After living in my house on North Haven since I was born — nearly 54 years — we decided it was time to knock it down and build a new one that would provide many of the modern comforts and amenities that a new residence brings. After over three years of dealing with various surveys, permits, design changes, and building the house itself (and going over budget), we finally moved into the new digs in November. The house has been everything we ever wanted and expected. 

But it did come with a sobering side when the unpacking began as we settled in. It was something I think I always knew internally, but kept buried in the deepest part of my mind. Reality was exposed after opening countless boxes and it hit me pretty hard. I’m a hoarder. Not your everyday kind that you see on the popular and rather disturbing TV show, but one that focuses in a particular specialty. For me, it’s collecting an assortment of fishing tackle. 

I can’t count all of the fishing rods and reels I have in my possession after basically over half a century of collecting. There are even still some in my mother’s basement in Manorville. That’s not good. It’s also terminal tackle and gear like hooks, rigs, sinkers, knives, lures, nets, rope of all sizes and lengths, clam rakes, scallop dredges, traps, and fishing line. The list goes on and on. Do I really need seven clam knives?

In finally seeing all that I have as I unpacked, I now realize that I have more tackle and fishing-related accessories than some well-stocked bait and tackle shops I have frequented. I even have a freezer solely for storing bait and fish. 

Without a doubt, I could easily have a nice store sign made up and anchored at the entrance of my driveway signaling that I’m open to serve all of your bait and tackle needs but I don’t think my homeowners association would appreciate the new establishment.

In working with the architect, one of my first requests for the new house was to have a room dedicated to my tackle collection. Swimming pool be damned, I wanted my own space to store my stuff (junk?). He smiled and listened to my request and he came through. While all of my rods can’t fit in my new tackle room, I do have ample storage for all of my other items, some of which clearly have not been used in decades. One unearthed packet of six long-shanked flounder hooks had a faded price tag on its now yellow plastic packaging. It said 49 cents. It was probably purchased 40 years ago when I was in high school. Yet it remains part of my arsenal of tackle on display in my new room.

Truth be told, I’m still buying more stuff that in reality I probably don’t always need. Do I need an intervention? I’m not sure. As far as I know, there are no Tackle Hoarders Anonymous support groups here on Long Island.

I know a few other people who have the same affliction, and I do take comfort and solace knowing that others share my issue. As a group, we are cognizant of what we battle with, and yet we still attend various fishing and tackle shows in winter and happily talk about the latest lure, reel, rod, or other contraption that we just can’t possibly live without the rest of the time. 

Are there worse things in life than to be a tackle junkie? Sure. Will I find a cure? Probably not. It is what it is, as the saying goes. I will just have to deal with it and try to curb my enthusiasm by just saying “no” more often to the latest high-tech fishing reel imported from Japan.

In the meantime, do you need a fluke rig? If so, stop on by. I probably have nearly 200 of them for you to choose from.

Speaking of fluke, the opening of the season is just around the corner. The season runs from May 4 through the end of September. Anglers can retain four fish over 19 inches per day. And porgy aficionados will be pleased to know that they can start fishing for those early-season giant sliver platters starting on May 1. 

“Not much action on the saltwater side yet, but the fishing in fresh water has been really good,” said Harvey Bennett, the veteran owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett. “Montauk has been the hot spot in the various ponds.”

“Still very quiet around here,” agreed Ken Morse at Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor. “I got a big delivery of clams and other baits in the other day, so I’m hopeful that the porgy and fluke bite will be good when the season opens in about two weeks.” Morse did note that that a few schoolie stripers can be had from the upper reaches of Sag Harbor Cove on plugs and swimmers.

And yes, if you are curious, I have more than my fair share of such lures in my basement.

We welcome your fishing tips, observations, and photographs at fish @ehstar.com. You can find the “On the Water” column on Twitter at @ehstar­fishing.

