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.

   The weather was springlike on Friday and I had the good fortune of accompanying Howard Reisman and Vicki Bustamante to a Southampton Town preserve that I hadn’t visited since the spring of 1979. At that time the 50 acres or so of wooded bottomland on each side of a meandering stream was in private hands. It was up before the Southampton Town Planning Board as a proposed subdivision with umpteen parcels.

    I was with the Group for America’s South Fork then, specializing in wetlands. I visited the site and found that it was heavily treed and the wetlands had many different rushes, sedges, and ferns, as well as a tall lily, Indian poke, which I had never seen before during my numerous wanderings throughout the South Fork.

    At the time several large subdivisions were being considered in both Southampton and East Hampton and this was one of those sites, almost entirely covered with wetlands. I knew about New York State’s Freshwater Wetlands Act, passed a few years earlier, and so enlisted the aid of two state Environmental Conservation staffers, Charles Hamilton and Charles Bowman, to accompany me for a look-see. As a result of that “site inspection” the wetlands were mapped and the subdivision application withdrawn. The wetlands were among the first on the South Fork to become protected under the act.

    That era was the beginning of a local land development bubble that didn’t­ burst until “Black Monday” of 1989. During that 10-year period about 10,000 acres in Southampton and East Hampton were slated for development. As it turns out, less than 50 percent made it through the review process. The rest was saved and is now public.

    This entire site was now not only preserved, but the Southampton Trails Preservation Society recently plotted out a nice circular trail covering most of it, replete at several points with very small footbridges crossing the meandering stream. Mr. Reisman is a professor emeritus of Southampton College and an active member of the society. He led Vicki and me and abided our many, many stops to look at and photograph this and that plant, this and that tree, this and that lichen-covered glacial erratic.

    It turns out that when walking the site 33 years ago I had missed much of its glory. I had been looking down most of the time, picking out this or that wetland plant, but hadn’t seen the trees for the forest. Ms. Bustamante, however, examined every plant, big or little, with a sharp botanist’s eye. It’s a good thing she came along, because what we realized at the end of ourtwo-mile trek was that we had been walking not only through a mature hardwood bottomland forest, but one that was relictual for the South Fork, as it contained several trees that most of our woodlands don’t have.

    First we came upon yellow birch — they also occur on Gardiner’s Island — with its peeling bark; then hop hornbeam; then witch hazel; a little farther on, shagbark hickory; then swamp white oak, and lastly a very tall sycamore, trunk blotched brown and gray, with only a few prickly fruit balls very high up, one of which had made it to the ground. How many sycamores do you see in the wild on Long Island? Very, very few. Vicki would propagate more of them from that one seedy prickly ball we found.

    There wasn’t much of an understory. A few high-bush blueberries, naptha-smelling spice bush, a few patches of huckleberries and low-bush blueberries, oddly no dogwoods or shadblow. Among the lianas were some venerable fox grape vines three inches around, a few poison ivies, and not one single Asiatic bittersweet. There were a few spots with clumps of invasives, however, including some privet, wineberry, garlic mustard, daffodils, and a touch of phragmites. It’s very hard for invasives to get a toehold in a such a mature forest with such an all-encompassing canopy with very few openings.

    It was too early for ferns and wildflowers to show their stuff, but there was one skunk cabbage ready to bloom at the edge of the stream. There were an uncommon number of glacial erratics of all sizes in a form of boulder train, suggesting that the glacier paused for a longish time on this site while it was retreating to the north.

    Oddly, not a single evergreen tree or shrub was to be seen, although there were more than a few fallen eastern red cedars from a previous age slowly rotting away. Except for two sedges, mosses, and an aquatic liverwort, the only evergreen was the princess pine, not a conifer but one of the club mosses in the genus Lycopodium. There are a few other stands of princess pine on the South Fork, though by and large they are uncommon. Because of the miniature pinelike appearance and tough green needle-covered branches, they were popular in the 1800s and early 1900s at Christmastime; many a princess pine from Long Island woods was plucked from the leaf litter and sold on the streets of New York to be used as ornamentation during the holidays.

    We only saw and heard one bird during the entire two-and-one-half hours it took to traverse the course, a hairy woodpecker. This species used to be the second most common woodpecker after the downy woodpecker, a smaller look-alike, but has largely been replaced by the red-bellied woodpecker from the South.

    Needless to say, we were all very happy that such a near-pristine woodland, serving as the origin of an ancient stream, North Sea’s Millstone Brook, has been spared from the bulldozer’s blade, and should go on to outlive us all while maintaining its historically mint condition.

   It’s just conjecture, but an early recreational fishing season seems possible given a number of signs, including the recent discovery by commercial draggers of a sizable number of porgies in 26 fathoms of water, relatively close to shore. The question is, will the fish arrive early, or did they never leave?

