We preach to the choir at our house, and when, following her excellent exegesis the other night of the world situation in which I could only nod in assent as each point was hammered home, Mary asked me what I thought, I said I thought it was about time to go to bed.

    Before I did, though, we agreed that if we had our druthers, we’d vote in the general election for one-fourth of Ron Paul, that quarter which says we should avoid foreign entanglements, and for three-quarters of Barack Obama — that part of him which sees the folly of combining a tax holiday for the rich with puritanical belt tightening for the rest of us and which is for education and for something approaching universal medical care.

    As for the $2 trillion or so we owe for our regrettable military adventurism in the past decade, which, aside from many dead and wounded servicemen, has achieved a civilian body count far and away surpassing the 3,000 killed in the World Trade Center attacks, and which has alienated countless more hearts and minds than ever would have been had we not acted in such haste, I can only advise that they start passing the hat.

    They can start at these debates. It’s the patriotic thing to do.

    And while the hat is being passed about, rugged individualists who want to forswear the trappings of the Welfare State, who want to get an intrusive government off their backs, should, when they dig deep for the Pentagon — presumably they will be so inclined — sign pledges to forgo Social Security payments and Medicare coverage. It’s the patriotic thing to do.

    Independent of this, on reading the other day that Plato’s school had over its entryway the inscription “Let no one untrained in geometry enter here,” I alit on what I thought was a marvelously clever idea.

    “Ah,” I said to Mary, “I’ll put one up over my office door that says, ‘Let no one untrained in absurdity enter here!’ ” And so I did.

    “Philip Roth would be proud,” she said when I made the announcement. But then, on reflection, she advised against it. “That means you’d be including all these absurd G.O.P. debaters, you know.”

    “I agree; it would be a big tent, a mighty big tent.”

    This morning I took it down from the lintel. At the moment, because I can’t bear to let it go quite yet, the red-lettered injunction is Scotch-taped to an inner wall under my favorite bumper sticker, “Honk If You Love Peace And Quiet.” I feel I owe absurdity that much.

   This week’s cold snap notwithstanding, spring has come early this year. Bruce Collins, who lives in East Hampton Village, phoned recently to say he had seen red-wing blackbirds in his yard more than a week ago, something he did not recall before the middle of March.

    Out where we live on the southeastern reach of Gardiner’s Bay, things are a week or so behind the village. I noticed the rusty-wire call of my first red-wing on Saturday though, which is early enough. There have been no spring peeper frogs yet; their trills are at least another 10 days off.

    It had been another cleaning and organizing weekend around the Rattray household. The kids have been growing (as usual), and there were clothes to be given away. The chicken coop, which had not been swept out since the fall, was due for a change of bedding. An old mattress took a last ride to the town dump. Amid all the trips back and forth, I spent a lot of time outdoors, listening to the birds, paying attention to the season’s signals.

    A cardinal perched in a scrub oak on the water side of the house held forth in the morning. Chirps and whistles from birds I could not identify came from unseen redoubts in the surrounding marshes. The bay was oddly quiet.

    Most winters the bay rattles with the gabbling of the long-tailed ducks, which raft in large, extended families a good way offshore. I assume they have been scarce this winter because their preferred grounds to the north have remained free of ice.

    There have been the usual gulls along the shore most days — herring gulls and a few black-backs. At dawn, when the wind has been from the north, they hurry to pick up scallops blown in overnight. They squall and bicker over what they find and quiet down once feeding is through.

    It may have been a mild winter on land, but dawn on the beach is bitter when the wind is up. Mostly, it is the gulls’ domain, for a few more weeks at any rate. The gulls’ lot is a hard way to make a living, although until it warms up they have little competition. Some mornings I see raccoon or fox tracks in the sand. Deer, too, walk the beach, though for what purpose I can’t be sure.    It may have been a mild winter on land, but dawn on the beach is bitter when the wind is up. Mostly, it is the gulls’ domain, for a few more weeks at any rate. The gulls’ lot is a hard way to make a living, although until it warms up they have little competition. Some mornings I see raccoon or fox tracks in the sand. Deer, too, walk the beach, though for what purpose I can’t be sure.