March came in like a lion and a lioness. Now it’s time to get on with spring. Notwithstanding two major coastal storms, signs of spring have been filtering through the stormy air. On Monday, Victoria Bustamante of Montauk spotted an osprey perched on a cellphone tower on the south side of the Sunrise Highway in Hampton Bays. My wife, Julie, checked the five osprey nests along Long Beach and Sag Harbor Cove the same afternoon, but there were no ospreys to be seen.

However, she reported that the beach drive was strewn with drying vegetation and sand from the recent tidal over-washes. She also observed that the many gulls that characteristically populate Long Beach each day were lined up like sentinels, eyes focused on the bay in a long row from west to east on the rises created by the stormy tides.

There have been several reports of spring peepers from different parts of the South Fork. T.J. Devries, who listens for the first ones every spring, heard a few peeps coming from the wetland at the end of Mile Hill Road in East Hampton on Feb. 27, several days earlier than his previous record, which was March 2. Members of the Third House Nature Center heard some peepers peeping here and there on their Saturday outing around Big Reed Pond and other parts west of Montauk Point.

By this time next week, the peeper chorus should be in fine fettle.

You may have noticed that red maples are already budding and that a few familiar shrubs, forsythia in particular, are also in the throes of budding out. Drive along Swamp Road and other local back roads in East Hampton and Southampton and you can’t help but notice the burgeoning trees and shrubs. 

Such is a very pleasing sight each spring and particularly this spring in Northwest Woods, where it takes the mind off of the hundreds of downed pines, felled to control the dreaded southern pine beetle’s invasion. One wonders if such a crippling attack by this little insect has ever been experienced here or on the rest of Long Island in the past? I would think not. 

The pine borer has been killing trees west of the Shinnecock Canal for five years now. It may be just one of the many impacts of global warming we are now witnessing here and in New England.

The third great faunal event that announces the beginning of spring here, along with the return of the ospreys and the emergence of spring peepers, has yet to begin. However, the alewives are already massing in our bays and harbors and it won’t be long before they begin entering the streams and creeks in search of quiet fresh waters for spawning. The largest continuous run of this herring on Long Island is the one that has occurred every year well back into history with nary a miss from North Sea Harbor to Big Fresh Pond in Southampton Town. Unless you are standing at the edge of the little bridge where Alewife Brook runs under Noyac Road at its western terminus at 2 a.m., you are likely to miss it. But you get an idea that it is happening when you see night herons camping on the trees and ospreys making numerous passes at that spot come the second or third week of March.

Another obvious sign of the coming spring is the appearance of blackbirds and robins along the roadsides and in the fields. In these last two decades they have been joined by another thrush species, the eastern bluebird, New York’s state bird. They have been making a comeback here since 1987 when Kari Lyn Jones of East Hampton Village and her helpers started erecting bird boxes made by the late Kim Hicks of Montauk following the observance of a few bluebirds in Hither Woods in the early 1980s. Since then, under Kari Lyn’s and then Joe Giunta’s annual efforts, the local bluebird population has flourished.

The long annual march of birds from the south to the north is underway. The ospreys are returning, the spring peepers are entering freshwater ponds to spawn, and the alewives will soon join them for the same purpose. 

I am reminded by a column by Marilee Foster in The Southampton Press of the relationship between the heralds of spring and the annual rite of plowing and planting. Lest you forget, there was a time in the not-too-distant past when fishermen and farmers made up the majority of the East End population. While only a few of these observed nature to the point of becoming natural historians of note, such as the potato farmer Roy Latham of Orient and the duck farmer Roy Wilcox of Westhampton, each and every successful farmer and fisherman was a student of things happening in the great outdoors, the annual changes in weather, the changes in flora and fauna, changes in the elevation of ponds and creeks.

So, in an age when real estate agents now outnumber farmers and fishermen on the South Fork, Ms. Foster, daughter of the late, great Sagaponack farmer Cliff Foster and his wife, Lee, equally adept at growing and harvesting things, wrote in her weekly column in last week’s Press, “Just after dark, she came through the back door, into the kitchen, dropped her bags and, in an exaggerated fashion, with both alarm and delight in her voice, announced: I hear peepers!” 

