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].

Victoria Bustamante and her college-age son Chris visited one of the Atlantic white cedar swamps on Friday. There are four in North Sea, three on the north side of Little Fresh Pond and one on the south side. Conifers that do well with roots in standing water are rare across the globe and white cedars are our only native conifer with such a habit. In fact you almost never find one doing well on dry land. 

Because they live and die in water-filled holes, colonists early on discovered that if you probe into these boggy spots your probes will often hit hard objects, and when such a hard object is brought to the surface, it is generally the trunk of a dead white cedar. When the bole is examined, it turns out that it shows little sign of rot, even after hundreds of years, and as shingles and shakes became the covering for colonist houses along the Atlantic Coast, the best ones were fashioned from such water-logged boles.

Small mossy hummocks are frequently found around the bases of the cedars and sometimes they serve as substrate for wetland species such as lilies and orchids. A few wetland shrubs line the shores and it was at the edge of one of these three cedar swamps that Vicki Bustamante and I found swamp sweet bells in bloom. To date it is the farthest east spot on the South Fork where we have found this shrub.

There is another Atlantic white cedar grove a bit farther east in the northern part of a Nature Conservancy sanctuary, Sagg Swamp, north of Sagaponack Pond at the south end of the Long Pond Greenbelt. Even though such white cedar swamps have existed on Long Island since the time of the earliest settlers, the Native Americans, not a lot is known about them. In this millennium John Turner, one of the four original members who started the Long Island Pine Barrens Society and a biologist who is now part of the Seatuck Environmental Association in Islip, visited each one and wrote a book about them. (It was that same group that did much of the original work on our pitch pine-dominated pine barrens, and whose work eventually led to protecting almost 80,000 acres of them. In fact, the only Long Island pitch barrens not protected are east of the Hampton Bays canal in Southampton and East Hampton Towns.)

Ms. Bustamante has raised a few Atlantic white cedars in a Warren’s Nursery greenhouse and has since replanted them in the wild. A single quite large one grew along the west edge of a small pond and wetland just west of Audubon Lane in Bridgehampton, but after it was identified in 2012, Superstorm Sandy came along and knocked it down. There were no other white cedar trees at that spot to protect it.

According to Vicki, as of Friday the water surrounding the white cedars was very dark and clear, with no aquatic plants or plankton growing in it, perhaps because it is so shaded over by the tall evergreen foliage above. I wonder how these cedar bogs have persisted so long; there are several houses not too far away from them. Interestingly, although several southern bird species are back, Vicki and Chris heard only one calling — possibly a titmouse. No spring peepers were chirping, notwithstanding the fact that other watery spots have enjoyed their calls for almost two weeks now. Although I’ve tried several times at different times of the year, I have never found frogs or salamanders in these ponds, maybe because there is little for the tadpoles to feed on.

In the 1980s I wrote about these cedar bogs for The Star, accompanied by a photo of a large white cedar taken by the photographer Rameshwar Das. I also aged one that turned out to be more than 100 years old.

What is scary is that as of 2018 on the south side of Little Fresh Pond, there is at least one mature Atlantic white cedar and many many seedling ones less 

than a foot high. Scary, because the Southampton Town Zoning Board has just approved a change of status for the tennis facility at that spot, which would make its primary use a summer camp — the Southampton Country Day Camp — for as many as 500 children and their counselors despite the fact that just about everyone living in the small family houses around the pond is against it. The pond is already deemed “impaired” by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The Surfrider Foundation, along with the Peconic Baykeeper and Concerned Citizens of Montauk, have been regularly sampling its water for several years running now for the intestinal bacteria flora enterococcus, and have found dangerous values of it, to the point where the D.E.C. says the pond should not be used for swimming or water sports.

There is a would-be twist to the zoning board’s recent decision. The owner of the camp is Jay Jacobs, chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee, who also owns camps in East Hampton and elsewhere on Long Island. He personally attended several of the zoning board meetings having to do with the camp. The head of the zoning board is a Democrat and four of the town board members are Democrats. One wonders if the business of politics is coming before the business of nature?

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

One of the big birds counted in the Dec. 29 Orient Christmas Bird Count, which includes North Haven, was the female Barrrow’s goldeneye, seen by Terry Sullivan, who has been covering that territory during annual count for 26 years running. 