From time to time, when someone asks why, given my age, I haven’t retired, I explain that I really enjoy editing what others write. The truth, though, is that the pleasure waxes and wanes. If a story is good enough to require very little editing, my work is easy but not much fun. If a narrative is jammed full of extraneous words and ideas — or if the most compelling information is left for the bitter end  — editing can be tough. On those rare occasions, however, when a writer and I work together to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, the job I do is very gratifying. (One of those occasions occurred last week, but I’m not going to tell you which story it was.) 

A nice result of having been an editor for a long time is that I’ve learned a lot about language from experience and others. Staff members have offered helpful tips. One, for example, is how to know when to spell stationery with an “e” rather than an “a.” All you need to remember is that envelopes are stationery.

Not long ago, one of our writers sent along a clipping about the difference between “bring” and “take.” Not everyone goes around mulling over such things, but the editorial “we” enjoys doing so. “Bring” denotes motion toward something while take refers to motion away from something.

Someone also set me straight on the difference between further and farther by simply pointing out that East Hampton’s Further Lane was incorrect. Farther is correctly used for physical distance; further for occurrences or thought.

Language is always in flux, of course, which makes writing and editing a challenge whether or not the task at hand is fun. Everyday speech will sometimes just take over the grammar books. At The Star we hold to many of the recommendations in Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style.” Some may think this old hat, although the fourth edition of the book was published as recently as 2000. Like The New York Times, The Star follows Strunk and White in forming the possessive singular of a noun by adding an apostrophe and an S. The Times ignores at least one other rule, about the serial comma (a.k.a., the Oxford comma), that we adhere to.

I am not sure whatever happened to parallel tenses, i.e., using “has” when it should be “had.” Jack Graves, our sports editor for lo, these many years, used to try his best to get everyone here to use parallel tenses, but I’m afraid he gave up. And don’t get Irene Silverman, another longtime Star editor, started on the importance of using active rather than passive voice.

Then there are some recent changes in usage that befuddle us; when matters are in transition, rather than settled one way or the other, all bets are off. For example, younger writers often drop the word “the” where I think it is necessary. The subject of a story this week “was on unpaid leave of absence from her job at Springs School.” I would have stuck in “the” before the school’s name. Quicker and snappier is perennially the trend.

Paul Friese, our advertising production manager, whose linguistic skills cannot be faulted, recently sent me a poetic treatise on disparate English spelling and pronunciation, but that is a topic for another day. Meanwhile, you might enjoy looking up “The Chaos” by Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenite. Be forewarned: It runs to more than 3,000 words. 

I do not know if you can ever understand loss, no matter how many times you experience it. In most things in life, repeated experience is a teacher, but each time you experience true loss, the circumstances are always unique, so the lessons are limited in use.  

    The second time in my life I experienced loss was in 1963 when I was 7 years old.

    There was a little patch of dirt on the side of our house on Lexington Avenue in West Hempstead. Every day that summer, I took my dump truck and my cement mixer and my bulldozer and I built a road in that patch of dirt. My roads may have led to nowhere, but they took me on a daily journey.

    I would speak for the imaginary men involved, who always seemed to be named Joe or Mack.

    “Hey Joe, better dig that hole right there,” Mack would shout.

    “All right, Mack.” And the hole would be dug, only to be filled in and redughe next day.

    And every day our neighbor, Mr. Laurel, would stop by and lean over the white picket fence that separated my construction site from his driveway and ask me what I was doing. I would explain to him the various ongoing projects, and he would smile and nod his head as if what I was saying to him was real and meaningful. I enjoyed talking to him because he actually listened to me.

    Mr. and Mrs. Laurel had moved in that spring. They were an older couple. Mr. Laurel was the first adult I had met whom I considered a friend.

