Outdoors

    An extraordinary event took place on Saturday — the annual Montauk Christmas bird count, now more than 100 years old and among the very oldest in the country.

    Birders go out and rake over a 15-mile-diameter circle to record the number of different species and the number of each seen or heard from before dawn until well after dusk. The circle covers Montauk, Amagansett, including Napeague, Springs, and Gardiner’s Island, as well as part of the ocean, Block Island Sound, Napeague Bay, Gardiner’s Bay, and Accabonac Harbor.

    It is impossible interpreting the present, but you can come close interpreting history. In my mind the history of East Hampton, and for that matter all of Long Island, is much more interesting than what is happening now. We’ve passed way beyond the age of discovery; we might better describe contemporary life as the age of packaging, marketing, distribution, and bad political theater. There are no Jeffersons, Washingtons, Lincolns, and Franklins to lead and enlighten us, only their poor likenesses recycled over and over to lull us into acquiescing submission.

Local discoveries and rediscoveries are still to be made.

    Sunday was a perfect day to take a walk in the woods. Adelaide de Menil and I went to the South Fork-Shelter Island Nature Conservancy’s Sagg Swamp Preserve. Adelaide had never been there, I had not been since 1995 when I led a walk for the Conservancy.

At 10 this morning, the Montauk SurfMasters surfcasting tournament ended with a collective whimper.

We cannot sustain ourselves without oxygen, and we can’t exist without nitrogen either, but too much nitrogen, and the balance of nature is seriously out of whack: Think red tide, brown tide, and other algae blooms.

    Thanksgiving is perhaps the one holiday that has not yet had its meaning sucked from it by commercial vampires, at least not here on the East End. Maybe because of the wild turkeys grazing along the side of the road.

    Certainly nature’s bounty in the form of striped bass, scallops, ducks, herring, deer, deer, and more deer, cauliflower, squash, brussels sprouts, and cranberries — if you know where the bogs lie — helps.

On Sunday, just when it seemed the surfcasting season was over, boaters began finding striped bass feeding on schools of herring

Leaves. We can’t live without them; some of us can’t live with them, particularly so after they’ve all fallen and coated every inch of landscape

The leaves are falling. It’s cold. No Indian summer this trip around the sun. No doubt a frigid winter is in store.

“However ridiculous it may sound to have a queen, the pound is worth more than our dollar,” was Harvey Bennett’s way of announcing that the British were not only coming, they are here.

    When he ventured forth with a bag of live eels on Saturday night, John Bruno led the Montauk SurfMasters surfcasting tournament in the wetsuit division. The fish that had put him at the top of the heap a few weeks earlier weighed 49.30.

    The fish he weighed in at Paulie’s Tackle shop early Sunday morning caused the scale to groan out the number 50.82. It was Bruno’s first striped bass over 50 pounds.

Napeague Harbor is the only tidal embayment tributary to the Peconic Estuary that has never had any part of its surface waters closed to shellfishing because of pollution.

As far as animals without backbones are concerned, insects rule the land, crustaceans co-rule the seas.

Sunday was Oct. 9, but it felt like Aug. 9. The parking lot at Montauk Point State Park was full. Fishing boats were spread out on the tide line like stepping stones leading all the way to Block Island.

The leaves are beginning to color up. The tupelos, dogwoods, red maples, and sassafras are always the first to turn.

“Insane,” was how Ken Rafferty, a light-tackle and fly-fishing guide described the action from Shagwong to Montauk Point over the weekend.

    Only two more weeks to enjoy the wildflowers. Unlike most parts of the country where the spring and summer blooms are the brightest, most colorful, and most abundant, Long Island’s best wildflower season is in the first month of fall. California and Oregon, for example, have only a few species of asters, while Long Island has many. Though those two states have their share of goldenrods, they are few and far between, whereas on Long Island you often find four or five species blooming in close proximity.

    It’s like reading tea leaves or entrails — cue the eerie music: What does it portend when surfcasters see schools of small bunker and large sand eels in the wash, but not a lot of bluefish?

    Fall fell last Thursday and the new moon rose on Tuesday, and yet, tons of baitfish and very few bluefish. This is the season when it’s not unusual to see acres of bluefish in boiling feeding frenzies that mass at places like Turtle Cove on the west side of the Montauk Lighthouse, or are carried on the tide along the south-facing beaches.

    The crisp air and silvery afternoon light tell us autumn is here, the season of great surf and equally great fishing. Both occurred in spades over the weekend.

    Hurricane Katia remained mercifully offshore, but her swells fired up local surf spots as well as the beaches of Long Beach, where the Quicksilver Pro surfing contest finals were held on Saturday.

    Offshore fishing was frustrated by strong easterly winds, but the inshore striped bass fishing came alive.

This past week saw the beginning of what could promise to be one of the greatest monarch butterfly migrations in a long time. The wind was gentle and blowing out of the southwest and south-southwest on most days after Tropical Storm Irene’s passage. At this time of year the monarchs fresh out of their chrysalises are heading south and southwest, into the wind, and following the shoreline. Since before the year 2000 here on eastern Long Island we have seen very little in the way of monarchs come the end of summer.

    Boaters should take care. Logs and other debris washed into the sea from flooded rivers during Tropical Storm Irene continue to haunt local waters and are virtually invisible in any kind of choppy conditions.

    Sailing on Sunday from Fort Pond Bay in Montauk to Eastern Plains Point on the east side of Gardiner’s Island, our sailboat, moving at about seven knots, nearly struck a log as long as a telephone pole. It could have un-pintled the rudder. Damage to a faster-moving power boat would have been far worse.

     Hurricane Irene has come and gone. Last year Earl swept up the coast near the end of August with a great deal of hullabaloo. It missed us but did carry away some of Montauk’s valuable ocean beach sand. Irene had decidedly better aim and hit when the tide was high, washing away beaches and dunes from the Rockaways to Montauk Point.

    If you take a ride out to Montauk via the parkway, you will pass through Hither Woods. As you motor along, keep your eyes on the rusting guardrails. Just behind them you will find a very healthy four-foot-high hedge of big bluestem grass, one of the original staples of old Montauk’s bountiful prairie. At one time it stretched from the western end of the Napeague isthmus to the point, a few trees here and there, but mostly grasses and wildflowers.

    By all accounts the blue-claw crab population is bursting at Georgica Pond’s scenic seams. According to one crabber, chicken-neck bait is hardly necessary. A slow walk in the shallows with an occasional stop will bring blue crabs to your feet. Best not to linger too long. Or, have a scoop net handy.

    It’s the time of year for bamboo poles, buckets, and spearing bait. Snapper bluefish are swarming around local docks in profusion.

    Anglers may dismiss them, but we owe a lot to bluefish. They are the species that, in these parts anyway, hook sportfishermen when they and their quarry are the age of Huck and Tom, even younger. It’s a good time to teach kids about conservation. Only 10 snappers can be taken if they measure less than 12 inches. 

    The waters are warming up and so are fishing and the fish. Is it the return of the menhaden in large numbers that has something to do with it? Is it global warming? Is it a lot of things?

We are under the spell of a full moon. The tides will run very high. The horseshoe crabs will come into the shallows and breed for the last time. The eggs deposited in the intertidal sands in May will hatch out and a new generation of these prehistoric creatures will have been spawned in one of nature’s greatest and oldest cycles.