    Steven Forsberg of the Viking fleet of party boats in Montauk reasoned that the scup (porgies) never went offshore. “They never went anywhere,” he said. If the porgies have stayed around in ocean water that has remained much warmer than usual, prey species have as well. 

    Ken Reney of the Seafood Shop in Wainscott said on Tuesday he expected his first shipment of shad roe the following day, a bit early.

    Unfortunately, the shop will carry the roe but not the delicious fish itself. Shad have an unusual array of side bones and are extremely difficult to cut. There is a special process requiring a complete knowledge of shad anatomy as well as the hands of a surgeon. Eric Krom, the shop’s longtime cutter, had such knowledge and hands — the one that held the fish was girded in stainless steel chain mail. He was “a masterpiece,” Mr. Reney said, but he’s moved to Wyoming. He might be filleting trout from the Snake River.

     The point is, the shad run has begun up and down the coast, as has the annual flight, from estuary to sea, of other herring species including alewives, the local favorite. Fly fishermen have begun to target them in recent years. And, there are other signs.

    In early February small gulls were seen picking tiny shrimp or the like from the surface, and large schools of dolphin were seen cruising along the south shore. No surprise that ospreys have been spotted. The sea hawks are fishing already.

    The food chain is in gear and the arrival of striped bass, bluefish, and blue­fin tuna might be close at hand because they never went very far.

    Meanwhile, codfishing, which was lean this winter as a function of warmer ocean temperatures, has improved of late.

    “It’s back to reality, the way it was for the last 25 years. The last three years was exceptionally good, overwhelmingly good. This year it’s back to normal. We had 25 guys out on Feb. 23. They had 85 cod, and about the same number of ling. They were real quality fish, a lot of gaffers,” Captain Forsberg said, using boat lingo for fish big enough to require the help of a mate wielding a gaff to bring them over the rail.

    Captain Forsberg said, “Everything is running six weeks behind for all fisheries,” by which he meant that cod seemed to have kept a late-fall, early-winter mind-set as they did three years ago. “If we go back three years, we didn’t catch anything in January and February. They showed up in March and we had another six weeks of good cod fishing.”

   The first column I wrote for The East Hampton Star was in March of 1981. It was about Alosa pseudogarengus, the alewife, of the now-threatened river herrings. As far as Long Island post-Columbian history is concerned, the alewife ranks right up there with the quahog, steamer clam, bay scallop, oyster, and right whale. It was, perhaps, the only catadromous fish — one that leaves salt water to breed in fresh ­water — the first settlers could count on, as our streams and ponds were too small for the likes of the Atlantic salmon, which bred in New England rivers.

    Although I spent my first 22 years on the North Fork and was well versed in the marine and freshwater fishes found there, I knew nothing of the alewife until I came back to teach field biology at Southampton College in the fall of 1974. At that time the resident ichthyologist, Howard Reisman, took me here and there to show me the fauna of the South Fork, which turned out to be much richer than that which I had experienced in my boyhood days across the bay.

    Big Fresh Pond in North Sea was one of those spots to which I was introduced. In September of that year I took my class to Big Fresh to seine. We caught the usual freshwater fish — largemouth bass, pumpkinseeds, yellow perch, bullheads, and American eels — all of which I was familiar with from my earlier days fishing Maratooka and Laurel Lakes on the North Fork. But we also caught several small fish of a species I hadn’t a clue about, young-of-the-year alewives on their way downstream and thence out to the Peconic Estuary by way of North Sea Harbor.

    It turns out that at that time Big Fresh Pond, one of the largest kettlehole ponds on the South Fork, was the only significant alewife breeding body of water left on Long Island. Yes, dribs and drabs still bred in other Long Island fresh waters such as those ponds attached to the Peconic River, Long Pond south of Sag Harbor, Jeremy’s Hole at the north end of Sagg Swamp in Sagaponack, Scoy Pond in East Hampton’s Northwest, Georgica Pond in Wainscott, and Big Reed and Stepping Stone Ponds in Montauk. During the prolonged drought of the 1960s, most of the overflow streams from these other ponds dried up, or the culverts running under them became clogged or were too small. Big Fresh was one of the few ponds that were still able to accommodate a good stock of sea-run alewives from year to year.

    In the early spring of 1975 Howard took me to the spot where the mature alewives in spawning condition would mass at the foot of Northwest Harbor, where it meets the freshwater stream at a large culvert under Noyac Road. Fishermen, including Shinnecock, were lined with hand nets to catch some of them. I was told that the roe was good and the fish tasty when smoked. From that time on I became a fan of alewife and looked for it each year thereafter right up until the present.

