Outdoors

I was born in a house next to my grandfather’s chicken farm in Mattituck, across the bay. White leghorn chickens may have been the first bird species I opened my eyes to, the first bird species I came to know intimately. Before someone coined the term “free-range chickens” in the late 1900s, that’s what they were, free-range. They ran freely over the expanse of old fields and gardens surrounding my boyhood area, feeding and carrying on as chickens left to their own devices do. At night they either roosted on tree branches or in chicken coops on rails.

Here’s where we get our electric energy from: hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), subterranean heat sources, the sun, wind, and hydrogen.

You’re spinning, I’m spinning, we’re all spinning. Everything is in motion. If you are standing in an island in an ocean transected by the Equator, you are moving easterly at more than 1,000 miles per hour. You just don’t feel it or notice it because the island, the water surrounding it, and everything on it are moving at the same speed. If you are standing upright and motionless on one of the poles, north or south, you are near stationary, except that you turn completely around once every 24 hours. From infancy to old age, you and I, assuming that we have been in the same neighborhood all of these years, have been moving easterly at almost the same speed, but not exactly.

When I dropped out of Cornell University for the second time in 1957 I was about to be drafted. We were not at war then, having settled the Korean police action some four years earlier, but, nevertheless, I didn’t think I was cut out for the infantry so I enlisted. I wanted to go into intelligence so I took my chances on getting into the United States Army Language School in Monterey, Calif. I landed a slot — the last available — in Russian. I thought I would be sent to Europe at the end of the course, but instead I boarded a troop ship in San Francisco, sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge, and headed for Japan.

We are solidly into winter. My yard is covered with 11 inches of snow thanks to the back-to-back snowstorms of last week. Noyac Bay, 100 feet to the north, is beginning to freeze over, and it will, there being not a wisp of a breeze for several hours now.

This the last weekly column of the year 2016, and I decided to write a little bit about my peculiar daily data-taking habits, which may come to an end one day soon. After Saturday I will begin saving a few trees and a little time.

You may remember the R & B group Earth, Wind, and Fire. The name contains two of the classic Greek primary elements, but leaves out the third, water. In fact in googling pop music groups over the past 60 years, I can’t find any containing the word water. Yet, the more we know the more we learn — and most often after the fact — how important water is to the Earth and life. Some of the 10 to 20 million species recorded thus far in the world can survive without air; none can survive without water.

Napeague was once famous for its bunker factory, the Smith Meal Company. Local fishermen purse-seined up menhaden by the ton and unloaded them at that menhaden reduction plant where they were turned into fishmeal.

Pamela Rosenthal, who lives in the hills southwest of Three Mile Harbor, called the other day. She found a spider living on a toy that was left in the yard for some time. She was concerned that it might be a black widow, as it was black. She said it had two red spots on the back, but it didn’t have the telltale red “hourglass.”

Having worked as the environmental protection and natural resources director for East Hampton Town for a long time, every so often I ride through the roads to see how the town and its village and hamlets are faring. Naturally, I check out past carnages to see if there have been any redemptions of sorts and, happily, in most cases there have been.

Yesterday, while I was motoring along the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, a rafter of turkeys crossed in front of me. Later on, at Sagg Pond, I flushed a gaggle of geese. On my way back home after checking out the ocean, a murder of crows flew over on their way to their evening roost in the trees of Barcelona while a herd of deer began congregating in the fields north and south of Stephen Hand’s Path. Then it got dark and wildlife activity subsided.

My plan was to take advantage of the warm day with light southwest winds and head toward Montauk Point, where striped bass were attacking bait on the surface, according to reports. I had been looking forward to a day of casting at bass blitzes for weeks if not months. But an unexpected late start forced me to reconsider the value of making the 16-mile trip from my dock in Three Mile Harbor.

As we go deeply into the autumn and the leaves fall at an ever-quickening pace, thoughts of the next spring gird us for the coming winter. We hope it will be as wonderful as the last and that the flowers and leaves will burst out with a vengeance, having slept long and deep through the cold and snow of winter.

It’s that time of year again when all of the local birds finish raising and weaning their second broods. The migrants among them have already flown south, and the year-round residents are out foraging and mapping the locations of all of the feeding stations in preparation for winter.

Striped bass and bluefish soon will begin their migration south and, we hope, come within surfcasting range. Fishermen hoping to bend a rod and others eager to observe the spectacle of birds diving, fish crashing bait, and rows of anglers launching lures into the surf will slowly roll their cars off the hard pavement into the soft sand.