    One day I was digging, with Mack barking orders to the ever-compliant Joe, when an ambulance pulled up in front of the Laurels’ house. Two men got out of the vehicle with a stretcher and went inside.

    A few minutes later they came out, carrying Mr. Laurel. They put him in the back of the ambulance and drove away.

    I never saw him again.

    My parents tried to explain death to me, but it was a concept strange, foreign. I remember that Mrs. Laurel came over one afternoon to sit with me.

    I had experienced loss the first time more than a year earlier. It was not a person or a thing I lost, it was a place.

    My father was, and still is, a writer, a newspaperman who also wrote short stories and, recently, a book. Before him, his father was a newspaperman and a writer, a very successful short story writer, selling over 100 stories to The Saturday Evening Post. His name was regularly featured on the Post cover with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Booth Tarkington, Agatha Christie, and Ring Lardner. His success gave him something most writers don’t have: money. The McMorrows weren’t rich, but they certainly were affluent.

    He took some of that money in the early 1920s and bought the family a beach house in the newly formed village of Ocean Beach on Fire Island. The house sat on a dune at the end of Bungalow Walk, facing the ocean.

    My earliest memories are like glittering grains of sand, splashed across the floor. The ride to Bay Shore. Daddy parks the car. We get on a ferry, cross the bay, get off on the dock. We have a wagon, our wagon. If there wasn’t too much on the wagon I’d pull it, or even ride in it. Ice cream cone at John and Anne’s, head down Bungalow Walk, cross Midway. Midway was magic. We were almost there, the ocean, the house. Sleep at night, the sound of the waves, sometimes crashing, sometimes gentle, the lullaby of the waves.

    Breakfast in the morning, out onto the beach. All day on the beach. Me and my two sisters and mom and Tante Frieda and Mum-Mum, Dad there on the weekend, all women during the week unless my cousins were there, in which case there were three other boys to play and race and wrestle and fight with. Splash in the ocean, dig holes in the sand, run along the beach. Before dinner, we’d go back up to the house. Play around the house, but stay off the dune, never play on the dune. The dune was sacred.

    If it was just me and my sisters, maybe we’d take turns riding the wagon downhill on the Bungalow path from the beach across Ocean View. Or else they would do girl things and I’d get out my trucks and dig away.

    If our cousins were there, I’d play with Bunky. His name was Tommy but to me he was Bunky. We weren’t supposed to go under the house but one time we did, opening up the storage area, pulling out old toys our own fathers had played with.

    Dinner was fish, almost always fish. One time a bone got stuck in my throat. It hurt. The adults were concerned. There was a doctor nearby. We went there and he reached in and pulled the bone out. To this day I love fish but am phobic about the bones.

    At night, the adults smoking, laughing, drinking. Mum-Mum always had a little whiskey and ice in her glass, the sound the ice cubes made in her glass, a light clinking-clink.

    Then to bed, to sleep, to rejoin the ocean’s serenade.

    In my memory, those were the summers of my early childhood. In reality, they were the May and June and September, even October. The house was always rented during the season to pay the bills.

    March 9, 1962. The house in West Hempstead. Somber. Dark outside and dark in. My father, distraught.

    He was holding pictures of the beach house, where he’d grown up and then started to raise his own family, large photographs that a newsman had taken of the wreckage. Piles of wood were all that was left. Smashed by the ocean. Holding the photos in his hands, slowly tearing them up, one by one.

    A storm had hit, a powerful northeaster. It began on March 6, the same day as the new moon, the highest tide of the month. It battered the East Coast for three days, for five high tides.

    The Army Corps of Engineers had built a huge revetment to protect the houses on the dune on Ocean Beach. Over the course of five high tides, the ocean had breached the dune behind the revetment, forming a powerful pulsing wave of water running behind the dune, a stream that sucked in the homes that sat there, one by one.

    In the end, only three houses remained on the dune after the storm. Ours was not one of them. The land that the destroyed houses had stood on was condemned by the state, never to be built on again. 