    Not only was the Atlantic Coast alewife population suffering throughout the latter half of the 20th century, but the other river herrings, the shad, and blueback herring, in particular, were also waning in numbers. This drop-off became alarming to the point that by the beginning of the 21st century the National Marine Fisheries Service and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation began to take steps to protect these species. Locally, the Southampton Town Trustees, the owners and managers of the town’s freshwaters, and the overseers of the largest alewife breeding population in the state took the most dramatic steps of all to save the species — they banned fishing for it in the waters they control.

    It’s ironic that the two fish species in our waters that breed the earliest each year — the winter flounder and the alewife — should suffer the biggest population falloffs. Their plight is certainly not due to overfishing; it must be tied to environmental conditions. While we scratch our heads about what to do about the flounder, there are things we can do about the alewife, and projects are under way throughout Long Island to return the alewife to its former status.

    The most successful of these can be found where the Peconic River runs into the Peconic Estuary in Riverhead at Grangibel Park. Much time, money, and effort have been expended by a consortium of forces to resurrect that population. So-called fish ladders have been installed to facilitate the upstream movement of the alewife. A video camera counting system keeps track of the alewives as they move through the fish ladders into the river. East Hampton, Brookhaven, and other Long Island municipalities are participating with a group at Seatuck in Islip to help the alewives make it back.

    The Southampton Town Trustees, an elected body dating back to the 1600s when Southampton Town was first settled, have not only acted to protect the alewife on paper, in the last week of February they got together in the field to modify the culvert under North Sea Road, the second of two culverts the gravid alewives have to forge before reaching Big Fresh Pond. Because of a seasonally low flow of water running out from the culvert last spring it was difficult for the alewives to get over the lip of the concrete apron leading into the culvert, and some of them had to be helped.

    The trustees acted just in the nick of time. The work was done last Thursday and Friday. Saturday morning I received a call from Trustee Fred Havemeyer. Alewives had just arrived and had already made it upstream to the reconditioned culvert. Less than an hour later, Howard Reisman, somewhat in disbelief as heretofore alewives had never arrived before the second week in March, took a look. Yes, indeed, the great alewife migration was under way. It’s been a nonwinter winter. Will it turn out to be a non-spring spring? That is the question.

   On Friday, for the second time in two weeks, I visited the largest of the three Atlantic white cedar swamps in the hamlet of North Sea with a fellow naturalist. Prior to those two visits, I hadn’t seen it since around 1983 when I visited with Rameshwar Das, who was a photographer for The East Hampton Star at the time. The swamp was too small to be protected under the state’s Freshwater Wetland Act, but not too many years later it received “special unique status” by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation as a result of some strenuous lobbying on the part of John Turner, a Long Island naturalist and environmentalist.

    In 1983, with Ramesh standing by, I cored one of the largest of the cedars, read the rings, and determined that it was about 115 years old. In other words, it was “born” shortly after the Civil War. On an 1838 United States coast map of mine only a few houses dot the hamlet of North Sea and the white cedar swamp area is labeled with the common surveyor’s symbol for wetlands, sedges.

    In the 1980s visit, there were no little white cedar trees or seedlings. Almost 30 years later, the situation is the same. Inasmuch as the trees are of a similar stage of maturation, 15 to 10 inches in diameter, and similar in stature, about 75 feet tall on average, it is quite probable they comprise an even-aged stand as is the case with most of the other white cedar swamps on Long Island, which now number fewer than 15.

    On the other hand, the white cedar swamp situated farthest east on Long Island, the north end of the Nature Conservancy’s Sagg Swamp Preserve, which is barely 100 feet across, had a small number of seedlings clumped in one small area in 2011.

    There are three different native American species in the white cedar genus, Chamaecyparis — the Alaska cedar ranging from the interior of Oregon through coastal Washington, British Columbia, and southern Alaska, the Port Orford cedar in an areas smaller than Long Island on the Pacific Coast where Oregon and California meet, and the one in North Sea, which is spotty along the East Coast from the Gulf of Mexico north into southern Maine.

    According to Thomas S. Elias’s “The Complete Trees of North America,” a field guide and natural history published in 1980, Atlantic white cedars can live to be 1,000 years old and “the light brown, lightweight, soft, close-grained wood is unmatched in its resistance to decay.” Everett Sloan in “Reverence for Wood” also praises the wood’s durability and goes on to add that cedar logs retrieved from the peat beneath cedar swamps where they fell hundreds of years earlier are still in excellent condition. In the colonial days, one widely used source of cedar shakes was the Atlantic white cedar.

    One wonders why these white cedars, along with those in the great cedar swamp south of Riverhead and those from Water Mill’s Seven Ponds area and Sagg Swamp, persisted during a time when most Long Island woodlands were either burned over by wildfire or clear-cut for lumber, firewood, farm lands, or buildings. Perhaps, it had something to do with their swampy surroundings. And how is it that very similar trees growing so widely separated by almost 3,000 miles of American interior got to where they are now? Which came first, the West Coast ones or the Atlantic Coast ones? The fact that two other Chamaecyparis species are native to Japan suggests the former.

