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.”

    Thanksgiving is perhaps the one holiday that has not yet had its meaning sucked from it by commercial vampires, at least not here on the East End. Maybe because of the wild turkeys grazing along the side of the road.

    Certainly nature’s bounty in the form of striped bass, scallops, ducks, herring, deer, deer, and more deer, cauliflower, squash, brussels sprouts, and cranberries — if you know where the bogs lie — helps.

    State waters continue to produce scallops and the scallop season opened in town waters on Monday. Striped bass have not left yet. Gene Hamilton, a dedicated fisherman, said that large stripers continue to haunt dips and coves in Shinnecock Bay.

    The wind kept most boats at bay over the weekend, but those hearty souls who ventured forth found striped bass, although in the “schoolie” size range. Surfcasters continue to be frustrated although there was one unconfirmed report that Dennis Gaviola found a 25-pound bass under the Montauk Light in recent days.

    Sue Jappell at Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reported that anglers were saying a new body of striped bass moved into Montauk waters late last week. “There was action over the weekend from the beach, and boats were catching stripers in the rips around Montauk Point prior to the weekend’s winds.” 

    Fred (the Eel) Kalkstein, an organizer of the Montauk SurfMasters striped bass tournament, confirmed that at least a few bass in the 20-pound range had been caught around Montauk Point, on the north side to be more precise. Kalkstein said that not one bass had been weighed as a tournament contender this month.

    “The only happy guy out there is Bruno,” he said, meaning John Bruno, who has been in possession of first place in the winner-take-all wetsuit division since Oct. 22 when he reeled in a 50.82-pounder.

    October was about as good as a surfcaster can expect to see. True, Kleaver Oleas, in first place in the wader division, caught his 37.74-pounder on Sept. 27, but then caught his second-place, 32.96-pound bass on Oct. 14, just four days after Columbus Day when casters were practically wading through huge schools of big fish. The great casting lasted through October. Gary Krist has the third-place bass in the wader division, a 32.24-pounder caught on Oct. 19.

    Mary Ellen Kane holds first and second positions in the women’s division with 15.45 and 14.06-pound bass caught on Oct. 15 and 16 respectively. Joan Naso-Federman is in third place with a 10.32-pound bass also caught on Oct. 16.    Philip Schnell is at the top of the heap in the SurfMasters tournament’s Youth division for anglers ages 12 to 17. His fish, caught on Oct. 6, weighed 20.98 pounds. Dylan Lackner has the second-place, 11.9-pound bass, caught on Oct. 15. James Kim Jr. is in sole position of first place in the under-12 kid’s class with a 10.6-pound bass caught on Oct. 6.

    On Sunday, schools of herring were being found not far outside the Montauk Harbor Inlet where they like to gather and west around Culloden Point into Fort Pond Bay.

    A friend filleted about a dozen over the weekend and smoked them in lieu of pickling, using a light brine and no extra spices. An experiment with toasted rye bread, sweet onion, sour cream, and smoked herring turned out to be a Thanksgiving success — outstanding.

    Not counting today, Turkey Day, there are only six more days of fishing left before the tournament’s finale next Thursday.

    Speaking of turkeys, the state hunting season for the wild variety started Saturday and closed yesterday. 

    The puddle duck season for mallards, pintail, redheads, scaup, canvasbacks, and mergansers will run from Thanksgiving Day to Sunday, then again from Dec. 5 through Jan. 29.

    It’s like reading tea leaves or entrails — cue the eerie music: What does it portend when surfcasters see schools of small bunker and large sand eels in the wash, but not a lot of bluefish?

    Fall fell last Thursday and the new moon rose on Tuesday, and yet, tons of baitfish and very few bluefish. This is the season when it’s not unusual to see acres of bluefish in boiling feeding frenzies that mass at places like Turtle Cove on the west side of the Montauk Lighthouse, or are carried on the tide along the south-facing beaches.

    This is the season when experienced casters know not to cast into such boils if they want to keep their lures, and to let their tins or bucktails sink down around the edges of the boils to find the striped bass that lurk there waiting for the bluefish’s scraps as they descend.

    With the blues away, striped bass are picking at the prey. Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reports that most of the bass action has taken place at night. In fact, the first fish to make it on the leader board in the Montauk SurfMasters tournament in the wetsuit division was caught at night, a 49.3-pounder reeled in by John Bruno. The fish won the State Parks Department tournament over the weekend as well. Richie Michelson is now on the board in the wader division with a 24.12-pound bass caught over the weekend.