Victoria Bustamante covered the Cedar Point-Grace Estate territory. Her biggest find was not a bird but a new tree “species” for the area, the whelk tree (see photo). I’ll have more on the Orient Count and the others that took place across Long Island in the weeks before and after Christmas, but first a look at the warming climate, which may account for some of the newest birds to be tallied on these counts.

It turns out that 2018, was the fourth warmest year for the world on record. The final results are not in yet: So far the warmest year on record was 2016; 2015 was the next warmest, and 2017 was the third warmest. In other words: The four warmest years on record were in the last four years! Something is indeed happening out there. 

As of Monday, the nighttime temperature so far this month in Noyac, where I live, had yet to drop below 26, which is an auspiciously mild start for normally the coldest month of every year since1850.

However warm it is becoming, we must remember that 100 million years ago when green plants were developing, tropical species were trapped and fossilized in Canada. We also should take note of the fact that only 20,000 years ago, the glaciers extended throughout the Northern Hemisphere and reached far down across Asia and into Europe, and into the United States to what we now call the temperate zone, say, almost to Missouri. In the distant past, when oil and coal were being deposited in great volumes underground, heat was generated by other than carbon-based fuels.

Although the burning of fossil fuels must be having a significant effect on the latest surge in warm weather years, the story of the world’s ups and downs in climates and sea level rises and falls is a long and varied one. Seas came and went, some reached inland as far as Kentucky and the rest of the Appalachians, where marine fossils can still be found. Plus, the weight of the glaciers pressed on the land, lowering it. As they melted the land popped up a bit and apparently is still rising in many coastal areas. Ergo, sea level is not only a function of melting glaciers and rising seas, but also of sinking and rising of continental coasts.

I was talking with Jean Held after getting the Montauk bird count figures. When discussing the increase of such southern birds as the Carolina wren, mockingbird, and red-bellied woodpecker, to name few of the southern species now found in northern winters, she commented that all of our birds were once only residents in the south. When I thought about it, I had to agree. Yes, sparrows, robins, warblers, and the like now breed at our latitude and farther north, but during the time of the great glaciers — the ones that created 90 percent of Long Island’s land mass — these birds were not here.

As the glaciers retreated, the birds began to extend their ranges farther and farther to the north, while the few northern species that were present — snowy owls, for example — went farther north, all the way to the Arctic Circle. Migration, which started merely as range extensions in order to decrease the competition for food and nesting areas, kept building, until more than 200 species of what we now call North American birds breed at our latitude and farther north in southern Canada each year. As the late naturalist Gil Raynor once pointed out, a few, such as the great black-backed gull, even extended their breeding ranges in a southerly direction.

Recently, the East Hampton Town supervisor was quoted as saying global warming is likely responsible for the onslaught of the southern pine borer beetle that has been ravaging our pitch pines so badly lately, but what he probably didn’t know is that that same species of beetle has been spreading south into Central America and ravaging pines there, as well. Insects are what we call poikilothermic. In other words, they are cold-blooded; their body temperatures take on the temperature of the air or water surrounding them.

We are losing our eelgrass beds, which is bad for a lot of the shellfish we like to eat and that helped feed the 

irst residents of Long Island — the Shinnecocks, Montauketts, Corchaugs, Poospatucks, and others — for thousands of years before we got here. Some say it is the rising temperatures of the shallow marine waters in which they grow, but eelgrass, Zostera marina, grows up and down both American coasts and throughout European and Asian seas as well. Ours was probably adapted to doing well in colder temperatures, but eelgrass will flourish again, unless the growing pollution in the Peconics and Great South Bays accounts for much of the mortality experienced here.

Long Island in its first years free from the overriding glaciers came to look like the tundra of the Arctic Circle, then developed slowly into a taiga of larch, spruce, firs, birch, and other species of trees that now grow farther north in a band that circles the Northern Hemisphere. The white pines that make up the southern portion of parts of the North American taiga still grow in the Northwest area of East Hampton Town, but very rarely elsewhere on Long Island.

Certainly it would slow things down a bit if we all drove around in electric vehicles that derived their energy from solar panels, not by burning gasoline, but we have to be careful in our prognostications about climate change: It is highly unlikely that oil, gas, and electric heat will be converted overnight into heat from the sun or wind, although many politicians have promised such a complete metamorphosis in as little as 10 to 20 years from now. In the meantime, I’ll try to enjoy the warmer winters, as the thought of becoming a snowbird and overwintering in Florida every year doesn’t excite me at all.