    One thing is quite clear, notwithstanding the fact that there are other mature wetland trees such as tupelos and red maples in the immediate vicinity of the North Sea and Sagg Swamp white cedars: They are outsiders looking in from the edge. Because of the closely abutting cedar canopies, the interior of the cedar swamp is in shadows throughout the bulk of the day. Only when the sun is low on the horizon, as in the very early morning or before sunset, do its rays penetrate into the swamp’s interior. That is why the dominant plants on the cedar root hummocks and in the surrounding waters are almost all green mosses. Thus the origin of thick deposits of peat moss over time.

    The wetland’s shrubby edge at a slightly higher elevation than the swamp itself has the aforementioned tupelos and red maples, as well as several wetlands shrubs, including maleberry, swamp azalea, sweet pepperbush, and one that is a rarity to the South Fork east of the Shinnecock Canal, swamp sweetbells.

    Because of the prematurely early spring, this last shrub was already readying to bloom on Friday.

    Except for a few evergreen checkerberries, i.e., redberry wintergreens, scattered here and there among the wetlands shrubs, the ground around the swamp is covered with leaf litter. Atlantic white cedars can be absolutely still, even ghostly when a slight mist is rising from the water. During the half -hour we spent at this one, not a single note from a bird was heard, and only one bird, a woodpecker, was observed. Now protected as it is by both the Town of Southampton and the D.E.C., one gets the sense that this one will last another century, at least, and maybe forever. ­

   Saturday set a record for warmth in January. Sunday was a little colder but well above freezing. My wife, Julie, and I decided to drive down Noyac Road a mile and visit the most popular United States Fish and Wildlife Refuge on Long Island, the Elizabeth A. Morton Wildlife Refuge on Jessup’s Neck.

    Jessup was one of the original founders of Southampton Town and owned the 187-acre parcel that reaches halfway across Peconic Bay by virtue of a long narrow spit. The spit is glacial in origin and was once its own island, just as Robins and Gardiner’s Islands in the Peconic Estuary still are today. Down through the ages and long before settlement, much of the material eroding from both sides of the east and west sides of the “neck” drifted south, shoaling up and attaching the island to the Noyac mainland, creating a tombolo in coastal geology terms.

    The upland part was mostly cut over and used for grazing livestock during settler times and eventually fell into the hands of Elizabeth Morton, who donated it to the Fish and Wildlife Service to be used by the public. Because it has a farming history it is still trying to become wild again. It has most of the native trees found on the South Fork including walnuts, various oaks, hickories, tupelos, shads, junipers, and so on, and a few trees locally rare such as the tulip tree, a very impressive specimen of which is found on its east side. It also has a small stand of a rare-to-New York State tree species, the swamp cottonwood.

    It has also become one of the best examples of a wildlife refuge taken over by “invasive” species. By taking the quarter-mile walk along the trail from the parking lot on Noyac Road to the bay beach, one can find just about every one of the 50 or so problematic exotic invasives threatening Long Island’s wild. There are so many invasive species that they are not only competing with the American species, they are trying to subdue each other. Japanese honeysuckle vines wrap around Asiatic bittersweet vines. Trees-of-heaven spread their canopies widely to shade out Eurasian phragmites, multiflora rose, wineberry, autumn and Russian olives, and Tartarian honeysuckle. Pampas grass competes with phragmites reeds, wild garlic competes with mugwort, Japanese knot­weed competes with boxberry. Sadly, they all seem to be outcompeting the natives, as well.

    Not much too look at, there are more blow-down trees than standing ones. Rotting wood and rotting bittersweet litter the ground. But what a crowd on Sunday! Old, middle-aged, post-teens, teens, and children, all walking, standing, some chatting, some quiet. They weren’t there just because the sun was out and it was Sunday. No, they came for another reason — to feed the birds. People standing still like statues with one outstretched arm, hand palm up, sometimes for five minutes or so. But all of a sudden with a twitter and a tweet a black-capped chickadee comes out of nowhere and alights on the open hand and grabs a black sunflower seed. Just as quickly, it flies away to eat or cache it.

    It’s a scene reminiscent of Francis of Assisi. First come the chickadees, then the titmice, then the cardinals, even a downy woodpecker. Wild birds are not stupid. Why scratch on the ground or peck at pieces of bark? It is much easier to sit and feed from a benevolent outstretched hand. Chickens and other fowl raised on farms were wild once, but give them grain and they’ll practically eat out of your hand. On Town Pond in East Hampton Village the mute swans and mallards that are used to getting handouts have become a major attraction that rivals other village attractions such as the Hook Mill and Mulford Farm. Just watch, local turkeys will be doing the same in the next few years.

