We are in the midst of a drought and there is nothing worse for those early leavers and early bloomers who bet on a premature spring, but not on the dry weather. In 1986 during an extended dry period a wildfire caught hold of Hither Woods in Montauk and burned more than half of it. In 1995 the Westhampton Pine Barrens exploded from too little precipitation and now in 2012 a warm, dry winter and drier, warmer spring has sparked another major forest fire, north and east of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton.

    So it was with some foreboding that the four of us, Joanne and Michael Pateman, Vicki Bustamante, and I, entered the 172 acres of the Culloden Point Nature Preserve on Saturday, wondering if all the wetlands had turned to desert wadis, and the trees and wildflowers had been nipped in the bud. We were pleasantly surprised. Culloden was just as grand as in previous springs, maybe even a little grander. The vernal ponds contained water, the stream to Block Island Sound was still running, and the trees and wildflowers were way ahead of schedule.

    Two hundred and thirty years ago, after the British frigate Culloden ran aground, the sailors left the floundering ship and made their way up the steep bluff face to the top with the help of a breeches buoy. One hundred and seventy-three years ago, the Amistad and its 400 mutinous African slaves were rescued in the vicinity by the U.S. brig Washington. One hundred years ago, Culloden Point was grazing land and there was just one shack to reflect its residential status. The only trees were those such as the tupelos, which grew at the edges of the wetlands. Prairie grasses — little bluestem, big bluestem, and Indian nutgrass — dominated the landscape and, I imagine, there were a goodly number of rare flowers scattered among them, such as the sandplain gerardia, Agalinis acuta, and the New York State rare bushy frostweed, two species that defined the early days of Montauk.

    There are several trails, two of which loop down to the seashore, one on the east side, one on the west side. They wind through mature hardwoods most of the way, three species of hickories, four species of oaks, two different shads, black cherry, American beech, sassafras, American holly, red maple, cockspur hawthorn, and several more, but not a single dogwood. The shadblows were beginning to bloom white, which they do when the shad run up the Hudson River to spawn. The red maples were filled with blossoms as red as could be.

    We could find only a single conifer among the broad-leafed trees, a scrunchy red cedar about as tall as we were and half-green, half-brown. Montauk has very few native conifers. Austrian pines and Japanese black pines were widely planted. There are two tall larches on a lawn next to the Montauk Manor, and only a few native red cedars and pitch pines. The pitch pines, the mainstay of Long Island’s Central Pine Barrens, had a tough time getting across the Napeague isthmus. They are only plentiful at Montauk’s western edge, just east of the Walking Dunes in Hither Woods.

    The birds were out and singing Saturday afternoon. Vicki had her ears and binoculars at the ready, even though we were more interested in the flora than the fauna, she picked them out one by one, either by their calls, their plumage, their behavior, or their flight pattern — palm warbler, yellow warbler, tufted titmouse, cardinal, chickadee, crow, blue jay, white-throated sparrow, red-tailed hawk, turkey, and three species of woodpecker, red-bellied, flicker, and yellow-bellied sapsucker, the rarest of the lot.

    As we approached the beach on a downhill leg of the east trail, the trail edges were carpeted with a variety of blooming wild flowers, including wood anemones, wild strawberries, and cinq­uefoil. A few ferns were popping up with fiddleheads, Pennsylvania sedge was flowering, skunk cabbage had already flowered and its leaves were lush and almost as big as elephant ears.

    Joanne Pateman was researching edible wild plants and the fruits they produce and we found a plethora of them, but all fruitless at this early stage in the growing season. Many of the edible ones were invasive such as the wineberry from Asia, garlic mustard from Europe, Japanese barberry, and wild garlic, but most were native — black cherry, huckleberry, lowbush blueberry, highbush blueberry, skunk cabbage, cat-tail, and several nut producers, hickories, beeches, and oaks. The Native Americans preferred the acorns of white oaks to those of black and scarlet oaks. Shagbark hickory nuts were also chosen over those from the other two hickories. Perhaps that is why we could find only one shagbark hickory tree but lots and lots of the others.

     While walking in Culloden from March to November, one has to be on guard. It is one of the tickiest places on Long Island. All three species that bite us and give us diseases are resident here. I took a towel along with me to swipe some of the grasses along the main trail emanating from Flamingo Avenue. Thirty seconds of contact with the grassy edge produced more than 10 ticks. Lone star ticks, the newest kids on the block, with each mature female sporting a bright white spot on her back, outnumbered the deer (or black-legged) ticks three to one. So early in the season, there were only a few spots along the trails with tall grasses, leftovers from last year, so our walk was mostly tickless.

    The 172 acres of town-owned land in the nature preserve were given to East Hampton as part of the Culloden Point subdivision, which was finalized by the East Hampton Town Planning Board in the early 1990s. It was a beautiful afternoon and a beautiful walk, except for one jarring insult, as obvious as the nose on one’s face. About a third of the nature preserve has been destroyed by dirt bikes and A.T.V.s. These off-road vehicular activities produced many deeply rutted trails — not part of the trail system that the East Hampton Trails Society and East Hampton Natural Resources Department worked out cooperatively. These new trails and their gullies and moguls have exposed the roots of trees and destroyed the groundcover in many spots.

