Outdoors

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.

Senior Chief Petty Officer Jason Walter handed the helm to incoming Senior Chief Petty Officer Eric Best. He then retired after 21 years of service to his country, and, by all accounts, extraordinary service to the Montauk and East Hampton communities during his last assignment.

It rained and winded Monday, not a good day for taking pictures of plants and flowers. But it was okay. We needed the rain and I hope it won’t be the end of it during the coming summer. It was okay because I had finished doing my annual end-of-spring gypsy moth and groundcover monitoring for 2015.

It’s the peak of the breeding season for almost every bird, mammal, reptile, amphibian, and fish, not to mention shellfish and crustaceans. It’s also the middle of the landscaping and gardening season, when lots are being cleared, new houses constructed, lawns planted with exotic shrubs, trees, and forms.

This time of year the very thought of the full moon illuminates the imaginations of fishermen of all stripes, whether they lower clam bait, live eels, or cast lures of many disguises in hopes of hooking Morone saxitilis, striped bass.

Long Island had two big fish kills in its inshore waters last week — one in Manhasset Bay, another in the western part of the Peconic Estuary. These two kills involved a single species that is famous for its periodic mass die-offs up and down the Atlantic Coast — the menhaden, Brevoortia tyrannus.

The die-off in Flanders of tens of thousands of bunker (menhaden) that peaked on Friday has been blamed on extremely low levels of oxygen in the Peconic Estuary due to an excess of nitrogen, which in turn brought on the “mahogany tide,” a dense brown algal bloom.

The East Hampton Volunteer Ocean Rescue Squad in a flier wants it known that this week, beginning on Sunday, is National Beach Safety Week, and, in keeping with the theme, has provided the following desiderata:

On Sunday, Mary Lee’s dorsal fin broke the surface a few miles off the eastern shore of Virginia at 10:29 a.m., prompting a ping to sail aloft, bounce off a satellite, and report to the OCEARCH organization, whose website transmits the information in very close to real time.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Well, if you believe in evolution the answer is easy.

Approximately 3,600 acres of Shinnecock Bay were reopened on Friday after being closed for two weeks after saxitoxin was found. Warnings were issued the same day for potentially harmful blue-green algae in two Southampton ponds.

I’m writing this heading back to saltwater from Buffalo and my first-ever visit to Niagara Falls. We crossed into Canada to view the three sections of Gahnawehta, as the Indians called them, to go aboard the vessel Hornblower — the equivalent of the Maid of the Mist from the United States side — to view the cascades from below.

We just had a glorious weekend in which all the hardwoods, save for the white oaks, which always are the last to foliate, were festooned with fresh green leaves. Thus it was a perfect setting for the arrival of the New World warblers, which every year near the middle of May stop on Long Island to feed and rest after a long flight from their southern winter climes.

In May, the sea draws a gauzy shroud over the southerly half of Montauk just as a blanket of white blossoms eases winter’s final chill. It’s as though the light, ghostly fog whispers a wakeup to the shadblow, “You can come out now.”

It’s getting warm. We need some rain. The small rainwater ponds are drying up, the peepers are barely peeping, but the shads are blooming nicely and the dogwoods are out at the same time.

The weekend was a blaze of glory. The sun shone, the bay waters were mostly calm, the shads and sweet cherries began to bloom to the west, and the shads along Napeague and in Montauk were on the verge of busting out.

I’ve been researching how waves are formed in order to create, and by July present, a narrated video explanation for visitors to the new Oceans Institute of the Montauk Lighthouse Museum. We hope to open the doors by the Fourth of July.

Let’s face it, if skates, with their bat wings and rat tails, flew in the sky instead of along the bottom of the sea, we’d run inside like cave people fleeing pterodactyls and wait for them to pass.

The current building boom has laid down a lot of big trees before they had a chance to leaf out, but it apparently hasn’t deterred the birds from returning from the south.

I walked east along the rocky beach from Ditch Plain into the Montauk moorlands on Friday. The day before I’d learned a new word, “brumous.” It describes a heavy mist, a good word for Friday, for this place and time of year.

Consider the following as an open letter to Larry Penny, The Star’s longtime nature columnist, my good friend, and an indispensable member of the East End community.

Larry, I’m writing this to encourage you to read “H Is for Hawk,” a memoir by Helen Macdonald. Just came out. It’s a beautifully written meditation on one person’s relationship to the wild, and what “wild” means in our time.

Environmental awareness is big here, as big as it is on eastern Long Island. Water, or the lack of it, is the major topic of the moment.

This year we decided on lobsters for Easter dinner instead of lamb. It seemed the right thing after the hard winter, although I’m not sure why. More celebratory perhaps, or because Duryea’s has a great price on a package deal that includes lobsters, New England clam chowder, and either a bag of mussels or Little Necks. 

We had invited a few friends over, so I set about getting the big lobster pot out of mothballs and searching for the tools needed to pierce the lobsters’ armor. Personally, I don’t need the hinged shell crackers and meat picks.

We finally broke through to placid spring, but it was a rough one on us and a rough one on nature. Waterfowl and water birds took it on the nose and so did several fish. Greg Boeklin, the bald eagle watcher in Sagaponack, saw several dead fish at the top of Sagg Pond. He couldn’t tell the species; they were decomposing. They may have been alewives. In some years when the water from Jeremy’s Hole comes down in a gush by way of Solomon’s Creek, the alewives make it up to the little water body to reproduce.

When the peepers start singing two things come to mind. There’s water in the vernal ponds and it’s warming up.

As of Monday the alewives are slow in coming but, nonetheless, many of the ospreys are back and ready to catch them as soon as they appear. On Sunday afternoon the spring peepers were peeping away in Big Reed Pond in Montauk. Evidently, they had just come up from hiding after a very long, cold, and snow-covered winter. Once they are up, they don’t retreat. They are mandated to sing and reproduce.

I’m embarrassed for my freezer. It’s pathetic, or it was. So much in and around the house that needs attention after the harsh winter just past. Where do I start? Then I opened the freezer compartment of the refrigerator and it screamed. 

A frozen wasteland. A scene from “Dr. Zhivago.” The coldest, most uncomfortable day of the winter, heavy clothes strewn about the house, wet boots, the rattle of the furnace, an old, leaky window — all of it was before me when I opened the freezer door, a diorama of the winter of 2015. I closed it.

After two major retreats spring marches on. There is no turning back, or is there? In this millennium there have been several spring northeasters, and in March 2010 the East End got more than seven inches of rain in two close-together storms.

I’ve been working on a book. Slow going at first. But, as most writers will attest, once the narrative ball gets rolling, even if it seems at times to be rolling uphill, the work becomes an oasis of sorts, a place to repair to in your mind.

It’s a bit like having the ability to summon a dream, or a semi-obedient genie whose job it is to gather kindling to feed fantasy’s fire, or at least provide food for thought.

The snow is melting away quickly, and the ice in the bays is disappearing almost as fast. Spring is three days away. Things are heating up. The black widow spider that lives between the panes of my south-facing window has made her end-of-winter debut. I’m sure she hasn’t eaten a thing since the end of summer, as she is the same size as when she retreated in the fall.

It’s 1820, the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Two sperm whales have been harpooned from the small boats launched from the whaler Essex out of Nantucket. A bull sperm whale does not like what’s going on. Enraged, it charges the Essex, ramming her bow twice. The ship fills with water, capsizes, and leaves her crew of 20 to head for the coast of South America a couple of thousand  miles away in three boats with nothing but a limited supply of hardtack and very little water. Half die en route, the others barely survive by cannibalizing their fellow whalemen.