    The Star Island Yacht Club’s annual striped bass and bluefish tournament will be held on Oct. 9 from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. Last year, 63 boats entered. The captains’ meeting will take place on the evening of Oct. 8. The entry fee is $275 per boat for up to four anglers, $50 for each additional angler.

    Boating anglers have found the bassing spectacular, even with a slight slowdown over the weekend. The rips needed a bit more tidal flow, which the new moon should provide. The Lazy Bones party boat reported brisk diamond-jigging action last week, with bass up to 35 pounds. Live eels are doing the trick as well.

    The sand beaches in Amagansett have been seeing more striped bass within casting distance of shore than has Montauk these days, according to Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in that hamlet — fish in the 10-to-20-pound range. And, “ah, the solitude of false albacore fishing” in Gardiner’s Bay with many of the mosquito fleet of light-tackle and fly-fishing boats in Montauk, Bennett reported with a satisfied sigh and a lure to his shop: “I’ve been making neat teasers’ feathers, wild colors that work real well.”

    Teasers are features of terminal gear that “swim” ahead of the hook on drop lines and appear to hungry fish as small prey being chased by a bigger fish (with hook).

    Brian Fromm returned to the West Lake Marina over the weekend aboard his Flying Dutchman with a 223-pound big-eye tuna. The Dutchman also found schools of mahimahi. One mahi weighed 20 pounds.

    Chris Miller of West Lake reminds flatfish anglers that the fluke season ends tomorrow. The recreational porgy season closed on Monday unless you plan to fish from a party or charter boat.

    On Sept. 7 the daily possession limit went from 10 to 40 porgies per person per day. It will stay that way until Oct. 11. Efforts are under way to convince the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to keep the porgy season open longer given the days lost to Tropical Storm Irene.

    Sea bass have been abundant of late. Unfortunately, that season is due to end on Saturday. It will open again on Nov. 1 and run through Dec. 31.

    Blackfish season opens on Saturday and will run until Dec. 20. Hunting the tautog (blackfish) will become legal again on Jan. 17 through April 30. Miller said West Lake had plenty of blackfish bait on hand — green crabs and the hermit crabs they favor.

    The mosquito fleet of light-tackle and fly-fishing boats was out in force over the weekend with the appearence of false albacore in the rips off Montauk Point and in Gardiner’s Bay. Striped bass made an impressive presence “up front” as well.

    “Insane,” was how Ken Rafferty, a light-tackle and fly-fishing guide described the action from Shagwong to Montauk Point over the weekend.

    “Stripers everywhere, mostly on the north side. The south side had big swells. Late in the day was the best, after 2 o’clock. Albies [false albacore] were everywhere out there, too. The bite was from 8 to 10 in the morning, then you hunt around for albies, then from noon on, and around the point a bit, small schools of stripers. At the end of the day there were striper blitzes on the shoreline.”

    “The albies are phenomenal, more powerful than ever. We had one, 12 pounds, like a torpedo.”

    Rafferty said bass and albacore were feeding on small bay anchovies in balled-up schools measuring about 20 feet across by 10 feet deep. “When

 you come across them, they’re so dense the ball is a maroon color. You see the streaks passing through taking mouthfuls. Here they are taking mouthfuls and you throw a fly that looks like an anchovy and they go for it. It’s the crippled one, the easy kill. They can’t resist.”

    The light-tackle guide said, “Sometimes you can’t match the hatch. Then the fly becomes one more of the billion in the ball, so you add color. I’m doing well on small white patterns with a flash mixed in,” Rafferty said, referring to the fly that’s been working best in recent days.

    Klever Olea — who seems well named — found a 37.74-pound striped bass to climb into first place in the Montauk SurfMasters tournament’s wader division. The catch pushed Richie Michelson’s 24.12-pound bass into second place. Mike Larson sits in third with a 21.88 pounder. John Bruno remains in the top slot of the wetsuit division.

    Paul Melnyk confirmed that bass, some in the 20-pound class, were caught over the weekend around the Montauk Lighthouse and into the Montauk moorland coves as well. Bigger fish, a few over 30 pounds, were taken at night, he said.

    Charter boats led their anglers to some truly large striped bass over the weekend. A live eel dangled from the Double Header boat attracted one that weighed in at 59.25 pounds. The angler was Jay Walsh, part of a group of fishermen from the Northport Yacht Club. Burt Prince on the Susie E II caught a 50-pound bass on Sunday night and the Soaker charter boat found a 53-pounder on Monday. Eels did the trick in all cases.

