Outdoors

My first 21 years were spent on the North Fork looking at this and that. While I specialized in birds, learned the mammals — there weren’t that many — I also knew the local frogs, turtles, newts. and fish, which I learned by catching them. I knew as many garden and farm plants as native plants, I knew that Japanese honeysuckle was not American, and I knew about a handful of other invasives. I knew blueberries, beach plums, black cherries, because I picked them and ate them. I knew poison ivy because it made you itch like the devil.

Life: The symphony of birds, thousands of them greeted the sun on Monday morning. Surfers, hundreds of them, awoke to paddle into a surprise east swell that arrived during the night with an offshore wind to sculpt near-perfect waves. Surfcasters greeted the news that big, very big striped bass were caught from the rocks in Montauk’s moorland coves during the night.

The instructions were straightforward: “Put ice, a Ziploc bag, and a 20 in the cooler. I’ll call you when he makes the drop.”

Like a beer-fueled, slam-bang game of Foosball at Liar’s Saloon, the fish deal was proof that a healthy undercurrent of local life continued to flow as the surface trickle of spring visitors swelled to a flood over the Memorial Day weekend. 

Terry Sullivan is one fisherman who has been around. He fishes the ocean, bays, harbors, tidal creeks, ponds, and trout streams such as the Nissequogue. He’s caught just about every fish that will hit a lure or a fly from a shore at one of the above. He’s seen just about everything fishwise on Long Island, but last Thursday morning he was a bit flabbergasted to find a fish that he never caught here and, maybe, one that he never saw here.

    The only butterfly I’ve seen to date is the cabbage white, the one long from Eurasia that lays its eggs on members of the cabbage family, to wit, garlic mustard, wild radish, and the like, also from Eurasia.

    Butterflies and moths are part of the second trophic food level; they feed on the first level, the “producers.” In fact most insects — grasshoppers, various ant species, bees and other nectiferous species, almost all beetles and almost all bugs — feed on plants.

    My wife, Kyle, is a sensitive person. She says this is why she adopts a hard exterior at times, a shell, like a turtle. I know this to be true. It’s also why she feels simpatico and keeps her eyes peeled for turtles making their equivalent of a mad dash across Montauk’s roads this time of year.

    She always stops to help them lest they be flattened by insensitive drivers. On Monday morning, she called me from the road. She was on the way to work and spotted “a big, very big” turtle on the west side of Flamingo Avenue. “Can you come get it?”

    A very active week in birdland, indeed! Topping the list of May returnees were ruby-throated hummingbirds. The first to return to the South Fork, perhaps, were the four that showed up at the house of my Noyac neighbor Ellen Stahl on May 6. She called to tell me that they were back, she had her hummingbird feeders up, and they were flying in my direction every once in a while. She thought they might nest in my backyard.

    Driving down Bluff Road in Amagansett on the sunny morning of July 28, 1992, I looked up and watched an osprey flying landward with a small striped bass in its talons.

    I was en route to the protest of a new state law that banned the ocean seine as a means of catching striped bass. The regulation capped a decades-long effort on the part of powerful sportfishing interests, in cooperation with UpIsland politicians, to cripple the East End’s inshore commercial bass fishery.

    An infinity of tiny fish darted and gathered in the green glow of a submerged squid lamp on Monday night. The long tentacles of a pulsating jellyfish swept for food in the slow current. Time passed. Larger fish jetted through the small, lighted section of bay carved out of the night by the lamps. “Bunker,” a voice declared, breaking a long silence.

    On Monday I took a drive through the hills of Noyac, Bridgehampton, Water Mill, and North Sea that make up the bulk of the so-called terminal moraine left by the glacier that retreated 15,000 or so years ago. When I moved back to Long Island from Oregon and California in 1974, those hills were only sparsely covered with houses. The pitch pine and oaks carpeted the ups and downs of the knob-and-kettle topography, and to the south, the farm fields spread from west to east as far as the eye could see. How things have changed.

    I was walking east in one of Montauk’s moorland coves the other day and saw a lone surfcaster heading toward me. It was Eric Ernst, wetsuited, with casting rod on his shoulder. He had been testing the waters. We fell into conversation as the cove’s spring green waves thumped and whispered.

    He confirmed what I’d heard earlier in the day. Small striped bass were being caught from the beach in recent days at Ditch Plain Beach and just east in front of the Montauk Shores Condominiums.

    By the time this publishes, we should have blossoms on the shads, sweet cherries, and beach plums, the bird’s-foot violets will turn certain road shoulders purple and the dogwoods in Northwest will be trying to expand their snow-white bracts (they don’t have petals).

    I don’t go anywhere without my white tick towel; I even have it at hand in the winter. You never know what will happen on a very warm January day. I went out for a walk around Trout Pond in Noyac last Thursday followed by a longer walk Saturday afternoon around Big Reed Pond in Montauk. You may remember that Thursday was very cold with a brisk wind. Saturday was nice and warm and quieter.

    The former Salivar’s, Montauk’s iconic, dockside eatery, reopened during the past week following an impressive renovation inside and out.

    The people who gave us the West Lake Clam and Chowder House are running the place. They have brought their popular menu and sushi bar across the harbor to the green building (a lighter shade now) that began serving food and spirits during a time when raw fish, as the saying goes, was bait.

