Outdoors

While the calendar may not officially state it, winter is here. By any measure, Saturday’s slushy snowfall, our first of the season, was a rather benign event. Yet, the wet, heavy snow, which was enforced by a rather strong northeast wind, made it feel much colder than the 33-degree temperature. It was a raw, nasty, bone-chilling day. For most, it was a day better spent indoors.

Wicked winds meant little fishing activity as of late.

I like cold weather. I always have. But the wicked change in temperatures this past weekend was truly jarring for me. Just a few days prior to the freezing conditions, which were enhanced by the bitter northwesterly wind, I was walking around in shorts and a light T-shirt. I was reluctant to say goodbye to our warm weather.

As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to tell us on “Saturday Night Live,” “It’s always something,” Things haven’t changed, or is that “the more things change, the more they stay the same”? We’re living in an up-and-down world, in a dynamic equilibrium. If it weren’t for the sunrises and sunsets, the phases of the moon and the clock-like rise and fall of the seas two times a day, we would be lost.

When J.P. Giraud, the American naturalist, published his book “The Birds of Long Island” in 1844, one would be hard pressed to find a single heath hen left on Long Island. Game birds such as the heath hen, Labrador duck, and passenger pigeon disappeared early, along with the wild turkey. The first three became extinct.

The ospreys flew south three weeks ago.

This October a different cosmopolitan species, the brown booby, common in the Caribbean countries and throughout tropical seas of the world, showed up in Montauk and may have found a new home.

There were some decent reports of cod a week earlier, but the ever-present black sea bass could be a problem. While they are widely proclaimed to be one of the tastiest fish, sadly, we would not be able retain any, as the season for them in Rhode Island and federal waters (more than three miles offshore) remains closed until this coming Sunday.

Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye! The Long Island hunting season for bobwhite quail starts on Nov. 1 and ends on Dec. 31.

If you are a fan of catching black sea bass, you have certainly been spoiled for a number of years by the increasingly large biomass of the fish. It seems they are everywhere, and now they are showing up in locations never seen before.

As the owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett for nearly 40 years, Harvey Bennett has probably seen just about everything that could happen on the water.

Down the road a piece from where I live is a wonderful nature Shangri-La overseen by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the Elizabeth Morton Wildlife Refuge. It once was a farm and now it is a place known by almost everyone on eastern Long Island and elsewhere for its wildlife and geological uniqueness.

Meteorologists and their forecasts will always get a bad rap. That will probably never change. However, I usually get a bit of a chuckle when Colorado State University puts out its annual forecast for the Atlantic Basin hurricane season.

Like me, I’m sure you have seen more than your fair share of out-of-state license plates on our roads this summer. California has been a common one, along with Texas, Ontario, Illinois, Florida, and New Mexico, to name just a few. There have been no sightings of a plate from Guam, but there is still time; however, we have seen some other foreign and distant visitors make a cameo appearance in the high-profile Hamptons scene of late. These are not your summer jet-setters ready to attend the latest charity event. These have fins and gills.

Who are the white supremacists? The neo-Nazis? ISIL? The Taliban? Boko Haram? These are some that we know about, but there may be hundreds of other such groups of militant, almost entirely male organizations that in various ways are trying to subvert the rest of us non-belongers and non-believers in devious and perverse ways that we have yet to learn about.

Eutropia in ecology is akin to functional Utopia in mankind’s world. There are levels of position and function, just as in modern society.

The never-ending mobbing calls of common crows and fish crows continue, but one rarely hears a songbird sing as we approach the halfway point of summer. Most of the birds have bred. The osprey fledglings are learning how to dive for fish. Turkey families are breaking up in preparation for the fall harvest.

When I told a few friends the other week on a 90-degree day that I was planning to go fishing for cod, I received some strange and quizzical looks.

Summer presses on, hot and humid with an occasional bout of rain. The beaches fill up on the weekend, the traffic is crazy mad on the South Fork’s main thoroughfares, County Road 39, Montauk Highway, Noyac Road, the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, Route 114, and the Scuttlehole-Head of Ponds-7 Ponds-Mecox Roads, which wind through the fields of Bridgehampton and Water Mill and meet North Sea Road north of Southampton Village.

The afternoon of July 3 was a perfect time to take a leisurely kayak cruise in Sag Harbor Cove. Due to other commitments this season,

Of all of the many thousands of vertebrate species, fish being the most numerous, which one is the most famous for preying on its own?

There was a lot of noise going on. While there were plenty of boisterous and colorful fireworks blasting off into the night sky during the extended July 4 holiday weekend, the local fishing scene also witnessed its own cacophony of activity on several fronts, as angler participation leaped into full summer mode. Some much-appreciated warm and toasty weather did not dissuade many from either jumping in the bay or even the still-chilly ocean waters for a nice, refreshing dip, or from baiting up a fluke or porgy hook for a chance at a nice holiday dinner.

Try to look beyond the madding crowd. There’s a lot going on in the world of nature, all of it free of charge. North America’s tiniest hummingbird, the calliope from the Pacific Northwest, has come to nectar alongside a ruby-throated male at Joanne Dittmar’s house in Springs on the bay just west of Hog Creek. Sibley defines it as an “accidental.” The ruby-throat is our tiniest bird species; just imagine how hard it would be to see a bird two-thirds its size with the naked eye as it whizzed by.

There’s an old saw that says “there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” It doesn’t actually have to do with removing the pelts from cats, thank God, but more with alternative ways of getting something done that needs to be done. In humankind as in nature, just about every method to get a given thing done has been tried. Some methods fail outright, some work for a while, then others that are more durable and efficient replace them; a few work forever with little change over countless eons, thus the horseshoe crab.

As the season changes from spring to summer, it’s always been a bit hard for me to fathom that our exposure to natural daylight is already on the downhill. A sunrise of 5:15 a.m. on June 21 in Montauk is 5:18 a.m. a week later. It’s only a three-minute difference, but the daylight does begin to erode rather quickly.

My memory of watching the movie “Jaws” for the first time shortly after its release in June of 1975 still stands clear in my mind. Its effect on me, and others at the time, was profound. Since that day, I’ve lost count of how many dozens of times I have seen it on TV, and yet I still get the chills watching several of its scenes.

The South Fork of Long Island has hundreds of beaches, woodland trails, sidewalks, and other stretches for walking and communing with nature.

On the South Fork it would seem that the stars get dimmer and dimmer with each passing year.

I went out looking for signs of gypsy moth infestations on Sunday, exploring the oak-hickory and oak-pine forests along the major Sag Harbor, Bridgehampton, Wainscott, and Northwest Woods roads.

Sunday night was cloudy and cool with a slight breeze. I set out for a second night on the trail of the once common but now rare whippoorwill. Last Thursday the Noyac and Bridgehampton hills were under my microscope. Sunday night it would be Northwest Woods in East Hampton and Napeague. I didn’t hear a single whippoorwill the first night. I was hoping that it would be a different story the second time out.