    We went to Ocean Beach once that summer. It was strange, sitting on the beach in front of where our house had been — that beautiful two-storied shingled beach house, now just an empty dune, glistening sand — returning that night to West Hempstead.

    T.E. McMorrow is a reporter at The Star.

   After getting my new hearing aid, and phoning Mary, I told her she didn’t need to shout.

    “But that’s the way I always speak when I’m talking to you,” she said.

    “Well, just tone it down a bit, I’m not deaf.”

    And then it occurred to me that, indeed, I am no longer deaf. The technology — though pricey — has finally caught up with me, and I can no longer plead hearing impairment when it serves my purposes to do so.

    “It’s all a cacophony,” I said. “The peanuts squeak between my teeth as I’m chewing, I look like ‘The Scream’ whenever the toilet flushes, the stairs groan unbelievably when I tred on them. . . .”

    “Welcome back to the real world.”

    “But I preferred my own. Despite what I used to say about participating in the dance — dance, it’s more like a stampede — of life. Things were quieter then, I was less tuned in, and rather liked it. For instance, the office, which I used to think was utterly silent, with everyone staring at their computers, is far more distracting than I thought.”

    Of course I can always shut my door — I am one of the few so privileged — but that would be a retreat into the nostalgic past. No, I must face the music. I no longer am in the world yet not of it. I must communicate — a strange imperative to come from the lips of one who’s been in the communications business for as long as he can remember, even when he was in the Army tapping out “Ben’s best bent wire” in Morse code in a Fort Bragg classroom.

    But how can one think with all that’s going on, to my left and right, before and behind, above and below, inside and out — plaints, scratchings, squeaky chairs, rumbles, phone conversations, the incessant traffic, the slurping of soup, the ingestion of sandwiches. . . .

    Accepting the fact that I’m now like everyone else will take some getting used to. It doesn’t quite fit my otherworldly persona. All of a sudden, within the span of a few weeks, I have a laptop computer, the first I’ve ever owned, and a professional-looking case to put it in, and a hearing aid that . . . will you shut up out there! . . . won’t abide my evasions anymore.

    And I thought these were supposed to be the Golden Years.

   There were flowers, balloons, hugs, and a wind-up jumping plastic frog Friday at Bucket’s. Friday was the day when Everett Griffiths’s 33 years of running the place came to an end and the still youthful-looking deli man and his wife, Angela, got ready to take life a little easier.

    At lunchtime friends hung around the door to Everett’s tiny kitchen waiting to wish him and Angela well. It was from here that he had served up thousands of egg sandwiches, made the salads, and provided a willing ear to those who had something to say.

    The jumping frog, according to the regular customer who brought it in, was intended to remind Everett that he was no longer going to be doing the back flips for others, that it was going to be someone else’s job to wait on him for a change. Hearing this, Everett and Angela erupted with laughter and wiped the mingled tears of sadness and amusement from the corners of their eyes.

    I had gone in to get one last sandwich and offer my thanks to the Griffithses and their staff. It is impossible to get close to an estimate of how many lunches I got there over the years, but considering that I went several times a week while in high school, missed about a decade due to college, work in New York City, and other things, but got back on track in 1998, it is safe to say the total is in the thousands. In the last decade alone, as I calculated today, I probably had 1,400 Bucket’s sandwiches, which, with a bottle of seltzer and perhaps some pretzels, cost me about $10,000 in all.

    Philip Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who lives in East Hampton, extolled Bucket’s in a poem we printed in these pages last week. Mr. Schultz wrote, “When Augie, our 12-year-old, told me about the sign / on the door he looked away, maybe from the idea itself — / he already knows things change and sometimes disappear.”    In a place like East Hampton, change is not all that often for the good, which is one reason Bucket’s ending is so bittersweet. There are fewer family-run businesses here every year. Losing one, especially this one, reminds us of what helped define our sense of place.

    I’ll miss the food, I’ll miss the laughter, and I’ll miss Everett, Angela, and all of those who made me my lunch over all the years.

