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Outdoors

Nature Notes: Natives vs. Invaders

   Sunday saw a break in the Memorial Day weekend weather. Downtown Montauk was jam-packed, a perfect time to escape into the deserted Montauk outback, as Vicki Bustamante and I are retracing Norman Taylor’s epic 1923 monograph on Montauk’s plants, “The Vegetation of Montauk: A Study of Grassland and Forest.”

May 29, 2013
Robert Van Velsor caught this 38.58-pound striper on Montauk’s south side using a bucktail. Montauk’s Mason-Dixon Line

   Montauk is bipolar this time of year. When the summer’s southwesterly winds start to blow in May and early June, a Mason-Dixon line of sorts runs the length of the peninsula that is the east end of the South Fork.

    The land south of the line is shrouded in thick, cold fog where the winter ocean first meets warm air blowing off the land west to east. North of the line, where the cold sea has less influence, the land is often bathed in warm sunlight.

May 22, 2013
Nature Notes: All That Racket

   I was at Morton Wildlife Refuge the other day when one of the private ferrying helicopters flew over on its way to East Hampton Town Airport. It’s hard to tell how high it was, but it seemed much lower than 2,000 feet and it made quite a racket as it passed over my head and, incidentally, over one of the osprey nests we put up around 1988 on the Jessup’s Neck spit. The ospreys were back. The female was sitting down low on the nest, and it was hard to tell if she was affected by the noise and vibrations as much as I was.

May 15, 2013
Peter Spacek caught this nine-pound fluke from his kayak off Ditch Plain in Montauk. Spring Blooms, So Do Fish

   The lilacs are in bloom, a sure sign that the fish local Indians called squeteague, and later dubbed tide runners, sea trout, or weakfish, have arrived right on their ancient schedule.

May 15, 2013
Nature Notes: Maytime! Behold Nature!

   Spring is definitely here, there is no going back. The oaks, hickories, red maples, and sassafras are unfurling their leaves, March’s dull and dreary landscape is behind us. The month of May promises to delight all of our five senses, especially those that deal with vision, scents, and hearing. Helicopters and unmuffled motor vehicles be damned, we will not let them destroy our vernal pleasures.

May 8, 2013
Surfcasters worked the broken jetty at Ditch Plain for striped bass on Monday morning as a dragger towed for fluke offshore. Rats at the Elbow

   Like the swallows to Capistrano (although I’ve read development has interrupted their instinctual return of late), Steve (The Perv) Kramer rolled into the Ditch Plain parking lot a few days ago from his winter haunts in Florida with a neatly trimmed beard. He is called Perv for no reason darker than his penchant for the odd, ribald observation. This does not make him a bad person.

May 8, 2013
A turkey vulture, eyes on a deer carcass, circled low over the Culloden Preserve in Montauk. Nature Notes: The Vultures Are Circling

   On April 22, I drove down to Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., with my daughter, Angela, who was visiting me from California. It was a bright sunny day with nary a cloud and not much of a wind. From New Jersey through Delaware through Maryland to Virginia, the sky over the highways 60 to 100 feet above the pavement was filled with sailing turkey vultures. We must have seen more than 25, mostly singles, sometimes in pairs.

May 1, 2013
Mickey Russo of East Moriches traveled to Montauk’s Fort Pond on Tuesday morning and was rewarded with bright sunshine and a walleye. Tourney Skips the Gibbets

   Time will tell, but it looks like the era of blood-and-guts shark tournaments could be coming to an end. In late July, the Montauk Marine Basin will host a tag-and-release tournament that promises to engage the public long after the fishing stops.

    The recreational shark fishery pioneered by Capt. Frank Mundus starting in the late 1950s exploded after the release of the movie “Jaws” in 1975. Shark tournaments proliferated along the East Coast, many of them in cooperation with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

May 1, 2013
The Lazy Bones party boat splashed into Montauk Harbor this week and is ready for the start of fluke season on Wednesday. A Torturous Waiting Game

    Ready, get set. . . . It’s like surfers waiting for a forecast swell to arrive, or the first crack of the bat for those yearning to return to Mudville. Fishermen are with child for the arrival of fish, as is the case each spring, but this season’s cold temperatures seem to be drawing it, torturously, out.

Apr 24, 2013
Nature Notes: A Chickadee a Day

   It was a bright, sunshine-filled Sunday afternoon when I pulled into the parking lot of Morton Wildlife Refuge in Noyac with my daughter, Angela, from San Francisco. The parking lot was jammed packed with vehicles. I found the only open spot — half in the woods, half out. With my camera and bag of black sunflower seeds at the ready, Angela and I proceeded into the reserve and followed the east trail, the one that takes you to the pond, the large tulip trees, and the state-endangered swamp cottonwoods.