    Boating fishermen were buoyed by the news that the porgy fishing season for private boats was extended last week until Dec. 25. The bag limit remains 10 porgies per day with a minimum size of 10.5 inches. Charter and party boat anglers may keep up to 40 per day until Tuesday. After that, 10.

    The blackfish season opened on Saturday and early reports are good. One charter boat reported 17 on Monday with about 25 throwbacks under 14 inches in length. The bag limit is four per day. There is talk of an increase in legal size to 16 inches, but not to affect this season’s fishing.

    Black seabass are abundant but off limits since Saturday. They are due to become fair game again on Nov. 1.

    Tuna-wise, reports have an abundant supply of albacore (the big ones) in Hudson Canyon; also a fair number of yellowfin and big-eye tuna offshore. Fishermen are finding a surprising lack of bluefin, however.

    The leaves are beginning to color up. The tupelos, dogwoods, red maples, and sassafras are always the first to turn. The tupelo-lined edges of Little Northwest Creek just east of Sag Harbor are turning burgundy. Having experienced the drying and salt-laden winds of Irene, I wonder, will we have a pretty fall or a drabbish one?

    As you may have noticed, the robins are flying around in loose groups as they hunt for berries and other food before picking up and going south. Grackles and red-winged blackbirds are beginning to fly around in mixed flocks. Adult crows, after raising their families, are no longer seen in pairs, but in large groups as they eye the cornstalks tanning in the fields.

    The cicadas and tree crickets are still stridulating at night, but with much less volume than in the middle of August when the temperature was in the 80s. The katydid’s “Katy did, Katy didn’t” has become slurred and dragged out as its song is temperature dependent, both in pitch and tempo. Around freshwater ponds, one hears the occasional fall song of the spring peeper, a call not to reproduce but to get underground as winter and freezing temperatures will soon be on their way. Frogs and box turtles caught out in the open during a freeze are likely to become nonsurvivors.

    The Carolina wren in the backyard has started singing again. It is one of the few birds that sings off and on throughout the year while it maintains its more or less permanent territory. The mockingbird is another, especially in areas where there are abundant rosehips and other fruit that persist into the winter.

    The witch hazel in Montauk’s Point Woods, a mile west of the Lighthouse, is beginning to bloom.

    It is one of those rare tree species that saves its flowering until after summer at a time when the other trees are ripening up fruit. Thusly, it has the bees and the other insect pollinators that frequent woodlands all to itself.

    You may have noticed acorns from one or more of our several native oak species hitting the roof at night with a clunk. Thus far it’s a so-so acorn year. The deer and turkeys are waiting eagerly for more to fall; the chipmunks and white-footed mice are scrambling to harvest their share and cache them in some secret hiding place.

    In the salt marshes the fiddler crabs are beginning to chink in their holes from below. They will spend winter underground in hopes of surviving until April when they open up their sodden lairs and begin to pop out.

    Double-crested cormorants are still drying their wings while sitting on fish raps throughout the Peconics, but soon will be forming into V or straight-line skeins and heading south. Geese from the north that overwinter here should be filling the skies with their cries any day now. Most of the honking will emanate from Canada geese, but if we are in the right place at the right time, we could pick out the squeakier honks of the snow geese that are infrequent in Long Island skies. Mallards are gathering in Otter Pond, Pussy’s Pond, East Hampton Village’s Nature Trail stream, and other local waterfowl wintering areas, where they are confident that kind souls will feed and shepherd them through the cold months.

    At the upper edge of salt marshes the groundsel bush or sea myrtle is flowering white and fluffy. It is one of the few local members of the sunflower family that is a shrub and not a wildflower. Every fall at this time it lights up the marsh. Those who identify and map saltwater wetlands for a living merely have to drive along and without leaving their vehicles can observe their misty whitened edges.

    Yes, ticks and chiggers also like the fall. [Please see editor's note below.] They are still out in droves, especially the larval deer and Lone Star ticks, which are popping out of eggs at this time. On the other hand, mosquitoes are becoming scarce, so walks at night along roads on Napeague and other low-lying areas have become tolerable without the benefit of Deet or other repellents.

    Cranberries are ripening in the bogs. Enjoy.

—

Editor's note: The presence of chiggers on Long Island has been consistently disputed by entomologists; no evidence for a population here has been found. 