   Three big does are concentrating on tufts of early grass at the left side of the front yard this evening. They, or their sisters and brothers, have already dined on the snowdrops in the backyard, although they haven’t eaten up the small daffodils that are just budding, at least not yet.

    Sitting at my computer at the front of the house, I can see what they are up to. I spy on them as they come and go, mingling among what remains of the many-decades-old rosebushes they decimated last summer.

    These three does are probably the same ones that watched me drive away from the house early this morning. They’re a wily bunch. A few nights ago I spied 6, hiking diagonally across the yard, and, about 10 days ago, I counted 12 marching through, moving quickly.

    I wonder where all these animals go when they aren’t in my yard. The adjacent properties are protected by deer fences; are the deer slinking across Main Street to some secret deer reconnaissance site?

    As I sit looking out the window I am eating an early supper of asparagus and a vegetable chili made with . . . venison. How do you like that, deer?

    (The recipe, on an old yellowed clipping, comes from The Star’s “Long Island Larder” column, which was written for many years by Miriam Ungerer. Miriam, who lives in Massachusetts now, told me the other day that someone was interested in publishing another book of her recipes, using that title. Miriam has four cookbooks to her name and it’s time she added a new one. I hope it happens.)

    It must be obvious that I am not squeamish about venison, or wild fowl, or any wild edibles, for that matter, having been treated to these local foods from the earliest days of my marriage to Ev Rattray. He was brought up here and had hunted most of his life. One day, though, after our first child was born and John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he decided to put away his shotgun. “There has been enough killing in the world,” he said.

    That didn’t keep us from enjoying others’ quarry. We rationalized it, telling ourselves that it would be worse to waste something that had already been shot. For about 10 years, we were the recipients once a year of a deer that had been hunted on Gardiner’s Island. It would hang in the barn for a time before being taken to a butcher. We liked to make venison stews, and most of the recipes are still around. I am pretty sure we never made venison chili back in those days.

    The chili, with zucchini and peppers and carrots and, of course, beans, was really good. If you told anyone it had been made with beef, they wouldn’t have known the difference. The venison arrived in three huge frozen patties from a friend of a friend of a friend. I guess the intermediaries are a bit squeamish.

    In a Star editorial last week, David Rattray blamed deer for destroying the understory of the woods, suggesting that hunting might be the only practical way to bring their population into balance with that of other woodland creatures, including birds. This week, we will publish a letter from Bill Crain, president of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife, who argues against hunting and believes that immunocontraception would work and should be tested.

    I’m of many minds about what would be the right thing to do. Clearly, something must be done. Maybe there is more than one solution. But although tonight’s juxtaposition of does on the lawn and venison chili in my dinner bowl was rather startling — if admittedly somewhat amusing — I am not going to become a vegetarian any day soon.

   “For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never worn,” was a six-word short story composed by Ernest Hemingway to win a bet. I was reminded of it a few weeks ago when placing a classified ad to sell two bass guitars and an amplifier.

    Since my husband, Phil, died of cancer almost five years ago, I had been confronted with the instruments during my weekly laundry chores. After a death, there is an immediate culling and distribution of the possessions of the deceased, but often a holding back of things that have more complicated emotional ties.

    Someone much wiser than I told me that I was finally ready for the next level of clearing out. It had been a long time since I had seen those instruments as anything other than a rebuke to my “to do” list intentions. In the new year, something about their presence began to haunt me, and it became important that I give them a new life.

    It wasn’t until I had taken them out of their cases to photograph them that it dawned on me that one of the basses was around Phil’s neck the first time I laid eyes on him. He was playing with a not terribly good band of law school buddies, who decided they needed something more to sustain them than simply their outsize lawyerly salaries. I went to their first performance, across from the old CBGB as they were proud to tell you, with my best friend, Priscilla, whose brother played with the band and had gone to law school with Phil. She wanted me to meet Phil, because she had already predicted that he and I would fall in love.