    Otherwise, Culloden is doing well.

   The last “Nature Notes” column talked about Montauk’s ancient hardwood forest, the Point Woods. In East Hampton Town there are two other forests dominated by broad-leaved deciduous trees that have hardly been cut over and have been equally impressive during settler, colonial, and modern times.

    They are the woods north of Cedar Street around the Northwest’s Old Orchard Lane and Old Northwest Road in East Hampton and, in Amagansett, the Stony Hill Woods between Accabonac Road and Old Stone Highway on the west and east, and Red Dirt Road and Stony Hill Road on the north and south. The former is rooted in outwash soils left by the last ice sheet, the latter in morainal soils from that ice sheet. The former is quite small, well under 50 acres, the latter quite large, over 500 acres. The former is well developed in terms of subdivisions, houses, and buildable lots, the latter is only slightly developed.

    The Stony Hill forest is unique as far as Long Island’s East End forests are concerned. It is not only rich in species of trees, but it is a mature forest in terms of forest ecology with many venerable beeches, oaks, hickories, sassafras, red maples, tupelos, and black birches, and a holly here and there, some of which are more than 200 years old. It is also well populated with box turtles, yellow-spotted salamanders, spadefoot toads, and a variety of mammals, including deer, raccoons, foxes, long-tailed weasels, gray squirrels, chipmunks, moles, several different mice, and two shrew species.

    Other than the fact that the forest is longstanding and diverse, its next most obvious feature is its diverse avifauna. Just about every songbird species, including warblers, vireos, thrushes, woodpeckers, grosbeaks, and sparrows that breed on Long Island, breed in the Stony Hill Woods. In a 1984 bird breeding survey conducted by East Hampton’s Natural Resources Department throughout the town, the Stony Hill Woods came out number one!

    Unusual breeding birds for Long Island, such as the chuck-will’s-widow, the rose-breasted grosbeak, and the red-bellied woodpecker, will often pick these woods in which to nest. Since wild turkeys were reintroduced in 1991, these woods have become a favorite feeding area for this species, one of the largest American birds, which forages on acorns, beechnuts, and other fruit, as well as insects and ticks.

    It’s one of the very few spots on Long Island where a pileated woodpecker can occasionally be found, according to the observations of John de Cuevas, an amateur naturalist and avid birder who has lived in these woods for many years.

    Its glaciated surface is indented with kettle holes here and there. A few hold water permanently. Most are vernal; they are wet in the spring more often than not. Here is where the yellow-spotted salamanders, Fowler’s toads, spring peepers, gray tree frogs, and spadefoot toads breed after rains fill the depressions.

    Stony Hill Woods sits on perhaps the purest groundwater reserves on all of Long Island. For thousands of years the roots of trees and shrubs have removed impurities found in rainwater as it percolates down into the deep soils. There is nothing quite like a mature forest with an undisturbed litter layer and organic topsoil to purify water. It is certainly one of the reasons why the Suffolk County Water Authority chose to develop one of its drinking water well fields south of Red Dirt Road and east of Accabonac Road. This well field pumps exceedingly pure water to supply most of the water needs of Springs to the north and as much as half of the water needs of Montauk to the east. The Water Authority doesn’t install wells just anywhere, they install them in large watersheds that are mostly undeveloped and promise to stay that way in perpetuity.

    Maybe that is also one of the reasons why the Montaukett Indians camped here, they and the other Native Americans knew not just the ways of fish, fowl, and flora, but were also hydrologists of a sort, even though they didn’t have the high-tech water quality testing devices in use today. I’m not sure how they knew pure water from tainted water. On the other hand, they didn’t muck up the water the way we have, so before white man came to these shores, there was very little in the way of unpotable fresh water to sully one’s circulatory system.

    That may be why the Montauketts, who thought so highly of these woods that they picked at least one American beech in them to produce stick drawings on, termed “arborglyphs” or “dendroglyphs” by anthropologists. In a recent publication by Laurie Billadello, corresponding secretary of the Suffolk County Archaeological Association, she describes one of the Stony Hill Woods dendroglyphs on a living beech that has a 1908 date inscription. According to Alexis Alvey, a landscape specialist and certified arborist, this tree, locally known as the Signature Tree, is 32 inches in diameter. Leighton Blue Sky, director and tribal consultant of the Matouwac Research Center, Montauk Indian Nation, makes a very strong case for protecting this tree and any others like it, not just protecting it as they do on New York City sidewalks with a little fence five feet in diameter around a big shade tree, but without a fence and a very sizable not-to-be disturbed space around it.

    Which gets us back to saving not just the Signature Tree, but the other long-lived trees around it and all of those remaining in the Stony Hill Woods, not just the dendroglyph ones, but all of them. You may not be aware that rainwater in this day and age is not pure. It contains nitrates, other chemical molecules, and heavy metals including mercury. In our hemisphere weather systems move from west to east, so much of our rainwater originates in China and India, two of the top five polluters of our atmosphere. Large trees like those in the Stony Hill Woods are purifying the water.