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

The nation is shut down. It’s not for me to open it up. What’s worse to my locally oriented mind, however, is the stuff against nature that has been going down right under our noses here on the South Fork for the past several years. 

The local drinking water aquifers that we depend upon are being polluted at a rapid rate, especially since I first moved back here from California in 1973. First it was the potato beetle killer Temik, next the gasoline additive M.T.B.E., and now it is the firefighting foams PFOS and PFOA. Along with that we’ve been dumping medicines and flushing urine down the drains for a century or more. It’s a wonder that there is any good water to drink or wash with left under our feet at all. The Suffolk County Water Authority does the best job it can under the circumstances and continues to drill new wells into aquifer areas that are still hardly tainted to provide us with good water. But it is treated with chlorine.

People have been mucking up Long Island’s drinking water supplies since before World War II. One has only to read Newsday each day to see how badly we have polluted the underground water supplies Island-wide. The saddest part of the story is that many Long Islanders have been drinking toxic water throughout their entire life spans. No wonder we are such an unhealthy collection of men, women, and children.

Most of our political leaders only react after the whistle is blown. It may not be too late to act, but much of the damage has already been done before they do. I am reminded of a very localized toxic plume on the west side of Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton about 28 years ago when I was the natural resources director of the town. I was informed by a geologist friend that at one house in that neighborhood a pet cat wouldn’t drink the water that came from the tap. I passed the information on to the late Russell Drumm at The Star and he looked into it. Turns out the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office was closely watching that site because of a suspicion of drug-making activity.

If Russell had waited for that department to finish its reconnaissance, which could have taken months and months, the toxic water would have spread underground from one house to another and so on all the way down the gradient. His story summoned the Suffolk County Health Department and the cat was literally out of the bag. Tony Bullock was the supervisor then and wasted no time in getting the Suffolk County Water Authority to extend its pipeline from a little ways north of East Hampton Village several miles north to the impacted area. 

The number of such incidents up and down the Island has multiplied over the years, yet much of our population is still drinking bad water.

Lately there is the Wainscott plume coming from the firefighting foams and other toxins used and released around the East Hampton Airport. The Suffolk County Water Authority has been summoned to the rescue. Unfortunately, many of the consumers of private well water south of the airport have been drinking the poison for years without knowing it. Residents of areas around  Gabreski Airport in Westhampton Beach have seen the same kinds of pollutants in their private well water. 

In Sag Harbor, the village board has voted to install a vehicle impound lot on property owned by the village in the hamlet of Bridgehampton — the old dump. The dump sits in the Long Pond Greenbelt area, which has more than six freshwater ponds, the largest endangered tiger salamander population on Long Island, and a nearly pristine swath of aquatic and upland habitats protected by Southampton Town for at least 20 years now. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which is the state’s number-one guardian of endangered and threatened species, approved the site after a short walk-through. 

The impound area is going to be paved so that the vehicles won’t sink into the soil when it becomes muddy. But where will the rain runoff from the impound area go? Directly or indirectly into the nearby greenbelt ponds, especially into a tiny “deer lick” pond that is immediately down drift of the area to be paved.

The Atlantic Golf Course on Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton is a known tiger salamander hangout. The D.E.C. knows it and the Town of Southampton knows it. The information is contained in an environmental impact statement done for the owners of the golf course when the land was still agricultural. I was the one who discovered the tiger salamander breeding area there and wrote it into the impact statement. Yet both the town planning board and the D.E.C. overlooked that information and a few weeks ago permitted the golf course owners to tear up the very spot where the tiger salamander breeding area was sited.

Did you hear? The Southhampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals just overwhelmingly decided that an 18-hole golf course qualifies as an acceptable add-on use for the Hills subdivision in East Quogue. That’s a very, very big accessory use. Might as well amend the present town code to make bowling alleys, stock car tracks, shooting ranges, and spas subdivision accessory uses as well.

The Town of East Hampton is in the process of buying a 4.2-acre piece of land on the west side of Route 114, just outside of Sag Harbor, smack over the deepest part of East Hampton’s aquifer. The town is considering building as many as 20 to 30 units of work-force housing there. The septage flushing into the same small underground area will spoil the aquifer and may be drawn to two nearby Suffolk Water Authority well fields that are still unsullied as of now.

