Boaters should take care. Logs and other debris washed into the sea from flooded rivers during Tropical Storm Irene continue to haunt local waters and are virtually invisible in any kind of choppy conditions.

    Sailing on Sunday from Fort Pond Bay in Montauk to Eastern Plains Point on the east side of Gardiner’s Island, our sailboat, moving at about seven knots, nearly struck a log as long as a telephone pole. It could have un-pintled the rudder. Damage to a faster-moving power boat would have been far worse.

    Once off Eastern Plains Point, with its castle-like tower used as an observation post during World War II, the clams were brought forth — porgie bait. They were surf clams coughed up by Irene’s storm surge and collected along an Amagansett beach. Gulls wasted no time chowing down the day after the storm, and fishermen were not far behind with buckets to collect bait.

    The standard two-hook terminal rig was equipped with a four-ounce lead to keep it on the bottom. The surf clams were cut into strips and threaded onto freshly sharpened hooks. Down they went. An earlier drop at Tobaccolot Bay just to the south produced nibbles but not the action fishermen have come to expect from the area. 

    The Eastern Plains drop was very different. Not 10 seconds after the first hooks touched the bottom, the porgies started knocking. The rest is up to soft hands, the feel, the timing between the knock and the angler’s upward jerk of the rod to set the hook. About a dozen big porgies were reeled in before it was time to set sail and head back to Fort Pond Bay.

    The regular porgie season will end on Sept. 26. Between now and then, the daily limit is 10 porgies per person per day. They must measure at least 10.5 inches. Charter and party boat anglers are permitted 40 porgies per person per day until Oct. 11. The recreational fluke season ends on Sept. 30.

    They’re here. It’s official. Ken Rafferty, a light-tackle and fly-fishing guide who works out of Three Mile Harbor but fishes Montauk this time of year, ran into a school of false albacore on Labor Day in the area of Outer Shagwong Point in Montauk.

    Time to break out the fly rods. Head out to Montauk Point in unseaworthy boats with low freeboard and casting platforms, but don’t forget to check over your shoulder every once in a while. The ocean has waves. 

    Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk and the Tackle Shop in Amagansett both reported productive striped bass fishing from the beach using clam baits.

    Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle said it was unclear what bass were eating after the big storm. Boating anglers were doing well, he said. Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop confirmed the clam-bait-and-boater successes, and noted that Saul Oliver caught a hefty 42-inch striper with an eel on Saturday off the Montauk Light.

    It was Oliver’s first bass venture. He was usually found out in the Butterfish Hole 10 miles south of Montauk with light tackle and spinning plugs casting “for little bluefin tuna.”

    Bluefish have been scarce on the beach, although in the bay, they are plentiful outside Three Mile Harbor and off Sammy’s Beach.

    Camouflaged, looking like normal people most of the year — their fishing passion disguised to all, even their spouses — are the surfcasters already gearing up for the annual Montauk SurfMasters tournament. It will get under way at one minute after midnight on Sept. 23 and end on Dec. 1.

    Contestants must have their applications and entry fees in by 7 p.m. on Sept. 22. The entry fee for those competing for heaviest bass in the wetsuit and wader divisions is $250, $50 of which goes toward the banquet dinner that marks the tournament finale. The fee for surfcasters in the women’s division is $150, with $50 toward the banquet. Youth and kids-division entrants get a free ride.

    There are a few changes this year. To liven things up, the caster who catches the largest bass over all will receive a $250 cash prize to add to his or her other winnings. In addition, surfcasters who land fish weighing over 25 pounds will get a raffle ticket that could win $400 toward a custom rod built by Paulie’s Tackle.

This past week saw the beginning of what could promise to be one of the greatest monarch butterfly migrations in a long time. The wind was gentle and blowing out of the southwest and south-southwest on most days after Tropical Storm Irene’s passage. At this time of year the monarchs fresh out of their chrysalises are heading south and southwest, into the wind, and following the shoreline. Since before the year 2000 here on eastern Long Island we have seen very little in the way of monarchs come the end of summer.

    These brightly colored orange and black butterflies count on two things when they get here after a long flight up in the late spring, not too much inclement weather, especially when they are emerging from their cocoons come August, and a good growing season for milkweeds.