    East Hampton purchased a lot of open space before and after the community preservation fund came into being, but in the Stony Hill Woods thus far the town has done very little. It was the de Cuevas family and the Peconic Land Trust that put much of the land, more than 250 acres of the woods, aside permanently. There are still buildable parcels within the area to put into permanent open space not only for the benefit of future water quality but for the ecology of the area, the flora and fauna, and also out of respect for the Montauketts and other Amerindians who knew these woods better than we do. There may not be a single local Indian site — camp, kitchen midden, cemetery, or what have you — that hasn’t already suffered insult and injury, including intrusions by bulldozers and other heavy equipment.

    To make one last point, the Central Pine Barrens of Suffolk County were preserved after the fact, but thank God they were. According to the 2011 water quality records for the Suffolk County Water Authority’s wells in that area, the average nitrate level is 3.29 parts per million, more than one-third the so-called safe drinking water level of 10 parts per million. Let’s face it, people have different sensitivities to such chemicals. That nitrate amount may harm people who ingest it, especially pregnant woman and infants. It also ultimately runs underground to the sea, where it mucks up the seawater, killing eelgrass and causing poisonous blooms of single-celled algae that color the water brown, red, or purple.

    A simple prayer: Thou shalt not despoil that land, but thou shall save it forevermore.

    Jean Dodds, secretary of the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt, anxiously hoped the moon would cooperate as two dozen hikers gathered in the parking lot of the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton Friday for the monthly full moon hike she led.

    The trail was said to be easy and flat, with a few bumps and vines the only obstacles on the walk through the 39-acre Vineyard Field in the Greenbelt preserve. The open field area, formerly a vineyard, is surrounded by oak woods and is part of a greenbelt that runs from Sagg Pond and Sagg Swamp in Saga­ponack all the way north to Sag Harbor.

    The first full moon in April was named the Fish Moon by coastal Native American tribes, according to Ms. Dodds, because it coincided with the time that fish, especially alewives, swam upstream to spawn. The walk brought sounds of a woodcock, and Ms. Dodds had walkers visualize life in the ponds passed on the hike, since they could not be seen until the large, orange-pink moon rose above the trees. Two of the four small, unnamed ponds in the field were built by farmers for irrigation, Ms. Dodd explained. One was dug in the 1940s and the other in the 1980s. The ponds are home to many birds, reptiles, and mammals, including the Eastern tiger salamander, an endangered species.

    “We are trying to bring back the alewives,” said Ms. Dodds. This project is one of the goals of the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt, in addition to attending to the restoration of grasslands that have been negatively impacted by invasive species, including autumn olive, Japanese knotweed, garlic mustard, mugwort, mile-a-minute vine, and purple loosestrife. The invasive plant species have blocked the existing public trail, and they threaten the rare old-field ecosystem, which comprises ponds, wetlands, wildflowers, and native grasslands, according to Eric Salzman, a member of the South Fork Natural History Museum’s board of directors. Re­storation of the grasslands benefits rare and endangered native plants, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, as well as butterflies, bees, dragonflies, damselflies, and many species of meadow-loving birds.

    When the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt recognized that restoration was beyond the scope of volunteer efforts, the organization applied for grants and received funding from many private and public sources. With this money, autumn olives spread across 10 acres were removed by a professional land clearing company in late 2006. Twenty more acres with thick autumn olive stands were cleared in 2007 and early 2008. Concurrently, volunteers continue to remove, by hand, Japanese knotweed, garlic mustard, and other invasives.

    Benefits to the public include new trailheads, pointed out by the hike leader, that are accessible from the field behind the museum, such as a six-mile trail that leads hikers to the ocean in Sagaponack. Ms. Dodds also pointed out different stars, planets, and constellations before the hike ended with hot cider, cake, and cookies served on a tailgate in the moonshine.

   Some of you may remember when Camp Hero was still in possession of the federal government and when President Ronald Reagan tried to sell it to the highest bidder. The Concerned Citizens of Montauk showed up in force at the bidding site in New York City and put the kibosh on the sale. Simultaneously, Tony Bullock was working with Senator Moynahan’s office to have it become public land. And it did!

    More than 10 years before that triumph, Hilda Lindley and C.C.O.M. talked Suffolk County into buying the land across the street, now known as Theodore Roosevelt County Park. In the early 1990s while Mr. Bullock was East Hampton Town supervisor, New York State purchased a large chunk of undeveloped moorlands next door to Camp Hero known as the Sanctuary, formerly in the hands of mob interests, and another 300-plus acres of open space was added to the growing Montauk parklands between Lake Montauk and Montauk Point.

    Aside from an attempt by the state to later convert a large part of Camp Hero’s undeveloped land and, presumably, some of the Sanctuary, into a golf course, the land has remained in its natural state, bounded on the south side by Old Montauk Highway and the ocean and on the north side by Montauk Point State Parkway.

