Outdoors

The fall is here, my favorite time of the year. The Hamptons are still the Hamptons, but the traffic is diminished, things slow down, the sky is beautiful, and the leaves turn myriad colors before they fall to the ground in November. It’s the time of the great bird migration and the harvesting of fish and shellfish, just like in the old days.

So, I’m standing at the beach with a late-summer visitor, an old friend, looking across Coke bottle-green waves to the horizon, and he says, “You’re so lucky.”

Let’s talk bones. On Sunday, we sailed Leilani to the Gardiner’s Island porgy grounds. Before we set sail, I walked across the street to the West Lake Marina (it’s still the West Lake Fishing Lodge in my mind) to buy a package of frozen clam bait.

We all know about the Venus flytrap. It’s a carnivorous plant that lives sparingly in the coastal Carolinas and catches insects in its trap. How many of us, however, know that right here on the East End we have more than a handful of such plants, which eke out a living by catching and eating insects.

Growing up on the rural North Fork surrounded by potato fields and water in the mid-1900s was idyllic for most of us. You could work as soon as you could walk, ride your bike anywhere day or night, play outside games like marbles, tag, hide-and-seek, giant steps, listen, look, taste, smell, and touch. You felt safe and secure.

The old expression was “he or she had sand,” meaning fortitude, and I think, seeing as how it was obviously a very old expression, “sand” referred to endurance or vitality, as in plenty of time remaining in the hourglass.

We agreed during a sail on Rob Rosen’s catamaran on Sunday evening — the soft wind quietly pulling the cat out of Montauk Harbor into Block Island Sound to watch the moon rise — that the bubble of exceptional weather had changed us. We had become accepting.

Two Wednesdays ago I was back at Crooked Pond south of Sag Harbor, this time with Victoria Bustamante and Arthur Goldberg, both of whom were new to the pond. The exposed flats, with their wonderful array of rare and opportunistic sedges, grasses, and flowers were still thriving. I say “opportunistic” because they only appear in odd droughty years when the pond level is way down.

A few weeks ago I was in the hamlet of North Sea with two California friends from my yippie days in Santa Barbara. We stopped at Conscience Point, where the first settlers to settle Southampton, from Lynn, Mass., came ashore in 1640.

“Schoolie” bass were stacked up in one of the Gardiner’s Bay inlets the other morning toward the end of an outgoing tide. A Springs resident who shall remain nameless reported that he had decided on a whim to don a mask and snorkel and let the current take him along for a ride.

We were alone on a secret beach, insulated from the crowds on that glorious summer day, and so the plane with its non sequiturious message — a crap duster seeding the clouds with yet another Hamptons pretension — made us feel like members of a cargo cult.

On Sunday I had the pleasure of leading a small group on a poke-and-look nature walk along the Long Pond Greenbelt trails south of Sag Harbor, sponsored by the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt. “Poke-and-look” because we shuffled along slowly, conversing, asking questions, answering them, and taking in the wonderful flora on either side of the trail as we wended our way towards Crooked Pond.

The subject is sheer delight. I tied up to the town pumpout station next to the Coast Guard station on Star Island in Montauk on Monday, late morning. While I offloaded what needed to be gone and topped off my water supply, what looked to be a family — a man, a child about 9, and a woman — were fishing off the end of the town dock.

I live on a fifth of an acre but there is still enough room to accommodate a visiting deer or two. I rarely see them, but I see their discrete fecal piles here and there, a couple of new ones each week.

Flow. It’s what we want, not hangs. I have a friend who moved way down south to a dirt-road town called Pavones. It’s located on the southeast side of the Sweet Gulf, Golfo Dulce, not far from the Panamanian border, where some of the finest waves in the world peel along the Costa Rican coastline.

It’s been hot as Hades and unrelentingly humid. In other words, the air is almost filled to capacity with moisture, but not the kind that produces rain. Plants are wilting and songbirds are trying to stay cool by lying low and not singing.

A shiver of sand tiger sharks approached the beach from the south in downtown Montauk and a large body of bluefish that were hunting schools of smaller prey concentrated between the sharks and a bloat of boogie boarders.

If you’re a child, tween, or teen, summer is a time for work and play away from the confines of the classroom. I wouldn’t trade my boyhood and its summer for all the gold in Captain Kidd’s chest. Growing up in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s on the North Fork was all that a lad could wish for.

Capt. Mike Vegessi of the Lazybones party boat out of Montauk was named Fishing Legend of the Year at the Montauk Mercury Grand Slam fishing competition held on Saturday and Sunday from Uihlein’s Marina.

You may have noticed that most of the songbirds have stopped singing and are either preparing to nest again or, more likely, just help their fledglings along while simultaneously nudging them away. Young-of-the-year ospreys have either already fledged or are standing in their nests flapping their wings in earnest as they anticipate the moment of departure.

Sendero Luminoso, the organization of Maoist revolutionaries of Peru, always comes to mind when I’m offshore on a boat that’s shark fishing. This only makes sense because of the dream state one drifts into while, well, drifting, as the crew spills ground fish and fish chunks overboard to create un sendero luminoso, a shining path that wanders toward the horizon as time passes, a route for hungry sharks to follow until they meet the boat’s baited hooks.

High mercury levels in East Coast marshes could wipe out some bird species, according to researchers.

My son-in-law stood over the stove Monday evening stirring diced vegetables that would go into bass cakes along with a medley of spices, an egg as binder, and crackers crumbled by hand. The 40-pound striped bass providing the substance of the cakes was speared on Saturday by the same man stirring the veggies.

Just about every school kid in the East knows about gypsy moths. If you asked them what one looks like, though, they’d be hard pressed to describe it.

Well here we are well into summer and the birds have successfully fledged many of their young. Will they go for a second brood? Piping plovers are one of those species that tries and tries again if it fails the first time around.

George Knoblach turns 90 today. Like many a Montauk resident, George “discovered” this place during his family’s summer camping trips to Hither Hills State Park — only much earlier than most.

The inch or so of rain we had on Saturday and Sunday morning really greened up the open spaces. It was readily apparent on driving around the outback areas of Southampton and East Hampton on Monday. The vegetation had been getting thirsty. Its thirst was thusly quenched.

This season’s no-kill shark fishing tournament is named the Carl Darenberg Memorial Shark’s Eye Tournament after the late owner of the Montauk Marine Basin who broke with precedent by maintaining the Marine Basin’s exciting tradition of shark tournaments while sparing the lives of sharks.

Monday night was delicious. It was quiet and as late as 9 objects big and small could still be discerned with the naked eye without the addition of artificial lighting. It was a perfect night to go out and scour the woods and fields for whippoorwills, without leaving the driving seat of my vehicle. So that’s what I did.

I had lunch at the Inlet Seafood restaurant in Montauk on Monday afternoon. There were five of us, one of whom pulled out his smartphone as we waited with delicious anticipation for sushi, mussels, and broiled mahi sandwiches.