The federal Department of Commerce announced on Tuesday that just under $650,000 in fisheries-related fines would be returned to individual fishermen and businesses following an independent review of cases that concluded “rogue” enforcement agents had exceeded their authority.

    “I’d like to get my money back, but I doubt it. I’ve been critical before and after,” said David Aripotch, a Montauk dragger captain who was fined $61,000 and ordered to tie his boat up for four months for inaccurately reporting his catch on a number of occasions. The punishment, which he said did not fit the alleged violations, was accompanied, he said, by efforts to coerce him into “fabricating” stories about fish buyers in New York City.

    Two years ago, following numerous complaints by commercial fishermen and buyers in the Northeast, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, directed the Commerce Department’s inspector general, Todd Zinser, to investigate allegations that enforcement agents and judges were being overzealous in their prosecution of alleged fisheries violations and had used excessive fines to buy boats and vehicles and to finance junkets abroad.

    The Department of Commerce is the parent agency of NOAA and the National Marine Fisheries Service. New York Senator Charles E. Schumer pressed the agency to correct the situation.

    During the investigation it was discovered that a top-ranking enforcement agent had ordered documents shredded.

    Based on the internal investigation’s findings, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke last year appointed a special investigator to review cases that were flagged. As a result, 11 individuals and businesses would be reimbursed for the excessive fines they were often coerced into paying, Mr. Locke announced on Tuesday.

    So far, the biggest payback will be to Lawrence Yucubian, a scalloper from New England who will get back $400,000. The Agger Fish Company of Brooklyn will have $160,000 returned, and the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction will receive $85,000 in returned fines. At least 80 more cases will be reviewed.

    “I feel vindicated, but they’re not going to prosecute these guys,” Captain Aripotch said. “I’d like to know who gave the soldiers their marching orders.”

East Hampton Town

Digging Into Soil Tests

    Recent soil tests at the East End Community Organic Farm, which is on town-owned property on Long Lane in East Hampton, will be the subject of an East Hampton Town Board discussion. The levels of arsenic in soil at the farm, remaining from past agricultural applications, have been a concern for years, and members of the East Hampton Citizens Advisory Committee had recently requested a new round of tests.

    The board is seeking someone who can provide a detailed scientific analysis of the results, but heard Tuesday that a Cornell Cooperative Extension Service toxicologist who was involved in previous testing in 2005 had informally reviewed the findings and reported that arsenic levels, which had been within acceptable standards, had not greatly changed.

    Organic farming practices now employed at EECO were expected to bring down the arsenic levels, said Prudence Carabine, a C.A.C. member who was also part of an East Hampton cancer task force that was looking for chemical or environmental underpinnings of a cancer cluster among students at East Hampton High School, across the street from the farm. Therefore, she said, if arsenic levels have not substantially changed, the board should consider taking further action.

On Financing Employee Buyouts

    East Hampton Town officials are once again seeking a State Legislature vote that would allow the town to issue 10-year bonds to pay for an employee separation incentive program, offering monetary settlements to entice workers to leave so as to reduce the town’s work force. The proposal, a change to a section of state finance law, was before legislators last year but was never brought to a vote after state lawmakers’ work got mired in Albany politics.

    This week, the Democratic candidate for town supervisor, Zachary Cohen, sent a letter to Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle detailing why he is opposed to using debt to finance a separation incentive plan, calling it “bad finance.” Details of the program itself, he said, have not been publicly discussed and so cannot be critiqued.

    Mr. Cohen said the incentives could be paid for with surplus money the town is accruing, while still leaving adequate reserves for emergencies, or, if an employee leaves early enough in a particular year, from annual budget savings from the remainder of the unpaid salary.

    On Tuesday, Len Bernard, the town budget officer, likened securing the ability to issue bonds for the program to obtaining another “arrow in the quiver” of financial options. He said that how much debt might be issued remains to be seen.

Trouble Over Truck Route

    Residents living in a neighborhood off Springs-Fireplace Road in East Hampton, concerned about the recent resurrection of a plan to route truck traffic through the area, have formed the Freetown Neighborhood Coalition and sent an attorney to speak to the town board on Tuesday. Jonathon Moore, who practices in Washington, D.C., and also lives in the area in question, which includes West Drive, Morris Park Drive, Warwick Road, Neighborhood Road, Austin Road, and contiguous streets, delivered a memo to the board regarding the Snyder family commercial subdivision, for which planning board approval is being sought.