    Such acquisition would have greatly pleased Norman Taylor, who studied the flora of Montauk in the early part of the 20th century and published his findings in a work put out in 1923 by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, “The Vegetation of Montauk: A Study of Grassland and Forest.” The “forest” referred to in the title was the only one in Montauk at that time, as the rest of Montauk was still grazing land. It was known as “the Point Woods” and consisted of the western part of Camp Hero and most of the Sanctuary. He would also be pleased to know that almost 80 years later the Point Woods is largely intact, many of the trees are well over a century old, as big around as a 55-gallon drum, and as tall as the South Fork’s only high-rise building, situated in downtown Montauk at the edge of Fort Pond, the South Fork’s biggest freshwater body.

    On Friday I had the pleasure of visiting that wonderful mishmash of upland and swamp forest with Andrew Geller of Queens College and the Long Island Botanical Society and Vicki Bustamante for the first time in more than 10 years. Like the late Norman Taylor, Dr. Geller is, perhaps, the living botanist most familiar with Long Island’s diverse flora and has described it in copious scientific works. He wanted to see the only spot on Long Island where one of Long Island’s premier naturalists had described American beech and red maple with two very different ecological niches, one dry, one wet, thriving shoulder to shoulder, strange bedfellows as it were. He was pleasantly rewarded, as we all were.

    The Point Woods is not only a monument to Long Island’s botanical riches, it is a wonderful grouping of several microhabitats — vernal ponds, swamps, fens, streams, hillocks, tall tree assemblages, shrubby woods, and ferny glades. It is also dotted with numerous boulders, glacial erratics, that have remained in place in the very same spots where they were dropped by the retreating and melting glacier some 15,000 years or more ago, their bases surrounded by morainal soils. They add a fourth botanical dimension to the woods, as they are largely covered with lichens of many different kinds, enjoying the freshest and most unpolluted air on Long Island, 100 miles distant from the city. Lichens don’t fare well in urban and industrial environments.

    This lush potpourri of microhabitats is just the place for state-designated rare blue-spotted and four-toed salamanders, spotted turtles, ornate butterflies, and unusual breeding birds in season. It is a good place for breeding woodcocks and the last place on the South Fork where in 1992 while marking the Sanctuary wetlands I flushed a ruffed grouse. We saw and heard several yellow warblers, observed a brown creeper creeping upward on a large tupelo, and encountered several other bird species, as well.

    As South Fork forests go, the Point Woods is as diverse as the Stony Hill woods in Amagansett. It has many of the same trees, including black birch, tupelo, mockernut and pignut hickories, American beech, eastern cottonwood, smooth and Canada shads, Bebbs willow, pussy willow, red maple, juniper, American holly, two species of hawthorn, witch-hazel, alternate-leaved dogwood, black cherry, elderberry, hop hornbeam, and many oaks — black, scarlet, white, and two species of red oaks, the northern and the southern. Montauk may be the only place on Long Island where the last-named species has gained a foothold. Except for the very occasional eastern red cedar at the edges, the only evergreens present were the hollies and mountain laurels.

    The understory species include mountain laurel, highbush blueberry, spicebush, sweet pepperbush, winterberry holly, alder, chokeberry, bayberry, and sumacs. You would have to crawl on your knees for miles and miles to find a single huckleberry or a single lowbush blueberry, so common in most other Long Island woods including those on the South Fork. The hollies and mountain laurels were fully green and vigorous in aspect.

    A variety of mosses cover much of the ground, especially where it is wet and at the edges of small streams. The rare-to-Long Island aquatic moss, fontinalis, formed patches of long “green hair” flowing with the current in part of the stream. There isn’t a tree trunk without patches of lichens in many different hues and textures. The trails, in part maintained by the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society, meander through the myriad of habitats, passing over streams and around the wettest areas. The swales are dotted with lush skunk cabbages, almost all of which had already bloomed. Sedges, rushes, and other wetland plants were just starting to poke up their culms and stems.

    The only lanais were native and few and far between — fox grape and poison ivy. What really pleased us was the fact that, while the rest of Montauk is host to hordes of invasive weedy plants, there were very few littering the Point Woods. We found some phragmites, some privet, some honeysuckle, and a few other exotics in a few small disturbed sites, but no bittersweet, no Japanese knotweed, no mugwort, no boxwood.

    At the end of our two-hour field trip we were happy to know that the Point Woods had not been turned into a golf course and never will be, and that, with a few additions, it is probably very much like it was when seen through the eyes of Norman Taylor.

   Are the striped bass here or not? The rumor mill is generating excitment and perhaps a few stretched truths.

    Surfcasting rods are appearing on roof racks. People who would normally drive Montauk Highway when traveling to and fro from Montauk are taking the Old Highway instead to keep eyes peeled for birds working.

    Yes, it’s an early spring, and yes, striped bass have been caught up west, but, as of Monday, the beach has been quiet so far in Montauk. East Hampton is another story.

    Atilla Ozturk of Montauk said he took a look at Georgica Beach in East Hampton a couple of days ago. “I saw a bunch of people. They were leaving when I got there. There was one guy left. He was hooked into a fish, but lost it in the rocks. Then he was struggling with another one. He said he had been catching them for about a week.” The stripers were “rats,” that is, small, the size fishermen expect to see first.

