48-pound bass on Sunday, Miller reported. And, the aim of Kevin Cordella, another spear fisherman, was true enough to bag a 48-pounder. Miller mentioned in passing that the marina now features a touch tank for kids to get acquainted with sea creatures. Sharks not included.

    The shark tag tournament held from the Montauk Marine Basin last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, the marina’s 42nd, ended with the largest shark caught on the Instigator boat, a 255-pound thresher. The first-place mako weighed 249 pounds and was angled aboard the Canyon Lady. The biggest blue shark weighed 252 pounds. The boat was the Fish N Chips.

    The marine basin encourages the tagging of sharks not considered big enough to be contenders. Tagged sharks become part of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s shark research program.

    The Marine Basin has also pioneered the use of circle hooks, a type that lodge in a fish’s jaw rather than farther down the alimentary canal. Released fish tend to survive after being caught with circle hooks.

    Unfortunately for the Montauk SurfMasters spring shootout tournament that ended on Saturday, the big bass did not come within casting distance. Mike Coppola’s winning bass weighed in at 28.8 pounds. Rich Reilly took second with a 26-pound striper, and Mary Ellen Kane was on the board with a 12.8-pound bass for the third-place spot.

    Ken Morse at the Tight Lines shop in Sag Harbor reports good fluke activity in Sag Harbor as well as a surprising number of weakfish. The downside, he said, was that the state is allowing only one keeper tiderunner per day measuring 16 inches or longer. 

    With warmer water temperatures, striped bass have moved east out of the Peconics with the bunker schools, just as Scott Leonard had reported in Montauk. Big bass are also being found around Plum Gut and the Race. Morse confirmed the experience of anglers farther to the east — that being pulling up porgies “bigger than I’ve ever seen in the Peconics, fish between 16 and 19 inches.”

    Morse recommended getting to the waters around Gardiner’s Island early before weekend boat traffic puts the porgies down. He said there was a good chance you would find big bass and huge bluefish chowing down on bunker there. Tight Lines carries live eels, worms, and live green crabs later in the year for blackfish.

   The e-news just reported that sea level is rising on America’s East Coast faster than on the West Coast. What this translates into is the retreat of beaches and bluffs, the flooding of tidal wetlands, and the salting of drinking water wells situated close to the sea. On the other hand, while there will be losses and changes, there will also be more of the same.

    Each shoreline on the South Fork of Long Island is different. Some are backed by coastal bluffs such as those in Montauk, some are fronted by dunes like those in Amagansett, some are edged with salt marshes, some are stony, some are sandy, and some, such as the points and strands, are flat, low, and barren.

    Middle Atlantic Coast beaches are different from Gulf of Mexico beaches. They have two flood tides and two ebb tides in a 24-hour day as opposed to one high and one low in the same time period. The tides washing in and out with accompanying waves are responsible in large part for a given beach’s profile and character.

    The ocean beaches of the south shore are mostly sandy. On Long Island, one has to travel all the way to Montauk to find stony ocean beaches. Traveling east from Napeague they become progressively stonier and the bluffs behind them progressively steeper.

    Why is that? Well, the ice sheet that created the South Fork about 15,000 years ago reached no farther south than the morainal highlands that run east-west in a line dividing the northern half of Southampton and East Hampton Towns from their southern halves. Montauk is an exception, however, as the glacier dropped and pushed its load of rocks and other debris far out into the ocean.

    Thus Montauk’s south shore and subtidal waters are mostly lined with rocks known as glacial erratics. Striped bass fishermen stand on the tops of the larger ones in the water while they fish. Boulders brought 15 millenniiums earlier from New England and Canada continually wash out of the bluffs, roll onto the beach, and in less than 100 years are partly underwater or completely so as rising sea level claims more and more of the retreating shore. The really big ones move hardly an inch or more over time while the sea overruns them. The biggest ones are shown on hydrological charts created by the Department of the Interior and they serve as important navigation points for boaters.

    The north shore beaches lining the Peconic Estuary, a series of bays beginning on the west where the Peconic River runs into the estuary and endng on the east with Block Island Sound are quite different from the ocean beaches. They are much stonier and have a lot more shells, different ones that you find on ocean beaches. The tides and storms drive the larger materials back and forth in a never-ending process called “sorting” by geologists. The sediments are sorted according to size and weight. Sand is lighter than gravel and gravel is lighter than stones and stones are lighter than rocks and so on. There are glacial erractics, as well, here and there along north shore shorelines. Drive over the Route 114 bridge from the Village of Sag Harbor into the Village of North Haven and look to the northeast at ebb tide. Sag Harbor Bay’s northwest side is littered with glacial erratics. They haven’t moved an inch in ages.

    Continue on to Long Beach Road around the corner of Route 114 and you will find perhaps the best hydraulically sorted beach on the South Fork, situated between Noyac Bay and Sag Harbor Cove. On any given day, there are at least four different zones running the length of the beach from North Haven into Noyac. At the top is fine sand and some dried seaweed left by storm and moon tides. A little farther down is a layer of empty slipper shells and jingle shells, purplish and yellow. Gravel also makes up this layer, lying beneath the shells because of its greater density. Then comes a layer of finely polished stones, mostly white quartz, followed by a layer of larger stones, or rocks, also well polished but much heavier than the stones in the more landward layer.

    You will also find another mode of transportation from sea to shore ongoing among these larger rocks. Rockweeds, Sputnik weed, and other algae attached by their holdfasts to rocks that are among the largest and most seaward. The buoyancy of the attached seaweed makes these rocks a little lighter and more mobile than those without seaweed and so they move closer to shore with each large wave. One gets the notion that the seabed is continually purging itself of rocky sediments.

    The north side of Orient Point, Fishers Island, Gull Island, and Plum Island — all formed by the glacier that created the Harbor Hill moraine that runs along the north shore of Long Island out into the ocean — also have stony beaches that show a similar horizontal zonation from seabed to upper shore to that on Long Beach.

    Some South Fork shores show a zonation of sands. White quartz sands are the most common, while garnet sands often form red wrack lines high up on the beach along with iron, or magnetite sands, which are blackish. One responds to a horseshoe magnet, the other doesn’t. Such differential sanding is common along Napeague Harbor’s shoreline, but also occurs on all the shores and points of the Peconics, as well as on some upper ocean beaches.

    While Lion’s Head Rock and the other massive boulders will likely last until the end of earth as we know it, semidiurnal tides and storm-driven seas are eternally grinding and grinding silicate against silicate against silicate, rock against stone against gravel against sand grains along our marine shores in a different kind of “food chain,” one that creates smaller and smaller particles from larger ones.

    What is the end point? That’s what I would most like to know. After the wind takes over, do the finer and finer sands eventually become atmospheric dust, which ultimately reduces to single and separate molecules, maybe even individual atoms? Think about it.

    One need not fret over it, however. The earth is not shrinking; it is growing larger. It loses far less material to space than it receives from it in the form of asteroids, meteors, and meteorites. The earth is slowly becoming obese.