    The subdivision application has been pending for years, and the family recently appealed to the town board for help in getting final approval. Because the process of providing an access to the Snyders’ landlocked parcel through a separate, unconnected section of West Drive, chosen by the planning board because it winds through an industrial, rather than residential, area, has bogged down in legal complications, Councilwoman Theresa Quigley had suggested looking again at the other potential access through the residential part of West Drive. That brought the residents out to protest, as they had done before the original idea was scrapped.

    At Tuesday’s meeting, Ms. Quigley reassured the neighborhood residents, saying that the access to the new commercial subdivision is “absolutely” going to be over the northerly route.

Floating a Farm Museum

    The house and barn on the former Lester farm at the corner of North Main and Cedar Streets in East Hampton, purchased by the town through its community preservation fund, would be a good site for a farm museum showing how hoi polloi here once lived and highlighting the life stories of colorful local residents, Prudence Carabine told the town board on Tuesday. Richard Barons, the head of the East Hampton Historical Society, and the East Hampton Citizens Advisory Committee endorse the idea, she said.

    “Farming and fishing gave the town its character,” Ms. Carabine said, suggesting that the museum could display farm equipment as well as textiles and other everyday goods used by residents in the past. Mr. Barons has submitted a letter to the board offering the historical society’s expertise in establishing and running the museum.    J.P.

New York State

Construction Dollars for John Jermain

    Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. announced Friday that $137,667 in public library construction money had been awarded to the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor. “With libraries now experiencing remarkable increases in use, and with budget cuts creating significant hardship, I am thrilled that my constituents, and the beautiful John Jermain Memorial Library, will benefit from these state funds,” Mr. Thiele said in a release. The money is part of $14 million made available for public library construction in the 2010 state budget.

    The Sag Harbor philanthropist Mrs. Russell Sage paid for the library to be built in 1910 in memory of her grandfather, whose name it bears. A public referendum for expanding the library, which is a state and nationally recognized historic place, passed by a wide margin in 2009.

Well before a March 11 earthquake led to a partial meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, local antinuclear activists and elected officials were warning of the potential for disaster if a hurricane or other unusual weather event damaged the Millstone nuclear complex in Waterford, Conn., despite assurances from its managing corporation, Dominion, that the two plants and their susceptibility to extreme weather are nothing like those in Japan.

Indeed, on Feb. 11, State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. introduced a bill to, among other things, bring about a “comprehensive review of disaster preparedness plans for . . . [nuclear] power plants,” including analysis of “the feasibility of evacuating areas within 50 miles of a power plant in the event of a severe core damage accident.” United States corporations that manage nuclear plants are required to provide evacuation plans for a 10-mile radius, though reports that Americans within 50 miles of the Japanese reactor were being encouraged to evacuate by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman, Gregory Jaczko, would suggest Mr. Thiele’s bill is based on this more aggressive approach.

“I feel as strongly about this as I ever have,” Mr. Thiele said over the phone on Friday. N.R.C. regulations “include only 10 miles — this takes into account the North Fork but not the South. More than ever, every nuclear plant needs to prepare a 50-mile plan, at a bare minimum.” State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle is also supporting the legislation, and introduced it in the Senate on March 25.

County Legislator Jay Schneiderman followed up with a release on March 29 drawing attention to a letter he sent to Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer and Representative Tim Bishop urging that they push to expand the 10-mile radius to at least 25. 

“If one lesson can be clearly learned from the nuclear incident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, it is that the current U.S. requirement of evacuation planning [. . .] is woefully inadequate,” Mr. Schneiderman wrote in the letter. “Our own president urged that any U.S. citizen within 50 miles of the Fukushima Daiichi plant be evacuated. Both forks of Eastern Long Island sit within a 50-mile radius of the aging Millstone 2 nuclear power plant in Waterford, Conn. The Japanese government required evacuations within 25 miles of the leaking power plant.” The East Hampton, and large areas of Southampton Town are all within a 25-mile radius of the Millstone facility.

Three reactors at Fukushima Daiichi lost power and could not be cooled in the wake of the tsunami in Japan, their batteries failing after eight hours. David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Program with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a media conference call on March 14 that many U.S reactors would find themselves in a similar situation in the event of a severe weather event, though earthquakes are rare in Connecticut.