    Preseason telltales also include gannets and ospreys. Both birds are feeding, and if the blooming of daffodils, cherry trees, and forsythia is any indication, alewives should be approaching their natal waters before their usual late-April appearance.

    Hank Altenkirk, a fisherman and custom rod builder from Hampton Bays, said he’d heard that anglers had been catching stripers from the 105 bridge in Riverhead. “They’ll be in the creeks first. It’s still early, but they’re popping up,” or so fishermen were telling him. “All fishermen are liars except you and me, and I’m not so sure about you,” he said on Monday.

    Altenkich continues the family rod-building tradition. He said he had just shipped 28 custom rods to Curacao, and got a message from a Moroccan fly fisherman he’d sold a fly rod to at a Miami trade show. The man bragged about a 220-pound marlin he’d caught on a 20-pound tipit using the Altenkirch fly rod.

    Fred Kalkstein, an organizer of the annual Montauk SurfMasters bass tournament, reported on Monday that Paul Pira caught nine bass one night three weeks ago at Moriches. Kalkstein said the SurfMasters annual Spring Fling tournament has been moved up on account of what looks to be a premature season. Fishing will commence on the stroke after the stroke of midnight on May 1 and end on Sept. 30.

    The catch-and-keep season for striped bass begins on April 15. New York’s annual summer flounder (fluke) season will run from May 1 to Sept. 30 and this season should be a lot more productive than last. Four fluke may be caught and kept per day, and the really good part is the minimum size limit, 19.5 inches.

    The search for winter flounder began with the opening of the season on Sunday. Ken Morse of the Tight Lines shop in Sag Harbor said he had one angler walk through his shop door on Sunday with a couple of flatties. “And, they’re starting to catch bass in the creeks,” he said of the reports he’d been getting. “Fishermen tend to embellish on occasion, but of course my customers don’t.”

    Tight Lines is open five days a week, closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 9 a.m to 5 p.m. during the week, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the weekends. “It’s looking better this year. We’ve had a couple of extra months, March and April, to do business.”

   What motivates us, what motivates nature? The DNA and the enzymes and hormones it provides the blueprints for are a driving force, of course, but then, too, there are the stimuli, of which there are many different kinds varying in strength depending upon our ability to sense them. Our senses receive these stimuli and cause us to do this or that, think this or that. There isn’t a single organism, one-celled or multicelled, including the members of the plant kingdom, that doesn’t receive and respond to stimuli. One doesn’t have to have a nervous system to react to stimuli. Even the simplest of life forms — viruses, viroids, and those proteinoids that cause mad cow disease exhibit cause and effect behaviors that govern their actions inside their hosts.

    The modern human is said to have free will, he or she is able to react differentially to stimuli by virtue of thought. I have an hour to spare. Do I want to watch “American Idol” tonight or would I rather read Newsday? On the other hand, most philosophers and psychologists don’t attribute free will to other life forms, so-called infrahumans and certainly not to plants, which lack nervous systems. In these organisms the automatic response to certain stimuli can make or break a wild population. Yes, the passenger pigeon that once flourished over half of America but became extinct in the first years of the 20th century was heavily shot for food, but its downfall was ultimately tied to the weather (and possibly disease), it migrated each spring according to the usual climate cues, but in the late 1800s got decimated by unscheduled spring storms on the way north.

    Temperature, day length, gravity, photoperiod, ultraviolet light, sound, atmospheric pressure, wind, moisture, scent, and tastiness are just some of the many stimuli that drive nature and, for that matter, many of us humans, when we are running on automatic and not according to ratiocination. In some organisms, such as in birds, photoperiod is dominant and migration is timed to it; but it is also affected by temperature. Birds return north earlier or later each spring depending upon the temperature. This spring they are arriving earlier, as much as two weeks earlier. Among them was a yellow warbler that Vicki Bustamante heard singing and then spotted near Big Fresh Pond on Friday.

    The flowering and leafing of higher plants and the parasitic insects that hatch out to take advantage of it are governed by a combination of daylight and temperature and the amount of daylight, so-called temperature-light days. Because it has been a warm winter and, thus far, a warm spring, forsythias, andromedas, daffodils, dandelions, and a host of other plants are all blooming much earlier than usual. If we are hit by a severe cold snap, there could be hell to pay. Plants would suffer and their pollinators would suffer.

    But the flip side would be fewer leaf and flower-eating insects in the next generation. Fortunately, in most cases, the conservative nature of the genomes of organisms saves them from the occasional catastrophe and eventual extinction. And most plants have backup systems. They can lose their flowers or leaves in a freeze or storm, and reflower or releaf once it turns warm again.