You can be pretty sure that when peepers are heard for the first time each spring, a farmer or fisherman was probably the one who heard them.

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

In last week’s column, I wrote about the beginning of the local eastern bluebird season. Then I received Joe Giunta’s annual recap of the East Hampton Town area’s bluebird box yield for 2017. Joe and his volunteers have been checking out and maintaining the boxes at nine different East Hampton Town sites and two boxes on North Haven in Southampton Town for nearly 20 years. 

These boxes, originally made by the late Kim Hicks of Montauk, were first installed by the South Fork Natural History Society and East Hampton’s Natural Resources Department in 1987. At that time, there were only a few pairs of the official New York State bird breeding on the South Fork. They had been decimated in the middle 1960s in the same way that the osprey population was decimated, by DDT and other pesticides.

East Hampton Airport was one of the first sites chosen because of its openness, consisting mostly of grassy fields. Commuter plane and helicopter traffic in the 1980s was much, much less than it is today. While the airport was being modernized and expanded in the 1990s, a Department of Agriculture agent came around and asked me to remove the boxes because birds at landing fields could cause accidents. Somehow, I never got around to removing them. In fact, more were put up.

Bluebirds and tree sparrows began showing up, so we knew that we were on to something. The first few years were low in productivity. Kari Lyn Jones did most of the monitoring. But things picked up as more boxes were added. Then the bluebird population began to burgeon. Breeding bluebirds were soon joined by tree swallows and house wrens. In 2016, a great-crested flycatcher pair used one of the boxes for the first time. Instead of hanging a molted snake skin, which is one of their peculiarities, the flycatchers hung a piece of plastic ribbon from the box. During the same period the New York State Bluebird Society formed and soon the state bird was reoccupying its perch across the state.

If it weren’t for Kari Lyn, then Joe and the helpers, however, where would we be? Probably not much better than the meager population found here in the early 1980s. Running a bluebird trail entails a lot of work. The boxes have to be cleaned annually and new boxes are put up regularly to replace dysfunctional ones. At the largest population site, East Hampton Airport, the boxes were put up close to the woods. That worked for a while, but when the South Fork flying squirrel population began to increase in the first decade of the millennium, many boxes and their broods began to be predated.

Joe began removing those near the tree line and reinstalling them about 15 feet out from it, which greatly reduced the amount of squirrel predation. He also equipped the posts with raccoon guards.

When one examines the annual records, it is easy to see how much the bluebirds and tree swallows benefited from such work. For example, during the height of flying squirrel predation in the summer of 2015, not a single bluebird fledged, compared to the record year, 2012, when 143 fledged throughout the system. Then in 2016 the number of successful bluebird fledglings at the airport shot up to 100. In 2017, the number climbed to 111, the second largest ever.

Of course, other factors came into play as well. Climate, in terms of storms and rainfall, plays a part. Food stocks, in the form of insects, are also very important in determining a good year versus a bad one. It is even conceivable that reducing the flight traffic at the airport played a role. For the first time in years, during my annual South Fork summer whippoorwill census I found at least three pairs of whippoorwills breeding in the woods around the airport, as opposed to none in several years prior to the town’s imposing limits.

The airport had by far the most successful breeding bluebirds and tree swallows compared to the other 10 sites surveyed. There were 82 bluebird fledges and 104 tree swallow fledges. The next most successful fledging area surveyed was the edges of the Barcelona golf course, with 21 bluebirds and 27 tree swallows. Tree swallows are adept at catching insects — including mosquitoes, gnats, and green-eyed flies — on the wing. It is hoped that the golfers got some relief from these biting insects by virtue of the bluebirds and tree swallows there.