    Sunday was Oct. 9, but it felt like Aug. 9. The parking lot at Montauk Point State Park was full. Fishing boats were spread out on the tide line like stepping stones leading all the way to Block Island.

    Between a line of surfcasters standing shoulder to shoulder like medieval archers and a fleet of small boats with light-tackle and fly-casting archers of their own, an acre of feeding striped bass boiled and frothed. The afternoon light made the short-lived, airborne escapes of their bay-anchovy prey appear like showers of gold coins.

    These were not small bass. They were 28 to 36-inch-long stripers by the thousand with nary a bluefish among them, and they had been making their same awe-inspiring appearence every day for a week.

    A strange calm seemed to settle on the point despite the vast numbers of fish and fishermen. Two surfcasters from New Jersey sat in the late afternoon sun, one holding a Heineken. They leaned against a large boulder beside their surfcasting rods. A fat striper lay between them. Not 30 yards away, the distance of an easy cast, big bass boiled. The men were not alone. Dozens of casters stood around, spent from reeling and satisfied to just watch one of nature’s most inspiring displays. 

    “Does it get any better than this?” one of the men asked.

    “The fish could be bigger,” his friend answered before both men laughed at such audacity.

    Large schools of pure striped bass began rounding Montauk Point on the tide last Wednesday. High water brought them to within casting range every day. At first, the larger fish were taking bucktails. Red pork rind seemed the color of choice to dress the lure. As the days passed, it seemed like new varieties of prey made the choice of lure more difficult. Whatever the lure, it would have been difficult not to catch a fish.

    Boating anglers were similarly blessed. The Star Island Yacht Club’s annual striped bass tournament drew 77 boats. The winning bass, angled by Bob Sztorc from the boat Caprice, weighed in at 46.6 pounds. Rick Gulia on a Mako 23 caught a 43-pounder for second place, and Bob Maier on the Elizabeth boated a 42.2-pound striped bass for third. It was Rick Gulia again who reeled in the winning bluefish, a 13.3-pound chopper.

    A 49.07-poiund striper was weighed in at Star Island Yacht Club on Monday morning.

    Striped bass were not alone enjoying what must have been the huge numbers of small prey species massing around Montauk Point. “You could walk on the false albacore,” Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported. He said schools of falsies were found deep into Gardiner’s Bay as well. And of surfcasting, Bennett said, “Everybody’s in Montauk. There’s nobody here,” he said, meaning the south-facing beaches of Amagansett and East Hampton. “It’s empty, but with bass. We’ve got a few bluefish up here on the sand beaches.”

    Big porgies are found around Gardiner’s Island, and blackfish season is on. The Viking Fleet of party boats will begin sailing combination black seabass and blackfish (tautog) trips tomorrow. The trips will leave at 3 a.m. and return at 6 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and Wednesdays through October.

    The weather has been suitable for offshore fishing as well. The West Lake Marina reported one boat steamed all the way to West Atlantis Canyon and was rewarded with 20 yellowfin tuna in the 68 to 90-pound range.

    The fall hunting season got under way on Oct. 1. That was the date for the start of the bow hunting season for deer. It will run through Dec. 31. Saturday marks the start of the hunting season for sea ducks (scoters, eiders, and long-tailed ducks formerly called oldsquaw). The bag limit is seven sea ducks per day per hunter. Woodcock hunting also started on Oct. 1 and runs through Nov. 17.

    The season for small game, which includes pheasant, rabbit, and squirrel, will start on Nov. 1. Pheasant hunters may keep four per day, cocks only, through Dec. 31. Cottontail rabbit hunters may hunt through Feb. 29.

    Puddle ducks, mallards, black duck, wood duck, pintails, redheads, scaup, and canvasback become fair game next month.

    As far as animals without backbones are concerned, insects rule the land, crustaceans co-rule the seas. There are a few insects, however, which can survive in salt water, and there are some invertebrates, namely crustaceans, that live their entire lives away from water. Two of these are among the most ubiquitous of creatures around the globe, and they look so much alike that we generally refer to them by the same name. I’m talking about sow bugs and pill bugs, members of the Isopoda (equal-feet) order, and among the most common creatures found on Long Island.

