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.

    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.

     Hurricane Irene has come and gone. Last year Earl swept up the coast near the end of August with a great deal of hullabaloo. It missed us but did carry away some of Montauk’s valuable ocean beach sand. Irene had decidedly better aim and hit when the tide was high, washing away beaches and dunes from the Rockaways to Montauk Point.

    The ocean beaches from Town Line Road in Wainscott to Ditch Plain and the end of Deforest in Montauk that I photographed and paced off last Thursday and Friday shrank by more than 50 percent and were about two feet lower in grade on Monday. This time the hullabaloo was worth it.

    A small portion of the displaced sand washed up to the north along the several road ends and trails accessing the ocean beach in Montauk and Wainscott. Wainscott, East Hampton Village, and Amagansett beaches got hit pretty hard, but Montauk suffered the worst. The major portion of the sand ended up a couple hundred yards offshore in the form of a sand bar, upon which waves were breaking on Monday afternoon during low tide. By the time this goes to press several of Montauk’s downtown ocean beaches will have been rebuilt.

    At Ditch Plain and elsewhere, an interesting geologic feature resurfaced. Where ponds and bays, such as Mecox Bay, were adjacent to the ocean thousands of years or so ago, they held their water because they were underlaid by a thickish stratum of clay, gravel, sand, and silt. Over time this stratum became reddish as a result of bacteria precipitating out iron from the overlying water. Napeague Harbor’s reddish hue is a reflection of this bacterial activity. The result was a hard, almost rocklike layer that is almost completely impervious to water, something akin to breccia.

    Such a layer extends along the back shore at Ditch Plain under the dunes facing the ocean. On Monday it was well exposed and pieces of fossil wood mired in it were also exposed. Where did the wood come from? Possibly from very early growth at the edges of the pond or, more probably, all the way from New England by the glacier that created the South Fork some 15,000 years ago. Every now and then geologists find a piece of fossil wood sticking out of an exposed bluff face in Montauk. The wood in question remains to be dated by carbon 14 or some other dating methodology well beyond the capability of yours truly.

    From the west end of Napeague to the Montauk Lighthouse another curious aftermath of the storm became more and more obvious as one proceeded east along Montauk Highway. The leaves of the bear oaks, shads, winterberry hollies, and other deciduous hardwoods had turned brown. The north and south wooded edges of the state parkway through Hither Woods revealed a similar pattern, a coloration that one might expect after a long summer drought. East of downtown Montauk the browning off of the vegetation was even more apparent. The brown landscape the rest of the way to the point was dominated by withered fox grape leaves. My guess is that the wild grape crop for which Montauk is famous will not be a bumper one come September.

    You may remember that after Hurricane Bob, which came ashore in late August of 1991, the vegetation on the south side of the South Fork also turned to brown seemingly overnight. The combination of the wind and salt spray off the ocean was more than the leaves could bear. Irene produced the same effect.

    Something unusual happened in the early fall following Bob. Trees and shrubs that had already bloomed in the spring and summer resprouted green leaves and began blooming all over again in a kind of renaissance. Most woody plants have the ability to refresh their foliage come monsoonal rains after a drought or heavy pillaging by gypsy moth caterpillars, but flower for a second time? That’s most unusual.

    It didn’t take long for the animal part of nature to get back to normal following the storm. On Monday afternoon there were swarms of darning needles and damselflies at the edges of the several freshwater ponds bordering Lake Montauk. Mosquito fish were in abundance. Mourning doves, goldfinches, song sparrows, catbirds, terns, robins, and crows were going about their business of feeding and preening, building up fat reserves and manufacturing new wing and tail feathers for the trip south to start but a few weeks later. Two months ago it was breeding and singing that preoccupied them, now it is feeding, feeding, feeding, and more feeding.

    Humans also belong to that branch of nature. They were out on the beaches sunning, walking, or out in the water, wading, swimming, and surfing. Montauk and Wainscott beaches were packed. No matter the magnitude of the storm and the narrowness of the beaches, they were not going to let the last week of summer pass by with a whimper. Demographers tell us that birth rates go up following blackouts, thunderstorms, and hurricanes. We will have to wait and see.

    Meanwhile if we have another one of these tropical storms within a month, there will be hell to pay, as the dunes are weakened and the beaches are almost as narrow as they are in winter. Keep a weather eye open.

    If you take a ride out to Montauk via the parkway, you will pass through Hither Woods. As you motor along, keep your eyes on the rusting guardrails. Just behind them you will find a very healthy four-foot-high hedge of big bluestem grass, one of the original staples of old Montauk’s bountiful prairie. At one time it stretched from the western end of the Napeague isthmus to the point, a few trees here and there, but mostly grasses and wildflowers.

