The northern puffer, blowfish, or bayman’s bottlefish, perhaps our most fascinating local marine fish, is making a comeback after a hiatus of almost two decades. It is one of some 121 different puffer species found throughout the world’s oceans, and one that kids wading and swimming in Long Island waters learn about at a very early age.

    Puffers have lost several typical fish characteristics, including the dorsal, during a long period of evolution, the same kind of evolution that produced some very odd relatives-Mola mola, or ocean sunfish, the burrfishes, and a few others.

    Puffers are not strong swimmers, so to survive over the millenniums, they have developed two very successful defense mechanisms. They can puff themselves up using either air or water, whichever they happen to be in at the time, or play host to bacteria that synthesize tetrodotoxin, or TTX, a powerful neurotoxin that is accumulated in the hosts’ body organs, making them deadly poisonous when consumed whole. In Japan alone, there are about 50 reported deaths a year from eating, but fish containing the same poison are widely distributed throughout Indo-Pacific waters, where they account for much food poisoning and several fatalities.

    In Wikipedia it is related that in 1784 Capt. James Cook sailing the South Pacific experienced a tetradotoxin poisoning incident. Several sailors got sick from eating puffer fish while pigs kept on board for food succumbed after eating the carcasses.

    Several other organisms including octopods, marine worms, starfish, and crabs can host similar bacterial, or Vibrio species, to make themselves poisonous to predators as well, while the rough-skinned newt of Oregon can do the same. About 40 years ago there was a news report about someone unsuspectingly scooping up one of these newts in the genus Taricha in a stream in the dark while gathering water to make coffee. The coffee was made, the coffee was drunk, the coffee drinker died.

    Recently, a second toxin, Saxitoxin, has been implicated in fish poisonings in the Atlantic tropics. It is the same poison produced by bacteria accumulated in shellfish that causes paralytic shellfish toxicosis in fish, marine mammals, and humans. While the poison TTX has been found in rare cases in the organs of mid and upper-Atlantic northern puffers and has been used experimentally to poison lab mice, the flesh, mostly muscle, of our local puffers has always been found safe to eat.

    Apparently, puffing up is enough to ward off most predators and it’s one  of the two mechanisms that can save the fish’s life. Let’s say that a striped bass or large bluefish cruises into shallow water during the summertime and zeroes in on a 10-inch blowfish. Before it is able to get a tooth hold, the blowfish has swollen to twice the size of the predator fish’s mouth gape. It’s more than a challenge for the pursuer, and most frequently the prey escapes. Try popping a balloon floating in the air using only your teeth sometime and you will understand just how effective such an escape act can be.

    Blowfish have very powerful jaws and strong teeth for cutting and crushing. They use them successfully on shellfish, snails, crabs, and other slow-moving hard-cased critters found on the seabed. Those little pearl-colored sand crabs in the genus Emerita that appear in the wave-wash sands along most of our beaches are one of their favorite morsels. There is a second puffer in our waters, but deeper, which I have never seen. It’s the smooth puffer and the new National Audubon Society “Field Guide to Fishes” says it can reach three feet in length. I imagine that such a large puffer could swell to the size of a soccer ball if provoked.

    When I was a child growing up at the edge of the Peconics in Mattituck on the North Fork, we used to catch blowfish with our hands after herding them into the shallows and causing them to blow up during breaks in clamming. We would rub their prickly bellies and listen to the base notes thusly produced. We also used to attract them to our feet by wiggling our toes and then put down a hook baited with a piece of balloon rubber to catch them. I hear similar stories from people who grew up on the South Fork. It just might be that blowfish are the most ubiquitously known fish in town. It’s music to the ears to hear that they are back!

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.

    With the first shark tournament of the season coming up this weekend, held from the Star Island Yacht Club in Montauk, a tale told by a visiting surfer and all-around waterman gets to the heart of the gut-level feelings stirred by the natural, and unnatural, hunting instincts of the big ocean predators. 

    “Sava began to whine,” Billy Hamilton said of his 10-year-old yellow Lab. The dog was in her familiar spot, standing near the nose of Hamilton’s surfboard waiting for the next set of waves.

    Hamilton lives on the north shore of Kauai, and he and Sava were enjoying a go-out at Hanalei Bay in 2003. The surfing and surfboard-shaping legend and his best friend had it wired. “I watch her now as much as I watch the wave,” he said during a fishing trip aboard the Mishell II charter boat on Friday.

    “She leans,” he said, getting down on all fours on Mishell’s deck to show how Sava has learned how to anticipate his cutback, a signature drop-knee turn recognized by surfers around the world.