Ken Holt, a spokesman for Dominion, said when reached by telephone that units 2 and 3 at Millstone, the active reactors, have two backup diesel generators each. In addition, unlike in Japan, the generators are protected from the elements by flood barriers and tornado doors. Nonetheless, he said that “any time there’s a major event in the nuclear industry, we pay attention. We’re reviewing our ability to respond in the event of an emergency.”

Nancy Burton, director of the Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone, has been warning for years that the plant is vulnerable, and believes a disaster like that at Fukushima Daiichi is not implausible. After acknowledging during a recent press appearance that earthquakes and tsunamis are not likely to affect the plant, she said, “. . . hurricanes, tornadoes, and other storm events can and do occur and they and other factors can set off a chain of events crippling the nuclear power station and even leading to a meltdown.”

Priscilla Star of Montauk and Florida, a former board member of the now-defunct Standing for Truth About Radiation Foundation, decided this month to form a new group, the Standing for Truth About Radiation Coalition. 

“If the U.S. government can urge U.S. citizens to evacuate a 50-mile zone away from Fukushima, then the U.S. government can provide that here,” Ms. Star said over the phone on Monday. “The focus of the STAR Coalition will be to mobilize East End environmental organizations to become a powerful demographic group. We will demand from our elected officials the implementation of a 50-mile emergency evacuation plan because all things considered, the 10-mile no-way-out plan really doesn’t work. Nuclear reactors in Waterford, Conn., and the East End of Long Island are environmentally linked in a New York minute. Quite frankly, this is an environmental call to arms.”

Millstone has a reputation for current and former employees speaking to the media about its safety issues and potential to harm nearby communities. When Millstone reopened after closing for safety changes in 1998, Gerald Reardon, an engineer at the station, said: “It is certainly possible to have a severe accident, and Long Island is kind of a trapped audience. If the wind is blowing toward them, they can come down to the shore and watch the cloud come. Radionuclides are not going to stop at the 10-mile limit.”

Bob Stern, president of the Concerned Citizens of Montauk, echoed Ms. Star’s apprehension. “Living in Montauk — at the very end of Long Island — we are relatively close to the Millstone nuclear plant and don’t have an easy exit strategy,” he said Monday, speaking for himself and not C.C.O.M. “Preparing ourselves with a population evacuation plan to a 50-mile radius from that plant sounds important and prudent to me. If that is the new standard for Japan, why not us?” 

    The East Hampton Town Board filled a vacancy on the planning board this week, appointing Nancy Keeshan of Montauk, a real estate broker. The position has been open since September, when John P. Lycke, the former chairman of the board who also lives in Montauk, resigned unexpectedly.

    Ms. Keeshan, who said she had no political affiliation, will round out the seven-member board. A partner with her father, John, in the Montauk firm Keeshan Real Estate, she also is president of the Montauk Village Association. She is the second appointment to the planning board by the Wilkinson administration in Town Hall, following the appointment of Reed Jones, an East Hampton insurance agent, in January.

    “I was honored to be asked,” Ms. Keeshan said yesterday, explaining that she and Supervisor Wilkinson had a long friendship. “He asked if I would help out,” she said, noting that she has lived in Montauk all her life and knows the hamlet well. She cited a desire to serve the people of the community, and to “make it possible for future generations to enjoy Montauk.”

    Members of the planning board serve for seven years, but Ms. Keeshan’s appointment is only for the remainder of Mr. Lycke’s term, which expires in 2014. She then could be appointed to a full term.

    In Mr. Lycke’s absence, the planning board has been headed by Robert Schaeffer of Wainscott, the board’s vice chairman. There are no meetings scheduled until the new year, when the town board will again have the opportunity to appoint a new member to the planning board or reappoint Sylvia Overby. Ms. Overby, a Democrat who has often voiced opposition to the actions of the Republican majority on the town board, has been the longest-serving board member since Mr. Lycke’s resignation. Her term expires at the end of the month.

    Town board members will also decide at the start of the year who will take the top spot on the board. Along with Mr. Jones and Mr. Schaeffer, Ms. Keeshan will serve with Peter Van Scoyoc, Patrick Schutte, and Eileen Catalano. All were all appointed by the prior, Democratic administration.