    Prairies remain so under the influence of the elements, in particular strong winds and sparse rainfall. But fire, either intentionally set or caused by lightning strikes, also plays a big part in maintaining grasslands. Montauk and other parts of Long Island have been burnt over since pre-Columbian times. New Long Island townships, forming close on the heels of settlement by the Dutch and English in the early 1600s, enacted laws limiting Indian burns. But even so, Montauk remained wild right up into the 1950s. Burns kept the grasslands in good stead for grazing. It wasn’t until 1900 that Hither Woods began to sprout as many trees as grasses and forbs. Most of Montauk east of Fort Pond was prairie — now called “maritime grasslands” — until well after the end of World War II.

    The state’s Montauk Downs Golf Course wasn’t carved out of the woods but out of pre-existing grasslands. Culloden Point was mostly grasslands. The lands north of the golf course, now as wooded as not and almost completely residential, were covered with big bluestem, Indian nut grass, switch grass, little bluestem, ladies’-tresses orchids, bushy frostweed, bearberry, gray goldenrod, bird’s-foot violets, and sand-plain gerardia to mention just a few of the many typical prairie plants that grew there. Norman Taylor, who published a monograph on Montauk’s vegetation in the 1920s, noted that in late August one could look east from the Montauk Inn and see the then houseless moorlands carpeted with the pink-purple flowers of the sand-plain gerardia as far as the eye could see. Today, the sand-plain gerardia, Agalinis acuta, is listed as federally endangered and is found in only a handful of places on Long Island and in New England. To do well it needs to be regularly grazed or burnt over.

    Today, Montauk’s grasslands are limited to the highlands and lowlands east of Lake Montauk, and despite grazing by livestock and the efforts of the Nature Conservancy to keep them in prairie via proscribed burns, they are growing up into a shrubby savannah infiltrated by many different non-native weedy species.    Long Island’s other major prairie, the Hempstead Plains, famous for fostering the beginnings of American aviation, has been reduced to about 17 acres. This little plot is closely watched over and has several of the species found in Montauk’s remaining grassland acres.

    Perennial grasses of many species belonging to many different genera are the mainstays of prairies and maritime grasslands. They produce a thickish turf that tends to inhibit the growth of woodies, while at the same time, providing numerous cracks and crannies in which goldenrods, gerardias, and grass-like orchids thrive. In the presence of livestock, any shrub or tree seedling is quickly gobbled up, or, if some survive predation, a summer drought will come along and do them in.

    We still have the bluestems and the other native grasses today; their genes go back to when Amerindians were the only humans on Long Island, almost to the end of the ice age. They are persistent, and in most cases, limited in their local distribution to the sides of roads or old fields.

    Ironically, two grasses from afar, Eurasian phragmites and Asian bamboo, are becoming as common as our native grasses. They are two of the tallest grasses — phragmites reaches 12 to 15 feet at times but is dwarfed by bamboos that can grow as tall as 50 feet. Like most of our native grasses, they are perennial, but unlike our native grasses, they tend to be very selfish, forming exclusive monoclonal stands that keep out all other plant species.

    Their success here is largely dependent on their mode of reproduction. They can produce flowers, but they choose to copy themselves vegetatively. They send out underground stems, or rhizomes, which can travel 100 feet or more, sprouting up new shoots every couple of feet or so. These rhizomes cross and recross onse another weaving a sturdy underground tapestry that sucks up all the available water and nutrients to the detriment of would-be competitors. It takes just a single phragmites or bamboo to produce a colony, all with the exact same genetics, all clones of the parent.

    No need for cross-pollination to keep up with competitors; they are so good at what they do, they don’t need to be different. The more identical they are, the better they do. Bamboo rhizomes can go through wood, plastic, even some metals. Pragmites rhizomes are piercing to a degree, but not as successfully so as bamboo ones. It’s hard for phragmites rhizomes to pass under a road where the soils are under heavy compression. The thriving phragmites stand on the south side of Bluff Road where it issues from Indian Wells Highway in Amagansett has been studying the wetland 20 feet away on the north side of the road, which is phragmites free, for years and years and doesn’t quite know how to get there. It would be an easy cross for bamboo rhizomes.