    But this day, the surfing dog kept whining. “I paddled in. Later that day, I met a girl at the post office who drew me a picture of the dorsal fin with a ragged trailing edge. Very distinctive. The shark had showed up a few minutes after I went in. The girl said it kept blocking her way back to shore. I said this shark is dangerous.” Whatever sense or combination of senses made Sava whine a warning, Hamilton said he now heeds it without question.  “Whenever she whines, I go in.”

    A week earlier, a large tiger shark had taken Bethany Hamilton’s arm near her shoulder. The young woman was surfing at a spot near Hanalei Bay on Oct. 13, 2003. She was just 13.

    Billy Hamilton explained that tiger sharks return to their natal waters to breed around the islands in October. Earlier in the year, they are farther north feeding on seabirds, then move to the south munching on monk seal pups, and finally around breeding time come close to the islands and target sea turtles. He said that occasionally, transient tigers drop by and exhibit strange behavior, which was the case with this one.

    It haunted surfing spots, even wriggling over the reef like a lizard to get to deep water closer to land. Billy Hamilton said he was the last person to visit Bethany Hamilton (no relation) before she left the hospital. “I met her father there. Tom Hamilton looked at me, angry, and said, ‘If you could catch that shark. . .’ ”

    “Laird called me and said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to get that shark,’ ” he said, referring to Laird Hamilton, his stepson and a legendary big wave surfer. Eventually he and a friend did so by making a bait out of a whole gray nurse shark with two very large hooks embedded, the shark tethered by a chain to a float buoy. The fact that the bait was left to fish in the middle of Hanalei Bay did not make everyone comfortable.

    After the fish was caught and dispatched with the help of a 44-magnum bang stick, Hamilton towed it offshore and cut it open looking for Bethany’s watch or perhaps bone. Nothing was found, but it had been three weeks since the attack. The jaws were cut out and brought to the beach so they could be matched up to the serrated half-moon-shaped bite that had been taken out of Bethany’s surfboard along with her arm.

    “Bethany watched as we fit the jaws to the bite in the board, a very brave girl.” The teeth matched the bite marks exactly, including a spot on the board that bore no marks exactly where the young surfer’s arm had been.

    Surfers were generally happy about what Billy Hamilton had done. “The surfing family liked it. Some of the Hawaiians who think of sharks as their amakua, their reincarnated ancestors, did not.” And, it took the intercession of a friend to prevent him from getting beat up, he said. “Another Hawaiian man wanted the tiger’s skin to make a drum head,” Hamilton added. He said the man died mysteriously while in the shower the next day.

    Hamilton said he had rounded up troublesome sharks before, but only ones whose behavior had become dangerous.

    Meanwhile, Bethany Hamilton continues to surf, and surf well with one arm. “Soul Surfer,” a movie about her heroic story, was released earlier this spring.

    Billy Hamilton caught two keeper fluke and a keeper striped bass during Friday’s outing. He will be around for the next few weeks taking orders for custom shaped boards. They can be ordered via [email protected], or by calling Hamilton directly at 808-639-3493.

    The captains meeting for the Star Island Yacht Club tournament will take place this evening at the Yacht Club. Fishing will take place tomorrow and Saturday.

    In other fishing news, larger striped bass are moving from west to east as proved by John Bruno, who used eels to catch 40.68-pound and 38-pound striped bass over the weekend. The bigger fish now lies in second place behind Bill Gardiner’s 42.26-pounder. A 39.56-pound striper caught by Wes O’Donnell was in third place as of Monday in the Montauk SurfMasters’ spring fling surfcasting tournament.

    Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk also reported bluefish blitzing right under the Montauk Lighthouse, and striped bass in the low-teen keeper size (over 28 inches) along the beach on Napeague and at Ditch Plain, Montauk, in the morning. 

It’s the fish and fishing season. Long Island has a lot of different kinds of fishes and a lot of different kinds of fishermen and fisherwomen. If we count the tropicals that are more and more common in the south bays with each passing year, we have more than 200 different species of fish to pick from.

    Where did they come from and how did they get here?

    Let’s start with the marine fish, the ones that support the greatest number of fishers, both recreational and commercial. Ten thousand years ago when Long Island was cold and barren and still contained blocks of ice left from the retreating glacier, the seas were salty and barely above the freezing mark and the fish fauna was very limited in variety. The warmer water marine fish that are so plentiful today had retreated to southern waters thousands of years earlier as the ice sheet advanced over the upper half of North America and Eurasia and the seas became frigid. A handful of fishes, mostly belonging to the cod and salmon families, plied the offshore waters, there were no freshwater fishes, per se, and no fisher people to catch what few there were.