I’m looking out my window at pines that are more brown than green. “Oh, darn, the dreaded pine beetle,” I say to myself. Driving around the roads today I saw lots of pines already gone and lots of others on the way out.

It’s that time of year again. Greens turn to yellows, reds, and oranges. Colorful birds flit from treetop to treetop, feeder to feeder. Gray squirrels and blue jays gather and sequester bronzy acorns. Azure skies sail overhead and morph into carmine-purple sunsets, then 7-to-7 uninterrupted black. Better to appreciate the harlequin days against a backdrop of lightless nights. Yes, it’s fall, and isn’t that grand?

While most East End fishermen wisely retreat to the comfort of home during a period of fierce northeast wind and rain, others pull on their waders, grab a stout surfcasting rod, and head toward the Point in search of big striped bass.

A great number of striped bass over 40 pounds have been caught locally so far this season. Among these cow bass are several that weighed over 50 pounds, which for many serious anglers is the dividing line between a large and true trophy fish.

It’s the season for migrating monarch butterflies.

In the 1940s almost every family on the North Fork had at least one dog and one cat. Many families kept a larger menagerie — pigs, chickens, goats, cows, and sometimes a horse or two. Horses were an extravagance; you couldn’t eat them nor did they give milk or lay eggs, and they were no longer needed to pull plows and other farm implements, having been replaced in the 1920s and 1930s by tractors.

America is making progress at bringing back lost species of flowers and plants, while simultaneously better protecting animal species that were most vulnerable. The gray wolf and grizzly bear, two species that were approaching extinction in the latter quarter of the 20th century, are now becoming so common in some areas that several states allow hunters to shoot them.

I led a nature walk at Shadmoor State Park for a nice couple from Amagansett who won the walk in the East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society auction held on July 30. Their son and a girlfriend, as well as another woman friend and her son, also accompanied us. I took my large white towel along and swept the vegetation on the sides of the trails as we marched on in the chance that I might find a tick or two. Shadmoor is well known for its large deer tick and Lone Star tick populations.

All animals of a species have culture. If we accept the notion that plants communicate with one another underground via mycorrhizal connections, plants also have culture. In evolution, not only does a species adapt to changing climes and competition by evolving adaptations — as a fish evolving lungs to become an amphibian — but a species also changes its behavior to keep up with quicker changes in its environment.

Long Island is the biggest island by far in the Long Island archipelago. This archipelago may not be a true archipelago like the Galapagos in the South Pacific off Ecuador or the Channel Islands off Southern California in the middle Pacific or the San Juan Islands off Washington in the northern Pacific. The status of Long Island as an island has long been in doubt, separated as it is from the rest of New York by the East River. The United States Supreme Court — lawyers, mind you, not coastal geologists or geographers — ruled 9 to 0 that Long Island is not an island but part of New York State’s mainland.

Bluefish are born mean. A snapper, or juvenile bluefish, will attack just about any lure thrown its way. This silver assassin’s impulsive behavior and voracious appetite make it the perfect target for kids, first-time anglers, and those who just want to have some summer angling fun without committing whole hog to the sport. Even a grizzled surfcaster can enjoy fishing for snappers with an ultralight rod and reel.

Some human domiciles are 1,000 years old or more. Several on Long Island date back to the late 1600s. Most houses, however, have lost their sense of permanence. Fifty years ago, one would never raze a house to build another one unless it was severely storm damaged or ravaged by fire. Nowadays, houses built in the last quarter of the 20th century are falling to new, larger ones right and left. Houses have lost their sense of permanence just as we who live in them have lost our sense of immortality.

Montauk, in my eyes, is one of the richest places for natural history in the United States. It has grasslands, forests, savannas, freshwater wetlands, tidal wetlands, ponds both permanent and temporary, hills, kettleholes, glacial erratics, cranberry bogs, dunes, ocean beaches, sound beaches, all matter of marine and freshwater fishes, blue-spotted salamanders, and the only ocean coastal bluffs north of the Caribbean Islands. That venerable Long Islander Teddy Roosevelt traveled the world, and he also visited Montauk. He must have loved it. Walt Whitman loved it. I love it.

Of course I did this on purpose, I told my wife, showing her the large silver hook dangling from my left ring finger. You think an experienced fisherman like me could accidentally hook himself, I continued, unsuccessfully hiding a smile. She rolled her eyes, called East Hampton Urgent Care in Amagansett, and off we went to free the shiny devil from my person.

The dog days of summer are supposed to wait until mid-August, but decided to come in July this year. Ouch! Having said that, the way the climate has been heating up in this decade, come August, the days could get even doggier.