    It is mind-boggling how members of single species and its conservative genetic code can exhibit the same exact behavior over a wide area without intercommunication. For example, the forsythias on the North and South Forks of Long Island flowered practically on the same day. The Eurasian earthworm Lumbricius terrestris, described by Linnaeus more than 250 years ago, comes out of the ground after a long winter for the first time come spring on the same day, whether it resides in Southampton, East Hampton, or Shelter Island. One sees the little mounds a half-inch high and an inch in diameter composed of semi-digested dirt balls scattered side by side over a wide area as also was observable on that same Friday. But soil moisture, not only temperature, governs the emergence of earthworms, so their emergences here and there are somewhat staggered according to the level of soil moisture. Rain brings them up all at once and that is why they are called “rain worms” in most of Europe.

    One such remarkable emergence of a burrowing insect was observed on Friday in several widely separated locations in the hamlet of North Sea in Southampton Town on Friday. It was a new experience for me, as I’m better versed in plants, birds, fishes, reptiles, and amphibians than insects. While Vicki and I were scouring the countryside for emergent plants and new avian arrivals, we came upon a most curious situation — hundreds of tiny holes in sandy open spots no bigger around than a Ticonderoga pencil. Around each hole was a small volcano cone of fresh yellowish sandy soil that sharply contrasted with the bleached-white soil separating each mound.

    We paused awhile and looked a bit more closely, and a brownish bee-like organism came out of one of the holes, while another buzzed around our heads.

     As far as the eye could see, in several different spots there was nothing but bare ground with hundreds of little yellow domes, a burrow in the center of each. Vicki took a few close-up photos and sent them to Daniel Gilrein, the entomologist at the Cornell Cooperative Extension center in Riverhead. It’s most likely the burrowing bee, Colletes inequalis, was his reply. Dan had been receiving a lot of reports of the same holes (and their inhabitants) from several different eastern Long Island spots. Interestingly, these bees furnish their burrows with maple tree pollen. It makes sense, in the areas we saw them in great numbers, there were lots of red maples in flower.

    In my 60-plus years of observing nature on eastern Long Island, I had never seen anything like it. What caused them to open their burrows? Was it the odor from the early flowering maples? I believe so.

   Think of the cold air that blew into town this week as a crystal clear lens provided for viewing the night sky, especially on Monday in Montauk, where there is virtually no ground light to interfere.

    The crescent moon was bright enough to make you squint, and Venus just below and to the right nearly so. Jupiter hung directly below Venus and if one were fortunate to have a telescope or even powerful binoculars, its moons would have been visible. On Tuesday night Venus was at its farthest point from the sun.

    On Sunday, April 1, Venus will be paired with Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters, a cluster of stars that in ancient time marked the start of the fishing and farming season. As it happens, April 1 marks the start of the freshwater fishing season in New York, as well as the season for winter flounder in marine waters.

    East Hampton has no trout, but the Southampton Town Trustees stock several water bodies including Wildwood Lake, a beautiful place southwest of the Riverhead traffic circle toward East Moriches. Alcott Pond in East Quogue, and Beaver Dam near the Quogue-Westhampton Beach border are stocked, as well as Big Fresh Pond and Trout Pond.

    Would-be trout fishermen who are not residents of Southampton must hire a resident guide, who can be contacted through the trustees’ office. “People from outside Southampton Town, non-residents, whether from Europe or New Jersey, need a resident guide,” Fred Havermeyer, a trustee, said on Tuesday.

    As for winter flounder, Nat Miller, a bayman and East Hampton Town Trustee, said there was no early showing — no word that the prized flatfish had come out of the mud — despite the unseasonably warm weather prior to this week’s colder snap. “Bunkers in the bay, seals around. It was so nice last week, flowers, and now there’s frost warning this week.”

    Although he said he’d already driven his trap stakes, the net will not likely be hung until about May 1. “Jumping the gun is jumping the gun. If you start early you’re not going to catch much and get the nets dirty for when the fish do arrive.”

    Not so long ago, baymen including the late Francis Lester set fykes (small underwater fish traps) in Lake Montauk early and could tell you exactly when the flounder rose from their winter slumber. No one has fished fykes there in years.

    East Hampton Town does have black bass of the largemouth and smallmouth varieties. Anglers may target them now — up until the Friday before the third Saturday in June — but catch-and-release only and using only artificial lures. The regular freshwater bass season begins on the third Saturday in June and runs until Nov. 30. Bait can be used to catch bass with a minimum size of 12 inches. This year, the bag limit will be five per day.

   Just when you thought you had nature by the handle, here comes one of the most bizarre creatures yet, one you had no idea of and one that is found in less than a third of the field guides and other books dealing with insects and lepidopterans, in particular, moths.

    It was two weeks ago when I was walking along the Long Beach parking lot road in Noyac when Vicki Bustamante pointed to something in the dune area between Long Beach Road and the parking lot. Not good, she said.

    She was pointing toward a low eastern red cedar that appeared to be festooned with strange fruit like nothing I had ever witnessed. They looked like inverted pinecones. “Bagworms,” she said. (Vicki has a degree in horticulture and has worked in the local landscaping field for more than two and a half decades — she is familiar with insect pests.)

    A week later I showed the arborist Bill Miller one that I had plucked on the way to the Long Island Botanical Society in Muttontown. “Bagworm,” he said without hesitation. He remembers seeing them in Ohio, where he grew up and went to college, but only once here, about two years ago, a large number of them in the junipers that grow along the south side of Bridgehampton’s Long Island Rail Road station. Vicki had remembered them from Maryland.

    The books say that they are native to eastern America, but I don’t remember them when growing up on the North Fork or seeing them on the South Fork in the almost 32 years I’ve lived here since moving back to the East Coast from Oregon.

    There is more than one kind of bagworm moth, but the one across the street from my house was the evergreen or juniper bagworm moth, Thyridopteryx ephemeraefomis. It has one of the most peculiar life cycles of all insects. As in the gypsy moth species, only males fly; females are sedentary. But while gypsy moth females are fully winged and legged, the female juniper bagworm has neither wings nor legs. She spends her entire short life in the pinecone-like cocoon, the “bag,” once she is a full-grown caterpillar and pupates in the early fall. She stays and dies before her eggs hatch in the spring and her little ones leave the bag.

    This kind of adult life and the fact that the adult female has no appendages is not the most peculiar aspect of the species. As soon as the larvae crawl out of the bag, called the “case” in other species when it doesn’t resemble a fruit, they begin feeding. As they feed they become covered with bits of vegetation from their host foliage. They can feed on any number of hosts, but prefer junipers or arborvitae, where available. They crawl around becoming more and more camouflaged under a coat of needles and the sticky silk they manufacture and secrete. Eventually you don’t see the caterpillar at all, only the bag. In the case of this species, the bag hangs down in the fashion of a white pinecone.

    A male and a female caterpillar will pupate, then mate inside the one bag, itself a very tricky process. After emergence from the pupae (inside the bag), mating takes place and only the male emerges from the bag, leaving behind the female and the eggs she lays.

    On Monday many of the bags were already in shreds, an indication that the larvae were leaving them or that they were attacked by some kind of predator, perhaps birds. The ones I was studying were confined to the north side of Long Beach Road. Across the street there were many, many evergreens. Not a single one was infested.

     Ever since the last cankerworm infestation of the middle part of the last decade and the very heavy gypsy moth caterpillar infestation of the turn of the century, I have been assiduously checking for both species. This fall and winter there were very few male cankerworm moths flying, and in the miles and miles of woods I have traveled in both Southampton and East Hampton I have come upon very few patches of gypsy moth eggs on the trunks and limbs of trees, but at the same time lots and lots of dead trees, particularly white oaks, reminders of those two back-to-back infestations.

    Now, I wonder, are we in for an evergreen bagworm infestation? It only takes a few bags to start an epidemic. Keep an eye out.

    Spring, the vernal equinox, the season of rebirth, sprang in the early morning hours on Tuesday with its promise that all living things, including fish, will return for another go-round.

    Every culture has celebrated the equinox — when the center of the sun is on the same plane as the earth’s equator — in one way or another, even in Amagansett. One such annual fete took place in the home of Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett. According to Bennett, the sol­emn ceremony went like this:

    “Well, I’ve really lost it this time. At 1:14 a.m. this morning with the help of some leftover St. Pat’s whiskey, I stood an egg on end! Then I tried standing a broom on end (which is something else one can do when all things are in balance and equal). Well, the egg stood, but I have to work on the broom. So now I’m hung over to beat the band, and for the third year in a row I stood an egg on end on the vernal equinox (see YouTube, ‘Harvey Bennett the Tackle Shop’). Happy spring, everyone.”

    This week, spring things included a whale cruising less than a mile offshore of Ditch Plain in Montauk.

    Alewives apparently have not gotten the message, at least east of Southampton. They have been seen making their spawning runs up various streams there, and the watch is on at Ligonee Creek in Sag Harbor. The brook, part of the Long Pond Greenbelt, has been cleared of debris with the help of the Southampton Town Trustees.

    “A lot died last year trying to get up there. It was treacherous. The Peconic Estuary Program people are studying how to improve the access,” said Larry Penny, East Hampton’s former director of natural resources. So far no scales or dead bodies have been seen along the creek banks (a natural occurrence), Penny said. He added that East Hampton’s spawning tributaries were in bad need of improvement.

    The creek flows into Upper Sag Harbor Cove, always a likely spot for striped bass to show up early. These are thought to be resident bass that start moving around this time of year — although we must remember that “this time of year” has come early in 2012, temperature-wise.

    Howard Reisman of North Sea has reported seeing ospreys and herons on the hunt, a sure sign that alewives have arrived. Alewives and other herring-type fish normally time their arrival for the second or third week of April.

    Given the unseasonable season, “there should be bass all over the place. The water temperature never dropped. The harbors never froze. I never had daffodils in February before. Maybe you could find bass in Eel Pond on Napeague, where the water warms up real quick,” Bennett suggested.

    Those who can’t wait to wet a hook might try fishing for pickerel in Scoy Pond in the Grace Estate. A little spoon or snapper lure should work. Pickerel get as big as three pounds and are known to jump and tail walk like mini sailfish. Otherwise, the start of the winter flounder season is only 10 days away, on April 1.

    Here are the seasons, minimum size, and bag limits published by the State Department of Environmental Conservation for 2012:

    The summer flounder (fluke) season will run from May 1 to Sept. 30. Three fish at 20.5 inches may be kept per day.

    Blackfish, four at 16 inches, from Oct. 8 to Dec. 4.

    Bluefish, no minimum size for the first 10, then 12 inches for the next 5 for a total of 15 per day.

    Weakfish, 16 inches, one per day, year round.

    Cod, 22 inches, 10 per day (more on a charter or party boat), year round.

    Pollock, 19 inches, no bag limit, year round.

    Striped bass, 28 inches, one per day for most anglers, two per day for those fishing on charter or party boats, from April 15 to Dec. 15.

    The first half of the porgy season will begin on June 13 and run to Oct. 1. For those fishing from for-hire boats, 10 may be caught and kept per day if they are at least 11 inches long. From Sept. 7 to Oct. 11, up to 40 porgies may be caught per day. Private boaters may keep 10 porgies at 10.5 inches from May 24 to Sept. 6.

    Blue crabs — yum! — will have to be four-and-a-half inches across the carapace. Fifty per day may be caught, year round.

   On Monday evening after a record high temperature for March 12 I went out at night to listen for spring peepers. Between 8:30 and 10, I visited 11 known peeper breeding sites and heard not a single peep. The sites were watery, but apparently not watery enough. Peepers and other frogs and toads that breed in water, as do all of ours on Long Island and all but one of our salamander species, generally don’t move from the ground until there’s a rain, and it hasn’t rained sufficiently for at least two weeks now.

    However, there are many other signs of an early spring to be found. By this date just about everyone has witnessed flowering crocuses and daffodils. A rather rare Asiatic species of bush honeysuckle, Lonicera smithsonii, with leathery leaves and pale white flowers, has been blooming since the last days of February in North Sea and Noyac. The diminutive European mustard with tiny white flowers has been blooming in spots along Noyac Road for a few days now. I would not be surprised to see a dandelion pop out in someone’s lawn before the week is done.

    Alewives have been leaving the sea and swimming up into North Sea’s Big Fresh Pond since Feb. 25. The very early alewife run raised the question, would the osprey’s favorite food item hasten an early osprey return, as well? Howard Reisman lives on the edge of North Sea from whence the alewives run and keeps track of the birds that feed on them. As of Sunday, he had observed a pair back on the Scallop Pond platform in North Sea and a single one on the platform within eyesight of his back deck.

    Last Thursday afternoon during a walk through the state’s part of Hither Woods in Montauk, there was a large ribbon snake half-coiled on one of the trails. Ribbon snakes look like very thin garter snakes and are rather uncommon. They are good swimmers. One of their favorite foods is spring peepers, which prompted me to go out listening on Monday night. When spooked, the snake quickly slithered into the adjacent leaf litter and out of sight. Most snakes don’t leave their winter hibernaculas until April, this one made a very big exception.

    The beach grass on the backshore and narrow area of small dunes at the bottom of the eroding bluffs at the north edge of Hither Woods was already beginning to send up fresh green shoots, unheard for this time of the year. While, apparently, it was still too early for the mourning cloak butterflies, there were swarms of tiny flying insects, thrips or midges, circling in the air five to six feet above the ground. They need fresh water to lay their eggs in and Fresh Pond, a k a Hidden Pond, was merely a stone’s throw away. The swamp maples bordering the pond had swollen red flower buds ready to pop.

    Fresh Pond is very high at this time, as high as I have ever seen it, similar in stature to Fort Pond two miles to the east. Fresh beaver work was apparent. Saplings of two-inch oaks and hickories were symmetrically gnawed through about a foot off the ground. Only the pointed stumps remained. There is a strong possibility that the Fresh Pond beaver is the same one that occupied Scoy Pond in Northwest for three years running beginning around 2005. It was seen and photographed on Napeague heading easterly more than three years ago. Signs of beaver were everywhere, but there was no sign of the beaver itself.

    The shiny purple grackle males have been back for a few weeks. In my yard in Noyac the coating of oak leaves that I never rake up provide them with a little recreation, the leaf upending game. For hours they walk around flipping over leaves looking for edibles. It’s an antecedent to tool using, the proto-tools are their sturdy pliers-like beaks. In another generation or two they will be fashioning sticks into rakes in order to the job more efficiently.

    Crows are already paired and feeding along the shoulders of roads, having abandoned their winter roosts with thoughts of spring in the air. Winter waterfowl have been leaving prematurely. On Sunday when it was almost dark, scores of Canada geese noisily passed overhead on their way north. You may have noticed that the geese have disappeared from most of the farm fields by now, and the large winter congregation on Shorts Pond in Bridgehampton has pretty much thinned out to but a few birds. Several local geese, along with mallards, have already paired up and can be seen flying low here and there, or standing at the edges of salt marshes and freshwater ponds getting ready for nest building and breeding.

    It wouldn’t surprise me at all if shads started to bloom by the beginning of April. A late March or early April cold snap or snowstorm would be disastrous; it would set the advance of spring back to zero.