    As the Atlantic Ocean gradually warmed, the marine fishes that had retreated moved up from the tropics and subtropics into Long Island and New England waters. The northward flowing Gulf Stream abetted this process, carrying several species passively into northwestern and northeastern Atlantic waters. As it melted, the glacial ice filled up the pores in the glacial sediments, creating our groundwater deposits, while runoff from it produced streams that ran toward the Atlantic, creating the major river ways that are with us today such as the Connetquot, Carmans, and Forge Rivers.

    Rivers that ran toward Long Island Sound — the Nissequoge and Wading Rivers, for example — were created as the glacier retreated farther to the north. The largest Long Island river of all flowed easterly from between the two glacial moraines, the Ronkonkoma and Harbor Hill moraines, dumping into the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Peconics separating the Twin Forks.

    Diadromous fishes like the Atlantic salmon, brook trout, and alewives that can function in both salt and fresh waters ran up these rivers to spawn. After spawning the salmons and the alewives would run back down to the sea to feed and get ready for next year’s upstream run. American eels also entered fresh waters from the sea, not as reproductively mature adults, but as tiny elvers no thicker and half as long as strands of spaghetti. They would spend several years in fresh water while they grew to maturity, then descend back to the ocean, ultimately traveling all the way down to the Sargasso Sea, south of Bermuda, to spawn.

    A group of marine fishes such as the killifishes and silversides had already evolved to tolerate brackish waters. Indeed, one silverside, what the commercial fishermen call “white bait” did just as well in fresh water as in salt water, while one of the killies, banded killifish, became an almost exclusively fresh water species. The white perch in the striped bass family also evolved to do as well in fresh water as salt. Today it is found in some Long Island ponds in a completely landlocked state.

    It’s not hard to imagine how the marine fishes and the diadromous fishes settled in Long Island waters, but it is difficult to imagine how Long Island got its freshwater fish fauna, as Long Island has been separated from mainland North America for thousands of years.

    One hypothesis is that while the Island was still young and the land extended much farther offshore than it does now — in some spots as much as two miles — there was a kind of network of fresh water, a chain of puddles, as it were, stretching from New Jersey to Staten Island to Long Island. This chain of puddles allowed freshwater fish such as the brown bullhead, yellow perch, mud minnow, pumpkinseed sunfish, two species of pickerels, a darter, a dace, and a few other freshwater fishes to “hop” along this chain, a couple all the way to Fort Pond and Lake Montauk before it was permanently opened to Block Island Sound in the mid-1920s.

    This hypothesis would also explain in part how the blue-spotted salamander (which cannot tolerate salt water and breeds in fresh water) became established in Montauk, but nowhere else on Long Island. Such a nebulous waterway, not stopping at Montauk Point, but extending north along the Atlantic Coast all the way to the Canadian Maritimes, would also explain how the Prince Edward Island spotted salamander, genetically identical to the Montauk one, got that far north. Similarly, such a waterway would solve the riddle of how a freshwater turtle, the red-bellied turtle, became indigenous to southeastern New Jersey, the Delmarva Peninsula, and southeastern Massachusetts, including Cape Cod.

    Popular freshwater game fishes native to the Midwest and eastern America and now common in Long Island lakes and ponds that didn’t get here of their own volition, including largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, bluegill, rainbow trout, and carp, were introduced. The carp had the longest trip, it came all the way from Eurasia. Such introduction, popularly known as “stocking,” was carried out officially by fish and game entities and thus widely publicized, but also by individuals and fishing clubs, often secretly and far from the public eye.

    What of the future? It won’t be too many years before a tropical or two carried to our southern shores by eddies spinning off from the Gulf Stream begin breeding here. Rock jetties and groins will substitute as coral reefs to make them feel more at home. Then, too, if global warming is proven to be more than a hypothesis, southern marine fishes like the channel bass, several snappers, and others will extend their ranges to include Long Island waters. By chance establishment of tropical fishes, range extensions of southern marine fishes, and continued stocking and introduction, the Long Island fauna will increase. Fishing could become better than ever.

   On Friday afternoon I witnessed something for the first time in my 75 years. I was standing with a companion on Alewife Brook Road at the edge of Cedar Point County Park, looking at the water from Scoy Pond in the Grace Estate rushing out of the iron culvert under the road into Ely Brook Pond. We were looking at some killifishes swimming in three or four inches of water on top of the pipe end, when my companion pointed to something different swimming in the same spot. “Isn’t that an eel?” he asked. I got closer for a better look, and yes, it was an eel, a small one, an “elver” about four inches long but only barely discernible because it was as thin as a spaghetti strand.

