With the exception of a few below-freezing days and a dash of snow now and then, it’s been an especially mild winter and, if things don’t change, one that will surely go into the record books. Blame fossil fuel and wood burning, wild animals, livestock, pets and humans flatulating, volcanoes spewing, natural gas fracking, and the further decomposition of organic deposits such as peat. All of these collective processes, both man-made and naturally occurring, are responsible for melting the glaciers, warming the seven seas, and heating up the atmosphere close to the earth’s surface.

    You may have noticed the daffodils and daylilies already pushing up new shoots. In swampy areas locally, skunk cabbage is already leafing and getting set to bloom. It is always among the first flowers to appear in the spring, but in February? Ridiculous.

    On a mild January night two-and-a-half weeks ago, Andy Sabin got the itch to go out and look for tiger salamanders, one of the New York State endangered species, the largest state populations of which occur on Long Island. He went to one of his favorite salamander ponds on the South Fork and, yes, he found four adult tiger salamanders. They had left their earthen chambers and were ready to reproduce. No telling how long they had already been in the water.

    Two Mondays ago on a warmish afternoon at Morton Wildlife Refuge in Noyac, the usual year-round resident birds were out in force begging for food, but there was also a catbird, not only basking in the sun, but meowing to passers-by simultaneously. A few overwinter here each year, but the majority go south to stay warm.

    Normally, at this time of year the ground to three or four inches below grade is frozen solid. Not this year. Perhaps, that is why the daffodils and daylilies are having an easy time of it and the tiger salamanders have no problem “digging” out. The early birds get the worm, the early salamanders get the breeding pond all to themselves, but what about the premature bloomers, do they get the insect pollinators? I think not.

    While looking for oysters in the shallows of Three Mile Harbor, Chris Russo saw what could have been a crab on the bottom but what turned out to be a diamondback terrapin. It is not uncommon for diamondbacks to be in marine waters close to shore at this time of the year, but buried in the sand or mud where the upwelling groundwater keeps them warm during the cold months in their semi-hibernatory states. That particular diamondback was taking a heck of a chance. A cold snap could render it helpless, without the wherewithal to dig back under. Aside from motor vehicle hits, the next-biggest killer of local box turtles is winter warm spells followed by severely frigid periods. The turtles come out of the ground in a torpid state ready to start spring, and they literally freeze to death when the cold nips them in the bud. I advised Chris to keep the terrapin until spring comes.

    On the other hand, one would think that there would be more roadkills to be seen, what with the opossums, raccoons, squirrels, and other mammals staying active these past warm nights. Not the case, however. The number of roadkills, at least according to my January and February observations, is way down. Part of the downturn can be attributed to few motorists on the roads during this time of the year.

    Maria Bowling has been entertaining bluebirds all winter in her East End yard. It may be because she provides water for them, as they are not birds that normally come to feeders, but they need to drink. Or it may be that she is a certified Chinese herbalist. Bluebirds could go for that.

    By the same token, two male robins were feeding on the grassy shoulder of Old Northwest Road in East Hampton when I drove by during the afternoon more than a week ago. Great blue herons are in abundance this winter. I saw three different ones on Feb. 3 flying low over North Sea Harbor, apparently in search of good fishing spots. In normal winters, the shallow estuarine waters and all of the fresh waters would be frozen over and the great blues would have to go farther south to find food, or perish from starvation.

    One of the most unusual birds among the many that have loitered through the winter here is a lark sparrow. It showed up at Walter and Ellie Galcik’s feeders at the edge of Ditch Plain in Montauk a few weeks ago and has hung around since. Walter and Ellie are very generous and longtime feeders when it comes to birds, so who knows, it might not be the first winter that a lark sparrow, normally a bird of the Midwestern prairies, has visited that spot. Several birders, including Karen Rubenstein, have visited the Galciks to get a good look at it. (Walter is the caretaker of Shadmoor Park, right next to the Galcik residence, and has worked continuously for the East Hampton Town Natural Resources Department since 1992.)

    The most unusual appearance of all, in my mind, was the adult chipmunk that greeted me along Morton Wildlife Refuge’s main trail to the bay on that same Monday afternoon that I saw the catbird. Chipmunks, like woodchucks, are hibernators. They almost never come out of their subterranean burrows during the winter. This one was every bit as chipper as those you see during the middle of summer, sitting up asking for handouts. I guess it knew what it was doing and was fully capable of going back under should the need arise.

    We cannot sustain ourselves without oxygen, and we can’t exist without nitrogen either, but too much nitrogen, and the balance of nature is seriously out of whack: Think red tide, brown tide, and other algae blooms.