    I remember him clearly that night. He was tall and stoic, but a little wild looking, a true bassist. His friend and band-mate Harold recalled at the memorial service that Phil had forgotten much of what he was supposed to be playing from stage fright, but he looked so cool up there that it hardly mattered. His T-shirt was royal blue and had one of those plastic adapters for 45 r.p.m. singles printed in yellow on it. It impressed me as an incredibly cool statement of protest for the loss, recent at that time, of vinyl LPs.

    Still, we didn’t speak much aside from introductions, and he wasn’t my physical type. I tend toward the more Anglo-European and he looked a bit like John Malkovich. Phil didn’t end up staying in law or in the band for much longer. It would be some time before I would see him again and even longer before we would exchange more than a couple of words. At a party several months later, he was so sarcastic when I made pleasantries that I resolved never to speak to him again.

    One cold night in January, that would change. He and his friends were celebrating both Elvis Presley’s birthday and the engagement of two of their friends. Priscilla and I met the group at an Irish bar in the East 20s. This time, we would bond over music, film, our childhoods in New Jersey, inside jokes that only few people would understand. He asked for my number. On the following Tuesday, the official night for men to call women, he rang on schedule and we made plans to meet that Friday.

    I had another first date that week, with a writer who played goalie on a hockey team with Tim Robbins, which is all I really remember about him. He was very nice and took me to a lovely dinner, but it wasn’t meant to be.

    After six hours of nonstop conversation and laughter with Phil, we were inseparable and remained so up to the moment of his last breath. I will miss him until my last breath, but I’ve had enough time to realize that his possessions will never be stand-ins for him and have no more talismanic power than my memories. Although he had the guitars at our house for several years, I don’t remember him playing them again.

    About a week ago, I ended up selling the three pieces to Crossroads Music through the kindhearted assistance of Zach Zunis, a Star sales rep, superior blues guitarist, and all-around awesome person. I hope they gain a few more remarkable memories during their useful existence.

    I have tried to devise a six-word summary to capture what meaning or allusions these objects might have in the larger picture I have of Phil’s life, but haven’t been too successful. The best I have so far: Once played well, then never again.

    Jennifer Landes is The Star’s arts editor.

   Tonight we’re going to see Alec Bawdlin try to lin the mayoralty of New York City on “30 Rock,” and after that we’ll dial in one of Mary’s c-lin-ical shows, “Grey’s Anatomy.”

    This, of course, after The PBS News Hour has delineated for us ma-lin-gerers the appalling failings of the de-lin-quent.

    You could have knocked me over with a shuttlecock when the night before at the badlinton Lynn Baldwin asked me who Jeremy Lin was. “He’s only the linchpin of the New York Knicks, the lingua franca of the world, in fact,” I said, blinking.

    “I’ve heard of him, I just didn’t know his first name,” she said consolingly. “A gremlin made me do it.”

    “That was like asking Larry Penny who Linnaeus was,” I continued.

    But, of course, it wasn’t quite the same. After all, a week before Lin had been l’inconnu. Now, words like linseed, alkalinity, all-inclusive, and lingo linger in my brain as I try to go to sleep each night after the Knicks play, following yet another lin-vigorating display.

    When my eldest daughter called yesterday to say my 5-year-old grandson was playing point guard on his team, and seemed to be liking it, I said, “You’ve got to get him to a doctor to have his peripheral vision checked out! We must know how well he sees the court.”

    “Dad, I just want him to have fun. . . .”

    “And dribble. He’s got to dribble, dribble, dribble. Crossovers, behind the back, through the legs . . . all of that.”

    “But I can’t let him dribble in the house.”

    “Why not?”

    “Because somebody lives downstairs.”

    “Oh, yes . . . Is he there all the time? I know! He could dribble in your room in the attic.”

    “On that thick carpeting?”

    “. . . You’ll have to rip some of it up. Nothing must stand in the way of this boy’s career. How’s his first step?”

    “His first step? He took that when he was a year old.”

    “No, no, I’m talking about the first step he takes when he blows by the defender on his way to the rim.”