    The Montauk Village Association is a nonprofit organization that advocates for the acquisition of land, beaches, and structures for public use. It also maintains the flowers along Main Street and Kirk Park.

Even before the mammoth northeast storm on Dec. 26 and 27 pushed sand into the mouth of Montauk Harbor, the bottoms of commercial fishing boats were hitting the shoal in the inlet. Their captains say the shoal has grown more dangerous because of this winter’s string of northeasters.

     Jason Walters, the senior chief Coast Guard officer who is the commander of Montauk’s search and rescue station, has advised captains to file an incident report whenever they run afoul of the shoal.

    While fishermen say they’ve learned to live with it, planning their comings and goings around the tides and then crossing their fingers, inconvenience can turn to disaster quickly during a storm.

    An Army Corps of Engineers study, the navigation and storm damage reduction project, first authorized in 1991,  remains incomplete. The next thorough dredging is not scheduled until 2013.   

    Two weeks ago, the dragger Perception was forced to wait for seven hours outside the harbor for a tide that was full enough to allow it to enter. Dan Farnham, owner of the tilefish longliner Kimberly, reported that Capt. David Tuma had hit bottom on the way back from an offshore trip last week. “He was two and a half hours off of low tide, but tapped the bottom anyway.”

    Shoaling in Montauk Harbor Inlet has become a chronic problem. In 1999, and again the following year, the shoal, which forms along the east side, grounded the draggers First Light and Jason and Danielle. The First Light, a wooden boat out of Shinnecock, was destroyed. The Jason and Danielle narrowly escaped capsizing in a cold and driving January storm and went to a Massachusetts shipyard for repairs.

    A month later, the inlet got its first major dredging in years. Approximately 48,000 cubic yards of sand were pumped from the channel and deposited along the beach at Soundview, a residential area to the west of the inlet. The job cost $700,000 and included a “deposition basin,” a deep hole north of the east jetty, to slow the east-to-west drift of sand that enters the inlet and creates the  shoal.

    The inlet wasn’t dredged again until 2004, but the job was roundly criticized as insufficient. The shoal was back and causing problems three years later. Commercial fishermen from Montauk’s Inlet Seafood company, the largest wholesale shipper of fish in New York State, met with an Army Corps representative that year only to learn that money for maintenance dredging had not been allocated in the 2008 federal budget. In 2009, 4,296 cubic yards of sand were removed, but the shoal came back bigger than ever.

    “God forbid the Viking [recreational party boat] capsizes,” said Capt. Chuck Weimar, who owns the Rianda S dragger. “Everybody, everybody is hitting bottom. We’ve all done it. It’s like threading a needle. If a boat from another port comes to Montauk on a transient trip, it’s dangerous.”

    Montauk fishermen have expressed confidence that Mr. Walters, who visited the Kimberly when she last hit bottom, understands the situation. “We ask for incident reports because it gives us a history of a vessel, so even if they do have a casualty, it shows there has been no negligence. We’re continuing to monitor, but with all the erosion, things can change within one storm,” he said.

    Mr. Walters said that updates on the state of the inlet were broadcast weekly on radio frequencies monitored by boaters and were posted in the Coast Guard’s Notice to Mariners. In addition, Mr. Walters said he continued to send information up the chain of command to district headquarters in Boston. Ultimately, however, it will be the Army Corps’ responsibility, he said.

    At an East Hampton Town Board meeting on Tuesday, Supervisor Bill Wilkinson reported that he had written to Senator Charles E. Schumer, asking him to expedite a meeting with the Corps of Engineers. “I don’t believe we can wait till 2013 to dredge the harbor,” he said.

    The cause of the shoal seems obvious to fishermen and the residents of the Soundview community, where houses had severe damage in December. They agree the problem is the inlet’s east jetty, which blocks the natural, east-to-west, flow of sand. The sand builds up on the Gin Beach, or east, side of the inlet, while starving the beach to the west. This is apparently made worse by the natural scouring action of currents that course around any hard structure. As a result, “green water” waves have destroyed bulkheads and undermined houses at Soundview.

    “We draw 10 feet when loaded,” Captain Farnham said of the Kimberly. “The larger draggers, 12 or 13. You can lose a boat easily . . . in a storm, if the wind picks up while we’re waiting, there can be trouble.”