    Psychologists and physiologists tell us that there are four primitive drives propelling us through life: food, sleep, reproduction, and shelter. For humans, shelter is protection from rain, snow, cold, high winds, very hot weather, and would-be enemies and attackers. These drives are rooted in our genes; all animal life forms have them, even single-cell animals, the protozoans such as amoebas and paramecia, are driven by these powerful urges. They exist in green plants, too, but much more passively. Plants don’t forage for food, they make it, and while plants may not sleep, they often become dormant.

    The genes that give rise to and shape these basic needs are made up of DNA and RNA nucleotides, composed of sugar and protein molecules. All life has the ability to reproduce itself. The most microscopic quasi-life forms, such as viruses, use the genes and enzymes of their hosts to reproduce themselves. The blueprints for life are in the arrangements of the proteinaceous nucleotides.

    Amino acids are the simplest of proteinaceous materials and amino acids all contain nitrogen atoms. The atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen gas. Life can’t sustain itself on nitrogen gas the way it can on oxygen. We owe our existence to oxygen. We respire it. Plants respire oxygen, too, especially when it is dark and they are not photosynthesizing, or converting carbon dioxide into carbohydrates.

    On the other hand we can’t exist without the nitrogen atoms, either, but for it to be of any use to us, it first has to be “fixed,” i.e. combined with hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms so that we can assimilate it into genes, enzymes, and the other proteinaceous materials.

    Too much oxygen is rarely a problem; it makes up about 20 percent of the atmosphere. Too much fixed nitrogen, however, can be a big problem. Salts of nitrogen such as nitrates, a common ingredient in just about all fertilizers, ammonia, which we secrete in our urine, and nitrites, are all important growth inducers. They are converted in one way or another by protoplasmic processes into amino acids, nucleotides, enzymes, hormones, and animal tissue building blocks.

    The threshold for potable water is no more than 10 parts of nitrogen in a million parts of water. Modern research is discovering that this level is much too generous, and the drinking water standard for nitrogen compounds will undoubtedly be lowered in the future.

    While we animals also make structural tissues such as skin, hair, fur, muscles, flagella, and cilia out of protein, plants synthesize the majority of their structural parts out of oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon, turning them into lignin and cellulose (the wood that we burn in our fireplaces, the paper we write on, etc.). However, they need the nitrogen to make genes and enzymes, and for respiration and energy production, just as we do.

    Too much of a good thing is not a good thing. While atmospheric nitrogen, N2, is not very soluble in water, the bottom level of the aquatic food chain, the phytoplankton and other microbes, get their nitrogen from organic and inorganic nitrogen compounds reaching the water by various means. Urea from mammals and uric acid from birds — including pets — is one source, atmospheric pollution in the form of nitrogen compounds (nitrogen dioxide, for example) is another. Some of that comes all the way from China, brought here by weather systems moving from west to east. Human septic systems are another source of dissolved nitrogen, and soluble fertilizers used by humans are a fourth source.

    Dissolved nitrogen gets to the aquatic system, say Lake Montauk or Georgica Pond, in rain or by way of runoff from roads and lawns or by welling up from the underlying water table, which is the main route for septic system nitrogen contributions. Think of it. There are 7 billion of us and we all urinate several times a day. Much of that goes into the groundwater untreated.

    These waste nitrogen compounds, whether they be from the air, the land, or underground, are many times more common than they were, say, 100 years ago. Certain phytoplankton suck it up and go amok. The result is extensive “blooms,” such as the reddish one that covered much of the western half of the Peconic Estuary in the late spring and early summer of 2010, no doubt at least partially driven by the runoff and upwelling from the record rainfall that March.

    Phytoplankton can divide and double in number once every hour if conditions are right, and it doesn’t take two of them to tango. A single one can get the ball rolling downhill and speeding up as it goes. Too much turkey today might give us a stomachache that might last until the next morning. Too much nitrogen in the water will give the Peconics a stomachache that could last for months.

    Sunday was a perfect day to take a walk in the woods. Adelaide de Menil and I went to the South Fork-Shelter Island Nature Conservancy’s Sagg Swamp Preserve. Adelaide had never been there, I had not been since 1995 when I led a walk for the Conservancy.

    In 1977 Rene Eastin, a geologist teaching at Southampton College, and I were given a small grant to study the preserve and write a master plan for it, which I believe was the first for a Nature Conservancy preserve on Long Island. That was Russell Hoeflich’s entryway into the Nature Conservancy; he was a student at the college and was hired to work on the study and plan. From there he went on to become the first director of the local Conservancy, later, the head of Oregon’s Nature Conservancy, a position he still holds today.Harbor and Sagaponack, we thought.

    This was the longest string of blackbirds I had ever witnessed. It took fully a half-hour before the last laggard had passed. There must have been several thousand of them, all told. The waves came from slightly different directions, some from the south-southwest, some from the south, others from the south-southeast, as if they had left their separate feeding fields north of the ocean but were converging into one massive flock to overnight together.