    Isopods are uniformly segmented creatures with a pair of like appendages, mostly locomotory in function, on each segment, or somite. Superficially they resemble fossil trilobites, among the earliest of invertebrates, but in general they are much larger. Sow bugs and pill bugs rarely reach more than half an inch in length. The sow bug is native to America, except in the West, where it was introduced. Pill bugs came from Eurasia. Both are gray, both are found on the ground under debris (leaves, rocks, boards, etc.), but there is a major behavioral difference. Pill bugs can roll up into a perfect ball, sow bugs cannot.

    In fact, pill bugs are one of only a handful of organisms in the world that can locomote with the help of gravity. They can roll down an inclined plane, although they don’t make a habit of it. Rolling up is more of a defense against predators, just as the box turtle withdraws completely into its shell to protect itself or the armadillo balls up its tough scaly epidermis to protect its vulnerable underbelly when threatened. That’s one of the reasons the pill bug family has been given the name, Armadillidae.

    In order to leave water permanently, the gills of sow bugs and pill bugs have to be kept moist so that they can exchange oxygen — the good air — for carbon dioxide — the bad. Terrestrial crabs and semiterrestrial crabs, say, fiddlers, also have gills and must keep them moist in order to breathe. That’s one of the reasons that one seldom finds sow bugs and pill bugs out in the open, and generally only during rainy or misty nights. Pill bugs have the added safeguard of balling up to keep from drying out.

    As common as earthworms and ants, pill bugs and sow bugs do very little harm and much good. They are among several species that spend 90 percent of their time feeding on dead and decaying organic matter, both animal and vegetable. Thus, they rank up there with earthworms as important soil makers, helping to create the topmost soil layer, the so-called “organic horizon.”

    In turn, they provide food for other invertebrates that live in dark, damp niches such as silverfish, centipedes, scorpions, various spiders, slugs, and salamanders. You very rarely find a horde of them as you might of Argentine ants, but it is a rare board in the yard or woods that will not sport a few when turned over. In Oregon where both sow bugs and pill bugs are introduced and not native, they are both called “potato bugs” because they are often found when digging up potatoes from under the soil.

    Sow bugs and pill bugs are also unique in that their eggs hatch directly into larvae that are identical in aspect and composition to their parents. They don’t have a separate larval form, as do almost all aquatic and marine crustaceans. When you run into these two in the house or basement, no need to step on them as they don’t bite humans or give us diseases. They rank among the unsung heroes of the underworld. They enrich the soil and provide food for others while leading a quiet life, mostly out of view.

The migration back to the city is under way. The migration south is under way. Not only are birds leaving us, but fish are going around Montauk Point on their way to warmer waters, dragonflies, and butterflies are moving off, whales, dolphins, and marine turtles are paddling south. In a few weeks the Canada geese and other waterfowl will be honking and quacking as they set in from northern breeding grounds, the seas off Montauk Point will be covered with the dark forms of scoters, geese will be settling into Hook, Georgica, and Wainscott Ponds, the leaves will turn, potatoes will be dug from the fields, and it will be fall.

     Not all migration is toward the equator, however. Mute swans move less than a mile, sometimes on foot, from breeding ponds to larger bodies of water, where they congregate to spend the winter in each other’s company. This is also the season for upshoots from the south and inshoots from the west.

    There has been an immature black tern feeding in the inlet of Three Mile Harbor for several weeks. Could it be related by birth to the adult black tern that used to visit Sammy’s Beach and the harbor annually in the spring prior to the year 2000?

    A visitor from the south that we are seeing more and more of each year has set down on the jetties at the north end of Lake Montauk and has been entertaining the folks eating at Gosman’s famous restaurant for a week and a half or more. You might have noticed it yourself and identified it correctly as a brown pelican. Vicki Bustamante, who lives in Montauk and “feeds” on unusual birds and rare plants, was the first to report it to me. It appeared in the wake of Irene, partially blown into town as it were.

    In most cases it’s a few brown pelicans together, but this one came as a loner. It has been sharing Lake Montauk inlet’s rich pisciculture with a band of double-crested cormorants, with which it is equally adept at catching fish. It has a singular advantage over the other: its gular fold, which identifies the pelican to the layman at a great distance. The cormorant can gape its mouth from side to side to put down something wide such as a fluke or flounder. The pelican can do the same thing, but also collect more than one fish at a time in that pouch hanging from its bill.

    There was a time in the 1960s when brown pelicans in the United States had been reduced to a few thousand individuals. Like the ospreys, they were victimized by DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides that entered the waters from farmlands or were sprayed into them by moswere banned by the Environmental Protection Agency shortly after President Richard Nixon and Congress created it, the pelicans began to come back on both coasts. Now, along the Gulf Coast and south Atlantic coast, they are almost as common as gulls, and much more abundant than their cousin the white pelican of the Midwest and Southwest.