    As our eyes adjusted to the tiny sinusoidal swimmer, we began to see more elvers, as many as 15, swimming around and on top of the culvert opening. A few were actually entering the culvert, moving upstream against the current. We wondered, would any actually be able to make it through the 30 feet of corrugated steel to the other side? They were all pigmented. If they were still “glass eels,” the metamorphic stage before elver, which they assume before leaving the Gulf Stream to head toward the estuary in search of freshwater sources, we wouldn’t have been able to see them at all.

    A few minutes later we were standing at the edge of Scoy Pond surveying the beaver damage of a few years back and watching the water pour out into Scoy Run. After a few minutes of staring at the rushing water, there came a few elvers heading up stream. They had fought the current through the culvert and were a mere 20 feet from the pond where they would spend the next 10 to 20 years growing up. To make it into the pond they would have to hug the bottom and swim-sidle up the incline at a 30-degree angle. But elvers have been doing just that for longer than humans have been on Long Island. They can even wriggle over land, as long as it is wet, to get to where they are going.

    These elvers belonged to the American eel species, Anguilla rostrata, one of several Anguilla species throughout the world. They are practically identical worldwide and they all have the same astonishing life history. When reproductively mature and packed with fat, they take on a silvery appearance and begin a long journey to spawning areas in the ocean depths. In the case of the American eel, the ones that grow up in Scoy Pond will have to travel more than 1,000 miles south to reach the sacred spawning ground somewhere in the Sargasso Sea south of Bermuda and east of the Bahamas. No one other than the eels themselves knows the exact spot. It’s a one-way journey, a year of fasting. Their digestive systems are metabolized along with their fat reserves. They’re not coming back. All is sacrificed for reproduction and continuing the species.

    They’re not so different from Pacific salmon that die after spawning, except the salmon leave saltwater to spawn in freshwater, while the eels do exactly the opposite. The salmon is anadromous, it goes up to spawn, like the shad, sea-run trout, anchovy, sturgeon, and a host of others that leave the sea to reproduce in rivers, lakes, and ponds. The eel is the only fish that does it the other way around, it is catadromous, it goes down.

    Three years ago Japanese scientists found the spawning area for Anguilla japonicus, near the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean. Two species of New Zealand eels, long and short fin, go to near New Caledonia to spawn. The European eel, Anguilla anguilla, the first to be studied in depth going all the way back to the time of Aristotle, who postulated they came from worms and wet earth, also spawns in the Sargasso Sea, more westerly so than its American cousin.

    A mature female eel can be four feet long and have more than a million eggs. After fertilization, the eggs develop into leptocephalus, “thin-headed” larvae that are transparent and flat from side to side, in the shape of a cherry leaf. It was the Danish ichthyologist Johannes Smith at the turn of the 19th century who figured out the mysterious whereabouts of European eels’ spawning area. His expeditions started in the latitude of the British Isles and ended near the Sargasso Sea. He caught smaller and smaller leptocephalus larvae drifting north in the Gulf Stream as he proceeded south-southeast.

    Twenty years earlier, the very odd looking leptocephalus was considered a species all its own, Leptocephalus brevirostris. It looked nothing like what it would eventually become. It wasn’t until Yves Delage kept a leptocephalus in a tank and watched it turn into a round elver, that it became known to the scientific world that, indeed, leptocephalus and eels were one and the same species.

    Even Sigmund Freud got into the act 10 years earlier while still a neophyte researcher in Austria. He looked for the reproductive organs in hundreds of small eels, but gave up in despair. He couldn’t find any. He went on to study a much easier subject. Eels are long livers, but only reproduce once in a lifetime. Elvers become “yellow” eels as they grow longer and wider, but don’t become sexual until spending many years in fresh water. As they get ready to reproduce and their sexual organs become mature they become “silver” eels and head for the sea in late summer and early fall, especially after rains.

    Having such a complicated life story, it is no wonder that eels are becoming scarce the world over. They are harvested for food, bait, even, skins. I’m sure you’ve heard of “eelskin” accessories. Largemouth bass and other fish, as well as diving birds, eat them. The American and European eels have been in a downturn spiral for 20 years now. Obstructions such as water gates, dams, and hydroelectric turbines prevent or injure eels going upstream and downstream, respectively.

