Outdoors

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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?

    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.”

    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.

   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.

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.

    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.

   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.

   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.

   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?

   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.

   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.    

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   The two recent gang-rape incidents in India and the beheading of a Sri Lankan woman in Saudi Arabia, a so-called friendly nation, has caused me to wonder if we are making any progress at all. We are supposed to be culturally evolving and perhaps some of us are, but these atavistic acts by men makes me wonder.

   Calcium. An element that we and billions and billions of organisms cannot live without. All vertebrates, with their vertebral columns and many other bones and teeth need calcium. All shelled mollusks and barnacles require calcium. You don’t find many barnacles, if any, in freshwater environments. Calcium is found in a host of other animals where it serves a variety of vital functions. Plants don’t metabolize calcium per se, but the calcium in lime or limestone neutralizes acid soils, which inhibits the growth of many plant species, including grasses, forbs, shrubs, and trees.

   The last of the Long Island Christmas Bird Counts — the Orient Count — took place on Saturday. The count compiler over the last 20 years has been Mary Laura Lamont of Northville in Riverhead Town, and as of Sunday night all of the results had not been turned in to her. Nonetheless, after talking with Mary Laura, it is obvious that this was a very good count, especially for the North Fork territories and Shelter Island. Our part of the count was Cedar Point County Park on the east to Morton Wildlife Refuge on the west.

   There’s a war on locally. I don’t mean the war on D.W.I.s or the war on drugs, I mean the war on the white-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginiana. It was here on Long Island before we were, even before the first Amerindians, and is the only member of the antlered-mammal family native to Long Island, we never had moose, elk, or caribou. Apparently, being too native is similar to being too alien. I once heard a well-known gourmet writer on North Haven call them “rats.”

   Friday afternoon I was driving my pickup along Daniel’s Hole Road passing East Hampton Airport when three healthy looking female deer jumped the low fence on the edge of the airport side of the road and bounded across in front of me to the mowed field beyond. I saw them from a fairly long distance and slowed accordingly.

   With a week left before the close of the 2012 striped bass season for sport fishermen and with schools of herring schooling right outside the Montauk Harbor Inlet, things could be worse. Bass are still being caught, although the bite has slowed and the fish are smaller.

    For boating anglers, what’s lacking in the striped bass department is being made up for in the bottom-feeding world of blackfish,  a k a tautog from the Algonkian language.

   We just learned something Monday as reported in both Newsday and The New York Times. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues to rise; it’s up 3 percent over last year. Every time we inhale, we 7 billion humans breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. If that isn’t enough, all of the other billions and billions of organisms including both plants and animals with the exception of a very few, also respire, i.e., consume oxygen and discharge carbon dioxide.

   On Sunday at noon while sitting in the living room counting cars going by on Noyac Road, there was a sudden spate of bird activity swirling around the front yard. There were purple finches, red-breasted nuthatches, white-breasted nuthatches, chickadees, titmice, a downy woodpecker, and a Carolina wren. They hung around for about 10 minutes before picking up and heading west — all except the Carolina wren, which was not part of the group.

   Two big storms in a row; will God try for three? As Bob Dylan recited so eloquently, “Something is happening, and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” It’s like that now in the world of geoclimatology and geopolitics. The two are meshing in a most confusing way, and while wasteful wars besmirch the earth, people by the thousands are dying for no good reason and sea level rises with no sign of abatement.