    Adelaide hears higher-pitched notes than I do. She heard the frail peeps of the spring peepers about to descend into their winter quarters. The only other sounds heard during our walk were those produced by a Long Island Rail Road engine stopping and starting up and a helicopter passing to the south.

    We walked north toward Jeremy’s Hole, a small body of swampy water where wild ducks breed in the spring and spend their nights in the fall and winter. A very nicely constructed walkway skimming over the top had recently been repaired by a Nature Conservancy work crew headed by Paul D’Andrea, I was told by Marilyn Lindberg and her son, who came by on a different trail. Otherwise we would have had very wet feet.

    Phragmites, that dreaded reed from Eurasia, had been making its way eastward  and had already penetrated well into the swamp parts of the preserve. More annoying, however, was the amount of black swallow-wort encountered. This viny invasive, a member of the milkweed family, hails from southern Europe and is a newcomer to the South Fork. Victoria Bustamante recently found it ranging as far east as Montauk. It spreads very rapidly, like mile-a-minute-weed, another invasive new to the area. It could easily take over most of the preserve in a few years.

    Water was flowing out over the weir at the foot of Jeremy’s Hole, the same sturdily constructed wooden weir that I had encountered in 1977. Jeremy’s Hole is one of the few places left on Long Island east of the Shinnecock Canal where alewives still breed. They come into Sagaponack Pond from the Atlantic Ocean when there is an opening, swim north under two bridges, enter Sagg Stream, and run up a quarter-mile or more to breed in Jeremy’s Hole. Not one was to be seen: They and their offspring were probably well back into the depths of the ocean by now.

    We wanted to reach the grove of Atlantic white cedars on the north side of the preserve but the going was too impenetrable. We decided to drive around and enter from Montauk Highway to the north. Sagg Swamp is part of a chain of aquatic habitats stretching north to the village of Sag Harbor, one of the last stops on the greenbelt of ponds originating at Otter Pond and Sag Harbor Cove. The white cedar grove in question is the farthest east of them on Long Island, a few miles east of the upper Water Mill groves and the very large groves in North Sea.

    Light was waning. As we walked in from the north, there were the white cedars in a circle no more than 100 yards wide, just as I left them 34 years ago, but about one and a half times taller, standing shoulder to shoulder. There were no little ones to take their places should they get blown over or succumb to fire.

    We were about to enter the grove when about 20 feet off the ground something moved. “Hello,” I said. A friendly “hello” called back from a hunter dressed in camouflage manning a deer stand. We had seen three midsize females daintily feeding and making their way through the south end of the swamp 15 minutes earlier. There were many recent deer rub signs on the saplings skirting the cedar grove from bucks removing the velvet from their new antlers.

    We left the hunter to his deer. No doubt, soon a few would be passing under or by the white cedar grove on their way to the lush grassy fields to the north, beginning south of the highway, to forage and spend the night. The sun was setting as we drove away. It had been a great day for a wonderful walk.

    When we arrived, I was happy to see the same viny euonymous spiraling up a large tree at the preserve’s entrance. This foreigner is the only one I’ve ever witnessed on the East End and I now know that it is at least 34 years old because it was in the same tree when the three of us undertook the study. It had multiplied during the ensuing interlude and spread into the first 50 feet of the preserve.

    It was warm, nary a breeze, just right for hearing nature’s sounds and seeing nature’s sights.

    We worked our way along the well-maintained path, the same one we scientists had followed in 1977 to begin the study. The tupelos, red maples, oaks, and sassafras had put on another 25 feet of growth, some of them are almost 85 feet tall now. At least three red maples had been blown over recently, exposing a root disk 15 feet wide but only a foot or so thick. An edge that once had been horizontally anchored in the wettish soil was now pointing straight up. A small pocket of water filled the void created by the upheaval. Two frogs or pollywogs were quick to make their escape as we approached to get a close-up look. Tropical Storm Irene of late August, we surmised.

    While we were marveling at the size of the exposed root disk and the way older blown-down maples had sent shoots straight up from their bases, some of which had become new trunks four or five inches in diameter, we heard clacking overhead. We looked up and there came from the south about 100 feet up a 50-foot wide swath of blackbirds. It was a little before 3 in the afternoon and they were heading in a northeasterly direction, 180 degrees out of whack if they were migrating. Going to a roost somewhere between Sag

    At 10 this morning, the Montauk SurfMasters surfcasting tournament ended with a collective whimper. Except for October, which saw some of the best surf fishing for striped bass in years, the hard-fought tourney was not blessed with that all-important ingredient: fish.