    “They dredge, then we have to get used to the shoal again. We need some kind of sand-bypass system that pumps sand around,” removing the glut of sand on east side to reduce its flow into the harbor, while at the same time feeding the beaches on the Soundview side. “It’s what you have to do when you have a port,” Captain Farnham said.

    After a second request for proposals for a restaurant concession at the Poxabogue Golf Course drew no bidders, Southampton Town Councilman Chris Nuzzi introduced a new request for proposals at last week’s town board meeting.

    On Jan. 11, Mr. Nuzzi said he had the sense from some of the people who had considered bidding in the past that they were not able to put a proposal together because of other commitments and travel over the holidays.

    This will be the third request the town has issued for the concession since August. After the first yielded no bids, Mr. Nuzzi, who handles Poxabogue for the town board, issued a new request with a provision that those interested be able to bid on rent as part of the package.

    At the time of the last request in November, Mr. Nuzzi said in discussions with East Hampton and others interested in the concession that he found that the set rental fee of $7,500 in the first request had been a chief concern for those who would otherwise be interested in the space.

    In the latest guidelines, those interested would bid against each other in setting a proposed rental rate. Mr. Nuzzi said in November that the towns would then have “the option to see if the numbers that come back are sufficient.” The towns will still seek to collect 10 percent of the gross revenues if that is greater than the agreed-upon rent. The number will be determined through a “point of sale” system, which the winning concession will install to track the monthly receipts of the restaurant.

    Hours of operation will be limited to 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. If the golf center is open earlier, then the restaurant has the option to open a half-hour prior to that time. The restaurant will be required to be open year round with the exception of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

    Because the hours of operation are constrained based on community concerns about full dinner service operations, Mr. Nuzzi said in November that the towns acknowledged that it was appropriate to modify the rental rate. “We  still see no reason why there can’t be a successful food operation there.”

    East Hampton and Southampton Towns own the course jointly, but Southampton is the lead agency. East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson has indicated an interest in selling the town’s share of the golf course to Southampton, but nothing has been negotiated yet, according to Southampton officials.

    Dan Murray, who operated his Fairway restaurant there until last March, said he is still interested in reoccupying the space and that he is thinking of putting in a proposal for it. He said the first request package had some things he did not like and he was away during the period of the last request.    

    Mr. Nuzzi’s latest plan would entail the release of the bid package today, a deadline of Feb. 9 for proposals, and the award of the concession on Feb. 22. “We all want to have someone there for the beginning of the season,” Mr. Nuzzi said.

    After extensive water damage and mold was found due to a leaky roof, the town replaced the roof and brought the cesspools and electrical elements up to date. The exterior has been painted and new structural elements have been added. “It’s cleaned up and looks good. We just want the right concession to come in and improve the space, consistent with the flavor of the place and make it theirs. Hopefully, we’ll get a couple of responses.”

    Mr. Murray, who still has the equipment that he used when he was there, said he had not been back to the space since it was renovated. If he were to have the winning bid for the space, he said it would take him about a month to get it up and running. “Maybe we could shoot for April 1, depending on what it entails. We would like to be there, but we’re a long way from getting it yet.”

    A proposal to move a two-day August music festival from a field in Amagansett to an area at the East Hampton Airport, devised as an alternative in the face of community opposition to the event at the Amagansett site, will require the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration as well as that of the East Hampton Town Board.

    Chris Jones, an organizer of the Music to Know, or MTK, concert, submitted a permit application for a mass gathering at the airport on Aug. 13 and 14 to the East Hampton Town fire marshal’s office on Feb 7. The festival is to include concerts on two stages by 18 performers as well as food,  beverages, and merchandise vendors.

    In late December, the board issued a mass-gathering permit authorizing the event to be held on land on the north side of Montauk Highway in Amagansett, but since then community members have expressed concerns about traffic, safety, and other issues surrounding the festival, for which 9,500 tickets would be sold. A coalition of opponents has hired Jeffrey Bragman, an East Hampton attorney, and has threatened a legal fight.

    Jim Brundige, the East Hampton Airport manager, said that he had met with the event organizers earlier this week to review plans for parking and use of the proposed site, a “dead zone” south of the unused runway 4-22, adjacent to Industrial Road.

