East Hampton Town could have an answer in June as to whether the legality of three laws designed to cut down on aircraft noise over the community by restricting hours and access to the airport will be assessed by the highest court in the land.

The laws were struck down by an appeals court last fall.

East Hampton Town Attorney Mi­chael Sendlenski told the town board on Tuesday that, following the submission of briefs regarding the case over the last week, the United States Supreme Court has scheduled a conference on Friday, April 28, to discuss the town’s petition and the briefs. An order as to “where our petition will go,” said Mr. Sendlenski, would be expected in the ensuing days.

In the meantime, Mr. Sendlenski said, the town is working with state and federal elected officials on legislative initiatives that could help address the airport noise problem, and is looking at what would be needed to complete the Federal Aviation Administration’s comprehensive analysis and application process, called a Part 161 procedure, to gain approval for locally imposed airport restrictions. The court decision against the town’s airport regulations found that they could not be enacted without complying with that F.A.A. process.

While the ruling against East Hampton’s three 2015 airport restriction laws — an overnight curfew on landings and takeoffs, an extended-hour curfew for noisy planes, and a once-a-week maximum on visits by noisy planes, all seasonal — was the result of one lawsuit by aviation interests, another lawsuit regarding the regulations, by the Friends of the East Hampton Airport, is pending but being held in abeyance pending the Supreme Court’s decision on hearing East Hampton’s case, Mr. Sendlenski said.

Initial court rulings let the two curfews stand. They remained in effect from the summer of 2015 until they were ruled out last fall. The one-time-per week trip limit was never allowed to be enacted.

East Hampton is represented in its Supreme Court case, filed at the start of this year, by Kathleen Sullivan and David Cooper of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and Sullivan.

Earlier this month, the City of New York, the Town of Southold, and the International Municipal Lawyers Association, along with the local Committee to Stop Airport Expansion, filed “friend of the court” briefs in support of the town.

At a town board meeting on Tuesday, consultants from Harris, Miller, Miller, and Hansen, a firm hired by the town to collect and collate data on airport noise — which was used as the legal underpinning for the three adopted airport noise restrictions — presented a review of airport operations and complaints spanning the period of June 30 through Sept. 30, 2016.

While overall traffic at the airport remained essentially the same in 2016 as during the same period in 2015, the number of complaints about aircraft noise rose by 27 percent, with a total of 24,309 last year, up from 19,099 in 2015.

The use of a second complaint system in addition to Plane Noise, the system the town has had in place, largely accounts for the spike, the consultants said. While Plane Noise logged in 9,754 complaints, through its phone hotline, online reporting system, and email tally, the addition of another system, called Air Noise Report, created a new way for people to lodge an objection to a noisy plane flying overhead.

The Air Noise Report system, created by a resident of western Long Island, provides access to a map that shows in real time aircraft flying overhead, and tracks information about them. Additional antennas for the system have been going up on the East End, although coverage is still incomplete. However, complaints lodged with Air Noise Report by East End residents about planes using East Hampton Airport accounted for 41 percent of the total noise complaints last year, or 9,877 individual complaints.

Both systems provide tools for the town to track the problem of aircraft noise, the consultants said, though each has its own shortfalls. Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, the airport liaison, said she hopes East Hampton officials can work with the proprietors of each system to address shortcomings and increase their effectiveness here.

Complaints about seaplanes increased last year by 71 percent, or 1,087 complaints. Seaplane operations, or takeoffs and landings, went up from a total of 1,882 in 2015 to 2,155 in 2016.

The airport overnight curfews did “exactly what we wanted them to do,” Mr. Baldwin said, with compliance by pilots, and the operation of aircraft that fall into a “noisy” category shifting out of the restricted nighttime hours into unrestricted daytime hours.

Flights in or out during the nighttime curfew hours “remained at essentially zero,” according to the consultants’ presentation. But, “at 5 o’clock in the morning, it only takes one,” commented Tom MacNiven, a Wainscott resident who has been active in airport matters, including serving on an airport advisory committee.