    It was a good year for milkweeds on the East End. Common milkweeds, butterfly milkweeds, and swamp milkweeds grew well and flowered well. The monarch caterpillars emerge from eggs laid by the adults shortly after they arrive here, and the caterpillars gorge themselves on the milky juices that milkweeds produce. The juices are not only nutritious but contain a noxious chemical that the caterpillars incorporate into their flesh. It stays with them through the process of pupation and emergence of fresh adults called imagos.

    Monarch caterpillars also feed on dogbanes, which, as the name implies, are poisonous, containing the same noxious chemical but in a more concentrated and slightly different formulation.

    Birds such as jays and small hawks that feed on butterflies on occasion learn to avoid the monarch after one bite because of that chemical. They are most unpalatable and consequently, they have little to fear, except for strong winds and running out of food on their long daylight flight down to the mountains in Mexico where they overwinter before breeding and giving rise to a whole new generation of butterflies, which instinctively fly north as soon as they spread their wings. Most songbirds migrate at night when they can navigate by the stars and gravitational forces and avoid the predators like hawks, which migrate during the day. The monarchs are safe to go during the day.

    However, they are slow fliers compared to birds and don’t fly more than 10 or 20 miles each day on their way south. The migratory flights of birds on the other hand can cover hundreds of miles in a 24-hour period if weather conditions are right. Birds store fat and carbohydrates for the long journey; monarchs don’t, they feed on nectar as they go.

    That is where the late flowering asters and goldenrods come in, especially the seaside goldenrod, Solidago sempervirens, which grows in the coastal dunes and on the back shores of our marine water bodies including the ocean. Everything was hunky-dory in monarch land until Irene came along. One can’t help notice how the vegetation along the ocean shore and along some of the North Shore bays turned an unattractive brown right after Irene’s blow-by. Thus far, the seaside goldenrods that are just starting to bloom look like they weathered the storm, but it will take a few more weeks before we can know for sure.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the wildflower crop is not faring as well as it would have absent a tropical storm’s impact. Thus, it will be a bit of a waiting game to see how these fluttering migrants will fare come the end of September.

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.

    Only two more weeks to enjoy the wildflowers. Unlike most parts of the country where the spring and summer blooms are the brightest, most colorful, and most abundant, Long Island’s best wildflower season is in the first month of fall. California and Oregon, for example, have only a few species of asters, while Long Island has many. Though those two states have their share of goldenrods, they are few and far between, whereas on Long Island you often find four or five species blooming in close proximity.

    The best place to view them now, either through the windshield or while leisurely bicycling or walking, is along the edges of the woods, in grasslands and old fields, along coastal strands and, would you believe it, in salt marshes and along swamps and fresh marsh edges. Just about any roadside on the South Fork sports a few native wildflowers in bloom at this time, but you may have a hard time telling the natives from the aliens.

    It’s also a good time to view the colorful fall grasses. The native purple lovegrass is dominating the medians and shoulders of the Sunrise Highway and the Long Island Expressway. It’s the most widespread expression of it since I started mapping the wildflowers along Long Island roads 31 years ago. Little bluestem is golden tan to purplish at this time and stands out nicely against the sea of purple occupied by the lovegrass. Incidentally, the lovegrass is the closest thing we have to western tumbleweeds. When the seeds are ripe, it doesn’t take much of a wind to send the plants on their way, bouncing up and down as they move along. That could be why they had become so ubiquitous by the end of the last decade.

    Right now the largest patches of the white orchid, nodding ladies’ tresses, on eastern Long Island are to be seen on the sloping south shoulders of the Montauk State Parkwway that runs through Hither Woods. If you are driving, you might have to stop your car and get out to take a look. In past years, the state highway mowers would mow them just before they started to bloom, but not this year. We wonder if it has to do with the New York State Park’s oversight or budgetary problems. Come to think of it, the latter reason could account for the wonderful purple lovegrass veldts, as well.

    Go to any shore, ocean or bay, or even upper salt marshes for that matter, and you can’t miss the dazzling yellows of the seaside goldenrod, Solidago sempervirens. It may be the most common goldenrod species in the state, given that we have a thousand miles or more of coastline. This species has as its neighbors American beachgrass and the blue-flowered beach pea, which plucks its nutrients out of the damp air that regularly sweeps over the shores and beaches, especially at night.