    He said that they were aware of the need to obtain approval from the F.A.A., which has jurisdiction over activities within the airport footprint, and that they would hire a consultant to pursue that permit.

    Mr. Brundige said the F.A.A. would not consider closing the airport, which sees an average of 700 to 800 “operations” — takeoffs and landings — over two typical August days.

    While the proposed location for the show will not interfere with use of the rest of the airport, Mr. Brundige said, pilots taking off from or landing on the airport’s other runways might react to having a large outdoor event there.

    The commercial mass-gathering permit application is being routed for comment to various town offices, such as that of the fire marshal, police chief, and other department heads, as is the normal procedure, and has not yet been discussed by the town board.    J.P.

It’s Monday, all the snow is gone here in Noyac. The News 12 weather channel predicts a week of high temperatures in the upper 50s with no snow, but some rain. Right now it’s 50 degrees, March is rapidly morphing from a fierce lion into a gentle lamb.

This should be a week of major appearances, and apparently one is already onstage. Byron Young, the head of the Eastern Long Island Audubon Society, emailed me on Saturday with a heads-up. He had finished leading a field trip at the Elizabeth Morton National Wildlife Refuge and decided to go to East Hampton to look for signs of spring. He ended up at Accabonac Harbor, where he thinks he might have found a new eagle’s nest.

While there he met a woman who told him that she had just seen an osprey at Maidstone Park on the bay, the first report of one to cross my desk this year. This is the time for the ospreys to sail back home, so it makes sense. Keep your eyes open from now on, because the return of the fish hawk is one of the most impressive signs of spring.

I would not be surprised if another sign of spring should pop up this week, one that arouses our auditory senses, not our visual ones. The spring peeper is one of our most faithful signs of spring, never missing a single year, even when it’s very dry and there is hardly a pond holding water for them to breed in. These little tree frogs didn’t get a long winter’s sleep this time around; they didn’t go under and hibernate until November. Less than two inches long and hard to make out against the lichen-covered bark of our oaks, maples, and hickories, they may emerge sleepy-eyed and groggy, but somewhere on the South Fork they’ll be up and wailing away, cheep, cheep, cheeping their rising notes. If you live anywhere near freshwater, you can’t miss them.

Freshwater? That reminds of another March sign of spring that follows on the tails of the ospreys and spring peepers. The alewife, a herring species and one of the only fish named after a woman, will be back, but not nearly so widespread on the South Fork as the osprey and the spring peeper. In fact, there is only one major alewife run these days between Montauk Point and Riverhead, and that takes place in North Sea at North Sea Harbor and Big Fresh Pond. 

In the old days, there were at least 10 local runs of this anadromous herring species, that feed in salt water but breed in freshwater. The installation of culverts and changes in stream depths and other obstructions have pretty much brought the runs into Jeremy’s Hole in Sagaponack, Big Reed and Stepping Stone Ponds in Montauk, Scoy Pond in East Hampton’s Northwest, and the ponds at the very eastern edge of east Shinnecock Bay in Southampton to a standstill.

And while we are on the subject, let us not forget about a local catadromous species (one that leaves salt water to breed in freshwater) that is also on the brink of disappearing and is considered endangered or threatened along parts of our Atlantic Coast: the American eel. In order to breed, it swims down the same streams in the opposite direction as the alewives, all the way south to the Sargasso Sea, almost 1,000 miles from here. The baby elvers, five or six inches long and almost transparent to avoid predation on the way back to their mothers’ ponds, arrive in the early spring.

And there are other birds besides the osprey that have already come back after a long flight north from their southern wintering grounds. Red-winged blackbirds, grackles, robins, and a few other species are back. Fish crows and bluebirds will soon follow.

Another sign of spring often noted in early March are the minute craters made of earth seen on lawns, playing fields and golf courses. These are telltale signs of the emergence of earthworms. The larger ones of the species, called night crawlers, can be found lying on the grass at night prior to breeding, basking in the moonlight. They make wonderful bait for perch and sunfish, and in the past were a part of the rites of spring, at least for the schoolboys waiting for the warmup.

Did I mention plants? Native witch hazel is blooming and snowdrops were blooming on the edge of a pond in Sagaponack off Audubon Lane that I was checking on two weeks ago. You can bet your eyeteeth that somewhere locally skunk cabbage is already in bloom.