The consultants’ report, which will be posted on the town’s website, also provides an analysis of airport noise complaint data based on geographic location, aircraft type, and inbound and outbound flight routes used by members of the Eastern Region Helicopter Council on a voluntary basis to cooperate with the town on noise abatement.

Following the airport consultants’ report, Jeffery Smith, the head of that organization, provided an overview of that effort, which had been presented at a March “fly neighborly” meeting of the helicopter council.

The East Hampton Town Trustees scored a victory in State Supreme Court this month when a judge denied a request for summary judgment by an East Hampton Village resident who constructed a 166-foot-long rock revetment on the ocean beach in front of her house after her property was damaged during Hurricanes Irene in 2011 and Sandy the following year.

The trustees assert that they, on behalf of the town’s residents, own a substantial portion of the West End Road property on which Mollie Zweig constructed the revetment. Ms. Zweig argues that the deed to her property includes ownership to the mean high water mark of the ocean.

She began construction of the revetment in November 2013 after East Hampton Village, and its zoning board of appeals, granted permits for the project over the trustees’ strenuous objection. The dispute has been the subject of litigation since that time, with the trustees last year failing in their effort to annul the zoning board’s most recent rulings on the revetment.

In a decision dated April 6, Justice Martha L. Luft wrote that a review of deeds submitted on Ms. Zweig’s behalf, with a title examiner’s affidavit asserting that the trustees cannot claim title to the disputed area, “reveals that there are issues of fact which preclude the grant of summary judgment.”

A title examiner, Lance R. Pomerantz, contended that a 1902 deed “should be read to indicate that the trustees quitclaimed any interest in the uplands,” Justice Luft wrote. (A quitclaim deed is a legal instrument used to transfer ownership of a property.) “Without evidence of the intention of the parties to said deed,” Justice Luft wrote that she “is not able to determine the import of the 1902 deed.” In a property dispute, she continued, the burden is on each party “to establish such claims other than by relying on defects in the title of their adversary.”

Ms. Zweig, she wrote, “has failed to establish that the southern boundary of her property is established by the description in the deed that conveyed title to her, or that said boundary extends to the high water mark along the Atlantic Ocean.”

The trustees opposed Ms. Zweig’s June 2016 motion for summary judgment with an affidavit from another title examiner, who concluded that her claims had no legal merit.

Beyond their claim of jurisdiction over the beach to the southerly line of beach grass, the trustees also argue that, even if the revetment is north of the line of beach grass, it could have a significant impact on the lands they own and govern, granting them jurisdiction.

Ms. Zweig contends that the revetment is located upland of the average line of beach grass that existed prior to Hurricanes Irene, in 2011, and Sandy, in 2012, and that avulsion — the removal of soil from one property to another, as in a flood — does not change title boundaries.

But “The doctrine of avulsion involves the loss of land by the sudden or violent action of the elements perceptible while in progress,” Justice Luft wrote, citing case law. “The title to land lost by avulsion is not lost, and the boundaries between adjoining properties are not changed. Here, Zweig has failed to establish the amount, if any, of the perceived loss of dune on the Zweig property that occurred on or about the dates of the subject storms.”

“In addition, Ms. Zweig has failed to establish the location of the average line of beach grass immediately before” the two hurricanes, Justice Luft concluded. Further, the judge wrote, it appears that Ms. Zweig has replanted a line of beach grass on land of which she has not demonstrated ownership due to avulsion.

The denial represents “a substantial victory for the trustees,” said Brian Matthews, an attorney representing the governing body. “The court held it was undisputed that the trustees own the property lying immediately to the south/southeast of the Zweig property,” he wrote in an email, “and that the only question surrounds the northern boundary of the trustees’ property” — the southern boundary of Ms. Zweig’s property. This is significant, he wrote, as Ms. Zweig “has argued that the trustees’ claims should be denied based on the spurious claim that the trustees could not show a clear chain of title dating back to the Dongan Patent,” the 1686 document creating the body and granting trustees jurisdiction over the town’s common lands.

Justice Luft noted “that the historic deeds for the Zweig property refer to her southern boundary as being the southern line of beach grass,” not the mean high water line, Mr. Matthews wrote, and specifically refer to the 1902 deed as the one establishing that boundary.