    You can tell it’s spring. Gannets have been seen diving, probably on alewives, in Gardiner’s Bay, a striped bass has been caught in Three Mile Harbor, bait and tackle shops are opening their doors, the Montauk SurfMasters tournament is nigh, and the buzz of power tools can be heard just off Old Stone Highway in Amagansett where Dwayne Denton is finishing up a dory for two baymen, Dan and Paul Lester.

    Alewives have entered Big Fresh Pond in North Sea in waves beginning two Mondays ago. Most of the ospreys are back, their returns scheduled, it would seem, to coincide with the movement of river herrings — alewives, shads, blueback herrings — from marine waters into fresh to spawn. The double-crested cormorants’ return seems to be tied to the same rhythmic phenomenon.

    Reading last week’s East Hampton Star about the proposed 200 megawatt wind farm in the ocean 30 miles off Montauk I envision either a free energy Shangri-la or a 256-square-mile death trap for migratory seabirds, which have been plying the same sea lanes back and forth up and down for the last 20,000 years or more.

    What is it about old boats, wooden boats in particular? Why do they seem more worthy of respect than old cars, or even old houses? Boats that have lived at sea for years have a knowing character, a wisdom.

    Have they taken on the lives of their masters or is it the other way around? Perhaps the bonding — the booted steps placed unthinking to meet the roll of the deck, the deck rolling to meet the helmsman’s feet — comes from surviving together in an alien environment. And of course there’s something of the cradle in boats.

    We had six inches of rain Saturday and Sunday in Sag Harbor, a downer for the weekend crowd, a blessing for the alewives, frogs, and salamanders. Ligonee Brook is a longstanding stream that runs intermittently down through the last century and more. Its course has changed more than once and it only runs from Long Pond to Ligonee Cove to Sag Harbor Cove once every five years. Nonetheless, it is an important conduit for alewives and eels.

    Time to wet a line. Tuesday, April Fool’s Day, marked the start of freshwater fishing — trout being the first species to become fair game. In the briny, the season for winter flounder also began on Monday. This year, both starts are iffy.

    Because of the extra cold winter, plus the fact that the State Department of Environmental Conservation does not stock trout in the Town of East Hampton, the joke is on Bonac’s trout anglers.

    From April 8 through 10, the Montauk Yacht Club will host a meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Marine Fishery Council, one of the nation’s eight bodies created in 1976 to oversee marine resources.

    The Mid-Atlantic Council manages 12 species that include fluke (summer flounder), porgies (scup), striped bass, and tilefish, all important to Long Island fishermen. Montauk is homeport to New York’s most productive commercial and recreational fishing industries, businesses that pour many millions of dollars into the local economy each year.

    As I write away midway through Sunday evening the outside temperature in Noyac has slowly crept down. It just fell a 10th of a degree below 35 degrees. I’m hoping that it never makes it to freezing. All the snow is gone and most of the fresh ponds have shed their icy coats. Should the weather hold for another three or four days and we get a touch of precipitation it might be just enough to start the great migration, not of birds — that’s already well in progress — but of amphibians and alewives.

    Victoria and Nicholas Bustamante were walking Shadmoor Park on the ocean in Montauk on Saturday afternoon when a bat flew overhead. Nicholas threw up some pebbles and the bat made a pass at them. It looked red, Vicki said, and was a little bigger than a little brown bat, the most common bat on the East End during the summertime.

    When a tornado, or tsunami, comes from out of the blue, it rattles our collective nerves. But it’s also unsettling when what we expect of nature fails to occur.

    Turkey vultures were back in town as of the Monday before last. Even more surprising was the sighting of individual ospreys over Sag Harbor by Ted Schiavoni and Jean Held three and two weeks ago, respectively. Ospreys used to nest in trees. Now almost all of Long Island’s ospreys nest on platforms situated on tall poles.

    During the winter months, the Montauk Post Office is like a watering hole in the Serengeti. Residents of all stripes approach cautiously for fear of crocodiles in the form of home-heating bills. Their junk mail becomes buffalo chips to feed the fire. They drink in gossip and news of the whereabouts of others not seen at the hole of late. They bay for summer, yet speak in fear of the herds that will descend on their place as the weather warms.

    In the early 1980s there were only about seven active osprey nests on the South Fork. The osprey was still on the New York State’s endangered list. But there were even fewer eastern bluebirds on the South Fork and just a pair or two on the North Fork. The state correctly made a big hullabaloo about the sparse osprey population, but did very little to encourage the recovery of the bluebird, which, ironically, at that time had already had the distinction of being New York’s official bird for decades and decades.

    Walked out onto the rock reef in front of the trailer park again the other day at super low tide to visit the life in the pools — the little black snails called rosettes, calico crabs, the gardens of red and green weed. Every 20 feet or so, I’d find a surfcaster’s lure, still snagged since the last bass season on seaweed, or trapped in the cleft of a rock.

    At first, the sound made me bolt up out of a deep sleep and reach for something to defend the house against an intruder, but now, I simply roll over and reach again for the arms of Morpheus. It’s only a deer eating the ivy off the cedar shakes, and ivy’s not good for the shingles.

    It’s been quite a winter thus far. Snowing every other day for most of February, all of the freshwater ponds frozen over solid, including Long Island’s second largest, Fort Pond in Montauk. If Lake Montauk hadn’t been opened permanently and jettied in the first half of the 20th century, it would be frozen over, too.