When the ball drops marking the beginning of the new year, for some, a silent gun goes off and an invisible race begins. They’re the bird listers, and their goal is to find as many different species of birds as they can over the next year.

In a petition started Monday, the Ditch Plains Association is gathering signatures to “urgently appeal to the East Hampton Town Board to take immediate and decisive action to address the critical loss of the protective dune . . . a consequence of two recent coastal storms.”

The East Hampton Town Board has set Feb. 1 as a tentative date to decide whether to exempt the proposed new senior citizens center, to be constructed on Abraham’s Path in Amagansett, from the town’s zoning and land-use procedures.

For many years, the Marmador, a family-run luncheonette in the Edwards Theater building on Main Street, was the choice for hungry people of all stripes.

The curtain rises tomorrow on the latest South Fork Performing Arts youth musical theater production, “Godspell,” at LTV Studios in Wainscott. Plus: stories, arts and crafts, cookies and cinnamon rolls, book clubs, dinosaurs, and a reading therapy dog, all coming up in the next week for kids and teens.

When Guild Hall’s Student Art Festival returns this weekend after taking a hiatus in 2023 while gallery renovations were underway, students and their families will have lots to celebrate beyond simply seeing their work hanging on the walls of a prestigious venue.

The Springs School fourth-grade opera, “Learning to S.W.I.M.,” took the stage last Thursday, and it might just be the best one yet, the school's Journalism Club writes.

East Hampton Town police arrested a 55-year-old East Hampton man early Sunday morning on drunken-driving charges, which were elevated to the felony level because of a previous D.W.I. conviction within the past 10 years.

Joshua Robert Kulp, an automotive mechanic in Port Jefferson Station who had attended East Hampton High School and Longwood High School, died on Saturday of complications of diabetes. He was 30.

Ruth Margaret Johnston, who took her “love of family gatherings, baking, traveling, and playing games” wherever she lived, whether Springs or Florida, died on Jan. 7 at the age of 92.

Julio Florencio Teo Gómez, a carpenter who came to the United States from Guatemala in 2010 to find work, died at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital on Dec. 30, after being struck by a car on County Road 39 in Southampton that afternoon. He was 48.

Yani Cuesta, East Hampton High’s girls winter track coach, called Melina Sarlo “one of those all-around athletes that you rarely see anymore.”

East Hampton High’s wrestling team earned a first-ever win over Huntington. Plus, Bridgehampton’s Killer Bees avenged themselves on Smithtown Christian.

The Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter Hurricanes drew raves from their coaches, Tom Cohill, Angelika Cruz, and Sean Knight, following two big university swim meets over the weekend.

A century ago, the State College of Agriculture at Ithaca called attention to a statewide Home Paper Week, in praise of the country weekly. Times have changed, reader.

Our readers will have their say. And say. And more say.

New property transfers from across the South Fork.

All the work and expense that the United States Army Corps of Engineers will pour into the project to save the downtown Montauk oceanfront is nothing more than buying time.

East Hampton Village has its own version of the classic Weeble Wobble toy — the Hedges Inn, which took another body blow from a speeding car in the small hours of Monday morning. Something needs to be done.

Grade schoolers here woke up unhappy on Tuesday. There had been a bit of snow, but not enough for a delayed start, let alone a day off.