    Montauk’s charter boat and party boat fleets continue to do well. Bass fishing was described as better than average, but not within casting distance from shore. The biggest bass taken from the beach during the month of November — there was a $250 tournament bounty on the biggest fish caught last month — weighed only 14.76 pounds.

    Many casters have given up. On Thanksgiving Day, the Montauk Point State Park lot where the regulars park their rigs was empty. So were the boulders where casters perch below the Lighthouse. A big sea was running and gannets, those swept-wing dive bombers, were plunging into the ocean, a sure sign that herring or other prey species were schooling with bass most likely hunting them from below.

    But, despite a flood tide, the gannets were making their promising dives only a few yards beyond casting range, a scene that mirrored this surfcasting tournament’s frustrating finish.

    Some fish were caught under the Lighthouse on Saturday, and the ocean water remains in the mid-50s. Small bass and bluefish were reported in Gardiner’s Bay over the weekend. Big bluefish were being caught from the beach in Amagansett and draggers report striped bass not far from shore. It’s possible that nature could hand insult to injury with a post-tournament appearance of big bass at the feet of those few who have not put their equipment away for the winter.

    Unless the fishing improved between press time and 10 a.m. today, Kever Oleas took first and second place in the tournament’s wader division. Gary Krist finished in third place. John Bruno’s 50.82-pound bass, the largest over all, made John Bruno the top fisherman in the wetsuit division. Mary Ellen Kane finished first and second in the women’s division, Joan Naso-Federman’s 10.32-pound bass captured third place.

    In the youth division, ages 12 to 17, Phillip Schnell’s 20.98-pound bass put him in first place, Dylan Lackner finished second with an 11.9-pounder. James Kim Jr. caught a 10.6-pound bass to become the winner in the tournament’s kids division for whippersnappers 7 to 11 years old.

    Tournament anglers have until 11 a.m. today to weigh last-minute fish. The post-tournament dinner will be held at Gurney’s Inn on Dec. 10. Festivities begin at 5 p.m. There is no fee for SurfMaster members. Guest fees are $50 per adult and $25 for “yoots.” All members and guests (not youths) will be charged $10 for gratuities.

    Meanwhile, a bit offshore, boaters have had beautiful fishing weather. The Cartwright grounds, a rocky outcropping located six miles south of Montauk, are producing cod, sea bass, and blackfish. Gary, a k a Toad, Stephens, came back to the West Lake Marina with a 9.85-pound blackfish that he weighed and promptly released so it would grow even bigger.

    On Sunday, John DeMelio, an angler aboard the charter boat Double D out of West Lake, caught a whopper, a 10.5-pound “tautog,” as the Indians called blackfish. Boating striped bass anglers have been jigging for herring outside the Montauk Harbor Inlet and using them successfully for striped bass bait out in the rips to the east. The bass have been mostly schoolie size.

    Michael Potts of the Blue Fin IV charter boat reported good fishing “in a lot of places” around Block Island. “Cod are showing up almost everywhere mixed in with sea bass.”

    With Christmas nigh, fishermen with boats not yet winterized might want to gig up a mess of herring to pickle. A jar of pickled herring with a red bow tied around its neck makes for a nice recession-era gift.

    Another beautiful Sunday. The three of us were out to discover something, if not for posterity, at least for our own diaries. These days one almost has to leave the earth and go into space to find something new and big, but local discoveries and rediscoveries are still to be made. So instead of setting out to find the source of the Nile, a feat that had already been accomplished more than 150 years ago, we chose the rediscovery of Rattlesnake Creek, the source of Little Northwest Creek in Sag Harbor.

    Then, too, while hunting down Rattlesnake Creek, why not ferret out the remains of the old bridge across Little Northwest Creek, from when the road linking Sag Harbor and East Hampton crossed the creek and there was no Route 114? Timothy Dwight, the second president of Yale University, had crossed that bridge in 1804 during his trip around Long Island all the way to Montauk Point with a side trip to Gardiner’s Island. Such adventure was recounted in one of his 163 letters covering his travels through the Northeast and Middle Atlantic coast during Yale’s summer vacation periods from 1796 to 1817. All of these letters were in a multi-volume work posthumously titled “Travels in New-England and New-York” in 1821 to 1822.

    Like Thomas Jefferson, who also traveled to Long Island early on, Timothy was one of those curious doctors of divinity who was interested in everything — Native Americans, fauna and flora, farming, fishing, and the like. He was a keen observer and a copious note-taker.

    The three of us would try to follow in a few of his footsteps, but we left our notebooks and iPads behind. We would rely on our memories, not on hard copy or photographs.

