Nature

For the last 81 and 67 years, annual end-of-the-year, or Christmas, bird counts have taken place without fail in two nearby areas, Quogue to Water Mill, and Central Suffolk. The tradition lives on and is increasingly revealing.

If there were no sun there would be stars, but no East Hampton Star. The latest calculations by astronomers, astrophysicists, and mathematicians is that the sun is 4.61 billion years old and has another five billion years to go before all of the hydrogen gas capacity is used up.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is allowing for a deer hunt on the Fire Island National Seashore. They say too many deer, too many problems.

There is another Long Island bird count that follows on the heels of the annual longstanding Christmas count. It’s the winter waterfowl count that happens at about this time every year.

The theory of evolution is still intriguing. It is “survival of the fittest” in one sense, but not totally so. And it’s going on all around us today.

Finally, world governments began to give a damn! Vanishing species had a friend. In the United States, the Fish and Wildlife Service led the way. You could no longer shoot hawks, eagles, and other birds that were not game species. Big fines became the rule of the day.

Squirrels are the closest thing to monkeys that I can think of in our area. Not only are they consummate climbers but they can also jump from branch to branch and tree to tree, using their furry tails as ailerons to guide them as they fly through the air.

The East End of Long Island came into being more than 10,000 years ago. Up until the present time the North and South Forks have been wearing away, first by the melting of the thick sheets of ice covering them — the South Fork first, then the North Fork as the glaciers melted away and retreated.

Southampton Town has more than 60 freshwater ponds. Most of these ponds are contaminated to this or that degree, but the most contaminated are given a label by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation that speaks to their fragility.

All of the winter bird, or Christmas, counts will be completed by the last days of December. Locally, the Montauk Count, which took place on Saturday, is the longest running on the South Fork.

Last Thursday we were visited by a full moon. It was mostly hidden by clouds, but just because the seas can’t see the moon dosen’t mean they don’t feel its tug.

According to “Bull’s Birds of New York State,” until recently bald eagles had last nested in the Long Island area on Gardiner’s Island in 1936. They almost became extinct in the lower 48 shortly thereafter.