    On the low duney strand best seen from Cranberry Hole Road in Promised Land, you will find many gray goldenrods in flower. Its stalks are never quite erect and its foliage is almost as gray as that of dusty miller. In the red cedar old fields scattered here and there look for tall goldenrod rising to four feet or more. These three aforementioned goldenrods have flowers ranged in a thyrse at the top of the stem. The blue-stemmed goldenrod found along Swamp Road and other roads in the Northwest part of East Hampton has the golden flowers scattered along the stem, halfway up to the top.

    Two other goldenrods in a different genus to be found in damp places such as dune slacks and wet depressions out in the open are the slender fragrant goldenrod and the taller lance-leaved goldenrod. The flowers in these two are in a flattish array expanded laterally from the top of the stem. The slender one’s leaves smell like licorice when crushed, thus the colloquial name “fragrant.” Look for two silvery-whitish pearly and/or sweet everlastings. They used to be picked and sold on the streets of New York City for flower arrangements. They have a nutmeggy smell and last almost forever.

    We have more than enough asters in flower now. In my mind, the prettiest of the blue-flowered ones is the New England aster, which is sometimes prolific along Dunemere Road in the Village of East Hampton proximal to the Maidstone Club Golf Course. The blue-flowered New York aster is common in brackish and fresh marsh situations, while the white wood aster is found along the shady edges of woodlands such as Old Stone Highway and Stony Hill Road in Amagansett. On Landing Lane in Springs and here and there on the wetter edges of Old Stone Highway you can find the tallish flat-topped aster, which blooms white.

    In our high salt marshes, the salt marsh hay zones per se, there are two salt marsh asters, both of which are quite rare in the state but common on the South Fork. Some have whitish flowers; most have bluish flowers. A diminutive plant with violet fl owers often grows along with them and with the greenish pickleweeds. It’s the salt marsh gerardia, a close cousin of the federally endangered sandplain gerardia that grows in Shadmoor State Park and a few other Montauk spots.

    The white-flowered heath aster is common along the edges of Cranberry Hole Road and of Daniel’s Hole Road in Wainscott. You are liable to find the grass-leaved aster growing beside it, and if you are very lucky, to see a New England blazing star, not an aster, blazing away purple-like nearby. It’s a state rarity. A ground-hugging variety of the heath aster is spotty along the tops of Montauk’s ocean bluffs. It makes a very nice groundcover that blooms blue at this time of year.

    Along weedy hedgerows and overgrown shoulders (such as Indian Wells Highway in Amagansett), look for one of the South Fork’s most common and tallest asters, and the one with the most widely spreading flower-laden branches, the panicled aster. If you look closely, you might find another white-flowering but more diminutive aster, the calico aster, growing beside it.

    A tall bushy-topped plant with abundant white flowers that used to be rare, it has suddenly become quite common. It’s the white snakeroot and it’s peaking now along damp swales, open or shaded, such as the one on the east side of Springy Banks Road just south of Wigwam.

    One of the great local places to see many different asters and many different goldenrods blooming together along with gerardias and blue-stem grasses is the East Hampton Airport. The grasslands bordering the runways are now covered with a fine blend of native fall flowers.

    In my own yard I have many different asters and several goldenrods. They are not favorites of the deer and generally survive through the summer in good fashion to bloom in September and beyond. That could be a reason why our asters and goldenrods (and possibly the white snakeroot) are so common at this time of year. The deer have spared them for our enjoyment and feasted on the more bourgeois flowering plants growing in most of our gardens.

    By all accounts the blue-claw crab population is bursting at Georgica Pond’s scenic seams. According to one crabber, chicken-neck bait is hardly necessary. A slow walk in the shallows with an occasional stop will bring blue crabs to your feet. Best not to linger too long. Or, have a scoop net handy.

    The annual fishing tournament held from Uihlein’s Marina in Montauk to benefit the East Hampton Kiwanis Club and the Montauk Friends of Erin was hard fought this year. In the end, Richard Rade Jr. took first place. He had the highest cumulative weight after catching fish from the contest’s four target species — a 28-pound striped bass, a 11.5-pound bluefish, a 6.95-pound fluke, and a 5.5-pound sea bass. For his efforts, Rade took home a brand-new 225-horsepower Mercury outboard motor.

    Charlie Etzel took second place with the help of a 10.35-pound fluke. Despite his 45.4-pound striper, Hugh Chancey came in third.

    There was a notable clinch catch during the tournament. Francine Mastrangelo, 11, caught the monster 5.5-pound sea bass to help put Rade’s Marie E boat over the top.