    There are so many people with different seeds to offer that the birds have become very picky, but not obese. Sunflower seeds of the dark variety seem to be the most popular. Julie and I didn’t have any seeds and took along some muesli in a plastic bag. We were the least sought after of all visitors. Apparently, birds are greener and more organic than humans. We went home with all of our muesli intact. The next morning I had it for breakfast.

    The question has always been raised in wildlife circles: Does human feeding lead to loss of wildness? Just try to close your hand quickly to nab one of those little chickadees cadging a seed or two. It can’t be done. Just as birds keep one wary eye out for predators while sleeping, the chickadee in the hand studies your face and body before plucking a seed. One tiny bit of motion and he’s off like a shot. Notwithstanding the fact that visitors have been feeding birds at Morton Wildlife Refuge for more than half a century now, not one bird or chipmunk, for that matter, has gone over to the other side.

    It was only a few years ago that signs were posted discouraging feeding the birds in order to safeguard their wildness. They didn’t work. Now the signs advise not to leave food on the ground as it might attract rats. Ugh! Nobody likes rats.

    John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, and Roger Tory Peterson never discouraged the human feeding of birds. It’s not the birds that are becoming more human, it is the humans that are becoming more human.

   In October, while Three Mile Harbor was being dredged by a Suffolk County contractor, Steve Brennan and Chris Martin were using side-scanning radar to follow the course of the dredging work. Side-scanning radar allows one to look sideways along the bottom of a water body and see objects that rise off the bottom such as old wrecks, sunken 55-gallon drums, and other debris. What Brennan and Martin found among other things was a very large boulder in the channel, mostly submerged but sticking up out of the bottom.

    The boulder turned out to be one of those subsurface glacial erratics carried here from the north country some 25,000 years ago or earlier. As the glacier melted away it dropped all sorts of earthen debris including sands, pebbles, stones, and several large boulders, almost all of which were ground smooth by abrasive actions taking place during their transport here and subsequent erosion by wind and water when left behind. Locals have a name for these large relics of the ice age that are roundish, at least not jagged like quarry rock. They’re called “potato” rocks by virtue of their smoothed shapes and predominantly tannish color, the color of sandstone from which they were derived.

    Around 1991 when a Suffolk County Water Authority contractor was directionally drilling under Lake Montauk’s outlet to Block Island Sound during the installation of a water main from the west side to the Gin Beach side of the inlet, the driller hit a big boulder some 15 to 20 feet below the inlet bottom and so had to start over from the beginning.

    The situation of these foreign stones beneath the surface of water bodies is of interest. Certainly, glacial erratics are not uncommon around harbors and embayments. Just take a look at Sag Harbor east of the Route 114 bridge on an ebb tide and you will see dozens of them along the shore and out in the water.

    The edges of Lake Montauk have a few, Accabonac Harbor sports several, and Three Mile Harbor has its share of them, too. One of the larger ones sticking out of the water along the west side of Accabonac Harbor was used by ospreys to build a nest several years back. When the osprey population was booming during the 1940s and 1950s before special breeding platforms were erected for them, ospreys frequently built nests on the glacial erratics rising out of the water along the shores of Robins and Gardiner’s Islands.

    Both the South Fork and North Fork are boulder strewn, but only wherever the glaciers came to sit. Walk along the ocean bluffs of Montauk and you will find a load of them, some inbedded in the face of the bluffs, some dropped down to the shore after washing out of the bluffs, some out in the water, indicating that the bluffs were once much farther seaward than they are now. They were all left by the ice sheet, which traveled the farthest south during the last ice age and deposited the “terminal” moraine, or Ronkonkoma moraine. The Long Island Sound cliffs edging the North Fork tell a similar story. Their boulders and the ones sitting out in the sound are part of the leavings of a second glacial advance, the one that deposited the Harbor Hill moraine, which runs all the way west to northern Nassau County.

    Where these massive stones sit on fastland, say in the Northwest area of East Hampton Town, or along the moraine separating Noyac from Bridgehampton in Southampton Town, they have been further weathered and have been subject to freeze-thaw actions during cold winters. Many of them have fissures in which water accumulates and freezes. The power of expanding ice is enough to actually split these boulders and there are several called “split rocks,” such as the famous one in Hither Woods or one that sits in the center of Stephen Talkhouse Park in Springs where Gerard Drive and Springs Fireplace Road meet. Many of them have human names such as Joshua’s Rock off Bull Path in Northwest and Lionhead Rock in Gardiner’s Bay, named after Lion Gardiner, some say. Perhaps the largest of them is the anonymous one perched high on a hill in Noyac west of Stony Hill Road. The part that is showing above the surface of the ground is more than 15 feet high and 30 feet across. It’s the closest thing to Tyrannosaurus rex on Long Island.

