Outdoors

My 30-foot Novia Scotia-built boat has been in the water for nearly three weeks, but, sadly, I’ve yet to untie its dock lines.

Eleven days ago, on April 3, the northern gannets invaded Sag Harbor. A friend sent a video of several hundred crowding the waters surrounding Long Wharf. Above them, the sky teemed with more. In 20 years of birding around Sag Harbor, I had never seen more than a handful from the wharf.

The eastern phoebe is just starting to show up on the East End after a winter down South, bringing with it the promise of coming warmth and humidity — and bird song.

In the last two weeks, ospreys have started to return to the East End from their wintering grounds in Central and South America. They’re a sign of spring, and a constant visual reminder that our actions directly affect birds.

The American woodcock knows a thing or two about a good display. No bird on the East End of Long Island comes close to rivaling its spring show.

While the great blue heron, the largest heron in North America, is not our only winter heron (black-crowned night herons roost locally all winter), it’s the only one you’re likely to see.

Pigeons are extremely sensitive to low frequency sounds; they can see into the ultraviolet range of light, and they are able to detect minute changes in air pressure. They don’t keep the tidiest of homes, allowing feces, and even dead nestlings, to remain in the nest, and since they reuse their nests, they get bigger and nastier as time goes on.

This weekend is the 25th anniversary of the Great Backyard Bird Count. To participate, you spend a minimum of 15 minutes counting birds, and afterward report what you see to the number-cracking scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The yellow-rumped warbler, also known, colloquially, much to my 10-year-old’s delight, as a “butter-butt,” is our only regular winter warbler and our region’s most abundant.

The first and most important thing to know about the purple sandpiper is that it’s not purple. It’s not even close. For the beginner, the best way to see this bird — the only sandpiper we tend to see here in winter months — is to know where it hangs out, because it absolutely doesn’t stand out.

Hunting with guns in East Hampton Town is a tradition that dates back to the middle 1600s. Back then, it was a means of survival. Now, it’s a sport, and a popular one, but also a tool for wildlife management.

The screech owl is about the size of a brick, with big eyes, and ear tufts, but this adorable little owl is an efficient killer. Its howl represents pure death to a variety of critters. Nothing is safe, even other screech owls. It even takes bats on the wing.