    Last week’s unofficial surfcasting award goes to Chris Valenti, who hooked what he thought was a blue shark from the beach in Amagansett on Aug. 16. Turned out it was a six-foot-long, 90-pound brown shark, also known as a sandbar shark. They bite. He was helped landing the beast by his father, Charlie Valenti.

    Speaking of sharks, anglers aboard Capt. Ray Ruddock’s Abracadabra boat out of the West Lake Marina did battle with six blue sharks about 18 miles south of Montauk. A 250-pounder “pulled on everybody,” Ruddock said. Also spotted here and there were schools of small mahimahi.

    And, speaking of offshore fishing and mahimahi, Jason Libath, Phil Cangiolosi, and Eric Flaherty took off in the morning dark on Monday for a 100-mile run to Atlantis Canyon in search of tuna. They trolled and trolled to no avail, then decided to slip over the side into a giant school of mahimahi with masks, snorkels, fins, and spearguns. A few dozen were caught. Suddenly, Flaherty said, “they all disappeared.” Time to get back in the boat.

    Closer to shore, Gardiner’s Bay continues to be chockablock with porgies, many of them big enough to fillet, dust with cornmeal or flour, and fry in olive oil and garlic.

    Ken Rafferty, a light-tackle and fly guide who usually plies the waters north of Gardiner’s Bay, has been going east to outer Shagwong Point, Montauk, where he continues to find very large bluefish up to 15 pounds. “We’re getting them on surface poppers,” he said, adding that the fish seemed to be chasing tinker mackerel. No sign yet of Spanish mackerel, false albacore, or bonito, he said. His fishing logs go back a decade or two. “The earliest I’ve seen falsies is Aug. 16.”

    West Lake Marina reported a day of excellent fluke fishing on Aug. 17, with four fluke weighing in at over nine pounds. All were caught south of Montauk in about 60 feet of water.

    On Saturday, the Flying Dutchman boat left West Lake at midnight. It returned on Saturday with a 135-pound bigeye tuna and a swordfish that dressed out at 103 pounds. The Dutchman also had a number of albacore tuna up to 60 pounds.

    Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett said surfcasters using clam baits continued to catch striped bass at Georgica, Main Beach, and along Napeague beaches.

    The waters are warming up and so are fishing and the fish. Is it the return of the menhaden in large numbers that has something to do with it? Is it global warming? Is it a lot of things?

    The baby sperm whale that drifted ashore in Montauk two weeks ago might be an indication. It had a wound, what looked like a shark bite, according to Kim Durham of the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research, who performed the necropsy on the whale at East Hampton’s Springs-Fireplace Road solid waste facility. Sperm whales are rare in our vicinity. We see more dead pygmy sperm whales, a different species that is smaller but otherwise almost identical in appearance.

    A giant Pacific Ocean sperm whale was memorialized in the novel “Moby-Dick.”

    Pacific sperm whales were regularly captured and brought in to the Port of Oakland as recently as 1965, a few years before America’s Marine Mammal Protection Act went into effect. The whales were hung by their tails and dropped inch-by-inch head first into a giant tub grinder, which rendered them into whale oil and other stuff.

    Sperm whales are the third largest whale after the blue and finback whales, which are baleen whales that sieve krill from ocean waters in order to grow up and make a living. The sperm whale, on the other hand, is a fish eater, it lacks the straining baleen brushes that most other whales have, but has peg teeth for capturing larger food organisms, including squids and octopi. Members of the herring family — in our ocean menhaden or “bunkers” — are among their favorites.

    Menhaden hit their peak not long after the Civil War. In the 1880s, when commercial landings in New York State were at their zenith, menhaden made up the bulk of the catch. The menhaden fishery lasted right up until the end of the Smith Meal Company’s operation on Hicks Island in Napeague Bay in the late 1960s. In the 1920s there were several fish rendering plants on both sides of the Peconic Estuary, mostly based in East Hampton Town. Only the Smith Meal chimney remains as a memorial to the heyday of the bunker fleets when the menhaden fishery ruled the world.

    Menhaden are back. They not only are good for sperm whales, they are a staple of the dolphins and porpoises, of which there are at least six species that ply our waters. With each new summer in this millennium bottlenose dolphins are becoming more and more common in the Peconic Estuary. Apparently there is more and more for them to eat in the way of bunkers and other schooling fish. Last summer pods of dolphins were seen by several boaters working the waters of Gardiner’s Bay off Gardiner’s Island.