Mr. Giunta’s census taking for the 13 consecutive years beginning in 2005 altogether accounted for 896 bluebird and 287 tree swallow fledges, 79 of which were counted at the South Fork Country Club in Amagansett, the second most productive area locally. Last year, along with the fledglings from these two species, 74 new house wrens came out of the box holes for a grand total of 1,257 fledges in all.

During the nonbreeding season, Joe, who is an excellent birder, leads tours in more southern climes. In fact, he just got back from leading a tour in Costa Rica. Now we have him for the spring and summer breeding season. Where would we be without Joe and his helpers? And let’s see if the increased traffic at the airport yields as high numbers of fledges this year as last. 

On the East End of Long Island, both the official state and national birds are back as regular breeders. Who says we aren’t making progress?

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

Twenty percent of the protein consumed in the United States is from seafood, “and according to the United Nations, the U.S. will need to double its aquaculture production just to maintain its current level of consumption by 2030,” said Donna Lanzetta of Manna Fish Farms in East Quogue, whose company aims to become the first on the East Coast to farm fish in offshore federal waters.

“The U.S. has to do more in this area and I’m hoping our efforts with Manna will take a firm hold,” Ms. Lanzetta said. 

In late December, the New York State Economic Development Grants program awarded Manna a $250,000 grant toward the purchase of submersible cages  in which striped bass will reside underneath an automated feeding buoy on Ms. Lanzetta’s 1.5-square-mile underwater farm. Ms. Lanzetta ultimately hopes to purchase upward of 12 cages, at about $250,000 each, for the farm, set eight miles off the Shinnecock Inlet.

She is also waiting on various permits and approvals to secure her pens to the ocean floor, as well as to solidify her operations onshore. 

“The U.S. is way behind many other countries in the world in developing marine aquaculture,” Ms. Lanzetta said. “The simple fact is that the U.S. is exporting a large percentage of its wild catch and is importing more than 90 percent of its seafood from poorly regulated markets like Asia, that offers an inferior, cheap product. It does not make sense.” 

Ms. Lanzetta plans to use submersible cage and automated feed technologies to grow local, wild species of finfish, as well as research integrated, multi-trophic aquaculture with kelp and sea scallops. 

On Long Island, marine aquaculture has largely taken the form of oyster farming. Several dozen independent operators have grown their passion into sizable, year-round operations to help fulfill the demand for the briny and tasty bivalves in many fine dining establishments on Long Island, Manhattan, and beyond. It too takes a lot of work and care over several years for an oyster to grow and mature from tiny spat into being served ice-cold on the half shell in a restaurant. 

And for fish, it takes years to secure the various permits and approvals to even get the project off the ground. “For sure, it’s an in and Ocean Engineering, St. Joseph’s College, and the University of Rhode Island. “We have received great support and guidance from so many people,” she said. “They have all been wonderful partners who we will work closely with as we continue to expand.” 

She pointed out that if she were to raise striped bass to maturity and eating size (her final permits will formally declare what size fish she will be allowed to harvest and sell), the majority of the stripers would be sold when the New York commercial season for that species is closed (Dec. 15 to June 1). “We don’t want to flood the market at peak times with fish or harm any of those involved on the commercial side. Providing if we do farm striped bass, I look at this venture as filling the gap when the bass season is closed and the demand is still there.”

Already, she said, “I’m getting a lot of job inquiries and in 10 years or so, I can easily see us having 80 to 85 people involved.” 

Last month she was in Las Vegas to attend the World Aquaculture Society’s annual meeting, where she served on a panel on the latest aqua tools technology. “It was a great opportunity to network and continue to learn about the latest trends in aquaculture,” she added. “The aquaculture industry in the U.S. is growing but we are still a laggard compared to so many countries.”

I just read in today’s New York Times that Nashville has a case of the demolition blues. I may have the same sickness. I also read a reminiscence by Beth Howard, a writer who rented the little farmhouse in Eldon, Iowa, made famous by Grant Wood’s 1930 painting “American Gothic.” Two American themes going in the opposite direction.

