Villages

The Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee had a surprise guest Monday night, Natalie Mongan, a junior at East Hampton High School. Ms. Mongan presented her own independent research, done through an A.P. research seminar, showing the level of erosion at Atlantic Avenue Beach that can not only affect shoreline defense, but shift the coastline itself.

The peripatetic American flamingo, first spotted in Georgica Pond in East Hampton on May 31 before leaving the next day, has returned to the pond. In the past 10 days, it is suspected the same bird has visited Cape Cod in Massachusetts and Cedar and Oak Beaches in western Suffolk.

The usually with-it Star was a little behind the curve with its 1924 comment on jazz music and musicians. And don’t miss the 1974 nudity-on-the-beach case.

If you’ve been to a high school basketball game, a tennis match, or a 5K on the South Fork any time in the last 45 years, you’ve probably seen The East Hampton Star’s sports editor, Jack Graves, on the sidelines, faithfully scribbling notes. But before Graves took over the sports desk back in 1979, he was The Star’s sole full-time reporter for about a decade and had begun his long-running column,“Point of View.”

The Rev. Samson Occom, one of the first Indigenous ministers to be ordained, was an educator and minister to the Montauketts and Shinnecocks and a proponent of land rights. 

An old elm tree thought to be lost after an intense storm roared through East Hampton two weeks ago is still standing thanks to the efforts of the village Highway Department and Jackson Dodds & Co., a tree care business.

“It’s the first in a very long time” to visit New York State, “if not the first ever,” said Shai Mitra, an assistant professor at the College of Staten Island, said of the American flamingo that visited Georgica Pond in East Hampton last week. The bird was last seen there Saturday at dusk.

A neighbor of Maidstone Park in Springs on Monday discovered an osprey hanging upside down from its nest, suspended by fishing line. Rescuers jumped into action.

The first ever American flamingo to visit New York State chose to touch down in East Hampton — Georgica Pond specifically — Friday afternoon. “As soon as the bird lifted its neck, I knew instantly it wasn’t a swan and realized it was a flamingo," said Cathy Blinken, who excitedly called The Star to report the sighting.

Richard Sawyer, the man behind Treely Yours and the Salty Dog, once split a cord’s worth of hardwood in 32 minutes and 30 seconds.

It’s mating season for the horseshoe crab, and last week, a group monitoring the crab for the Cornell Cooperative Extension dropped in on an all-night orgy repeated along bay beaches for 400 million to 500 million years.

From a hair-raising double drowning in Plum Gut to a second-story deck collapsing under the weight of too many partyers in Sagaponack, The Star reported it all.