    On Sunday during a return trip from Montauk to Three Mile Harbor, Denise and Louis Savarese ran into a bunch of dolphins in Napeague Bay. They were jumping and cavorting as only dolphins do when they’re chasing bait, presumably menhaden in this instance. It is not a sign of global warming but a sign of the return of the marine schooling fish species.

    When I was a boy in the 1940s and early 1950s the harbor porpoises, dolphins with blunt noses, would swim up Long Island Sound from east to west in pods numbering 40 to 50 every July and August. At about 11 a.m. each day during Red Cross-sponsored swimming lessons at Mattituck’s breakwater beach they would swim by on their way to Riverhead and points west. On one occasion they came so close to shore that we were whistled out of the water by the swimming instructors. The fish that they were chasing could have been menhaden but the water was also thick with Atlantic silversides, so thick that you could scoop them up with your hands.

    In the 1940s and 1950s ospreys were so common that they were nesting on just about every other telephone pole on the main road to Orient Point. There were no double-crested cormorants. Menhaden were the ospreys’ staple. When the menhaden went, so did the osprey, their departure coinciding with the widespread use of DDT and other chemically inorganic pesticides. The ospreys will probably never return to their record highs of the post-World War II years.

    The menhaden are back, but it’s a different ballgame. The cormorants and maybe even the dolphins will see to that. One thing for sure, if the menhaden population plummets again, it won’t be the fault of the fishermen, but due to the rise in cormorant numbers, the large numbers of striped bass and bluefish, and the ever-increasing intrusions of dolphins into our bays.

Shucks, only 12 more days before the days begin getting shorter and the nights longer. You might say that’s the zenith of activity for each new year. After that things start going downhill.

In a trip from Sag Harbor to East Hampton on Monday evening, the foliage on both sides Route 114 was a brilliant green. The white oaks had caught up to the other oaks and the hickories. The black locusts were still flowering. It was a highlight of June, indeed. Then I flashed on last year at this time as I passed Daniel’s Hole Road, wondering if the patch of gypsy moths that broke out last year at about this time a quarter mile north of Whooping Hollow Road survived the winter?

My eyes fixed on the left side of the road. A couple hundred feet of semi-bare canopies loomed up along the east shoulder. Yes, the patch was now the size of a football field; next year it could cover half the town. As predicted, the gypsy moths are back, just as the ticks are back, and the mosquitoes soon will be. 

Sublimity suddenly turned to apprehension, I continued along to my destination, eyes on the road ahead, not on its sides. 

On the other hand, the last week of May and the first two weeks of June mark the egg-laying time for most of our turtles. Female box turtles look for a sunny spot, often a lawn, to dig into the ground with their hind feet and deposit their eggs, then cover them up. Female painted and spotted turtles leave their ponds to travel 100 feet or so upland and do the same, female snapping turtles bigger than basketballs do the same. Swamp Road in Northwest Woods and Old Stone Highway in Springs have sunlit sandy shoulders that make them perfect ovulation spots. 

The last of our turtles to come ashore to begin the annual reproduction cycle are the diamondbacks that emerge from bays and tidal creeks. They are common egg layers in the dunes of Sammy’s Beach and sandy spots along the west trail through the woods of Barcelona Neck. It won’t be but a few more decades before green turtles from the Atlantic begin laying their eggs on our ocean shores; they now deposit them on sandy beaches as far north as southern Virginia. In the 1990s a female green turtle did make a nest on the Amagansett ocean beach, but apparently never laid eggs. When a crew went to uncover it in the face of an approaching coastal storm, it turned out to be barren.

The last of the white flowering shrubs, the mountain laurels, multiflora roses, and the arrowwoods are beginning to flower. The latter are most spectacular in Montauk, the former in the morainal woods of Bridgehampton, Noyac, and Water Mill, but also along Sagg Road between the Long Island Rail Road tracks and Sag Harbor. White stands out, even on dimly lit days and the bees can see them from a long way off.