 I’ve been spending a lot of time lately watching the BBC series “Blue Planet II.” As a trained ecologist I thought I knew just about everything in nature and how it worked. Wrong! It turns out that nature is much deeper, much more mysterious, much more complicated than in my naive view of it. It is as if we have only scratched the surface. When one adds up all of the species of flora and fauna and all of the microbes, the number of which is increasing every day as new life is discovered, together with the geology, oceanography, hydrology, climatology, and meteorology, not to mention subatomic particles, all acting and reacting in unison with every single tick of the clock, one can be completely overwhelmed, but pleasantly so. 

It is always more rewarding to discover what you don’t know than what you already know or think you know.

In our individual snapshots of life as witnessed through our senses and devices, we know a great deal, yes, but only a tiny bit of what there is to discover if we lived forever. What little we do know about the expansion (or contraction) of the cosmos is fascinating and, some would say, a reason for living.

As an evolving species, ever since we fashioned and used the first tool, we have been changing behaviorally at a rapid rate. Look around. Other species stay put. If they were to change their minimalist cultures as we change ours, we would be beside ourselves. If robins didn’t return each spring, if deciduous trees didn’t leaf out, if the flowers in our gardens didn’t bloom, if the sun didn’t rise and set at precise times throughout the year, we would be lost, and no doubt go crazy in a very short time. Our sense of reality and, yes, saneness is based on all of the natural phenomena around us. If the moon stopped rising and setting, the tides and waves became still, the winters became hot and the summers ice-cold, we would be lost.

If you grew up in a small spot on the Earth as I did in Mattituck on the North Fork, you became part of the slow human rhythm controlling such places. You got used to that rhythm and felt at home in it, drew confidence and meaning from it. The flora and fauna were part of that rhythm. The spring birds came back and began singing their territorial songs and building circular nests out of pieces of vegetation. Earthworms came up from the ground. Trees leafed out in the spring, became brilliant come fall, then dropped their leaves, and the ambience became drab and somnolent. And we small-town inhabitants (hicks?) became somnolent as well. We didn’t try to be otherwise. In today’s parlance, we went with the flow.

Today, our environment is changing so rapidly that we are beginning to lose our rhythms. One goes away for a year or two, comes back, and there next door, an old familiar house is gone, the neighbor with it, a new, much larger one stands in its place, and fierce outside lights stare down at you at night from the second story. Down the block a bit, there is a new spa, a huge building with rows and rows of locomotory machines with rows and rows of people walking on them but going nowhere. The corner grocery store has a “for sale” sign on it. A ride through the countryside is no longer a ride through the countryside. One shiny new big house after another stand in a row. They block out the view of the fields you came to know as you passed them year after year, season after season.

That bayman, a longstanding friend of yours, who eked out a living with his rakes, traps, and seines one year after another, finding something to fish for every day, and every once in a while leaving some clams or a sea bass on your doorstep, has moved to North Carolina, where it is much warmer and cheaper. 

That familiar back road that was bordered by shoulders with bird’s-foot violets and lupine in the spring, asters and goldenrods in September, now has grassy shoulders, and behind them, miles of fences and lawns where there used to be only native shrubs and trees. The road has become so well traveled by motor vehicles that one can smell the exhaust plume they leave.

That wood thrush that used to sing so prettily each May morn outside your window has been replaced by starlings. The brown thrasher is gone. In the evening you don’t hear the whippoorwill. They used to keep you awake, but now you miss them.

Come late fall when all of the leaves have fallen, you begin to hear a new continuous noise, loud and obnoxious: The lawn mowers have turned silent, but the leaf blowers are out in force. The leaf rake has become a thing of the past, of yard sales and antiques shops.

You begin to take stock of the differences as you struggle to maintain your rural rhythm. In your old neighborhood, where there once were baymen, carpenters, and other tradesmen, there are now seasonal comers and goers, night-lighted driveways, fancy cars, hedges, and a deer fence or two. And, oh yes, they all have that familiar yellow tag at the edge of the road shoulder advertising a recent pesticide treatment.