Stephen Angel, an attorney representing Ms. Zweig, did not return a call seeking comment.

Absent any appeals, the matter will be put on the court calendar for trial, “and the trustees remain confident that they will ultimately prevail,” Mr. Matthews wrote. 

New Sag Harbor regulations banning parking on side streets near the village’s two schools may be the village board’s way of encouraging the school district to provide more parking on its own, but some are concerned that the laws could impact safety, as well as local businesses.

Sag Harbor schools occupy two buildings. The elementary school is on the corner of Hampton Street (Route 114) and Clinton Street. Pierson Middle-High School is off Jermain Avenue, between Montauk Avenue and Division Street. On Dec. 13, 2016, the village board resolved to prohibit parking, mainly during school hours, on some of the nearby residential streets, prompted, according to the mayor, by safety concerns.

Parking was eliminated on Clinton Street, and prohibited between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. on both sides of Montauk Avenue, the west side of Hamilton Street, the west side of Ackerly Street, and the south side of Elizabeth Street. Enforcement began on Monday as students returned from spring break.

On Tuesday afternoon, Dr. John French, a dentist who lives and works on Hampton Street, said the new regulations were already causing him problems. “Now, during the drop-off and pick-up, it’s almost impossible to get a spot here,” he said. Hampton Street parking is packed in both directions, he said, and his wife could not come home.

His driveway can fit three cars, but he has six employees and sees some 30 patients a day, starting at 8 a.m. He recently purchased a practice and will soon have up to nine on staff, he said. Dr. French starts seeing patients at 8 a.m.

He bought his house in 2004 from a family practitioner, who had paid $20,000 for a “home professional” permit meant to facilitate parking, he said. “Do I get my $20,000 back?” he asked.

On April 11, during the village board’s regular monthly meeting, Dr. French voiced his concern. “I’m going to lose half my business for this,” he said, explaining that Ackerly Street was where many of his patients used to park.

Ed Deyermond, a member of the village board who lives on Ackerly, said Dr. French had a valid point, but that the village had to do something about congestion from school-related traffic. The district does not provide enough spots for its employees, he said. “You can’t get vehicles up Ackerly Street. The school has to step up. I’m surprised no child or parent or grandparent hasn’t been hit on Clinton Street . . . we’ve been talking about this for years, and what’s happened? Nothing.”

Mr. Deyermond said he understood from school officials that 30 percent of eligible students take the school bus. During drop-off and pick-up, he said, “the traffic is backed up from the school down 114, north down 114, down to Madison Market — I’m showing my age here — almost to Bulova.”

Late last week, school district officials met with village board members and the police chief. “I’m certain they would have liked us to roll back the restriction,” said Mr. Deyermond, adding that district officials indicated they would appoint a committee to look at the matter. Crosswalks and sidewalk improvements in a half-mile radius of the school were discussed as well.

As for traffic, Mr. Deyermond said it was already flowing better under the new regulations.

The new law is “not going to make the cars disappear,” said Ken Yardley, the owner and funeral director at Yardley and Pino Funeral Home, which is across the street from the elementary school. “It’s only going to cause them to park on another street. Where they end up might not be a good place either.” 

His business, with visiting hours for the departed usually occurring between 2 and 4 and 7 and 9 p.m., will be affected only during the afternoon hours. The funeral home has been there since 1932, but the hustle and bustle around the school has grown over the decades. Mr. Yardley said he understood the village’s safety concerns, but “you still have to put the cars somewhere.”

The school district, he said, has to do something to alleviate the congestion, and he suggested that buying property to create a parking lot somewhere was the best answer. “If they had a 40-car parking lot, that’s 40 less cars out on the street.”

The State Department of Environmental Conservation has warned against spring and summer pruning of oak trees, which have become infected across the state and Suffolk County with a disease called oak wilt.

Beetles that can spread the disease are active in spring and summer and are attracted to freshly cut or injured healthy trees, according to the D.E.C., and so could carry the fungus from sick to unaffected trees if pruning takes place now. If pruning is needed, it should be done between October and February, according to the state.