And the same town is on board with the massive turbines set to be installed 30 miles off Montauk in the middle of prime fishing grounds. The electricity produced is to be conducted through cable some 40 miles long that is to come ashore at Beach Lane in Wainscott and travel underground to an inland storage site in East Hampton. 

When one of these large storage batteries goes up in flames it’s like the Fourth of July all over again. Solar panels don’t blow up and don’t have rotors that knock birds out of the sky.

As we head into the new year, it seems to me that with respect to protecting the environment, we are still very much mired in the dark ages. Our underground water supplies are being corrupted at a fast pace, our marine and estuarine waters are turning sour with each passing day. With each new warm season the blue-green algae, coliform bacteria, and toxic phytoplankton masses come on like gangbusters. Each year another of our coastal ponds and tributaries is added to the rapidly growing list of impaired water bodies and is shut down to the public.

Notice, I left out the traffic situation, possibly the worst insult to our environment of all, not just because motorists have to inch along at a few miles per hour, but because it pollutes the air so. Long Island has one of the highest average ozone values in the state (and by the same token one of the highest sinusitis problems as well). 

At least one local politician is speaking up in a profound way on behalf of the environment. State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. is an integral part of the suit against the inclusion of the golf course as an accessory use in the Hills subdivision.

Isn’t it time to stop and think these matters through thoroughly before carelessly destroying one more butterfly or honey bee?

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

Brrrr. We knew that the mild weather wouldn’t last. So here we are shivering our timbers and wondering what comes next. Then, however, March is only a month away. Let’s hope it’s a pleasant one.

These are the doldrums, but without summer’s traffic and with a large number of snowbirds having gone south, one has to be extremely watchful. There’s always someone in the wings trying to pull something over on when a lot of people are just trying to stay warm and the environment is hibernating. 

The best way to get their attention is with sops, the kind of sops that we are seeing more and more of as Long Island maxes out and is beginning to lose it.

Sops are as old as mankind, but it is only recently that sops in the form of large offers of dough-re-me have entered into the political workings of the East End. The phrase “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” has been part of doing business for thousands upon thousands of years. But, as measured in dollars and cents, it has not been a significant part of doing planning and zoning business here on the South Fork.

For example, an out-of-town corporation called Orsted U.S. Offshore Wind, formerly Deepwater Wind, is offering the leaders of East Hampton Town a package of such monetary sops — large sums of money for this and that town improvement in the hope that those leaders will continue to look favorably upon what they are trying to sell, in this case a package of elixirs called offshore wind turbines. The company assures our leaders again and again that these several-hundred-foot-tall statues with immense twirling blades, once installed in our offshore fishing grounds, will send an everlasting supply of electricity through an underwater tube that will come ashore in Wainscott and then go inland to connect with the electrical grid.

Some sopified members of the town board and town trustees seem to have fallen for these add-ons, notwithstanding that the turbines as seen in the original presentation have gotten larger. 

One of the longest standing political leaders in the South Fork community, however, is not so easily swayed and has just put his foot firmly down, saying, “Enough is enough!” State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., who has been a town supervisor and a member of the Suffolk County Legislature, however, before becoming an assemblyman, and has always been a leader in protecting our rural environment, has turned against the offshore wind plan. As it turns out, sops in lamb’s clothing are often wolves.

Not only has Mr. Thiele rejected the sop packages attendant on the Deepwaterl/Orsted offering, he has joined in a suit against another out-of-town company that has offered even a bigger package of sops to the town of Southampton and its hamlet East Quogue, first in the form of a golf course in a large water recharge area, and second in the form of a subdivision and 18-hole golf course in the same spot. 

As you may have read in the local weeklies, East Quogue’s private water wells are already suffering serious contamination from fire-retardant foam chemicals. I ask you, would a golf course and 114 pricey residences not make the situation worse? It certainly would seem so. Three Southampton Town Board members, Democrats, have resisted, while the supervisor, also a Democrat, and the other board member, a Republican, appear to be for it.

Why all of these big sop offers here? One would think that sops in the form of large amounts of money for developmental favors would have no standing as far as the formal and lawful approval of land developments are concerned. Local laws should proscribe such offers, which seem out-and-out bribes on the face of it. In the 28 years that I served East Hampton, its various boards and staff, we never received offers of money for this or that subdivision approval or for this or that wetland permit. However, it is not only on the South Fork that monetary sop offers are gaining prominence; western Suffolk County and Nassau County are already sop ridden, as it would seem from reading Newsday and watching Long Island’s news every day.

