Villages

This postcard from the Harvey Ginsberg Postcard Collection shows a summer cottage belonging to Benjamin Franklin Evans (1843-1913) on the dunes at Lily Pond Lane.

This weekend is the 25th anniversary of the Great Backyard Bird Count. To participate, you spend a minimum of 15 minutes counting birds, and afterward report what you see to the number-cracking scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Two hundred and two years ago, Sarah Frances Dering of Shelter Island wrote her paternal first cousin Elizabeth (Eliza) Packer Gardiner in New York City about a perilous, snowy trip by sleigh.

Lucky for us, if the ponds remain unfrozen, kingfishers are fairly common around the East End during the winter months.

The winners of the Amagansett Village Improvement Society’s “Love Letters to Amagansett” essay-writing contest were announced on the society’s website on Monday, Valentine’s Day.

Much may depend, however, on an assessment of the condition of the site’s four structures, commissioned by the town and to be issued this week. Its author, the consulting engineer Drew Bennett, has said that “there are some things of concern” in his report.

The Star was “well spoken of everywhere” 125 years ago, 50 people were injured in a L.I.R.R. derailment 75 years ago, and one Orrin Pilkey sounded the alarm on beach erosion and the folly of hard structures to prevent it back in 1997.

Monday marks the federal holiday originally established in 1885 in recognition of President George Washington’s birthday on the 22nd of February. It wasn’t until 1971 that it officially became known as Presidents Day, when it was included in the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, and moved to the third Monday in February, as an attempt to create more three-day weekends for the nation’s workers. Perhaps it’s time to take a historical jaunt and commemorate the South Fork’s ties with many sitting POTUSes over the years.

It’s gull season on the East End.

More than 1,200 trees at Napeague State Park have been identified as infested with the southern pine beetle and are due to be felled late this month.

This 1997 photograph from the Springs Historical Society shows the exterior of the John Edwards House on Duck Creek Farm off Three Mile Harbor Road. The two-story “half house” is believed to have been built by John Edwards (1750-1806) after he bought the property from John and Mary Gardiner in 1795.

The contractor for the developers of the South Fork Wind farm is continuing to remove some vegetation within the Long Island Rail Road right of way this week, in advance of the onshore construction that is set to begin within the next two weeks.