Notice the ospreys in their nests, say along Deerfield Road in Water Mill, Long Beach Road in Noyac, Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett, or around Accabonac Harbor, most of which are easy to see from the road. When you see the female standing up, you know the eggs have hatched and she’s mostly looking down at the downy chicks while waiting for her partner to fly in with a fish or two. Fortunately, there are a lot of bunkers around and only a handful of cormorants, so there is not much competition for food, save where there are eagles nesting nearby, like on Gardiner’s and Shelter Islands and the wildlife refuges at Mastic and farther west.

Barring a big windstorm or tornado-like downburst, or both, of the kind that Three Mile Harbor suffered several years back, all of the nests should fare well and we should see young ospreys flapping their wings in the prekindergarten lessons of flight school.

The eggs in the nests of robins, grackles, red-winged blackbirds, mocking birds, cardinals, and the like have long hatched and the chicks are mostly well-feathered and ready to take off. Terry Sullivan picked up an obstreperous fledgling blue jay in his eastern Sag Harbor yard. It had tried to fly, but came to earth. It squawked loudly, attracting its mother, who flew down and gave Terry a powerful bong in his head. Mother birds are not so different than human mothers. They will stop at nothing to protect and nurture their young.

If you don’t hear the birds singing in the yard, it is not a sign that they have left. It’s a sign that they are feeding their young and have little time for song. When you see blackbirds chasing a crow as you drive along a back road, you know that the crow has been up to no good. Crows are notorious nestling stealers. Yes, for the next three months there’s no way to avoid the jungle out there. One doesn’t need lions and tigers. Cars, trucks, motorcycles, helicopters, and jet planes suffice nicely.

    It’s the time of year for bamboo poles, buckets, and spearing bait. Snapper bluefish are swarming around local docks in profusion.

    Anglers may dismiss them, but we owe a lot to bluefish. They are the species that, in these parts anyway, hook sportfishermen when they and their quarry are the age of Huck and Tom, even younger. It’s a good time to teach kids about conservation. Only 10 snappers can be taken if they measure less than 12 inches. 

    Those who grow apace with bluefish learn to respect them. Not everyone likes their taste, but few would dispute their fight, especially when they run away with lightweight line. There has been plenty of that kind of action this summer, and the battle can be short if the angler has failed to arm the terminal end of his gear with a bite-proof leader or tipit.

    Blues were being caught from the beach over the weekend on Napeague out toward Hither Hills.

    Not as toothy, but of equal challenge on light tackle, are fish from the greater tuna family and we are about due for the arrival of both green bonito and false albacore. There have been reports of greenies schooling in Fort Pond Bay in Montauk. This would make sense, according to Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett.

    Bennett said Fort Pond Bay was loaded with tinker mackerel. “I keep getting reports of green bonito there. It makes sense because tuna love mackerel. There are a lot of definite maybes. We don’t have tinkers the way we used to. When I was a kid we used to go down to the ocean. Charlie Whitmore and I caught them on the ocean beach with snapper jigs. Charlie casted out a tinker and a bass grabbed it. He gets it through the breakers on a snapper rod. It gets off the hook, and Charlie jumped on it.”

    Bennett said this was the first year that people were going down to the town dock at the end of Navy Road in Montauk to target tinker mackerel. Some were as large as eight inches long. He said he was selling a lot of Sabiki lures, the herring rig with multiple hooks strung in a row, and that the tinker mackerel were in Gardiner’s Bay as well, at Devon and Albert’s Landing.

    Fort Pond Bay is otherwise offering up porgies from the town dock on the west side, some just shy of dinner plate size.

     Again this year, Uihlein’s Marina will be ground zero for a two-day fishing tournament to benefit the East Hampton Kiwanis Club and the Montauk Friends of Erin. At stake for private boaters is a brand-new Mercury outboard engine. Charter and party boats fish in a separate division. As usual, four species — bluefish, striped bass, fluke, and sea bass — are the targets. There will be plenty of prizes for kids. The entry fee is $300 for all boats for the two days of fishing. Captains can sign up at Uihlein’s up until the captains meeting tomorrow at 6 p.m. 

    Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk reported a slow pick of striped bass by surfcasters working the rocks east of Ditch Plain in Montauk at night with eels and nighttime lures like darters and needlefish.

    Chris Miller of West Lake Marina, also in Montauk, reported one boat making an overnight trip to Block Canyon where five yellowfin and four albacore tuna were caught. The trip included some adrenaline-fueled moments during a two-hour battle with a big-eye tuna in the 200-pound class. “They had it up to the surface twice then they saw a large great white come up,” Miller said. The tuna freaked and headed straight to the bottom.