So what should we immediately do to protect our natural resources? In my opinion, we should side with Fred Thiele and not be seduced by such offers. If Long Island’s native peoples had been fairly represented before turning over thousands and thousands of acres for a pitiful sop in the form of a handful of coins, tools, and whatnots 300 years and more ago, they would be in a much better stead now, and would not have to beg to be recognized.

—

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

As videotaped footage began playing of Greg Metzger battling a juvenile great white shark he had just hooked near Jones Beach using just the fishing rod and reel he was gripping, it was easy to momentarily forget the scientific nature of the project Mr. Metzger and the South Fork Natural History Museum are engaged in, and marvel at the spectacle. 

The shark’s teeth were bared and its gills were flaring; its tail thrashed around as it raised its head out of the water toward the boat Mr. Metzger was on, and then tried to shake free.

Mr. Metzger’s rod was bent into a large quivering ‘C’ as he moved back and forth along the boat’s side rail, occasionally fighting to keep his footing as he tried to pull the shark in. Even if it was just a juvenile — great whites are four feet long at birth — it was only natural to wonder how Mr. Metzger avoided getting pulled into the water himself as he waited for the shark to tire out so his crewmates could lasso its tail, do a scientific workup, and tag its dorsal fin before releasing it.

It’s a drill Mr. Metzger and fellow researchers have now successfully repeated 23 times to help SoFo’s three-year-old shark research and education project get the data used to establish that Long Island’s waters are the only confirmed nursery for great white sharks in the North Atlantic.

“The number-one question I always get asked is, ‘Don’t you need a bigger boat?’ ” Mr. Metzger said with a laugh, knowing it’s a repeated line in the movie “Jaws,” not just a reasonable question about the modest 21-foot Parker boat he uses to catch and tag juvenile great white and thresher sharks from Manhattan to Montauk.

“But one of the things we want to do is get ahead of the ‘Jaws’ craze and educate people about how fantastic it is to have these sharks in Long Island’s waters, and how it fits into the bigger ecological picture,” he said. 

Mr. Metzger described the program’s 2018 season for a near-capacity audience Saturday at the SoFo Museum in Southampton. He is a marine science and aquaculture teacher at Southampton High School and the field coordinator for SoFo’s shark research and education program. The program’s other principals include Frank Quevedo, SoFo’s executive director, Dr. Tobey Curtis, the SoFo program’s lead scientist, and Chris Paparo, a photographer and writer who has been documenting the group’s work and manages the Marine Science Center at Stony Brook Southampton College. Other researchers and students collaborate as well.

Last year, Mr. Curtis, Mr. Metzger, and six colleagues published a peer-reviewed article about their research for the first time in the prominent science journal Nature.

Mr. Metzger knows many people are either highly fascinated or slightly nervous to learn that sharks of all sizes, but especially great whites, summer in the Atlantic off Long Island in large numbers, along with threshers, makos, and tiger and sand sharks.

But experts agree surfers and swimmers have little reason to fear, especially if they use common sense. The risk is never zero, and you certainly don’t want to go near a school of bunker or even seals, food sources for sharks, Mr. Metz­ger said, noting that in the 100-plus years shark attacks on humans have been tracked in New York State, only 12 “negative interactions” have been confirmed.

“So, the chances are absolutely minuscule that you will have a negative encounter with a shark,” Mr. Metzger said.

Still, observers have a sense — accurate or not — that shark activity is increasing, perhaps because of climate change, or perhaps because great white sharks’ numbers seem to be rising since they became a protected species in federal waters in 1997 and state waters in 2005. A revitalized seal population could also be drawing sharks closer to shore.

Last summer, two children were bitten and slightly injured on separate Fire Island beaches on the same day, but officials never confirmed whether sharks were responsible or a large fish. Farther north, a man was killed by a shark off Cape Cod, raising further alarm, although it was the first fatal shark attack in Massachusetts in eight decades.

Mr. Metzger said sharks usually arrive on the southern shore of Long Island as early as May and typically head south by October toward the warmer waters of the Carolinas and Florida. Then the cycle repeats itself.

Mr. Metzger and his fishing cohorts use two types of tags on juvenile sharks. The most common is a satellite “pop-off” tag that collects data for 28 days. The second is a $12,000 CATS (Customized Animal Track Solutions) camera that Mr. Metzger and, more recently, Jeff Neubauer, a teacher at the Bridgehampton School, got funded to use for  the SoFo program. Both types of tags are attached to a shark’s dorsal fin.