    In some places these glacial erratics occur one right after another in what are called boulder trains. In other spots they are solitary, sometimes appearing like brooding earth gods bearded with an array of grays, greens, and yellows, from lichens that festoon them. Lichens are mutualistic duets consisting of a fungus and an alga. The alga seeks cover in the lichen and manufactures food by means of photosynthesis, the lichen feeds on some of it.

    The age of these lichens on eastern Long Island glacial erratics is not known precisely, but where rock lichens have been studied in detail in other parts of the world some of them are said to be thousands of years old. Some of ours are probably a few thousand years old, as well. Unfortunately, however, glacial erratics are not protected by any kind of local or state statutes. If they are on one’s property they can be moved, decorated, broken up, or otherwise desecrated. You will ride along, say, on Brick Kiln Road in Bridgehampton and see one that’s been painted or fixed with a house address.

    On the other hand they must have a special appeal for most property owners because the majority of them have been left in situ where they came to rest thousands of years ago. They dot the landscape the way large trees do and during the winter when the trees are mostly leafless they stand out like old men on the mountain.

    Although their roots are Canadian and New England, they are now an important part of our heritage and the largest ones will be here long after we perish, hopefully, with their complementary colorful lichens but no chips of paint.

    If you want native rock, you’ll have to drill 1,000 feet down or travel to Queens and Manhattan.

   The South Fork of Long Island and, in particular, East Hampton Town have a quasi-natural feature that few other areas in the United States can claim, the “lop tree.” Lop trees, or boundary marker trees, are scarce in Southampton Town but abundant in East Hampton, especially so in the Northwest, Springs, and Amagansett areas.

    As the name suggests, these trees, almost all of which are white oaks, were formed by lopping off the stem above one of the early lateral branches when the tree was but a mere sapling with loppers, or pruners. As the tree matured, it grew out rather than upward.

    Yet the process of lopping was not finished; there was still a lop to make. As soon as the lateral branch sent up a vertical shoot — nature’s way of allowing a tree pushed over by winds but still partially rooted to recover — the lateral branch was lopped off just beyond the origin of the new shoot. If the lopper did a good job and, from the look of it, there were some very fine lop-tree fashioners in the early history of East Hampton, in 20 years’ time you had a tree that formed a kind of chair or three-quarters of the numeral four.

    There was another trick to the first cut. It was best if the horizontal branch selected was in line with the boundary that the tree was cultured to represent. Almost 90 percent of the hundreds of boundary trees I have looked at in 30 years of backwoodsing East Hampton not only mark the edge of a parcel’s boundary line, but also tell the observer the directional course of it. In many cases a few hundred feet down the line there is a second lop tree with its horizontal trunk pointing in the same direction as the first one’s.

    This meshing of horizontal trunk direction with a survey line’s course can be readily seen on the periphery of the Duke Estate on the east side of Springy Banks Road just south of its junction with Hand’s Creek Road, the site of one of the most magnificent and oldest lop trees in the town. This particular lop tree has the longest horizontal portion of any boundary tree that I have observed locally. It is more like a bed than a seat.

    In studying several of these trees, I have found almost all of them to be more than a century old. Why was the white oak picked for this job by early surveyors and woodsmen? Most likely for three reasons: It was a common tree on eastern Long Island, it was the longest living of the local oaks, and the bark was a very light gray, almost white. Thus a white oak lop tree could be seen in the woods at a distance, because of its light hue and its shape.

    It has been suggested by some anthropologists that lopping was a trick the early settlers learned from the local Native Americans, who taught the first whites on Long Island so many things to make their lives easier. Whether this is so or not, the lop trees do have a kind of spiritual presence. Not only do they tell us something about the early days, but also their venerable aspect is not so different from that of boundary trenches, old rock piles, even old stone walls, all of which were used by the early inhabitants to demarcate boundaries. The lop trees, however, are the only living relics of the bunch.

    The fact that very few lop trees have been damaged or cut down by the hands of man over the years shows that they are somewhat revered by the town’s residents. Many generations of town Highway Departments have been particularly careful not to remove or alter them. No doubt many wild mammals and birds take notice of them in defining their territories.

    Unfortunately, some recent big blows such as Irene and the post-Christmas storm of 2010 have done in a few old lop trees, say, along the town trustee road to the end of Barcelona Point and one or two of those along Accabonac Road where it passes by a town nature preserve. Lop trees are sturdy and long-lived but their lower trunks, including the horizontal part, are often hollow, belying a certain vulnerability when challenged by strong winds.

    The George Walbridge surveyors have taught me a lot about lop trees. In these parts surveyors and lop trees are often bonded. Field crews frequently encounter them in their survey work. Among that local group, David Weaver has personally related to me on more than one occasion how many of these trees are smack-on-center of survey lines that are still current but date back 100 years or more. David was also the one who pointed out to me that of the four presidential faces carved on Mount Rushmore, three of them belonged to surveyors.