A fungus that blocks water and nutrients and causes leaves to wilt and drop off, the disease has been killing thousands of oak trees in the eastern United States annually and is expected to make its appearance in East Hampton Town this summer. The state agency will undertake sampling and aerial surveys to check for oak wilt in July, when it is most apparent. Infected trees will have to be cut down.

Oak wilt is one of the most destructive tree diseases, and can kill trees in as little as four to six weeks. Symptoms include discoloration around leaf edges and sudden loss of a substantial portion of leaves during the summer months.

Earlier this year, the D.E.C. issued an emergency order creating a protective quarantine zone encompassing the entire county. It prohibits the transport outside the county of oak wood, or firewood logs of any species, as it is difficult to determine whether cut logs are oak or not. Protective zones have also been established throughout the state.

All oak trees can come down with oak wilt disease, but red oaks are particularly susceptible; they die faster from the fungus than white oaks, and spread the disease more readily.

The fungus spreads through tree roots below ground, and is spread above ground by the beetles, which feed on tree sap and bark. Beetles can spread oak wilt spores throughout an area of several miles.

The D.E.C. has encouraged people to report possible instances of oak wilt to its Forest Health office, by phone at 866-640-0652 or by email to [email protected].  Photos of the symptoms should be included.

Pat Mansir, a first term East Hampton Town Trustee, resigned on Monday, expressing growing frustration with colleagues who “diminish and restrict” other trustees and with what she describes as the panel’s dysfunction. 

In a letter to the editor of The Star this week, Ms. Mansir, who had been a town councilwoman for 12 years and a member of the planning board for 10 years before that, wrote, “This board of trustees is where he who can talk the longest, loudest, and most foul, can take over and lead the board. This kind of behavior is to the detriment of the morale and productivity of each and every board member.”

By telephone on Tuesday, Ms. Mansir, a Democrat who was elected with Independence endorsement, said she had called Len Bernard, the town budget officer, and said, “Take me off the payroll.”

“Each member, including me, has skills, expertise we can bring to the table. With all of that experience and willpower we can solve almost anything, but in this case the bigger story, which I’m not going into here, is the actions by a few,” she said.

Ms. Mansir was said to be focusing on Jim Grimes, a Republican also serving his first term, with whom she has quarreled. In January, Mr. Grimes publicly criticized her handling of the bidding process for planned excavation at Fresh Pond in Amagansett.

“The trustee seat requires more hands-on work than a councilperson’s,” Francis Bock, the trustees’ presiding officer, said yesterday. “We don’t have to follow exactly the bidding procedures the way the town does. That whole bidding thing is what threw her off.”

 Mr. Bock said he was surprised by Ms. Mansir’s resignation and was unsure if her seat would be filled by appointment or remain open until the Nov. 7 election, when all nine seats will be contested, as they are every two years.

As a consequence of Ms. Mansir’s resignation, Brian Byrnes, who said last month that he would not seek re-election, has reconsidered, telling The Star yesterday that he will run again. “I see a need to continue on and do the good work that we’ve been able to accomplish,” he said of his Democratic colleagues.

Ms. Mansir has been dismayed by Mr. Grimes’s use of crude language during meetings, which are broadcast live on LTV. “There are F.C.C. rules,” she said on Tuesday, referring to the Federal Communications Commission. “I can’t believe LTV would want this kind of language. . . . I would be very embarrassed if my grandchildren heard that.” 

“Jim is extremely opinionated,” Mr. Bock said. “I think he’s also a voice of reason from the Republican Party. Certainly, we’ve embraced that. He’s intelligent, he knows his stuff when it comes to a lot of this, especially waterfront issues. For some reason, Pat didn’t think it was a good idea for us to embrace some of those things. I never understood that. But I’m not going to start a war of words with her. I think the trustees have done a pretty decent job so far. We’ve changed the direction. We’ve accomplished most of the things we set out to do when we campaigned. She hasn’t seen it that way.”

Ms. Mansir received the second highest number of votes in the 2015 election, which resulted in a bipartisan board, with Democrats taking six of the nine seats. Mr. Bock, a Democrat, was the top vote getter. When the board was sworn in, in January 2016, Ms. Mansir was elected as one of two deputy clerks, with Bill Taylor. In January of this year, however, she lost that position, along with a corresponding reduction in salary, when the trustees voted to replace her with Rick Drew, another first-term Democrat.