“The CATS cam is the most sophisticated tag you can put on an animal,” Mr. Metzger said. He explained that it provides information such as the temperature and depth of the water, the angle and acceleration when an animal changes direction, and where it travels. “Plus,” he said, it has a high definition camera, so we can literally see what the animal sees. It’s like you’re strapped on its back.”

When Mr. Metzger cued up another video — this one underwater footage of a shark biting his rope and making off with his chum bucket — the audience seemed rapt.

“All you have to do is say great white sharks,” Mr. Quevedo said afterward, “and people are fascinated. They want to know more.”

The Village of Sag Harbor is more of a harbor municipality than a beach haven. There are beaches on all sides, Long Beach on the west and Ninevah beach on the east near the East Hampton Town line. My tax map book for Sag Harbor shows a possible East Hampton ownership tag for the outer beach sands lying between Sag Harbor’s Havens Beach Park and Northwest Harbor. The dredge spoil deposited on Havens Beach in the spring of 2018 was full of a bunch of curiosities including pieces of concrete, crockery, rusted hunks of metal, and other junk. The beach became more of a junkyard than the sandy beach it was prior to dredging.

Suffolk County did the dredging, but the work, which should have been screened by the village’s harbor committee, didn’t really have an overseer, or it would have been stopped shortly after it started. Apparently the collection of stuff from the harbor floor was not properly screened, thus accounting for the various largish objects and blackish underlay that now makes up a good part of the beach.

A Havens Beach group formed as a result of the strange collection of materials and this group gave an eye-opening presentation replete with maps and narrations to a packed house at the recently redone Sag Harbor Library last month.

There were three presenters, Carol Williams, Jean Held, and Terry Sullivan, all of whom were regulars at the beach for a long time before the dredging. The slide show featured early photographic representations of Havens Beach, as well as an early landscape painting done by a resident of Sag Harbor, the late Annie Cooper Boyd, in which a small stream by the name of Little Creek could be seen as it went through the marsh that was once a large part of the Havens Beach Park parcel. Thus, there was once a third creek entering the headland of Northwest Harbor in addition to Little Northwest Creek, which separates Sag Harbor from East Hampton and Northwest Creek, the largest of the three. 

Little Creek and the salt marsh that surrounded it are no longer, having been filled in with sand and other soil materials over the course of the 20th century. I looked on one of my historical United States Coast and Geodetic Survey maps, dated 1888, and sure enough, Little Creek and the salt marsh were still extant, if not in name, at least in substance, as of that year. Instead of Little Creek, now there is a longstanding man-made ditch that collects rain runoff from a fairly large watershed basin on Sag Harbor’s east side and shunts it through a pipe under Bay Street out into Northwest Harbor. Unfortunately, the culvert under the road is too small to pass all of the water through in a timely fashion and after a large rain or snow melt the water backs up and floods nearby basements and yards.

One of the saving graces of the eastern portion of Havens Beach Park, which was spared from the corrupt dredge spoil, is a large, partially vegetated sand-filled area where gulls, fish crows, some shore birds, and other bird species gather from time to time.

Before the dredging, the beach was a popular area for local dogs to not only visit, but also to defecate, to the degree that one smelly eyesore was replaced by yet another, or, maybe, there are two smelly eyesores present now instead of one.

It is still a mystery why the harbor had to be dredged at all by Suffolk County’s Department of Public Works. Some postulate that it was dredged to accommodate bigger boats with bigger and deeper hulls. Part of Sag Harbor’s fascinating history is its harbor, which has earned quite a reputation in the past for accommodating big boats, ships, even. It was the first customs port in New York State and one of the East Coast’s biggest whaling ports during the 1800s.

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

What’s happening to the global environment? What’s happening to America’s environment? What’s happening to the local environment? Air pollution is a bigger and bigger issue each year. In India and China it is much worse than in the United States, but at least you can see the pollution clearly in those two very populous countries. Here it’s invisible; you breathe in what looks like clean air, but you develop sinusitis and it doesn’t clear up for months. I couldn’t sleep last night.