There is one last early spring form that is endangered in New York State, but which occurs here and there locally — the tiger salamander. It is the first one of the local mole salamander species to emerge from the ground and breed each year, particularly in the Long Pond Greenbelt region south of Sag Harbor Village. If you see one of these six-to-eight-inch-long black and yellow amphibians, please note the location and give a shout.

Eek! As I was about to send this off to The Star, my wife screamed from the kitchen that the Argentine ants are back on the counter, a much less pleasant sign of the warming weather.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

Birds continue to return north. Jane Bimson sent me a nice shot of an osprey perched in a tree at the edge of Fort Pond. Karen Rubinstein, who has overseen the Montauk Christmas Count for the past two years, and lives with her sister on Accabonac Harbor, reported that a pair of fish crows arrived and she observed an oystercatcher at Louse Point. She still has a pine siskin at her feeder that has yet to go north.

I went to observe an overfilled wetland pond in south Bridgehampton last Thursday and was greeted by a rite-of-spring chorusing of 25 or so red-winged blackbirds ringing from the tops of the trees, while a duck quacked on and off and a robin looked for food on a lawn edging the pond. Once spring begins in earnest, there is no stopping it.

Plants are popping up here and there. While there was only one snowdrop plant at the wetland pond site two weeks ago, last Thursday there was a slew of them, some even popping up their pearly white flowers from underwater. One of the signs of early spring is the blooming of the skunk cabbages. Apparently their skunk-like odor — who could miss it — attracts early pollinators when competition for those flying insects is at a season low.

There are a few spots on the South Fork, all of them wet, where skunk cabbage patches cover a lot of ground. One is on both sides of Edge of Woods Road in Water Mill before it enters Majors Path, two others are on the north side of Millstone Brook Road in the Town of Southampton near where North Sea meets Tuckahoe. The largest ones I know of in East Hampton are the one on the west side of Barcelona near Little Northwest Creek, another in Sagg Swamp in Sagaponack, and in Montauk around Big Reed Pond. Jane Bimson was on hand to see the ones at Big Reed just coming into flower. Very often you will find Jack-in-the-Pulpit beginning to flower at the edge of the skunk cabbages.

As Long Island warms up along with the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, southern plants and southern birds begin to breed here. Several, including the mockingbird, cardinal, red-bellied woodpecker, and Carolina wren, have become established members of the Long Island avifauna since the late-1950s/early-1960s. Others, like the indigo bunting, blue grosbeak, and black vulture, are just beginning to establish here.

Montauk at the southern and eastern tip of Long Island is an area where southern plant species establish first because its seasonal temperatures are 

milder than the rest of Long Island’s. Its southern red oak population continues to thrive.

So-called global warming resulting in the subsequent melting of northern and southern glaciers such as those on Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and Antarctica has been going on since the last glaciation and began to melt away from Long Island about 15,000 years ago. But there was a time after the very major glaciation of 500 million years ago when five of the seven continents were still connected, forming a super-continent known as Gondwanaland.

Beginning some two-plus million years ago, and ending with the glacier that created Long Island, there have been at least four major glaciations and retreats. After each retreat, the Northern Hemisphere warmed up to the point where the evergreen Podocarpus and many other tropical plants thrived and north-south bird migrations got going. Sea level was much higher during those glaciations. What are now Long Island and New York City were well under water. A similar post-glacial sea rise is now in progress, but it has a very long way to go before it tops the previous records.

Proto-humans and modern humans haven’t been around nearly that long, and so it will be interesting to see what happens to all those postmodern-era coliseums and monuments, built recently or still on the drawing board, such as those in Dubai, Shanghai, Mecca, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and our own New York City. Golly, Hudson Yards could become half submerged. Maybe Bezos and Amazon know something we don’t.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

When I was a boy growing up in Mattituck across the bay, there were no Little League baseball teams or summer camps to occupy our time and keep us from getting into trouble. We could work for money as soon as we could walk. My first job was plucking white leghorns on my grandfather’s chicken farm every weekend come midspring. I would also mow lawns with a push mower, pick peas, rake leaves, etc., etc. You didn’t get rich but the work was fun and mostly outside. A dollar in those days would buy you a hamburger and a milkshake at the Paradise shop, or get you into four movies. 