At the time, Ms. Mansir downplayed the significance of the move. “It had nothing to do with the money,” she said on Tuesday. “But it was par for the course.” Mr. Grimes and Mr. Bock, she said, are working to ensure that they alone “play a definitive role.”

“I’ve done so many good things for the town. I can’t survive in anything where I’m not able to produce. It’s just not fair,” she said.

“I knew that she has been struggling since she was replaced as deputy clerk,” Mr. Bock said, “and I knew that she was considering not running for re-election. I tried to talk to her about that, but wasn’t really getting anywhere. But I certainly didn’t expect her to go this route.”

East Hampton has some of the most beautiful and bountiful water bodies on Long Island, and government’s growing attention to water quality remediation is encouraging, but harmful algal blooms continue to foul several waterways due to excessive nitrogen and phosphorus, largely fed by aging or failing septic systems. That was the message Christopher Gobler of Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences delivered on Monday in his annual report to the East Hampton Town Trustees.

The good news, he told the trustees, is that his data suggest that some waterways in which the State Department of Environmental Conservation has prohibited shellfish harvesting could be opened, either seasonally or year round. The bad news is that Three Mile Harbor has had the highest levels of rust tide ever seen here.

Dr. Gobler has monitored waterways under the trustees’ jurisdiction for the past several years. He also studies Georgica Pond on behalf of an association of property owners. His assessment was mostly upbeat, pointing to mitigation measures that appear to be helping Georgica Pond and to Suffolk County’s 2016 approval of improved septic systems that will significantly reduce the amount of nitrogen released.

Alexandrium, which produces a toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning, was first documented on Long Island in 2006 and has been seen at varying levels every year since then, Dr. Gobler said. Cyanobacteria, the blue-green algae that have afflicted Georgica Pond and several other water bodies, appeared here in 2003. Cochlodinium, or rust tide, has recurred annually since its appearance in 2004.

“More nitrogen going from land to sea now, because there’s more people and more activity on land than there had been in the past” is the primary cause, the scientist said. Nitrogen not only makes the algae grow faster,  but “the organism can make more of the toxin because it has more nitrogen.”

In 2016, alexandrium was measured only in Three Mile Harbor, and only at low levels, he said. However, maximum levels of cochlodinium, or rust tide, “were extremely high,” in Three Mile Harbor, with one event possibly the densest bloom ever seen in East Hampton Town waters. The 2016 levels “were much higher than in 2015, and also significantly higher than the long-term average.” Dinophysis, or red tide, was also found in the harbor.

But even Three Mile Harbor presented a reason for optimism, he said. Most of the groundwater in the Three Mile Harbor watershed moves relatively quickly, he said. “If you make the changes now, “within 10 years you will have addressed at least 64 percent of your groundwater entering the water body,” he said. The vote in November approving up to 20 percent of community preservation fund proceeds to be used for water quality initiatives demonstrates a determination to take action, he said. In East Hampton, “Three Mile Harbor is obviously an area to be focused on.”

That focus coincides with Suffolk County’s Reclaim Our Waters program, through which advanced septic systems have been approved. Dr. Gobler referred to a “10-10-30” goal: septic systems that release less than 10 milligrams of nitrogen per liter, costing less than $10,000, and having a minimum 30-year lifespan. Nitrogen-removing biofilters, which work with existing septic systems, are another promising technology, he said.

In Georgica Pond, cyanobacteria levels were much lower in 2016 than in the two previous years, and Dr. Gobler said the removal last summer of nearly 60,000 pounds of macroalgae from the pond with an aquatic weed harvester may be responsible. By removing macroalgae, he said, “you’re taking nitrogen and phosphorus out of the pond.” The effort will be repeated this year.

 “Over all, I think the town board is doing great work using C.P.F. money to focus on the septics that are close to water bodies. . . . It seems like we’re making some good headway on that front,” Tyler Armstrong, a trustee, said at the presentation’s conclusion.