Instead of going up into the atmosphere, the smoke from a neighbor’s wood stove sank down under the influence of a meteorological inversion and kept me awake. It’s automobile exhaust in the daytime, other stuff at night. Lately I have noticed that those parts of the multi-tiered bureaucracy, from the federal Environmental Protection Agency on down to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, then the County Health Department, and, finally, down to the local-level agencies — the zoning boards and planning boards — it seems that they have all relaxed their guard.

During the Nixon administration, national wetland laws enforced by the Army Corps, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and the E.P.A. came into play. Then in New York State, two very strong wetlands act laws were passed by the State Legislature, one covering tidal wetlands, another covering freshwater wetlands. Tony Taormina of the New York D.E.C., now retired, was responsible for getting them up and going, and after he retired, they were enforced on Long Island by the redoubtable Chuck Hamilton, until, in my opinion, he was forced into retirement several years back because he enforced the wetlands laws too well. Towns and villages followed suit with wetlands laws of their own. Riverhead, then East Hampton, then East Hampton Village, then Southampton, then Sag Harbor followed suit. Russell Stein, while serving as East Hampton Town attorney, wrote the one for East Hampton Town with my help. One for East Hampton Village followed, and so on and so on.

Lately, however, the D.E.C. seems to be passing out wetlands permits with very little review and the towns and villages seem to be following the state agency’s lead. It’s as if protecting the environment is falling out of fashion. For example, the only longstanding stream in Sag Harbor, Ligonee Brook, which connects the largest freshwater pond in the greenbelt between Sag Harbor and Bridgehampton to the Peconic Estuary by way of Sag Harbor Cove and then out into the bay under the North Haven bridge, is under threat from someone who wants to build a swimming pool right next to it.

That party already received what’s becoming a “no-look” permit from the D.E.C., which looks more like a Christmas card than the permits handed out in the past, despite the fact that it is the second largest alewife and American eel run east of Long Island’s most productive and most longstanding one that connects North Sea Harbor with Big Fresh Pond in Southampton. Alewives and eels are doing poorly, as you might have already discovered; the D.E.C. and local governments should bend over backward to see that they make a comeback.

The Federal Endangered Species Act of 1973, another product of the Nixon administration, was followed by New York State’s Endangered and Threatened Species Law, and we all applauded. The list of such species is always being edited and revised by the D.E.C. in collaboration with the New York State Natural Heritage Program. The tiger salamander, which is found only on Long Island in the whole state, is one of the rarest vertebrates we have. Wouldn’t you know it, the center of its South Fork population is that same Long Pond Greenbelt system. Yet the D.E.C. gave a blanket permit to Sag Harbor to build an impound area for vehicles seized by the police at the old dump, which is part of that system, eschewing public input while doing so.

Then again, the same state agency gave a wetlands permit to the Atlantic Golf Course, carved out of a potato field on the north side of Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton, that allowed the golf course contractors to wipe out the very spot where a neonate tiger salamander was discovered about 20 years ago by yours truly, even though the finding was well documented in the draft environmental impact statement for that golf course, a copy of which is on file in the D.E.C.’s Long Island office in Stony Brook and in the Southampton Town Planning Department office. The Southampton Town Planning Board followed the D.E.C.’s lead and passed a resolution to the same effect.

And who watches over and protects Long Island surface waters and groundwaters? The same D.E.C. Just look what’s happening to those waters; they are being polluted at a record pace and what’s worse, half of Long Island’s population has been drinking polluted water from the aquifers under their feet completely unsuspectingly. If it weren’t for the work of volunteer groups and the cats and dogs, the sensory systems of which are much better than our own, the groundwater pollution would have had all of us Long Islanders drinking chlorinated water from water distribution companies and water authorities or  bottled water by 2025.

Then all that water eventually passes through our bodies, mostly as urine and ends up in underground septic systems thence into the groundwater to leach to the nearest large surface water body, where the nitrogen compounds, detergents, ingested medicines, and the like wreak havoc on fish and shellfish. Putting Long Islanders’ wastewater into a sewage treatment plant, which then sends the treated water out to sea is the option that many politicians rush to, but is it the best solution? Best maybe in the short term, but not in the long term.

The oceans are not doing so well either. Who knows how much longer they can handle the effluent of 7.5 billion people.

So what’s really going on? There’s some kind of high-powered trickle-down philosophy in the glory of progress, to build and develop, build and develop, build and develop. It is as if, should you stop for a moment, the momentum will be lost and gone forever and you won’t be able to start up again. The civilization dies. So, we have big ideas like the Ronkonkoma hub, a 75,000-seat arena nearby, plans for a major expansion of the Nassau County hub, the expansion of the Belmont track area to include a hockey rink stadium.