    Surveying is one of the oldest occupations, every bit as old as lawyering, and lawyering is almost as old as prostitution.

   It’s the middle of winter. Except for the greens of the conifers and some evergreen hardwoods, the trees are bare and the leaves that still cling to the lower branches are a drab brown.

    The lawns, whether covered with leaves or raked clean, are of an ecru hue at this time, with a few exceptions. There are some brilliantly green lawns, even in winter, and the greens come in a variety of tones, from very light to a brilliant lustrous green to a dark green that reflects little light.

    These green lawns are not composed of Kentucky bluegrass, commercial fescues, and clovers. In fact, you will rarely find a grass species or any forbs in this carpet of green. These lawns are composed entirely of plants that had their origins 500 million years ago and are still thriving today with no sign of petering out — mosses. They are almost ubiquitous throughout the world’s land areas with the exception of Antarctica.

    The beauty of a lawn composed of mosses is not merely that it is green in winter, but also that it requires very little attention — no fertilizing, watering, mowing, or weed removal. It does require the shade provided by hardwood trees in spring and summer, as well as the removal of the leaves after the drop in the fall. Moss lawns are not only attractive and practically care-free, they are also eco-friendly.

    Moss turfs do not make good athletic fields; they don’t take a lot of roughhousing. On the other hand you won’t look out your window on a moonlit night and find deer grazing on them. You don’t find many such moss lawns in the densely populated suburbs of western Suffolk County and Nassau County, but there are many on the South Fork, especially in the northern halves, say, in Northwest and Springs.

    Mosses are plants that presumptively gave rise to the higher plants, the ones with vascular systems. Since they don’t flower, produce edible fruit, or grow much taller than a few inches above the ground, they are nondescript to the human eye. They are so nondescript, in fact, that although they are all around us, they don’t have common names as all of our flowers, trees, shrubs, and, even, ferns do, at least in Western society. They are lumped into a few common categories such as “pin cushion moss,” “sphagnum,” and the like.

    They are “pioneer” plants in that they colonize bare ground, especially where it is partially shaded. Some moss species live on the trunks of living trees, some on old wood — dead trees, old sheds, and roofs. The reader would be hard pressed to find a field guide to mosses of the likes of those popular publications covering wildflowers, trees, birds, insects, amphibians, mammals, mushrooms, ferns, rocks, and minerals. My own field guide to the mosses is “Mosses of Eastern North America” consisting of two volumes totaling 1,328 pages authored by Howard Crum and Lewis Anderson in 1922. It’s not the kind of field guide that one carries around in a jacket pocket.

    On Saturday afternoon I took a walk with one of the few individuals on Long Island who knows mosses, Bill Miller, an arborist by profession, but a devoted aficionado of mosses and liverworts. He goes to Humboldt Institute in Maine every summer to study them. We started at the giant boulder west of Stony Hill Road up on the moraine in Noyac and wove our way through a mile or so of trail nicely maintained by the Southampton Trails Society.

    Everywhere one looked there were mountain laurels, oaks, red maples, and a few pitch pines, and not one bittersweet, mugwort, Japanese knotweed, Tartarian honeysuckle, or other invasive species. The entire area had been burned over in 1944 by a wildfire that also destroyed a Noyac house or two.

    It was not only mountain laurel heaven, but moss heaven, as well. Bill identified the mosses on the ground along the trail, explaining the niches preferred by each one, whether on the trail edge, a tree trunk, boulder, or other substrate. He knew the scientific name of each. The most plentiful moss was the one that ran along the shoulder of the trail for hundreds of yards. Bill told us that it was one of the mosses that reproduces vegetatively, the way phragmites, poison ivy, beech trees, and quaking aspens mostly do.

    Not all the mosses were green, some species were reddish, but all of them were active, photosynthesizing away in the cool afternoon air. Bill could recognize a species on a white oak tree bole by its color and growth form from a distance of several feet. Some of the mosses were shooting up fruiting bodies, little capsules supported by hair-thin stems with spores inside only an inch or so above the leafy base.

    At one high point along the trail, North Haven, Shelter Island, Jessup’s Neck, and Noyac Bay were all visible. I lamented the fact that I had lived less than a quarter of a mile from that trail since 1979 and had never been on it.

    When I caretook the late Ward Bennett’s house on the edge of Accabonac Harbor in Springs in the early 1980s, I helped Ward put in a moss lawn next to his garage. It was composed of squares of moss removed from under eastern red cedars on his property. The squares were fitted next to each other like the tiles of a bathroom floor. When weeding the moss lawn I would lay down a piece of plywood so that my knees didn’t make depressions in the soft turf.