    An Asian parasitic nematode, Anguillicola crassus, that arrived on the Atlantic and European coasts in the mid-1990s, has added to their difficulties. It attacks the swim bladder, an organ in many fishes which regulates buoyancy and which is certainly of great value in the long trek from northern waters to the Sargasso Sea.

    North Fork and South Fork creeks and streams, save for culverts, don’t have dams and other barriers preventing eels from reaching fresh waters in which to mature. The new fishway at Grangible Park in Riverhead where the Peconic Estuary meets the Peconic River is probably just as negotiable by eels as it is by alewives. What’s good for the goose is also good for the gander. 

    It is difficult to know what to make of a series of meetings in East Hampton last week between local officials and representatives of the United States Department of Commerce. The participants were more or less handpicked by Town Hall, and the sessions were closed to those not invited. The meetings had their origins in an Economic Development Administration study of six United States commercial fishing ports. The goal was to determine how development aid might be appropriated in light of reduced landings of 19 species, including cod, haddock, and yellowtail and winter flounder.

    From a look at an agenda, however, it appears that the meetings were set from the start to be more of a grab-bag on the local economy than the beginning of something that would ultimately help commercial fishing. The first day included representatives of the East Hampton Business Alliance and the heads of the town’s chambers of commerce, as well as “work-force housing advocates” and others.

    The second day started with bank officials and the work-force housing people again. That afternoon had motel owners, real estate brokers, and film industry personnel discussing the challenges and opportunities of doing business here, and, yet again, work-force housing advocates. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon on the last day that the group got around to actually talking directly to the fleet. Then it was time for a wrap-up buffet at Gosman’s.

    The value of the meetings will be judged from a report said to be coming in a matter of weeks. It remains to be seen whether any aid for the fishing industry will be the result.

    When it comes to fishing, this is the time of year when anglers put their ears to the railroad tracks — metaphorically speaking, of course — when ears become radar, eyes become sonar, noses become bloodhounds, when rumors grow like Jack’s beanstalk, when even the slightest indication that the finned ones have arrived on their annual migrations gives meaning to life.

    “Bass are in the ferry slip,” is an example of how just a few words can make hearts soar like eagles. That would be the South Ferry that connects North Haven to Shelter Island, where, for unknown reasons, striped bass appear early.

    “I saw a seagull with a fluke on the beach near Devon,” is another sign from above, in this case from the Tackle Shop in Amagansett where the first few sales of sandworms indicated that the search for porgies has begun.

    “Nothing in the ocean, but there’s bluefish around Bonac Creek” is surfcasting jargon for where best to begin casting for striped bass and blues — Bonac Creek referring to Accabonac Harbor, where small bass are often found early in the harbor’s shallows, ideal light-tackle and fly-casting. Good idea to check for early bass around tributaries to Three Mile Harbor and Lake Montauk, where alewives might be drawing them. Alewives were reportedly seen in Little Reed Pond, a tidal pond that feeds in and out of Lake Montauk. The herring are a good sign not witnessed in some time.

    And, don’t forget to look up for fish. By all accounts, the ospreys that winter as far south as Brazil, Costa Rica, and Trinidad have returned to their nests. It’s not unusual to see an osprey pecking at a flounder on top of a telephone pole or flying overhead with a small bass in its talons. Up to us to figure out where they got ’em.

    Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reported the absence of squid. “It’s a little late,” he said of the spring run, which not only draws larger predators to the waters around Montauk, but has, over the past several seasons, provided tons of inky fun to the fishermen fishing by nighttime lamplight in Fort Pond Bay.

    The squid should be here soon, and given a reasonably strong wind, the near-shore presence of their schools can often be detected by sensitive noses as a sweet smell.

­    I’m sure you’ve noticed that not all the leaves on the deciduous trees are deciduous, although none on our deciduous trees remain green through fall and winter. For some yet unknown reason, most likely an adaptive one, many of the lower leaves of oaks tend to stay on throughout the winter and only drop off when new leaf buds begin to unfold in late April and early May. Nevertheless with more than 95 percent of the deciduous leaves fallen, including those of understory and shrub-layer deciduous species, it is a very good time to familiarize yourself with the native evergreens, of which there are several.

    Save for a handful of hemlocks, the origin of which is questionable, and a red pine or two, we only have five native evergreen conifers on the South Fork, one of which is a shrub. We have a few conifers here and there that are non-evergreen, i.e. they drop their needles in the fall and put out new ones in the spring. It is the larch that I know of, and there are a few magnificent ones in Montauk in the hilly area east of Fort Pond and large one in North Haven.