    Little Northwest Creek is the dividing line between Barcelona, née Rousell’s Neck, in northwestern East Hampton and the Village of Sag Harbor. It and the surrounding uplands are owned by the State of New York and managed by the Department of Environmental Conservation, as the bulk of Barcelona is now. The redoubtable Ben Heller had tried to develop it along with the Grace Estate to the east in the 1980s, but fell short and settled for several million dollars, a tidy sum in those days.

    While working for East Hampton in the mid-1980s I had ribboned the edge of the three or four miles of wetlands associated with Little Northwest Creek and Northwest Creek Trapping around Barcelona from west to east, Route 114 to Swamp Road. On the east side of Little Northwest Creek I had noticed a “bump” with small trees standing on it jutting out into the creek, but thought nothing of it. Ten years later, Jean Held, a Sag Harbor historian and naturalist, informed me that the bump was the landing for the Old Sag Harbor Road where it reached Rousell’s Neck then turned south in the direction of East Hampton. I had forgotten just where I had seen that bump, but the three of us took a chance and walked due west from “golf course road,” keeping to the south wooded edge of the Sag Harbor Golf Course and trying to disturb the Sunday golfers as little as possible.

    Then we entered the woods on the west side of the course, walked through small oaks and tupelos for about 100 yards and, voila, arrived at the bump. It was about 8 feet wide and 20 feet long and extended about 15 feet out from the edge of the wetlands that impinged on the north and south sides. It had some small oaks and tupelos, none more than 50 years old I guessed, and only one more than 12 inches in diameter. We had re-found the eastern part of the bridge access. It was midtide, and when we looked into the murky creek water only three feet deep or so, we could make out two rows of eroded posts (cedar? locust?), south and north, fording the creek, reaching to the Sag Harbor side now covered by hardwoods.

    Having satisfied ourselves that we had indeed been standing on the very spot where Timothy Dwight and his driver had crossed over by horse and buggy more than 200 years ago, we went on to find the source of Rattlesnake Creek.

    This time we went to the west side of Northwest Creek behind the Barcelona Motel, headed north from the golf course road, and made our way to the junction where the phragmites-infested wetland edge turned easterly. That was the outlet for the creek we were looking for. Two hundred more yards through dangleberry and bayberry shrubs and under very tall pitch and white pines, we came to a break in the phragmites and the opening that I visit once a year when the cardinal flowers and other wetland plants are blooming just out of the reach of the invasive reeds and where the creek is clear and fresh.

    Knotty red maples and tupelos reached up toward the sky. It was clear and soft going underneath. Timothy Dwight may have seen one when he passed by, as he wrote about snakes, as well, but the timber rattlesnakes after which the creek had been named were long gone. Nine-spine sticklebacks, a species that is circumpolar in the Northern Hemisphere, travel up the creek from Little Northwest Creek to breed here, but there were none to be seen on this day. The two to three-foot-high stalks of the cardinal flowers were not to be seen, either; it was late in the season. We stopped a few hundred feet from Route 114, on the east side of the Jewish Cemetery, where one arm of the creek takes issue.

    We walked back to our vehicles, content that we had visited the two historical sites that had been our goal and with the knowledge that if you are of modest means, you do not have to go into space or visit Antarctica to get a good sense of the world and its evolution. You can dig up a lot in your own backyard.

Today, the woods on what is now called Barcelona Neck contain a mix of young and ancient trees, some, like this toppled giant, live on as smaller suckers rising from a single trunk.

The woodland and surrounding marshes now home to the Sag Harbor Golf Course were once known as Rousell’s Neck, which was depicted in an 1918 atlas as owned by W.T. Diefendorf.  

    It is impossible interpreting the present, but you can come close interpreting history. In my mind the history of East Hampton, and for that matter all of Long Island, is much more interesting than what is happening now. We’ve passed way beyond the age of discovery; we might better describe contemporary life as the age of packaging, marketing, distribution, and bad political theater. There are no Jeffersons, Washingtons, Lincolns, and Franklins to lead and enlighten us, only their poor likenesses recycled over and over to lull us into acquiescing submission.

    I try to keep up, but keep up with what? I invariably find myself drifting back to the way it was when I was a child, the way it was before I was a child. In that respect, a picture is worth a thousand words.

    Old photographs and old maps are my salvation. Old maps of Long Island and the South Fork keep me going. They let me climb back into a time when everyday life was a different kind of challenge than offered by reality TV. It was a time when living off the land was, indeed, living off the land. Time was slower, and except for lightning itself, things didn’t move with lightning speed. People then were not derivative, not mere models of other people; they were all individuals who worked hard with the simple tools at their disposal. They used their hands in a variety of ways, not just for typing and driving and waving in the air while they raved it up, but to knead the soil, make things, catch things, harvest things.