     In the air pelicans can be easily identified, not only by their gular pouch and their large size, but they fly in a particular formation that is rarely seen in other birds. They fly in a line, follow-the-leader like, low over the water. They seem to know where they are going. They flap and glide, conserving energy, the way birds do when they set their wings and sail along. As soon as the lead bird stops flapping, the second in rank sets its wing horizontally, followed by the third, then the fourth, and so on in precise military fashion. As soon as the lead bird stops gliding and starts flying, the trailing birds in tight formation, one by one, take up the beat, until the very last is flapping along to keep up with the others, all the while keeping in a straight line at the same elevation above the water, equally separated in space and time from each other.

     By the end of this decade we shouldn’t be surprised to see a pelican or two each summer day visiting the Hamptons, and perhaps, near the end of summer, fledglings in tow, learning how to flap and glide with precision, like their parents.

    The crisp air and silvery afternoon light tell us autumn is here, the season of great surf and equally great fishing. Both occurred in spades over the weekend.

    Hurricane Katia remained mercifully offshore, but her swells fired up local surf spots as well as the beaches of Long Beach, where the Quicksilver Pro surfing contest finals were held on Saturday.

    Offshore fishing was frustrated by strong easterly winds, but the inshore striped bass fishing came alive.

    “The bass bite has been phenomenal,” was how Chris Miller of the West Lake Marina put it. “A lot of big fish,” he said, going on to name them:

    “I weighed a 49.1-pound bass caught by Louis Garcia on the Double D, also a 48.2-pounder caught by Joe Daily on the Mistique. Eleven-year-old Griffin Barnett caught a 47.8-pound bass on the Michelle II, and Ken Marici caught a 40-pounder on the same trip. Another 42-pound bass was weighed on the Remember When. Those were the top fish, but there were lots of others close to or over 40 pounds.”

    Miller said all the big bass were caught using live eels for bait. Boats that towed wire caught teen-size fish, he said.

    Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle Shop in Montauk looked longingly toward the rips off Montauk Point on Sept. 7, a banner day of surfcasting on the north side of the Point. There was a steady production of bass into the teens from morning until late afternoon. But, the big bass stayed offshore.

    “There’s no shortage of bass in the 40s in the rips. I thought I had it the other day. We had a great morning, a great day, but once the east wind crapped out, that was it. Without a blow, a bad beating, we’re not going to do anything. We need a hard, hard, hard, hard east wind,” Apostolides said. “I’m counting on one real quick.”

    The bountiful supply of bass bodes well for the start of the Montauk SurfMasters surfcasting tournament on Friday, Sept. 23.

    “The bait has been in close to the beach for several days, and there is a good body of 10-to-12-pound fish roaming all the usual haunts,” Fred Kalkstein e-mailed SurfMasters contestants on Monday. “The peanuts [bunker] and white bait have been thick at times and should keep these bass on the feed with a little help from the weather.”

    The good bass news was not confined to Montauk. Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported “big bass all over the beach in East Hampton. One guy got 15 bass on Sunday, two keeper size [over 28 inches long] using tins.”

    He said the man who scored big bass in East Hampton was John Domank from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where he works as a marlin-fishing guide.

    Bennett reported that false albacore were schooling “all over Gardiner’s Bay.” They are being caught on flies and small Yo-Zuri lures.

    Fluke and porgies are still strong in Gardiner’s Bay, and Spanish mackerel are being caught off the Three Mile Harbor jetties. Bennett said Ed Bartman caught some but didn’t know what they were so he cut them up and used them for lobster bait. A great waste, Bennett said, seeing as how the mackerel are such good eating.

    Fluke fishing was steady on the south side of Montauk. The Lazy Bones party boat reported seven keepers up to six pounds during one of the half-day trips on Monday. The Bones will switch over to diamond jigging for striped bass this Monday.

    There were 25 entrants in the annual snapper bluefish derby sponsored by the Harbor Marina on Three Mile Harbor on Saturday. Sinian Byrnes and Frank Faulkner tied in the 3-to-8-year-old division with snappers weighing exactly four ounces.

    In the 9-to-11 age group, Max Herrlin prevailed with a hefty six-and-a-half-ouncer. Matthew Bubek landed a nine-ounce snapper to walk away with the top prize in the 13-and-older group.