“Our job,” Mr. Armstrong continued, “seems to be to use whatever techniques we can to mitigate the onset of blooms, and the effects of blooms, in our water bodies as we replace septic systems, work on reducing input to surface water from groundwater, and, hopefully, work together to eventually get this under control within 10 years. . . . I have a lot of confidence from your report.”

In other news, Mr. Armstrong reported that the two pump-out boats operated by the trustees, in Three Mile Harbor and Lake Montauk, removed 93,380 gallons of sewage from 2,530 boats in 2016. A $10,000 grant from the State Environmental Facilities Corporation offset the cost of the boats.

A lawsuit against East Hampton Town, brought by a group of Montauk property owners who claim that erosion of their waterfront land was caused by the installation of the jetties at the mouth of Montauk Harbor, will proceed to trial, following a court decision last week denying the town’s request for dismissal.

The suit, filed in 2011, alleges that the jetties have caused erosion and damage to public and private beaches as well as the shoreline houses to the west, along Soundview Drive and Culloden Shores, leaving them vulnerable to destruction in storms. It asks that the responsible government agencies be ordered to restore and replenish the beaches, and to continue to maintain them against erosion.

In response to the lawsuit, East Hampton Town had asserted that the Army Corps of Engineers, which installed the jetties, should bear responsibility. An earlier suit, in state court, was dismissed because the Army Corps was not named as a defendant; the plaintiffs then filed in federal court, naming the Corps.

Just last week, after years of discussions with the Corps about building up and restoring the beachfront west of the jetties, town officials said they would ask the Corps to drop the plan, which called for the installation of sandbag groins. That approach — the only one the Army Corps was willing to fully fund — violates the town’s local waterfront revitalization plan, which precludes hard structures along the shore, town officials said.

The estimated $21 million cost of an alternate plan favored by the town, using dredged sand to build up the beach, is $11 million more than the Corps’s plan, and the town would have had to pay the difference.

The recent ruling dismisses the Corps from the property owners’ lawsuit on a technicality, though the agency could once again be included in the future. At present, it would be the town, as sole defendant, that could be held responsible for the erosion along the shore in the affected area, and also on the hook for restoration or repairs, should the case go that way.

Thomas Peele, an investigative reporter and a member of East Hampton High School's class of 1979, has won a 2017 Pulitzer Prize in the Breaking News category for coverage of the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, Calif., in which 36 people died.

Mr. Peele led a team of reporters for the East Bay Times that delved into the cause of the December 2016 blaze in a warehouse that had been illegally converted to an art studio and living space, and Oakland officials' failure to make safety inspections of the building. Pulitzer jurors called the team's reporting "relentless" and "exposed the city's failure to take actions that might have prevented it."

"City officials just last month had cited the owner of the warehouse where a deadly fire killed at least nine people late Friday night," Mr. Peele wrote on Dec. 3, hours after the fire, "and had launched an investigation into whether the interior structure was illegal, city records show." He went on to report that a neighbor had filed a complaint less than three weeks before the fire.

He subsequently reported that, two weeks before the blaze, inspectors had been unable to get into the warehouse, which was occupied by an art collective called Ghost Ship. 

"The honor of journalism's highest award is both thrilling and humbling," Mr. Peele, who is 55, said in a statement. "I am very proud of our reporting team and we continue to work very hard to shed light on this tragedy and hold government accountable. We have more work to do."

Mr. Peele is a lecturer at the University of California Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, where he focuses on public records and freedom of information. He has also worked for Newsday and for newspapers in New Jersey and Delaware. He holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Long Island University and a Master of Arts degree in writing from the University of San Francisco. 

He is also the author of "Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism's Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist," about a black Muslim cult and the 2007 assassination, by one of its members, of Chauncey Bailey, editor in chief of The Oakland Post. 

Judith Miller has made a career out of tracking dictators and their attempts to amass weapons of mass destruction. Last week she had words of warning for a crowd gathered at Stony Brook Southampton for a reading: “I have never seen a time of such peril for this country.”

She was referring to the Trump administration’s tough stand on North Korea, and “playing games with this country” that “already has four, five, up to 10 — we don’t really know — nuclear weapons . . . headed by a crazy man who only talks to basketball stars. We’re in a whole new territory. We’re going to need good reporting now more than ever.”