Such grandiose plans for Long Island’s future all come with the addition of thousands of condominium units, hundreds of housing developments, more large estate houses, and scads of work force housing. Yes, these are in the wings now and only on paper, but as we speak, that paper is trickling down through the various boards until finally it is all to be stamped and certified, and then let the construction begin. Build, build, build orders are coming down from the highest echelons of government, federal to state to county and on down to you and me. And it’s not just the Republicans, it’s a conspiracy involving all parties, denominations, and races, and nursed along by a comparatively few but very powerful individuals.

In the meanwhile, what will happen to the alewife, the American eel, and the tiger salamander? We should be able to find a few in aquariums and zoos. Remember the prediction of Pitirim Sorokin, that Western civilization is now in a post-ideological stage, what he called the “sensate,” and that the next stage is “decadence.” Or put another way as Cyndi Lauper used to sing, we “just want to have fun.”

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

On Dec. 15 one of the oldest Christmas Bird Counts took place in East Hampton, the Montauk Count. Seven territories were covered by different observers — Montauk Point north, Montauk Point south, Lake Montauk west (including Hither Hills), Napeague, Accabonac in Springs, and the annual plum, Gardiner’s Island. In an unofficial tally of 5,501 birds, a total of 118 species were seen and counted under the direction of Karen Rubinstein. 

Among the winter-resident birds counted were 477 white-throated sparrows, 8 white-crowned sparrows, 40 snow buntings, 136 juncos, 5 purple finches, 1 redpoll, 45 pine siskins, 35 fox sparrows, 2 tree sparrows, 27 yellow-rumped warblers, 38 hermit thrushes, 5 winter wrens, 13 saw-whet owls, 1 snowy owl, 1,898 razorbills, 4 Iceland gulls, 281 gannets, 2 rough-legged hawks, 6 red-necked grebes, 71 horned grebes, 496 common loons, 2,469 red-throated loons, 1 Barrows goldeneye, 2 harlequin ducks, 1,445 common eiders, 830 long-tailed ducks (formerly, old squaw), 283 bufflehead, 74 ruddy ducks, 3 common mergansers (a low), 31 hooded mergansers, 43 greater scaups, 8 canvasbacks, 458 surf scoters, 961 black scoters, and 2,806 white-winged scoters. In duck hunter parlance all scoters are called “coots.” 

It is not surprising that of the 4,225 scoters in total, more than half were in the Gardiner’s Island area, which sees comparatively less waterfowl hunting than the six other survey areas. The same can be said for horned grebes (not a game species). More than half were observed in the Gardiner’s Island count area. Scoter species are usually found in high numbers during the winter in the Long Island area, but the 1,445 common eiders counted is unusual. Global warming may be stunting some local species with respect to breeding, but it seems that common eiders may be given a breeding boost. The same may be said for the 281 gannets observed.

Global warming may account for the large number of spring and summer breeders such as the large number of stay-behind robins (673), song sparrows (585), catbirds (56), and red-winged blackbirds (53) counted. 

Many bird species that used to show up in the winter on earlier counts that I attended on Gardiner’s Island — purple finch (5), red crossbill (0), common redpoll (1) — were either lacking altogether or in very short supply.

Lastly, those birds that are generally here all year, such as crows, herring gulls, and the like, were in good supply. There were 381 of the former and a whopping 1,795 of the latter counted. There were 481 chickadees, 88 tufted titmice, 431 blue jays, 186 Carolina wrens, and 247 mourning doves observed. Only one of the latter was seen on Gardiner’s Island, where birdfeeders are very few or none at all.

Some of the unusual occurrences were the two ravens observed in the Accabonac area, the two pipits counted in Montauk south, and the four tree swallows and one rough-legged hawk on Gardiner’s Island. Birds that are not “natives,” such as the starling (623), mute swan (21), house sparrow (133), and rock dove (219) from Europe, and the house finch (101) from the southwestern United States, are apparently holding their own.

Wild turkeys, which used to be here on Long Island but were missing for almost 200 years, are back in good numbers now. Seventy-five were counted in all, 43 on Gardiner’s Island, where they have been since the early 1960s. 

Pretty good day’s work, don’t you think? Nice job, Karen!