    We ended up at Bill and his wife, Shirley’s, house up the hill from mine and were treated to their moss and fern garden incorporating a low stone wall around its periphery. When a few minutes later I pointed to a quite lovely moss lawn resplendent in the late afternoon sun just across the road from his house and asked, “How do you make a lawn like that?” Bill replied, “Benign neglect.” End of walk.

   An authority on rope suggested to me that vines that climb up trees go up clockwise just as the first course of rope is laid in its manufacture. Do all vines go “right-handed,” like rope? Of course, a right-handed vine is only right-handed when looking up from the ground. Looking down from its top it is left-handed or counterclockwise.

    I also wondered if the rule might apply to trees. Forty years ago when teaching college in Oregon I noticed that many Oregon conifers, in particular Douglas firs and true firs, spiral up as they grow. Their trunks are twisted and the twist is always to the right. Such twisting of the grain is often hidden by the bark, which appears to go straight up, but is readily seen once the bark is removed.

    In the Northern Hemisphere, the sun after rising in the east arcs to the south then swings back to the west, where it sets. The growing tip of a vine, or apical meristem, that is following the sun as it grows upward would circle the tree in a counterclockwise direction. Right-handed vines, or twisty tree trunks, would not be chasing the sun.

    Then there is the Coriolis effect, which when applied on a grand scale is responsible for the Gulf Stream moving to the right as it courses northward in the Atlantic Ocean from the eastern tropics to the coast of Ireland. Because a vine rotating around a tree trunk is so small in scale compared to a current in the Atlantic Ocean, it is doubtful that vining is a function of the Coriolis effect.

    On Monday I went looking for curling vines and twisty tree trunks in the Morton Wildlife Refuge in Noyac. There were several woody vining species, or lianas, to observe — wild grape, poison ivy, Japanese honeysuckle, Virginia creeper, and Asiatic bittersweet among them. This last species was by far the most common and so I was able to make a statistical study of its curling habits.

    I looked at more than 100 bittersweet vines in a half-mile of trail, all of which went up the tree in a clockwise rotation. In some instances there were three different bittersweet vines curling around each other, all of which were right-handed or clockwise. A few wild grapes circled upward in the same fashion, but the majority of them were opportunistic, taking the most straightforward route to get to the top. Wild grapes have tendrils, little curlicues that fasten onto tree branches to help them climb.

    Poison ivy, like the unrelated Boston ivy and Virginia creeper, has holdfasts resembling the round suction-disc toes of tree frogs to give it purchase on tree trunks. It goes straight up. Bittersweet is like a snake. It has no special tree-climbing appendages, thus to get purchase it has to “strangle” its host, and some literally do just that, frequently leading to the host tree’s death by cutting off the flow of nourishments and water up and down in the conductive tissues lying just beneath the bark. Bittersweet vines are cross-ribbed, giving them extra holding power.

    Except for a black cherry or two, the twisted-trunk trees were Juniperus vir­giniana, eastern red cedar, one of the evergreen conifers native to Long Island. Roughly 5 percent of the hundreds of junipers covering the refuge had twisted trunks and, as in the bittersweets, all were twisting clockwise. I was beginning to think that all vines and trunks that twist as they go upward were right-handed.

    The adaptive value of the bittersweet twist was obvious, but what was the function of twisting in the junipers? Many arborists and foresters believe that a twisted trunk makes a tree stronger and better able to withstand gale-force winds. To test that hypothesis on the eastern red cedars, I examined trunks in quiet stands well away from the edge of Peconic Bay and those along its edge, where winds were expected to hit with more force. The outcome? The percentage of twisted trunks in the quiet groves was just as high as along the shore.

    At the end of the walk, along the edges of the Morton Wildlife Refuge parking lot a stone’s throw from Noyac Road, I encountered patches of Japanese honeysuckle. Lo and behold, their vines were all left-handed, turning counterclockwise as they climbed. Thus, at least in Noyac, not all vining species are right-handed.

    Monday night I visited the Web and read about an amazing woman botanist, Angela Moles from Australia, who went around the world studying vines and their climbing habits. She studied 1,485 vines of several different species. Ninety-four percent of them were left-handed. In other words, the main reason for one vine’s penchant for curling one way and another’s for moving in the exact opposite direction is primarily genetic.

    With respect to trees, the preponderance of twisted trees is found among the coniferales. In fact, a cultivar of one oriental species, Juniperus chinensis torulosa, is always twisted. Perhaps that’s why it’s known in American horticultural circles as the Hollywood juniper. But for almost every conifer species that exhibits twisting, say, the bristle-cone pine of the Western mountain ranges, the most venerable of all trees, left-handedness and right-handedness is as it is in the human species — there are both left-handed and right-handed individuals. Whether it is genetic or environmental in the bristle-cone has yet to be determined.

    But the question begs an easy solution. Take seeds from left-handed and right-handed bristle-cones, plant them and record their development, a process that could take 50 years or so. These long-lived trees are extremely slow growing.