     Larches are part of the northern boreal forest, the “taiga,” named after that vegetational zone in Siberia which extends around the northern hemisphere. It is not known whether the local ones were planted or are the remains of hangers-on left here when the red and blue spruces, northern white cedars, hemlocks, and firs moved north into New England as Long Island warmed up after the retreat of the last ice sheet.

    The least ubiquitous of the five is the Atlantic white cedar, or bog cedar, Chamaecyparis thyoides, which grows in the wetlands of North Sea east of North Sea Road, around some of the Seven Ponds in Water Mill and in the northern part of Sag Swamp south of Montauk Highway in Sagaponack. They are fairly long-lived trees; when I aged a few of the North Sea ones 30 years ago, they were already 120 years old.

    For some reason this species, not uncommon in the large cranberry bogs south of Riverhead, never made it to East Hampton. It might be on its way, but will probably never make it, as the East Hampton bogs are already occupied on their edges, at least, by pitch pines and white pines. Atlantic white cedar is one of those woods that lasts forever and is prized in the industry. Logs hundreds of years old have been mined from swamps and bogs and found to be in excellent shape for woodworking.

    The second least ubiquitous of the five evergreen conifers is the shrub Juniperus communis, also known as common juniper or ground cedar. Though it is only a very low shrub, don’t let its size mislead you. It can be well over 100 years old. It grows out, rather than up, as it ages. One in the Soak Hides nature preserve at the head of Three Mile Harbor is about 80 feet in diameter, yet only a foot high.

    On Route 114 there is one the east side of the road where the grassy shoulder is very wide. It’s less than a foot tall and has been there since before 1980. It is plainly obvious as it peeks out from the woods and tries to conquer the shoulder where there is more light. It would do so, except that the state mowers keep it cut back. The roots of the common juniper exude a substance called an allelopathogen, which is noxious to plant neighbors that might try to invade its territory. Oddly, in southern China the same species is a tree, at times reaching 30 to 40 feet tall.

    Our most widespread evergreen conifer of the five may not be the most common, but there is hardly an acre on the South Fork that doesn’t have one or two of them. The eastern red cedar, Juniperus virginicus, is a sibling of the common juniper. It is found most in old fields once farmed but now idle and on coastal strands including low duny areas such as the ocean dunes between Atlantic Avenue in Amagansett and East Hampton Village. Very often local junipers take on the shape of a voluptuous woman, narrow waist, wider below and above. Deer are responsible for this sculpturing. They forage on the juniper needles that are head high, leaving the rest alone. It is believed that the red cedars serve as food, especially in the winter when other vegetative matter is scarce or unpalatable and that the juniper needles have some kind of medicinal value as well.

    The tallest of the five native conifers is the white pine, Pinus strobus, which can reach heights of more than 150 feet and live for more than 200 years. The white pine was one of those trees that in early colonial times were tagged as belonging to the king. The straightest and tallest were picked out to serve as ships’ masts for his majesty’s navy.

    The white pine is rare on the rest of Long Island, but common in the northwest part of East Hampton, the southern part of Shelter Island, and the wooded area of west Greenport on the North Fork. North of Long Island, it is one of the mainstays in the interior of New England, say, in the Berkshires. The tallest and oldest ones are in Maine.

    If you drive along Two Holes of Water Road, Old Northwest Road, and Bull Path you will see mature white pines reaching skyward and under them little white pines just starting out to eventually replace them. This forest approaches a climactic steady state — white pines, once completely cut over, look like they will be the Northwest’s dominant tree for generations to come.

    The last of the big five is the pitch pine, Pinus rigida, its needles wiry and arranged in fascicles of three in contrast to the white pine’s soft needles bundled in fascicles of five. The pitch pine is the dominant tree of the Central Pine Barrens, Long Island’s state forest, almost 100,000 acres large. It’s a tough pine that can stand the rigors of the ocean dunes habitat, is at home in old fields with red cedars, and does well in close proximity to the Northwest’s white pines with which it intermingles. It is a fire climax species — its pine nuts survive the heat of forests fires, which open the gummy bracts of the pinecones so that the seeds will drop out on the forest floor and restart the cycle of growth. Pitch pines were called “ill-thriven” by President George Washington when he toured Long Island at the turn of the 18th century.

    They have been traveling eastward for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, and have reached Hither Woods where they are common in the area of the Walking Dunes, but they have yet to reach downtown Montauk. They also have yet to reach Gardiner’s Island. A few have made it onto North Haven, which was once an island itself. They thickly cover the western half of Napeague, where they compete with the shorter-lived Japanese black pines first planted in the dunes of Amagansett after World War II. When you see a dead or dying pine in Amagansett, 10 to 1 it’s one of those misbegotten Japanese ones. Old timers tell of an era in the middle of the 20th century and earlier when a ride through Napeague to Montauk showed mostly barren dunes and very little in the way of pines growing out of them.