And where you used to know everyone on your block, you suddenly realize that you now know very few people living there. And they speak a different English than that which you heard when you were growing up. Almost no one says “yes, yes” and “finest kind” anymore, and they speak so fast, it’s hard to understand them.

Yes, yes, things have changed and the rate of change is accelerating. It can be very upsetting. Makes one want to stay inside during much of the year. To keep from going mad, every once in a while I take a trip back to Mattituck, where they still role the streets up by 8:30 every evening. Little has changed. There are still lots of farm fields and houses, and few fences. It is quiet and sublime, for the most part. It makes me wonder if the Baltimore orioles will return to my Noyac yard this May as they have done every year since I moved here in 1979. If they don’t, I will miss them sorely.

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

A 50-pound gray seal that had become entangled in a piece of gill netting was rescued on Saturday, a little after noon, on the shore between Georgica and Main Beaches.

East Hampton Village police responded after receiving a call from a Lily Pond Lane resident who had been walking along the beach and noticed the seal in distress. The officer dispatched to investigate found the seal above the tide line, near the dune. The officer, Christopher Hansen, contacted the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, sending them images of the seal from his cellphone. The netting the seal was trapped in appeared to have broken off from a larger net, or perhaps from a fishing line, East Hampton Village Police Sgt. Matthew Morgan said Monday. 

According to Nicole Valenti, a coordinator for the foundation, a two-person rescue team was dispatched to the beach. The team reached the seal on foot, then transported it back to the truck in a crate. From there, the seal was taken to Riverside, where it was freed from the netting in the foundation’s treatment room.

Charles Bowman, president of the foundation, said Monday that while the seal had not suffered any cuts from the netting, he did have a high white blood cell count. That may have been caused by internal injury or infection brought on by the seal’s struggle, he said. The National Fisheries Institute was notified about the incident, which was classified as being caused by human interaction. “He is lucky that he was found when he was,” Mr. Bowman said.

Seals rescued by the foundation in 2018 are being given names of different flavors of ice cream, Mr. Bowman said Monday. 

Dublin Mudslide, a Ben and Jerry’s flavor, is the moniker the seal has been given, Ms. Valenti said yesterday. The name was chosen because it was found on St. Patrick’s Day. “He is very active, and is eating on his own,” she said. His white blood cell count is still high, and he has been put on antibiotics. 

When the seal is back in good health, he will be released into Shinnecock Bay, where there is a thriving seal population.   

Just about everyone has a rough idea of what “food chains” and “food pyramids” are. The ones at the very bottom are the microbes, single-celled diatoms and the like; the ones at the top are the “top” carnivores. In one respect, the human is a top carnivore. In another, a top herbivore. In all respects — strict vegetarians omitted — an omnivore.

We are the topmost carnivores when we eat, say, the flesh of a mako shark, another top carnivore. Occasionally, a top carnivore, say a tiger, lion, or grizzly bear, will eat one of us, making that beast a topmost carnivore, and so on.

Very few terrestrial top carnivores — tigers, jaguars, grizzly bears, leopards, crocodiles, bald eagles, Komodo dragons, and the like — hunt in packs. Most are individual hunters. A few species such as wolves, wild dogs, hyenas, and occasionally lions will hunt in packs, but the packs rarely number more than seven or eight individuals.

It’s different in the seas, however. Sharks often school, especially for reproduction, but sometimes for hunting. Orcas are marine mammals that hunt in packs. Some seal species also hunt in packs. Seals are frequently preyed upon by orcas, which are at the very top of the food pyramid and at the very end of the food chain.

Size is an important consideration in rating carnivore success. Lions and tigers are the largest cats, white sharks the largest carnivorous sharks. Crocodiles can reach 20 feet in length. Boa constrictors and pythons can get almost that long. 