    On my 1838 U.S. Coast Maps, for example, I can count the houses and other buildings, the cemeteries, the farms, the orchards, the bountiful woodlands, the marshes, dunes, the bays, creeks and ponds, the old dirt roads and trails. There have been lots of changes in the human landscape since that time, most of them occurring since World War II. Sadly, many of the features seen on my old maps are no more. But several are, such as on the 1838 map, Sag Harbor to Accabonac Harbor, remnants of the old bridge across Little Northwest Creek, a relic of what is now called the “Old Sag Harbor Road” which ran from Southampton to East Hampton and has been replaced by Noyac Road and Route 114.

    Many of the old trustee roads have been overgrown with woods or reduced to foot trails. A few such as Six Pole Highway south of Sag Harbor, the now LIPA high-voltage power line from eastern Southampton into Wainscott, Two Rod Highway, and so on are cleared or partially cleared and still navigable.

    Perhaps, the most unusual of these old byways, are the corduroy roads fashioned from wooden sampling trunks laid side by side that circled the edges of marshes and gave firm footing to carts carrying marsh hay, eelgrass, and other wetland harvest products drawn by horses. In the olden days marshes provided forage for livestock, insulation for houses. Parts of one of these old roads still exist in the marshes of Accabonac Harbor.

    The road remained largely intact until the 1930s when mosquito ditches were being dug through Long Island marshes by hand as part of the Great Depression’s Works Project Administration. As you walk along the ditches, say, north of Landing Lane off of Old Stone Highway, you will see where the ditchers had to cut through this marsh highway in spots to complete a ditch. The thinnish boles making up the road are covered by a layer of marsh peat and soil six or more inches thick, sediments that have been deposited over a century or more by wind and tide.

    The wood is still sturdy. In the old days boat makers used to put wood for making hulls in salt marsh mud for a time to soften it for shaping. The salt marsh soils are anoxic, and very little decomposition of the wood takes place under such low-oxygen conditions. No doubt, oxcarts or other drays will never traverse these salt marsh roads again, but they serve as a reminder of a time when we all, not just a few of us, lived off the land and its riches and all human life was truly original and not derivative.

    An extraordinary event took place on Saturday — the annual Montauk Christmas bird count, now more than 100 years old and among the very oldest in the country.

    Birders go out and rake over a 15-mile-diameter circle to record the number of different species and the number of each seen or heard from before dawn until well after dusk. The circle covers Montauk, Amagansett, including Napeague, Springs, and Gardiner’s Island, as well as part of the ocean, Block Island Sound, Napeague Bay, Gardiner’s Bay, and Accabonac Harbor.

    Mary Laura and Eric Lamont and fellow observers have covered Gardiner’s Island each year since before 2000. The island plays host to a plethora of winter birds, several species of which are not normally observed elsewhere in the count area in any given year. It is particularly rich in raptors and waterfowl. In most years a snowy owl is counted along with other boreal visitors such as rough-legged hawks, great cormorants, and rare visiting geese species. With only one family, the Goelets, and a caretaker or two residing on the 3,300-plus-acre island, you might say this wondrously still wild, somewhat isolated place is literally for the birds.

    Mary Laura called me Sunday evening quite excited. She discovered something new to the Long Island avifauna. On last year’s trip she found a very large nest in a large oak tree, not on a platform of the kind put up for ospreys throughout Long Island and along the entire East Coast.

    She thought at that time that the nest was much too big to have been constructed by a pair of ospreys. So this time around, she went to a high spot on the island and looked in the direction of the nest.

    In her absence it had grown even larger. But the most remarkable aspect about the nest was that there were two mature bald eagles in it. They were nervously twittering and moving about as they will often do when humans are within easy eyesight, especially in spots such as Gardiner’s Island where they encounter so few humans.

    She continued to observe the pair when an immature bald eagle, one without the white head, entered the scene. Could it be a young of the year? she wondered. Immature bald eagles are seen regularly on Long Island during migration and visitations from New England, while adults are much less frequently seen.

    Osprey young of the year often hang around the nest long after having fledged; why not bald eagle young?

    The last bald eagles known to have nested in the Long Island area nested on Gardiner’s Island some 75 years ago, during the Great Depression.

    Peregrine falcons have returned as regular nesters in Nassau County high up on the Nassau County Medical Center building for several years running. Four years ago Charlie Morici, the Hither Woods Park caretaker, discovered in a deserted World War II storage building on the edge of Fort Pond Bay the first Long Island turkey vulture nest with two young.

    Cooper’s and sharp-shinned hawks have become quite common as nesters on eastern Long Island during the first decade of the new millennium. Long Island has at least one resident beaver, in Montauk, and several otter pairs, a few of which have raised young in the creek and bay waters of northern Nassau County. Dolphins are becoming more and more common in the Peconic Estuary with each passing year. Why not the return of the bald eagle, too, as a breeder, the final feather in the Island’s cap?