Apr 24, 2013
It takes a lot of sitting, and a lot of fish, to successfully raise osprey chicks, but an experienced pair of osprey can carry it off. Nature Notes: Fish Hawks Endure

   As of Monday, the red flowers of the swamp maples and yellow flowers of the spice bush are out, the wood anemones are about to bloom, and the smooth shads will follow shortly. It was a record cold March and April hasn’t been all that warm, but the native plants are beginning to show their colors.

Apr 17, 2013
It might take a while for fishermen and striped bass to come together. On the Water: The Bass Shootout Cometh

   The Montauk SurfMasters spring shootout tournament will begin on May 10. The first of Montauk’s annual fishing tournaments targets striped bass.

    The entry fee is $110, all but $10 of which will go into the winner’s pot. The ten bucks is for lunch on awards day, June 29. The tournament has no divisions. Waders, wetsuiters, adult men and women compete against one another. An extra prize of $100 will be awarded for the first legal-size bass (28 inches long or longer) that’s weighed in.

Apr 17, 2013
Nature Notes: White Pines Gone Brown

   People have been asking me about the completely browned-off white pines that resulted from the passing of superstorm Sandy at the end of last October.

Apr 10, 2013
Benjamin Franklin wanted the wild turkey to be the country’s official bird. Hmm. ON THE WATER: Tom Turkeys on My Trail on Flamingo

   So, there I was driving down the hill on Flamingo Avenue toward the Montauk Firehouse early in the morning last week. Up ahead on the other side of the road was a jogger at the start of her climb. Whoa! What’s that behind her?

Apr 10, 2013
Sportsmen’s Expo Gansett

    The Sportsmen’s Expo that is coming to the Amagansett Firehouse on April 20 will pretty much cover the waterfront when it comes to outdoor pursuits.

    Terry O’Riordan, one of the organizers, said during a conversation this week that “we’ve got 30 to 40 exhibitors, about 10 more than we had at our first expo last year.”

Apr 10, 2013
FLOUNDER: Anglers Will Give It a Try

    There was a time in early spring, not all that long ago, when baymen set fykes on the bottom of Lake Montauk to trap the winter flounder as they rose from their muddy hibernation. There were enough flounder, in fact, for hook-and-line flounder anglers to get their nose out of joint over the presence of fykes. No more.

Apr 3, 2013
The mourning cloak butterfly is the first butterfly by a long shot to make its appearance here each year. Nature Notes: Mourning Cloak Is Risen

   Well, we finally had a spate of spring-like weather. On Saturday, a phoebe was calling around my house, joining the two-week siege of grackle, redwing blackbird, cardinal, Carolina wren, and tufted titmouse calling and singing. Phoebes show up when the insects begin popping out, and they started popping out over the weekend like mad.

Apr 3, 2013
There it was, almost de novo, a new walking dune carved out of the sands of northeastern Napeague. Nature Notes: Speed Walker in the Dunes

If only Robert Moses, New York’s supreme 20th-century planner and doer, could revisit one of his first parkland acquisitions, Hither Hills State Park, and take a look as the gem of that park system, the Walking Dunes, he would feel very confident that his decision was well made.

Mar 27, 2013
Paying Heed to Weather Gods

    Keeping a weather eye can be a challenge in these parts, especially as the seasons change. Anglers who have begun the process of getting rods, reels, boats, and trailers out of mothballs might also think about getting back in touch with the weather gods.

Mar 27, 2013
A red fox leaped into the reeds at Fresh Pond in Amagansett. The local fox population is booming, and for now is free of mange. A Malodorous Harbinger

   Skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, is a plant of the Northern Hemisphere and a species that occurs throughout most of North America except for in the South and West. A flowering plant in the Jack-in-the-pulpit family, it is one of the first plants to flower each year and thus is a true harbinger of spring. The second half of its scientific name refers to its fetid smell, not unlike the effluvia emitted by a defensive skunk or the scent a red fox uses to mark its territory.

Mar 20, 2013
Feared by striped bass, ducks, and all sorts of small game in our neck of the woods, Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett recently ventured to the Caribbean, where he outsmarted a tarpon and a saltwater gar. Fluke Hang in the Balance

   The Ides of March, the days on and around March 15, were the start of the new year on the ancient Roman calendar. It was considered a propitious time full of promise unless you happened to be Julius Caesar, or the old men back in ancient Greece — long before Medicare — who were first dressed in animal skins, then beaten, and finally driven from town to celebrate the expulsion of the old year.

Mar 20, 2013
Nature Notes: Naturalist, Scientist, Healer

   Who was it that said you can make naturalist into a scientist, but it’s almost impossible to teach a scientist to become a naturalist?