    As the climate warms up, we can anticipate many of the more southern pines, such as short-leaf pines and loblolly pines, making it to Long Island and in the very distant future establishing here.

    It seems that there are more seals around this year than ever before. Just the other day Peter Van Scoyoc saw three basking on the shore of Hicks Island. There’s been at least one seal in Three Mile Harbor all winter and another spent most of the winter in Accabonac Harbor. As many as 100 seals use Warner’s Island in Shinnecock Bay every winter and stay later and later into the spring each year. From year to year 300 to 400 seals can be found along the shores of Great Gull Island.

    It’s not that seals on Long Island are a new phenomenon. Early Long Islanders like Roy Latham and Roy Wil­cox reported seals now and then along Long Island Sound’s shore, along the Atlantic Ocean, and very occasionally in the waters of the Peconic Estuary. But sightings were rare — a seal or two a year, and that was that.

    When we think of global warming we think of southern animals — birds, mammals, and sea turtles — ranging farther and farther north each year, but, now in some cases, we see that the opposite is true as well. Our seals — harbor, harp, gray, and ringed — are northern species used to colder water. But marine mammals in general can tolerate a wide variety of water temperatures. It’s not water barriers that hold them back from increasing their ranges, it’s the presence or absence of food.

    Why hang around the edges of Shinnecock Bay, Great South Bay, Napeague Bay, Lake Montauk, Three Mile Harbor, and Accabonac Harbor? There’s a very good reason, and it’s the same one that caused sea lions from the San Francisco area to bolt north to Oregon. It’s the pursuit of food! And for most seals in the Long Island area it’s one fish in particular, the winter, or black-backed, flounder.

    This is one of the very few species of fish occupying waters at our latitude that breeds in winter and early spring, when the seals are most likely to be around. It’s also one of the few species of commercially important food fishes that comes into all of the above-named water bodies to spawn. It spawns in shallow water bodies with very little competition from other fish or crabs at a time when most fish are out to sea or torpid.    As Howard Reisman, the fish biologist who taught at Southampton College, has shown, winter flounders are especially adapted — they have “antifreezes” in their body fluids that enable them to live and remain active in waters that approach 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

    Thus, when they come into spawn they usually have a given water body all to themselves. But nature abhors a vacuum. When the seals discovered that these flatfish are about during the winter and early spring months when they are in need of food to get through the cold period when other stocks are low, they took advantage of it.

    Flounders are not swift swimmers in the sense of, say, mackerel, herring, salmon, and weakfish. Their primary strategy when it comes to eluding predators is their cryptic coloration: Their white sides are pressed against the bottom so as to be undetectable, their mottled, variegated brownish upper sides blend in to a sandy bottom. They can lighten or darken their upper sides according to the lightness or darkness of the sand upon which they are resting.

    This works well for other predatory fish, but not so well for getting by hungry seals. Seals are no dummies. They are mammals with comparatively large brains and like dogs can be trained to do a lot of circus tricks. When it comes to eating — their primary occupation in addition to reproduction — they learn quickly. Flounders are no match for them; they cannot outswim them, the way a bluefish could, for example. And they are not like us; they don’t go out of their way to vary their diet. What is conveniently proximate and easy to catch is what is eaten.

    Evolution works very slowly. Given 1,000 years or so, the winter flounder might develop a quirk, say, a very unpalatable or toxic taste that would deter seals. But time is of the essence. The flounders don’t have enough time to experiment with this or that new protective strategy. As long as the seals remain in the bree ding territory during the breeding season, they are doomed.

    And the seals keep finding flounder territories like the Shinnecock Canal in which to ply their trade. It used to be that during the heyday of the winter flounder, hundreds of fishermen would line up along each side of the canal when the flounders were passing through from bay to bay. Now it’s the seals that line up.

    These days the few flounders that make it through the seal gauntlet and breed successfully as they still do each year in Napeague Harbor, have to face a gauntlet of a different sort — a double-crested cormorant one. The double-crested cormorant just may be the most redoubtable of all Atlantic coast fishing birds. They are speedy underwater swimmers, they have eyes especially adapted for seeing underwater, and a long, sharp beak with a hook at the end for grabbing fish and holding on to them while returning to the surface where they swallow them whole. Their jaws are narrow when not being used to feed, say, when preening, but are very expandable, as a snake’s is, when swallowing a fish as wide as a flat fish whole.

