Outdoors

As seems to happen every year, summer appears to get shorter and shorter. Memorial Day arrives and with a quick blink of the eye, Labor Day appears to roll right in.

Just a month ago nine dogs died from drinking pond water in New York City’s Central Park that was thick with blue-green algae, oops, I mean cyanobacteria, which is not actually algae at all.

Fishing this summer for various species of tuna, including albacore, yellowfin, bigeye, and bluefin, has been the best witnessed in many years, and it looks like it will continue well into the upcoming fall season.

The bowhunting season for deer opens on Oct. 1, and in Suffolk County licensed archers can obtain permits starting on Monday for access to designated areas in select county parks. 

Did you know that according to the Encyclopedia Britannica there are 43 different species of the deer family, Cervidae, worldwide?

Gloria was a powerful Category 3 storm and had just brought a storm surge of 8 to 12 feet to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, with 125-mile-per-hour wind gusts.

It’s September, the favorite month for hurricanes. The shorebirds that went to the tundra to breed are already halfway south. We humans have very high I.Q.s, but we can’t fly. Some butterflies and darning needles are also on their way south. They have lower I.Q.s than birds, yet they can also fly and know where the winter is warm.

It felt like only yesterday that we were all celebrating Memorial Day in joyful unison. The summer season was upon us. Time to relax and take in the lazy, hazy days of sunshine, fishing, barbecues, and beaches. But, while the calendar technically states that it is still summer, the party is over for many people. It went fast, too fast for me.

Many of the not-so-rare but equally beautiful native plants were in flower — the yellow Maryland golden asters, the pinkish-purple Joe-Pye weed, the purplish-blue slender bush clover — while several species of goldenrods were just beginning to bloom.

They go by many names. Blow toads, sea squab, chicken of the sea, blowfish, and puffers are just a few of the common ones. But no matter which name you know them by, they usually bring a smile to just about any face.

Something peculiar is going on in Turkeydom. Turkeys here and there on the South Fork have begun to develop bunches of pustules on their faces and elsewhere, but only on bare patches of skin, not on feathered areas.

Baby bluefish, also known as snappers in these parts, have arrived en masse. The annual invasion of the sporty little fish is evident at every dock, wharf, and bulkhead on the East End.

We have reached a point in the world’s development when species will be lost at a faster rate than evolution can compensate for.

While we are still in the summer season, early Saturday morning in Montauk Harbor felt as if a faint hint of September were in the air. A cold front had passed through a few hours earlier and the breeze was coming from the cooler and drier northwest.

Impairment means the water body is high in nutrients (nitrogen compounds and phosphates, for example), algae-ridden, high in intestinal bacteria such as enterococcus and coliform bacterium, or unsafe to swim in.

Once again, sharks have been making headline news. Whether it’s an aerial photo of one lurking close to a popular beach, a scrape with a bather, or a specimen caught from shore, every incident seems to be amplified on social media and other platforms more than ever before.

On the drive east to Montauk early Friday morning, pale pink hues of the developing sunrise could be seen over the sand dunes alongside the Napeague stretch. Would the fish be on the chew? Only time would tell.

The dead adult humpback whale towed to the Montauk ocean beach last week is just one of several humpbacks that we have been reading about this year in the local newspapers. There have been many sightings offshore and even in Great South Bay and other estuarine water bodies.

It was so hot that nature at night overwhelmed nature during the day. On the evening of July 16, for one example, during Dai Dayton’s full moon walk, the trees and wetlands were alive with the sounds of tree crickets and tree frogs and the air was alive with fireflies.

Last weekend’s heatwave reminded me why I went to college in Buffalo and not to the palm-fringed campus of the University of Florida. It wasn’t just for the education, but also to enjoy the snow, bitterly cold winds, and to play ice hockey as much as I could. Sounds weird, eh?

The calendar reminded me that it was time to get back on the water, grab my rod and reel, and partake of the 19th annual Mercury Grand Slam tournament last weekend out of Montauk.

Hot, Hot, Hot! Cars, Cars, Cars! Nothing to do but grin and bear it, and observe nature.

What was I thinking? 

This column, penned for so many decades by various writers in this long-established newspaper, has been aptly named “On the Water.” It’s a pretty clear and accurate description of its intended content and hopefully the audience appreciates its narrative for better or worse. 

All of a sudden it’s July and the traffic is more ferocious than ever. One of the silly things I have indulged myself in is counting the vehicles that whiz by my front window on Noyac Road, the second busiest road on the South Fork. I’ve been doing it since the mid-1980s. The protocol I used is the number of vehicles going east and west during two consecutive four-minute periods. I was anxious to see if the AAA’s projection for travel during the holidays of more than 40 million vehicle trippers had any basis in fact. At any rate, on July 3 shortly after 3 p.m., I counted the most vehicles ever. Based on the number going east and west in eight minutes, the projected hourly rate was 1,575 vehicles per hour, the kind of count one might expect for the Long Island Expressway at a point where Suffolk County and Nassau County meet.

Here it is half the year gone and I understand less about nature while studying it more. Friday evening was the perfect night for studying the flashes of the fireflies. It was calm, only partly cloudy, and gray tree frogs were singing from the wet spots.

It’s been an unusual season for the normally reliable bluefish this year. Catches were scarce in many locales the past two months, and the fish showed up only a week or so ago in Noyac Bay. Usually they could be found as early as the first week of May in this area.

After months of eager anticipation, the black sea bass season in New York finally opened on Sunday. While anglers in New Jersey and Connecticut have been allowed to retain the popular fish as of May 15 and 19 respectively, folks in New York have had to sit on the sidelines while their nearby neighbors have enjoyed bountiful catches for over a month. To rub salt in the wound, Jersey anglers could keep 10 fish per day, while those in the Nutmeg State could retain five. A huge, if unfair, advantage.

On Sunday night at 8 o’clock I began watching out of my front window on Noyac Road in anticipation of the firefly show to begin. The first flash down low in the herbage at 8:46 started what would become a barrage of flares, 127 of which I tallied until 9, when I stopped. 

Whippoorwills were once common throughout the woods of Southampton and East Hampton, especially in Wainscott, which is the center of the South Fork’s oak and pitch pine forest.

There certainly have been a lot of headlines about tension between the United States and China of late. Trade and tariff warfare have captured most of the attention, and it appears that this ongoing squabble is not about to end anytime soon.