    One might have guessed that something was up. This writer has never fielded so many eagle sighting calls as during 20ll, many of which were summer birds, not a few of which were unmistakably adults with bright white heads.

    Mary Laura is not only a full-time ranger at the National Park Service’s William Floyd Estate, but a seasoned naturalist, as well, and the coordinator for many years of the Orient Bird Count, which covers part of the South Fork, Shelter Island, and much of the North Fork. It will be held on New Year’s Eve day. If I were she and experienced what she experienced on that fateful Saturday I would be in a state of perpetual joyous excitation and have a hard time sleeping.

    Thanks to the Goelets for keeping their island as wild and undeveloped as possible. Thanks to all of the hard-working environmentalists and naturalists who have been working with politicians and federal, state, county, and local officials not only to save what’s left of Long Island’s wild environment, but also to return to it that which we thought was gone forever. They should take a second or two to pat each other on the back as the clock strikes 12 this New Year’s Eve. Their efforts are paying off.    

    The eagle has landed!

­    As the Northern Hemisphere continues to warm up, natural selection will reverse a long-term trend in warm-blooded animal evolution known as Allen’s Rule. Mammals that stay active in the winter tend to have thicker fur than those that hibernate, just as the plumage of seabirds is thicker than that of land birds in general.

    Water is a much better conductor than air and the waterfowl that rest on the water or dive under it must be well insulated or else they would perish from hypothermia. They don’t make pillow and coat stuffing out of the feathers of land birds. They use eiderdown, which is a very good insulator.

    The appendages of mammals radiate body heat into the atmosphere. The longer or larger they are, the better radiators they are. The size of the ear serves as a good example. With the exception of humans, perhaps, in northern latitudes mammalian ears tend to be much smaller than those in tropical and subtropical areas. Tails are also heat radiators, that’s why most mammals with tails curl up when sleeping. The closer the tail and the legs are to the body, the less the heat loss.

    The furs of northern fur-bearing animals such as fishers, martins, lynxes, and minks were highly sought after by the French and English settlers in the 1600s, not just for local use, but for export to Europe. The fur trade was a very profitable industry for those seeking out livings in the New World.

    Allen’s Rule states that for any group of mammals, say, bears, rabbits, or squirrels, the more boreal the mammal, the shorter its ears and the shorter its tail. Polar bears have smaller ears than southern black bears; snowshoe rabbits have shorter ears than jack rabbits. Jack rabbits released on the tundra for stocking purposes would not fare well at all.

    Just like the primates we stem from, humans are tailless and have comparatively small ears. Nevertheless, these small human ears radiate a lot of heat. Touch your unprotected ears on a very cold night and they can feel ice cold. Many mammals with longish ears can fold them back against the body when the going gets cold. We wear hats with flaps covering the ears for the same reason.

    Another rule that applies to mammals residing more northerly than their southern look-alikes is that their bodies are more massive. Think of the polar bear and the Alaskan brown bear: They are far more massive than the black bears that range in the Smoky Mountains or southern Rockies. It seems to be a paradox. On the one hand their ears and tails are smaller, but their bodies are larger.

    The larger bodies have to do with the surface area to mass ratio. The surface, or integument, of the mammal’s body is responsible for most of the heat loss. That is why we insulate it on cold days with layers of fabric, sometimes in a sandwich filled with down. Rotund bodies have less surface area per unit of mass than slim ones. Take shrews for example. They’re smaller than mice and their surface area to body of mass ratio is among the highest in all mammals. They lose so much heat through their integument that they have to eat four or five times their weight every day in the winter in order to keep from losing out to hypothermia.

    Yes, obesity is not popularly represented in the Styles section of The New York Times, but in older times it could mean the difference between survival and loss in cold climates. All mammals in colder climates store up body fat to get through the winter, why not humans? It’s a good insulator and energy source.

    There is a downside to the larger bodies and smaller ears. Smaller ears don’t hear as well as larger ones, especially those that are both large and can be directed toward a sound source. As the climate heats up, heat loss will not be as important. Those individuals born with larger ears and developing smaller bodies will have an advantage over their littermates. In time evolution will move in the opposite direction.

    In humans it will be different. We are on the verge of making the selection ourselves with the help of genetic counselors, based on sex, I.Q., size, and other attributes. Couples that want athletes will be able to select for them, those that want girls and not boys will have girls, and vice versa. You want your son or daughter to be eligible to join Mensa? That will be possible, too. In other words, we are coming very close to being able to produce superhuman progeny. It’s been done in livestock, dogs, cats, and other domestic mammals and birds for centuries.