    Rhizomes not only extend out, spreading the colony centrifugally, but like tree trunks and other plant stems, they convey nutrients and water over considerable distances. Thus phragmites, which is a fresh water-loving plant, can grow in areas deluged by salt water because the rhizomes carry the fresh water from an upland source out onto the salt marsh. Sever the connection and the salt-marsh phragmites perishes.

    Yes, there’s a pitched battle of the grasses going on throughout Long Island and right here under our noses on the South Fork, as well. The giant foreigners seem to be winning, the natives losing out.

    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.

    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.

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.

    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.

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.

While it’s ticks galore on the mainland, it’s quite a different story on Shelter Island.                        It’s been known since the late 1980s and early 1990s that if you reduce the deer population you reduce the population of ticks. When I worked on Fishers Island for the Southold Town Trustees in 1989 I would take my “tick flag” along with me and every once in a while between site inspections, drag it over the vegetation here and there. The results amazed me. I would get an occasional dog tick, the big one of the three common ones, but nary a deer tick, the one that gave me and half of the resident population on Shelter Island Lyme disease. It wasn’t until late in my tenure there that I found out the reason — no deer.

    In the 1980s and early 1990s deer ticks were rampant throughout East Hampton Town. In 1992 and 1993 a third tick began to show up on my one-meter-square white cotton flag, the Lone Star tick, but only in Montauk and once on Gardiner’s Island. The Southern Lone Star, so named because of the white spot on the back of the female, was a latecomer to the area. Now it is the most populous of all and is found on Long Island wherever there are deer.

    In 2005 Cornell University’s natural resources department, with help from Cornell Cooperative Extension, the Suffolk County’s Office of Vector Control, and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation initiated an experiment on Shelter Island (and part of Fire Island) that would change the direction of tick population growth from up to down. After three years of pre-study, “four-poster” baited deer stations were deployed throughout the island in 2008. The four-poster is a unique setup that provides food to the deer while at the same time applying a “tickiside,” permethrin, to the deer’s neck with rollers.

    A comparable number of areas without the devices were used as control areas, against which the results of the experimental application of per­methrin would be gauged. The Village of North Haven, north of Sag Harbor, was also used as a control area, as the deer population there had been reduced beginning in the late 1990s by nuisance hunters. The results of the experiment, which was concluded at the end of 2010, were recently published and made available on the Internet.

    Tick densities were not the only factor examined. The relationship of the four-posters to deer collisions on nearby roads was also studied, as was the impact on vegetation in control and treated areas. Permethrin is a powerful insecticide, so the amount of it found on harvested deer necks was swabbed. Deer movements were recorded with G.P.S. collars fitted on several deer. In order for the experiment to be faithfully carried out, the roller applicators at each four-poster had to be regularly charged with permethrin.

    The number of deer visits was measured both by photography and the amount of bait, in this case corn, taken in a given year. Thousands of pounds of corn were consumed, some of which was found in the stomachs (the rumens) of deer that were harvested during the special shotgun hunting season in January and by bow and nuisance hunters. Raccoons, which are not widely known as tick vectors, visited the four-posters as frequently as deer, and even squirrels and birds came regularly. The three different mammals using the sites all received permethrin hits.

    It was a very meticulously contrived and carried out experiment and the results were not unexpected. The resulting tick densities as measured by 30-second flaggings in random locations throughout the control and treated areas told the story. Throughout the course of the experiment, deer numbers and deer sizes increased, perhaps due to the availability of corn in the four-posters, but also because of good acorn years as measured in the Nature Conservancy’s Mashomack Preserve on the island.

    In the treated areas, tick populations dropped considerably, especially for the Lone Star tick, which was the most frequently observed both on Shelter Island and Fire Island. In the last year of the experiment, both species of ticks had been decreased in the treated areas vis-a-vis the control areas, the Lone Star tick more significantly so. In 2010 there were comparatively low numbers of deer ticks in all of the sites tested, including North Haven.

    Vegetation was eaten both at the control sites and the treated sites, with the maximum damage being more profound at the control sites. There was no significant correlation between deer-vehicle collisions and proximity of four-poster stations over the course of the study.

    Permethrin exposure was the most worrisome thing. Swabs from the necks of harvested deer showed significant amounts of permethrin and on some harvested deer permethrin was found in the neck muscle immediately below the hide attachment. Livers, spleens, and other body organs may have cached some permethrin over time, but none was detectable in tests conducted by the New York State Health Department.

    Short of killing deer and thus removing the primary hosts for deer and Lone Star ticks altogether, the use of the four-posters, while requiring regular maintenance, renourishment, and occasional replacement, did decrease the tick population in the area in which each was deployed.