We were also clammers and fisherboys. Come early spring we would catch winter flounders as they arrived in Mattituck Creek to spawn. There were no catch limits in those days but we would not take more than we could eat or give to our neighbors. I sorely miss those times.

Come my tenure in the Natural Resources Department in East Hampton Town 30 years or so later, I began to think back on my early years. In the first years on the job I was surrounded by fishermen and fisherwomen, and it was a little like the old days growing up. The baymen with their fish traps, clam rakes, and scallop dredges scratched out enough to live on. Nobody got rich, but the fun of catching fresh stuff from the creeks, harbors, bays, and ocean was just compensation.

The late Stuart Vorpahl taught me that there were good years to catch certain species and bad years. When scallops were scarce you raked clams, when striped bass were scarce you caught porgies or sea bass. There were hundreds of aquatic species coming and going and all of them were tasty and nutritious. One of them, the blowfish, practically disappeared and then made a comeback beginning some six or seven years ago. Winter flounders, however, one of the most important fish species for baymen and one of the earliest in the season to harvest, have yet to do that.

In the mid-’80s the brown tides visited the bays, and scallops and other shellfish became scarce. The idea of growing marine shellfish and finfish to supplant scarcities came into being. It just so happened that what used to be called the Montauk Ocean Science Laboratory had gone fallow. Developers, then on the rise in Montauk, bought the buildings and property on Fort Pond Bay, an extension of Block Island Sound where it met the Peconics, to create condos. In a give-and-take procedure, the developer got his condominiums and with the help of Councilman Randy Parsons and the East Hampton Town Baymen’s Association secretary, Arnold Leo, the town saved one of those buildings, which otherwise would have been razed, and turned it into an aquaculture facility, the Montauk Shellfish Hatchery. 

The town received a grant from the state to help with the conversion, which included new intake and outtake water lines, and we were on our way. The brown tide, which stretched easterly to east of Accabonac Harbor, had already crippled the scallop population, but luckily never reached beyond Napeague Bay.

Not only did we get a substantial building for free, we got the best bay water in the whole of the Peconic Estuary to grow shellfish in. We also got the wise hand of the late Anthony D’Agostino, a consummate marine biologist who specialized in lobster biology. The developer was going to raze his little lab, so we moved him into the aquaculture building.

At that time there were commercial shellfish operations on Fishers Island and in Great South Bay, and one other town aquaculture facility, that in the Town of Islip. We soon were in business and the hopes of the local fishermen were raised accordingly. The building had a long south-facing roof on one side, perfect for solar panels, and ample space outside for adding a wind turbine or two to help pay for the building’s energy needs. Unfortunately, except for Randy Parsons, the town board never got behind the energy saving idea and up till today, the building is run on standard PSEG-supplied carbon-based electricity.

Thirty years later and more productive than ever, the Montauk aquaculture facility stands in good stead under the leadership of John Barley Dunne, and the water drawn in from the bay is still plentiful and free of the colored plankton tides that have wreaked havoc with shellfish grow-out in the western part of East Hampton and all of Southampton.

Lately there is talk of a second large aquaculture facility on Three Mile Harbor. A rationale proposed for this new one is that transportation of juvenile shellfish for seeding in western town waters results in a large number of fatalities. Such losses are puzzling to me. According to one of Long Island’s most longstanding and successful aquaculturists, Robert Valenti of Multiaquaculture on Napeague, baby scallops and other shellfish can be shipped to Long Island waters for seeding all the way from Massachusetts suffering hardly any die-off. Another point with this idea that is baffling to me is the quality of the water in Three Mile Harbor.

I motor past it quite frequently and during the warm weather season the water is often colored in the same way that the water in western Shinnecock Bay and other Southampton Town marine waters are colored. It would seem that until such water is clear of colored plankton tides all year round, the method of live transport from the Montauk facility for planting in waters to the west should be improved to the point where such mortality is no longer a problem.

One other point that is troubling is the long-term fate of the baymen locally. Bay fishing largely made East Hampton the town that it is. What was in part learned from the Native Americans, e.g., the Montauketts, has been going on for more than 300 years without interruption. In my eyes there is no finer profession. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the town ended up with two world-class aquaculture facilities, but not a single bayman left to harvest their spawn.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].