    Leaves. We can’t live without them; some of us can’t live with them, particularly so after they’ve all fallen and coated every inch of landscape as well as roofs, driveways, swimming pools, and other non-vegetated surfaces. On most of the South Fork it was not such a big year for acorns, but it was a great year for leaves. As of Tuesday morning, oak leaves were still falling in dribs and drabs, and that was because there were only dribs and drabs left on the trees, at least that was the case in Noyac, where I live.

    Montauk never recovered from the late-August passing of Irene. Hither Woods on both sides of Route 27 was 50 percent drab from September on. Napeague, in the hamlet of Amagansett, suffered a similar fate. Very little in the way of color, save for the yellowing of the pitch pine needles. Drab, drab, drab.

    North of the highway in the rest of East Hampton Town was a different story. The Stony Hill mixed hardwood forest was pleasingly colorful right through Election Day, while the pine hardwood trees of Northwest were still resplendent on the weekend. On a scale of 1 to 10, I gave Northwest leaf color a 9.5 at its peak this year. Swamp Road, Two Holes of Water Road, and Old Northwest Road offered the greatest show of reds, oranges, and yellows. Even the woods along Route 114, which had taken such a beating in past years from gypsy moths and cankerworms, were showy this fall.

    While New England had its usual fanciful fall coloration, one didn’t have to leave Long Island to find vibrant fall foliage. One simply had to walk, bike, or drive down a local road or two to realize the meaning of fall and the turn of the seasons. The West Coast has the Pacific Ocean and miles and miles of redwoods and grasslands dotted with live oaks, but the fall is not so different from the spring. What would happen if climate change brought us 20 straight years of Mediterranean weather, in which summer turned abruptly to winter without a soothing intervening fall? A lot of us would move away.

    Isaac Newton may have based his theory of gravity on a dropping apple, but he could just as well have based it on the British Isles’ falling autumn leaves. They were falling on my house and around it in droves over the weekend. On Friday morning the leaves were coming down around the house at a rate of two per minute, the oaks still had 75 percent of their leaves. By Saturday noon the leaf-fall rate had picked up to 21.5 per minute or 31,000 per 24-hour day, while on Sunday noon, only a leaf or two were left. No wonder that on Tuesday morning they were falling at an average rate of only half a leaf per minute. The five large oak trees on my sixth of an acre lot were already 95 percent bare.

    Who other than Mr. Newton or Galileo, perhaps Roger Williams, maybe Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson, would spend time watching leaves fall, from September on? In California they don’t play those songs.

    On Sunday, just when it seemed the surfcasting season was over, boaters began finding striped bass feeding on schools of herring as desperate surfcasters, watching from shore, thrilled to the aerial assault on the herring by gannets.

    A strange fall indeed. Here it is well into November and the ocean temperature remains above 50 degrees. It seems that larger striped bass time their southern migration so they can feed from the herring bounty en route to the Chesapeake Bay.

    Speaking of which, both Virginia and Maryland have posted near-record totals in their respective young-of-the-year surveys of striped bass in the giant estuary. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources recently announced the fourth highest totals, well above the long-term average in the survey’s 58-year history.

    The survey also showed an increase in the abundance of the juvenile blueback herring population, the bass’s favorite forage food. Virginia’s survey results were similar. The 2011 young-of-the-year bass should be fishable in three or four years.

    Bob Otter told Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett that he was off Watch Hill, R.I., last Thursday, where boats were drifting through schools of herring and hauling up striped bass from their midst in the 25 to 28-inch range. Watch Hill is north of Montauk so if there’s any justice, predator and prey should arrive before week’s end. 

    And, sure enough, Chris Miller of the West Lake Marina said on Monday that the herring were thick right outside the Montauk Harbor Inlet, and the Lazy Bones party boat has reported more consistent bassing.

    Michael Potts said: “If you’re heading over to Block Island to do a little bottom fishing you could see sea gulls picking up bunker and trying to eat them. They were being chased up to the top.” It would seem there’s plenty of bait around for a strong striped bass finale.

    And, as if further evidence of a strong late fall sportfishing season were necessary, the angling for bottom dwellers including blackfish, sea bass, jumbo porgies, and cod has been excellent, according to boaters.

    Miller said blackfish seemed to be moving east from their late summer Fishers Island feeding ground to Cartwright Shoals, Southwest Ledge, and south of Block Island. He confirmed that a healthy number of cod were mixed in with the blackfish catch. Lots of sea bass and jumbo porgies, too. He added that West Lake Marina had plenty of hermit crab blackfish ammunition on hand at the Marina.

    Bennett reported the best sea duck hunting in years, flocks of 20 to 50 birds each. “There’s probably 10,000 ducks around Gardiner’s Island. They fly on the falling tide to get to the shallows, so that’s when you put your decoys out. I had marinated coot breast for Saturday night dinner on the grill,” he said, using the local name for sea scoter. “It was out of this world.”