    Tuna are known to “mud up,” that is, make a suicidal dive into the bottom.

    Miller said Gary McEntee also made a trip to the canyon over the weekend and caught four yellowfin using butterfish and sardine bait while chunking in daylight.

    Fluke fishing has been steady without the big-fluke excitement generated a few weeks ago. The spot known as Frisbees on the south side of Montauk did produce last week, however.

We are under the spell of a full moon. The tides will run very high. The horseshoe crabs will come into the shallows and breed for the last time. The eggs deposited in the intertidal sands in May will hatch out and a new generation of these prehistoric creatures will have been spawned in one of nature’s greatest and oldest cycles.

    The salt marshes are at their peak of growth now, verdant and shining where not overshadowed by the dreaded phragmites. Cord grass, spike grass, and salt marsh hay are all beginning to flower. Salt marsh fishes come alive when the tide is the highest, the moon shines overhead, and the seawater reaches all the way up to the edge of the forest and on to people’s lawns.

    The killifishes rule at this time. They teem among the inundated marsh grasses and do their thing. That thing is milling about together, ejecting and fertilizing eggs, and otherwise consorting in a night of frenzied reproduction. As the tide recedes, they recede, and as dawn breaks they are all back to normal leading their routine lives like you and me.

    We are relatively rich in killifish species, all of which can be found in any harbor, tidal creek, or lagoon at almost any time of year. They and the silversides in the genus Menidia are a force that drives many of the larger fishes in our estuaries. A few inches long at the most, they are only a step or two above the phytoplankton and seaweeds that form the base of the estuarine food pyramid that ultimately leads all the way up to the big game fish — the sharks and the marine mammals — where the white shark, mako shark, and killer whale are kings. Who could imagine that such a little fish could have such an important role.

    The “kill” of killifish is a word for creek or channel derived from the Dutch “kil.” Many of the streams in and around New York City were called kils by the early Dutch settlers. Some of those local names like Fishkill are still in use and can be found in Hagstrom and Rand-McNally map books covering the tristate area.

    The killifishes were the most common fish in the kills and so the name has stuck and is now almost universal up and down the Atlantic Coast. The near extinct desert pub fish of the Southwestern desert ponds and sloughs is a killifish, closely related to one of ours, the sheephead minnow, which is doing quite well in local marsh waters, especially in spots in the marsh where little ponds form surrounded by spartina grasses that get overwashed by the tides one or two times a day.

    The four most common killies in our area are the mummichog, striped killifish, sheephead minnow, and rainwater killifish, in that order. The mummichog is the only one with a persisting Algonkian name. Obviously, this killifish was common when Native Americans were the only residents on Long Island and in New England and played a role in their everyday sustenance. The mummichog is the killy that will be filling the water spilling onto the marshes during these few nights while the moon waxes fully.

    The striped killifish is a little bit larger and prefers the inlet areas of tidal creeks and harbors where the water can move swiftly on incoming and outgoing tides. It is fusiform like a fighter plane, not chubby and blunt-nosed like the mummichog, which prefers quieter waters. The female has dark stripes running along the side of a whitish body and is larger than the male, which starts out with vertical stripes like those sported by the mummichog.

    The sheephead minnow is the least streamlined of the three, and its shape belies its penchant for very quiet water, where its cryptic coloration affords it greater protection from predators than its swimming speed.

    The rainwater killifish is the smallest of all, barely reaching an inch in length or a little more. It also prefers to live in quiet pools, especially at the top of the marsh where the pools are fresher as a result of rain runoff from land and groundwater intrusion.

    Finally, there is a freshwater killifish, the banded killifish, found in most of our larger freshwater ponds such as Fort Pond in Montauk and Big Fresh Pond in North Sea. Except for its more pointy snout and larger number of vertical stripes, it can be readily confused with the mummichog, which is also vertically banded.

    Most killifishes are good osmoregulators, i.e., they can exist in both saline and fresh waters. One occasionally finds the banded killifish and the mummichog in the same minnow seine catch.

    All of the killifish make wonderful aquarium fish. Why spend a lot of money depleting the reefs of tropical fishes, colorful as they may be, when one can simply go down to the nearest salt creek or tidal lagoon and with a small seine or minnow net on a pole scoop up a dozen or so in less than an hour’s time.