Currently a Fox News contributor, the former reporter for The New York Times and Sag Harbor resident said she almost did not make it out from the city to Shinnecock Hills for the reading because of the latest breaking news from the White House. “Donald Trump just reversed himself on NATO. Remember he called it useless? Today it’s just great, now that they’re spending money on terrorism.”

She added a historical note: NATO’s first involvement with terrorism was in 2001, when it helped the United States go after Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“We’ve had a complete flip-flop, and now we’ll spend barrels of ink and have many commentators telling you how this change came about.” Having interviewed the president at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach mansion, she said, “nothing he says or does at this point would surprise me.”

It has been more than a decade since Ms. Miller’s articles for The Times corroborated the Bush administration’s incorrect claims about Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weap­ons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War. And it has been two years since the publication of her book that attempted to explain her reporting. But for several members of the audience, their resentment of what they saw as her role in legitimizing the conflict was still raw.

Ms. Miller read two passages from “The Story,” her 2015 book about her life before and after the period of reporting that earned her infamy and also jail time for refusing to reveal one of her sources, who turned out to be Scooter Libby, the chief of staff of then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

It was in the question-and-answer session when the room started to heat up. The first question — “By what measure does your front-page reporting on weapons of mass destruction not constitute fake news?” — set the tone for many of those that followed.

She did not shy away from the questions or the questioners, who, in some cases, were personal in their attacks.

“The book was an effort to examine what I got wrong,” she said. “Much to my surprise, the stories that I and The Times were criticized for were not wrong. When I said President Bush was told X, Y, and Z, he was told X, Y, and Z. The problem was what he was told was wrong.”

She added that classified information, by its very nature, is challenging to verify independently. As a reporter, she had to rely on sources who could only describe to her what they had seen. “You cannot see the raw material; you cannot see the people who are providing the information for the intelligence reports. You are often going to make mistakes,” she said. “So what is important is letting people know when we did.”

Ms. Miller said she vetted what her sources told her by going abroad to talk to officials in countries like England, France, Germany, Israel, and Jordan, nations either skeptical of the U.S. reports or neighbors of Iraq who knew what Saddam Hussein was capable of and had seen the results of his earlier uses of similar weapons.

“When all of them said absolutely, he has it, he’s hiding it, and he’s a terrible man anyway, I tended to believe them, because I did the best I could to balance whatever their political bias was with the bias of our leaders,” she said. “That’s pretty much all you can ask a journalist to do.”

She was concerned about the media’s polarization, now energized by its opposition and resistance to Donald Trump. “We pay a price for a polarized press. Yes, we can have a standard of fair and objective reporting, saying, ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand.’ That’s so boring, isn’t it? You get through 15 arguments and you’re so tired. But I think that’s still the goal to which journalism should aspire.”

She found it depressing, she said, that journalists can tweet “atrocious things about a president that if they said in print would get them fired, but it’s okay because it’s on their Twitter feed.”

But what is most important, she said, is for journalists to pursue the questions swirling around the election and the current administration: “What are the connections — if there are any — between Russia and the hacking of the [Democratic National Committee], the attempt and success of interfering with our election process? Who knew what, when, where? Who’s making policy in this administration?”

Ultimately, Ms. Miller said, “There’s so many questions to be asked and so much reporting to be done that to start beating up on the media because things are not being done as well as they should be done is missing the point.”

A weekend with near-80-degree temperatures and it seems like spring prematurely turning into summer. Alewives, or river herring, are running, ospreys are sitting on nests, hardwood trees are budding, and at Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, trailing arbutus are flowering up a storm, according to Jean Held. 

But with the good comes the bad. Patricia Hope, a retired East Hampton High School science teacher, reported that after a very long absence dating back to before December 2016, the first lone star ticks are out. On Sunday she picked up two adults, male and female. (The female has the white spot on the back, thus the common name.)