    Just as the seals are leaving, the cormorants arrive in droves. It’s a rare baby flounder that is fortunate enough to escape that beak and live to leave the nursery waters, maybe even grow up to maturity and breed on its own. The number of cormorants that hang around Napeague Harbor from midspring through the summer gets larger and larger each year as they breed in rookeries as close by as on Gardiner’s Island.

    What is the winter flounder to do? Don’t blame the poor fisherman who is barely getting by. Point the finger at the seal and the cormorant.

    There is a human way to reduce the seal population — use modern contraceptive techniques. It works for people, it can work for seals. One doesn’t have to shoot the seal or harpoon it, one can dart it with a contraceptive that makes the female’s eggs reject the sperm. It is done in black bears, wild horses, deer, even elephants.

    What about the cormorants? The seals are protected by the Marine Mammals Protection Act, the cormorants by the Migratory Bird Act, which is almost 100 years old. Unfortunately, humans by law have been put in the awkward position of having to manage the other macrofauna one way or another. They are doing a fairly good job of saving species such as the California condor and whooping crane from extinction, but at a great cost. For example, our national bird, the bald eagle, is no longer considered endangered, merely threatened. But humans have a very long way to go when it comes to reducing species that have multiplied beyond their carrying capacity and are threatening the very existence of other species, in this case, the winter flounder.

    Something has to be done to level out the playing field. On the West Coast sea lions are controlled around the mouths of rivers. A case in point: the mighty Columbia River, which runs to the Pacific between the states of Washington and Oregon. Sea lions are removed from the mouths of such rivers because they have been depredating the salmon trying to get upstream to breed. They are as damning as dams.

    We should follow that example, but in a humane way, or the winter flounder may go the way of the Labrador duck, the heath hen, the passenger pigeon, and the Carolina parakeet. Now, wouldn’t that be a tragedy?

    The late, great Capt. Frank Mundus, Montauk’s Monster Man, said that during his many years of ferrying charter clients offshore to come to grips with their various demons by way of tangling with big sharks, it was the wives and children they brought along who often hooked the fish.

    We are all creatures of habit, a fact that often works against us. Mundus observed that experienced fishermen, that is fishermen who put a lot of time in on the water, handled their fishing rods in a practiced way, smoothly, with rhythmic winding of the reel, habitual jigging routines — actions that, when telegraphed down the line to the terminal gear, spell healthy prey, or something unnatural, to a predator.

    By contrast, the jerky, fumbling, uncertain rod handling of neophyte anglers signaled injured or otherwise vulnerable prey to a predator. “Don’t listen to your father,” he would tell a child after taking him or her aside. “He will tell you what he don’t know.”

    And, so it is these unusually cold spring days when the routinized dreams of sport fishermen turn toward the arrival of striped bass, bluefish, fluke, and flounder — the species their calendars say it’s time to catch. The party boats from UpIsland that came to Montauk over the winter to get in on the cod fishing, have left. Private and for-hire boats are out of the water getting their spring paint jobs and engine overhauls. Meanwhile, cod and the piles of herring they feed upon are just offshore in numbers not seen in many years, and with relatively few boats on them.

    Michael Potts, captain of the Bluefin IV charter boat said he would be missing the action if he’d hauled his boat as he usually does this time of year. Weather has been an obstacle, but the fish are there. “And, they’re bigger. Very few tiny ones. We had a 22-pounder the other day, and fish in the teens,” Potts said.

    Unseasonably cold ocean temperatures are keeping the fish and their cold-water bait in the area, and in what could be another instance of habitual behavior, striped bass and bluefish are keeping to their spring migratory pattern despite the cold water.

    Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reminds us that Easter week was the traditional start of the commercial haulseining season. “They would get the early bass run, and mackerel,” Bennett said, the mackerel so thick at times that the nets’ cod ends would fill to overflowing.

    Bennett reports “runner” bluefish in Gardiner’s Bay. The runners are the early scouts that arrive here first, skinny from not eating en route. They are likely fattening up on alewives, which have made a strong appearance in Southampton, and probably in Gardiner’s Bay as well.

    Kathy Vegessi, shoreside support for the Lazy Bones party boat, said there was hope that the State Department of Environmental Conservation would be allowing a three-fluke-per-day bag limit with a 201/2-inch minimum size, a big improvement over last year’s two at 21 inches.

    “We caught a lot of fish last year that were 20, and 201/2. It’s not written in stone,” Vegessi said of the 2011 regs. As it stands, the season is set to begin on May 15, but that could change.