    “No wonder no one played sports in our family, Dad. I just want him to have fun, to enjoy the game.”

    “He’s got to develop that explosiveness, and also a quick release on the perimeter. . . . What shall I offer him as an incentive, a lin-centive. . . ? Tell him I’m sending him a Jeremy Lin shirt. How about a visit to Harvard, a consult with a sports psychologist?”

    “A visit to a shrink might do you good, actually, Dad. He’s 5 years old.”

    “Now don’t be lin-solent, Emily. I’m chillin’. I’m chillin’. It’s just that I’ve got lin-somnia. I’ve been taken, as they say, to lin-finity and beyond.”

   In the weekend’s Great Backyard Bird Count, which I wrote about on Feb. 9, East Hampton Town was considerably better represented than in 2011. My own participation was less than I had hoped, however, as I was laid low with a stomach virus that is going around — the less said about that the better.

    The count draws on the contributions of thousands of birders across North America, who are asked to spend a minimum of 15 minutes over the course of three days, usually during Presidents Day weekend, jotting down what they see and submitting results online. Taken together, the data provide a snapshot of the distribution and variety of birds, as well as of the birders. This year, 10.6 million birds were identified, though participants have until March 5 to submit reports. More than 75,000 checklists have been logged so far.

    I had hoped to birdwatch each day, with one session on the Montauk bluffs counting scoters. This was not to be; Saturday morning, after breakfast and some chores, I was taken ill and went back to bed and stayed there for the rest of the weekend.

    But at least I beat my 2011 total, returning to Lazy Point on Friday afternoon, where I tallied black ducks, mergansers, golden eyes, and herring gulls — 249 in all. Coincidentally, in each of the three years I have taken part, I have identified the same number of species: eight.

    Perhaps because of the mild weather for the count, reports from within the Town of East Hampton exceeded those of 2011. There was but one filed from Montauk last year; so far in 2012 there have been 13. There were 15 from the East Hampton ZIP code, mine alone from Amagansett, and none from Wainscott. The town’s top bird this year was the Canada goose, which numbered 994.

     Montauk’s 62 species put it in the In the weekend’s Great Backyard Bird Count, which I wrote about on Feb. 9, East Hampton Town was considerably better represented than in 2011. My own participation was less than I had hoped, however, as I was laid low with a stomach virus that is going around — the less said about that the better.

    The count draws on the contributions of thousands of birders across North America, who are asked to spend a minimum of 15 minutes over the course of three days, usually during Presidents Day weekend, jotting down what they see and submitting results online. Taken together, the data provide a snapshot of the distribution and variety of birds, as well as of the birders. This year, 10.6 million birds were identified, though participants have until March 5 to submit reports. More than 75,000 checklists have been logged so far.

    I had hoped to birdwatch each day, with one session on the Montauk bluffs counting scoters. This was not to be; Saturday morning, after breakfast and some chores, I was taken ill and went back to bed and stayed there for the rest of the weekend.

    But at least I beat my 2011 total, returning to Lazy Point on Friday afternoon, where I tallied black ducks, mergansers, golden eyes, and herring gulls — 249 in all. Coincidentally, in each of the three years I have taken part, I have identified the same number of species: eight.

    Perhaps because of the mild weather for the count, reports from within the Town of East Hampton exceeded those of 2011. There was but one filed from Montauk last year; so far in 2012 there have been 13. There were 15 from the East Hampton ZIP code, mine alone from Amagansett, and none from Wainscott. The town’s top bird this year was the Canada goose, which numbered 994.

     Montauk’s 62 species put it in the state’s top four areas, behind Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Ithaca. Fifty-four species were counted in East Hampton, which came in at number seven. The numbers can be found online at gbbc. birdsource.org, where you can discover nuggets like the astonishing 80 crows listed on Sagaponack’s lone 2012 entry, which contained only this species. Southampton (ah, Southampton) contributed a mere 11 species in three reports.

    For the third year in a row, New York took top state honors, with 4,471 checklists so far, and it ranked fifth in total number of birds.