Pat has been studying ticks for almost five years now and has already done enough research and traipsing through fields and woods to make her eligible for a Ph.D. She has a marvelous laboratory set up at home and for more than two years has been taking a daily walk through a prescribed territory with her dog, at the end of which she removes the ticks from herself and man’s best friend, and then identifies, tallies, and preserves them. The one good thing about ticks is that they are tiny and a million of them can fit in a shoebox.

Her research has yielded a remarkable finding: The black-legged, or deer, ticks are no longer the number-one tick enemy. They have been relegated to the colder months, but even then they have become very scarce. There is an old maxim, no two species can occupy the same habitat and niche for a long time without one becoming dominant and displacing the other. The niche is how the organism makes a living; the habitat is where it hangs out, feeds, and breeds.

It is only fitting that the deer tick — the primary vector of Lyme disease — is now taking a backseat to the lone star, as it was largely responsible for squeezing out the dog, or wood, tick, which used to be the common Long Island tick for so many years. Now the latter tick has become a great rarity, although I don’t think New York State will ever put it on its endangered and threatened list.

Pat’s steps to her new endeavor are not unlike that of the other great Long Island naturalists who have made their second job their first and best. Perhaps Long Island’s greatest naturalist ever, Roy Latham, was a potato farmer and part-time fisherman. Gil Raynor was a meteorologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Dennis Puleston was a world trekker, then a P.R. person for that laboratory before he began banding ospreys and other birds. Paul Stoutenburgh peddled irrigation pipe for the Long Island Lighting Company, and then sold insurance and finally became an industrial arts teacher at Greenport High School, while all the while honing his naturalist and writing skills as the first weekly nature columnist on eastern Long Island. 

Leroy Wilcox, who wrote the first definitive scientific paper on piping plover behavior, was a duck farmer with his brother. Art Cooley was a teacher at Bellport High School and was instrumental in starting the Environmental Defense Fund with Dennis Puleston, as well as serving as the guiding light for the state’s bottle deposit law. He is still very much alive and active in environmental affairs in San Francisco. Jim Ash was a sheet metal worker, then a house and building washer, but always a naturalist, before he headed up the South Fork Natural History Museum. Their progeny are many and carry on the good environmental fight.

And now here come the women. Karen Blumer, the author of “Growing Wild on Long Island,” knows both her fauna and flora, and is very active on the environmental battlefield in the areas of clean water, watershed protection, and environmental education. Jean Held, after a long career with Time Inc., then Fortune magazine, helped start the South Fork Natural History Society and has been a force in the Sag Harbor Historical Society, all the while studying native flora and fauna, especially butterflies and dragonflies. 

She was the first to remove by hand invasive phragmites at a time when the State Department of Environmental Conservation was protecting it as it ran rampant on the north end of Long Pond in Bridgehampton. Ginnie Frati gave up a good job working for Suffolk County’s Public Works Department to work with injured and sick wild animals of all kinds at the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center in Hampton Bays, which she was instrumental in establishing.

Louise Harrison on the North Fork is well versed in every aspect of the natural world and the human environment. Sara Davison, who at this very moment is busy trying to clean the choking mats of algae from Georgica Pond in East Hampton, as executive director of the Friends of Georgica Pond, once led the eastern Long Island Nature Conservancy, then jumped to the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons and ran that great dog-and-cat-caring organization for almost 20 years. Nancy Kelley, present executive director of the Nature Conservancy of Long Island, was the head of America’s Group for the South Fork for several years. 

Dai Dayton, the director of Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt, has been taking care of vineyards, estates, and the like, but her chief concern has always been the South Fork’s natural areas. And then there is my niece, Gwynn Schroeder, who works tirelessly for everything environmental on the North Fork, in addition to raising four children and being a right-hand aide to Suffolk County Legislator Al Krupski.

And what about all of those wonderful women horticulturists, gardeners, and landscapers serving the South Fork?

I have only cited a few of my heroes and heroines. And there are so many other naturalists and environmentalists, long established or up-and-coming, that I have failed to name. They should not feel neglected, but should keep doing what they do best — taking care of Mother Nature in their own definitive way as long as they are able to.

I leave you with a saying attributed to an old Native American that I learned about for the first time at the end of an email by Karen Engel of the D.E.C.: “When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.” 

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected]