Alfonso Marino stopped casting into the Georgica Pond gut as the water flowed into the sea. He stopped casting flies and watched in awe as Mother Nature did her spring thing shortly after the pond was opened to the sea on April 2 by order of the East Hampton Town Trustees.

    Trustees open it each spring and fall — when storm-driven ocean waves do not — in order to accommodate the fish that leave as fry and return to spawn as they have for millenniums.

    “I had never seen the alewives come up until this year. I stopped fishing to watch them. How interesting it was to see how some were smarter than others, swimming around on the sides while others fought the current. The gulls peck at them to wound them.”

    “They’re a beautiful iridescent fish. Fascinating to see how they reacted. The birds were on them. That’s how I knew they were there. They were coming in pods, singles, or four or five together.” After his fit of amazement, Marino caught and released several stripers. He fishes with barbless hooks.

    He’s a fly fisherman, for the most part, and ties flies during the winter months in preparation for “every day,” when the striped bass begin their run.

    “I fly-fish exclusively. I do have a spinning rod for emergencies, like when the wind blows 40 miles per hour,” he said. His usual schedule takes him to the Georgica gut and other oceanside spots for the early run, and Montauk every day during the fall. “If my friends are there with spinning rods, they let me in,” he said alluding to a blocking strategy that protects him from the often-aggressive territoriality of spin-casting surf fishermen. 

    He has 9 and 10-weight rods, bigger flies, and heavier line to deal with conditions on the ocean side, but prefers a 6-weight to catch bass up to 34 inches in the bay. “That’s a really good fish,” he said, a good size for a light rod. “If you give the fish pressure immediately, it has a shot,” a sporting chance, he said. “I don’t care about the next fish, I’m enjoying this fish. I can enjoy the little ones, and I can beat the bigger guys.”

    While a magnificent fish, striped bass are not the best fighting fish, he said. “I’d rather catch a bluefish any time.”

    Except for the month of October — “just looking at my logs,” Oct. 10 was the best — last year’s surfcasting fell short of expectations. Marino blames sand eels for staying too far offshore. “If bait is not on the beach, when the peanuts [peanut bunker] aren’t on the sand, especially in the fall, the fly-fishing is no good. The peanuts bring the blues, the bass come in right behind them.”

    The bigger flies Marino displayed at the sportsmen’s expo held at the Amagansett Firehouse on Saturday were designed for stripers of the rotator-cuff-tearing size, the ones feeding on herring and bunker flies. “I use different colors, just leave them in the water, you don’t have to ‘strip’ them [lure fish with line-retrieval finesse].”

    Nor does he strip the deceiver flies that he ties with feathers on top of them rather than on the sides in the style of fly-fishing guru Ken Abrames. “When the feather gets in the current, it undulates. You don’t have to work it. You need current.”

    Most of Marino’s catches are returned, but every once in a while he keeps a bass to cook “Italian style” with a Livornese sauce — “capers, tomatoes, onions. I’ll simmer the sauce first with the bass in another pan just to give it a hit. Then, I let it sit in the sauce for 10 minutes. You don’t want to overcook the fish.”

    Fishermen often link themselves to the food chain, so it’s worth mentioning that squid and blowfish have entered Gardiner’s Bay in healthy numbers, a development pleasing to both striped bass and human lovers of calamari and blowfish-tail scampi.

    It was while dressing a table-bound fish that Marino was drawn to the stomach contents, which included several species of crab. “My head told me the bass were on the bottom. You need things with eyes [lead] to get down there,” a type of fly known as a Clouser. Using photos of the crabs in mid-digestion, Marino designed crab-pattern flies that have proved very productive. “My workhorse flies.”

    Speaking of fly-fishing and alewives, Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett recalled his younger days tramping along the banks of Little Reed dreen in Montauk tracking alewives as they worked their way up into Big Reed Pond from Lake Montauk. “Me and Charlie Whitmore would cast Mickey Finns at them, red and yellow freshwater flies. It pissed them off. They’d hit it and jump about three feet in the air. We’d laugh our asses off.”

    Bennett explained that, like spawning salmon, alewives would not bite on the flies because they were hungry — they are filter feeders — but because they aggravated them.

    In other fishy news, Steve LaPani, a freshwater aficionado, caught and released seven largemouth and one smallmouth bass in Montauk’s Fort Pond on Saturday, a perfect day to play Huck Finn.

    And, a reminder: The recreational fluke season will get under way on Tuesday with a 19.5-inch minimum size and a four-fish-per-day bag limit.

    The Montauk SurfMasters spring fling competition is scheduled to begin on May 11 and run through June 30.

    On April 10 I went with some friends to the meeting of the Long Island Botanical Society held at Stony Brook University. When we were approaching the campus from the north end of Nichols Road, a red fox streamed across the road from east to west with outstretched tail. When we arrived back at Warren’s Nursery in Southampton (our starting point), a red fox ran across Majors Path into the nursery, its tail in the same position. That made sense, there is an active den with fox kits at that site.

    All evidence points to this being the year of the red fox. They seem to be everywhere, and always hurrying with tail straight out. If you go outside and smell what you think is the scent of a skunk, it’s probably emanating from a red fox. If you hear strange yelps in the night that you haven’t heard before, they’re probably being uttered by a red fox.

    There has been an approximately 15-year hiatus between peaks in the fox population on the South Fork. Between 1994 and 1999 they were very common. Then the mange struck and the population was quickly decimated. Prior to that time, the last peak occurred in 1982, following which the mange knocked the their numbers down as if overnight. Thus it would seem that the fox population rises and falls in a 12 to 14-year cycle.

    In the early 1990s when raccoons were as common as they are today, distemper hit them hard and until the start of the new millennium, their population remained down. For reasons unknown, our local population of opossums hit a low in the early 2000s, then sprang up to another high point by 2007. They and raccoons are still going strong today. All of our mammals, including gray squirrels, chipmunks, cottontail rabbits, voles, and shrews, have cyclic highs and lows, perhaps with the exception of deer, which continue to thrive from year to year.

    In the old days we referred to these comings and goings as “the balance of nature,” a phrase that had gone out of fashion in scientific circles, while to us laypeople, the notion still holds water. Walk around on the average South Fork lawn and you sink in, the voles have been tunneling back and forth creating mazes of weaknesses in the soil structure. Why so many voles? Too few foxes!

    Cottontails, although not nearly as common today as they were 60 years ago, when almost every yard had one or two, have been increasing in number while foxes were down. They have been held in check somewhat during the interim by red-tailed hawks; the number of pairs breeding locally has never been higher. We can expect to see cottontails’ numbers plummet now that Reynard is back in town.

    Little foxes need meat, meat, meat, and lots of mother’s milk, prior to weaning come midsummer. Vixens have to work really, really hard to keep their young in good health until they are ready to go out on their own.

    It will also be interesting to see what happens to the wild turkey population in the face of this spate of foxes. Like white-tailed deer, wild turkeys — reintroduced on Long Island after an absence of almost two centuries — have probably never been so common as they are today. Adult turkeys are a bit much for foxes, but poults are easy picking.

    The red fox also enjoys a certain momentum that species invading new territories for the first time often exhibit. Our red fox and the Eurasian one are practically synonymous, you can’t tell one from the other by their looks. The North American red fox came from Asia (but was also later imported from Europe by fox hunting enthusiasts), probably at about the same time Asian humans arrived here. It probably happened during the last ice age when the seas were hundreds of feet lower than they are today and one could practically walk across “Beringia,” the icy land bridge connecting Siberia with Alaska.

    Long Island’s common (and, maybe, only) fox in pre-Columbian times was the gray fox, a small number of which persist here today, particularly so in the Central Pine Barrens but also in Montauk. Once established in Alaska and western Canada, the red fox spread quickly throughout the rest of North America, then down into Central America, and from there into South America. Its population is still expanding. Until something happens to dramatically lower the red fox population on Long Island for a very long time, the gray fox will have to play second fiddle.

    Global warming will probably not affect the red fox population as the species has adapted handily to living in the tropics. Indeed, it might be the other way around. Frigid winters are largely responsible for doing in mangy foxes as they are left with little fur to insulate them from the cold. Some mangy foxes may be able to eke out an existence during a mild winter such as the one we have just experienced.

     Let’s keep an eye out to see what happens.

    Reading this week’s press release from the State Department of Environmental Conservation was like waking from a wonderful, liberating dream and realizing it was all true.

    “These regulation changes reflect improvements to populations of scup, black sea bass, and summer flounder,” reported Kathy Moser, the D.E.C.’s assistant commissioner for natural resources. “The scup population is particularly robust at this time, and we encourage anglers to get out on the water and enjoy the increased opportunity for anglers to bring home freshly caught fish.”

    Wow! The D.E.C. release ushers the reader — more familiar with the agen­cy’s doom and gloom regulatory strictures — into a kind of parallel universe, where, in addition to the good fishing, beer has been found to be good for you, adds years to your life, and seeps from natural springs. And, where the $50, summertime, nonresident toll to enter Montauk across a newly-dredged Napeague canal supports fishermen living within East Hampton Township year round.

    Ms. Moser was referring as well to the summer flounder (fluke) season that began on Tuesday with a four-fish-per-day possession limit, and a 19.5-inch minimum size limit. The season will run until Sept. 30.

    The liberalized scup (porgy) season also got under way on Tuesday with a 20-per-day bag limit of scup measuring 10.5 inches or longer. During the May 1 to Dec. 31 season, party and charter boat anglers will have to be satisfied with an 11-inch minimum size limit, but they will be able to keep 40 fish per day during the months of September and October.

    As for black sea bass (one of the more delicious fish in the sea) new regulations permit a 15-per-day bag limit and a season from June 15 through Dec. 31. The minimum size will remain 13 inches.

    Capt. Mike Vegessi of the Montauk party boat Lazy Bones was reached Monday morning on the eve of the fluke opening. He said he had made a couple of trial runs and found fluke biting, as well as “lots of bait,” including a healthy supply of sea robins.

    Mackerel and herring are in the area, which would explain the occasional offshore shower of diving gannets. Squid was high on the fluke’s list of favorite prey, Vegessi said, and small schools of squid are being seen by trap fishermen and nighttime jiggers.

    Captain Vegessi’s daughter Becky will be on board again this season as mate and filleter extraordinaire. Kathy Vegessi, the captain’s wife, will wo(man) the Bones’s shoreside headquarters located beside the harbor’s new bistro (formerly Lenny’s), now called Swallow — which should give visitors something to chew on. 

    Scott Leonard is manning the expanded tackle shop located within the ship’s store at the Star Island Yacht Club. Already a full-service marine supply store with foul weather gear, boots, knives, and all sorts of boating paraphernalia, this season the Yacht Club has made an impressive effort to reel in the surfcasting crowd.

    On Tuesday, Leonard showed off the shop’s collection of Penn, Daiwa, Shimano, and Van Staal reels, custom rods, every style of surface, swimming, tin, and bucktail lure, bait, including live eels, shaved ice, korkers, coolers of all sizes, and more.

    Star Island is an official weigh station for the hotly contested Montauk SurfMasters Spring Shoot-Out, and fall classic tournaments.

   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.

   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.”

   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.

    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.

   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.

    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.

   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.