Mar 13, 2013
Skunk cabbages have been blooming, a sure sign that spring is on its way. Nature Notes: Here Comes Spring

   One more storm and then spring’s a-poppin’. In Noyac on Friday daffodils and daylilies began to sprout. Two weeks ago skunk cabbages were in bloom in Morton Wildlife Refuge in Noyac and at Big Reed Pond in Montauk. As of last Friday, deer ticks, both the blackish males and reddish-backed females, were crawling onto shoes, socks, and trousers in the shrub lands in Montauk east of the lake.

Mar 6, 2013
She’ll not do Everest next, perhaps the Camino de Santiago. Kilimanjaro Celebration Was an Arduous One

   Karin Padden, who lives on one of Montauk’s high hills, said during a recent conversation that she had decided to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, “the world’s tallest free-standing mountain,” as a way of celebrating her 50th birthday.

    It was also her way of saying that she, who has experienced much grief in the past several years, including the death of her husband, Robert M. Padden on Nov. 10, 2010, continues to love life and is not one to shrink from challenges.    

Feb 27, 2013
An Adirondack guide boat at the New York State Museum in Albany. The museum houses a collection of botanical specimens, some gathered on the East End of Long Island by Roy Latham. Nature Notes: To Albany and Back

   Last Thursday, Karen Blumer, Vicki Bustamante, and I went north to Albany. After leaving Long Island it was bedrock all the way north along the Hudson River. The advance of the last ice sheet of the Wisconsin glaciation purportedly carved out the river basin that is over a mile wide in some places and stretches a good 200 miles. It is oriented north to south, so it makes sense that a quarter-mile-high glacier coming from Canada would be capable of making such a deep gouge and simultaneously creating the Palisades along the west side.

Feb 27, 2013
The American oyster the pond was named after still thrives there in most years. Nature Notes: Montauk Endures

   You hardly hear anyone call it Lake Munchogue these days. The Hagstrom Suffolk County Atlas still has it down by its Native-American name, while including Oyster Pond in parentheses below. Many of the other water bodies on the South Fork retained names derived from the local dialects of the Algonkian language since settlement. There are Shinnecock, Noyac, and Mecox Bays as well as Lake Agawam, Poxabogue, Wickatuck, and Sagaponack Ponds and Sebonac Creek in Southampton Town. While in East Hampton there are Accabonac and Napeague Harbors and Napeague Bay.

Feb 20, 2013
Non-native grasses like broomsedge and purple love grass, which normally thrive in slightly warmer climates, are taking over in open meadows where the native little bluestem once thrived. 	Larry Penny PhotosNon-native grasses like broomsedge and purple love grass, which normally thrive in slightly warmer climates, are taking over in open meadows where the native little bluestem once thrived. Nature Notes: Seeds of Change

   Monday morning, the yard covered with a thick blanket of snow, but hints of global warming — six male robins and some starlings visited the privet and sniped the dark berries one by one. They were at it yesterday as well. The berries looked black, but when digested and defecated, they left deep purple stains in the snow. Privet berries must be emergency rations for berry-eating robins, which never feed on seed or suet.

Feb 13, 2013
Woodchucks have been making their way east on Long Island. This one was photographed by remote camera last summer outside its Bridgehampton burrow for Jill Musnicki’s “What Comes Around” art installation, part of the Parrish Art Museum Road Show. Nature Notes: If a Woodchuck Could Chuck

   Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania and Staten Island Chuck didn’t see their shadows on Saturday while Malverne Mel and Holtsville Hal did. It’s hard to believe that Pennsylvanians and Staten Islanders will be blessed with an early spring, while we Long Islanders will suffer prolonged winter, as we are relatively close to those areas and prevailing climate conditions stretch for hundreds of miles. What weather conditions eastern Pennsylvania has, we should also enjoy.

Feb 6, 2013
The natural world in action at the Nature Trail in East Hampton, as an immature Cooper’s hawk dragged a mallard to the water’s edge. Nature Notes: Carolina in the Morning

   It was gently snowing with big and little flakes on Monday morning when I went into the living room with my coffee to see if Noyac Bay had frozen yet. I was greeted by a flutter as something whizzed past my head and ended up on top of one of the Venetian blinds where it twitched nervously. The twitching little body, white stripe over the eye, and cocked tail gave it away immediately — a Carolina wren. Poor thing, it didn’t like the freezing cold and falling snow any more than I did.

Jan 30, 2013
On a visit to the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton this fall, young members of a nature club sponsored by Third House Nature Center posed with sculptures by Yue Min Jun. Nature Notes: Center Without a Home

   Across the face of the world thousands of new organizations are spawned every day. Just take a look on the Internet and you will find millions of groups and associations that have an e-mail address ending in .org. It isn’t hard to start an organization, but it is hard to keep one going.

Jan 24, 2013