Yet, as big as carnivores can be, they are not as large as the largest herbivores. On land we think of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, Cape buffaloes, water buffaloes, moose, gorillas, and giraffes. These are all herbivores, and they are larger than all carnivores. In the seas the carnivorous sharks, whales, seals, and dolphins are not as large as the whale sharks, basking sharks, and baleen whales, such as the largest of them all, the blue whale, which sieves krill and plankton. Thus size is a very good deterrent to being eaten.

Speed is another deterrent, but even the speediest of antelopes, deer, and their kin can be captured by big carnivores, especially when those carnivores are ones that hunt in packs. Terrestrial herbivores have another defense against predation. They feed and travel in large groups called herds. A few individuals from each herd are enough to sate the appetites of the carnivores that hunt them. A few are sacrificed for the sake of maintaining the bulk of the herd. In numbers there is survival.

Many top carnivores are loners. They pair up for reproduction, but the rest of the time they fend for themselves. Lions, hyenas, and wolves are exceptions. Wolf packs are led by the alpha males and are highly organized. Snow leopards, jaguars, tigers, lynxes, coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, and cheetahs, except for coming together to mate, are solitary. There is a good reason for females avoiding the company of males, except for the purposes of reproduction: if hungry, the males will feed on the young cubs.

In the ocean, very often a group of whales traveling in a pod will all be female or all male. Fish, however, very rarely travel in same-sex schools.

Herbivores can be exceedingly long-lived and a few are known to be centenarians. Elephants, macaws, and turtles can live that long. The mammoth Galapagos tortoises that can weigh nearly a ton and our own much smaller box turtles can live to be more than 100 years old. There is always an exception to the rule. The longest living animal of all — the Greenland shark, in the sleeper shark family — can live to be more than 300 years old, and perhaps even as old as 500 years. It’s a carnivore that mostly eats fish.

Albert Durer lived in the 16th century. He was a printmaker and artist. One of his well-known works is a large fish pursuing a smaller fish, which in turn is pursuing an even smaller fish — a classic, if old, reproduction of a marine food chain. Food chains can be very long. A one-celled plant, say, a small diatom, is often at the very bottom. It can be ingested by a large unicellular protozoan, which in turn is eaten by a multicellular but very small hydra, which in turn is eaten by a minnow. The minnow is then swallowed by a snapper, which in turn becomes food for the striped bass. The striped bass can end up in the stomach of a very large grouper or mako shark.

On land, a beetle is eaten by a white-footed mouse, which is killed and eaten by a short-tailed shrew, only to be eaten by a black racer, which is subsequently wolfed down by a coyote. Terrestrial food chains are generally shorter than aquatic and marine ones. The food pyramid is different. The carnivore at the peak of the pyramid feeds on one or two organisms, say shrews, on the next level, the shrew feeds on several beetles, the beetle feeds on several ants, the ants feed on several nematodes, and so on, down to the smallest single-celled plant or bacterium. 

As a general rule, 10 percent of the nutritive value from each individual at one level makes it up to the next ascending level and so on. If there are six different trophic levels, one-tenth of onetenth of one-tenth of one-tenth of onetenth of the original protoplasm becomes part of the top-level predator. That is why the food pyramid is widest at the bottom with a single block at the top.

To provide an example of the most important second or third-level organism in North Atlantic waters, we will consider the sand lance, Ammodytes americanus.

It’s no bigger than a silverside or killifish, yet it is the most prolific marine baitfish around. Destroy the annual sand lance crop, with poisons or by tearing up the bottom in which they tunnel or setting off large underwater explosions, and a very bad fishing year will follow, for both commercial and recreational fishers.

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

It all started on Jan. 16 when I received an email from Debbie Kuntz of Montauk. Debbie had been driving on Montauk Highway in Water Mill when she looked up and saw a mature bald eagle flying south. Seeing an eagle was a thrill in itself, but she noticed that it was carrying a stick in its beak as it headed toward the area that was once occupied by the Mecox duck farm but is now condominiums. She wondered if eagles could be nesting so early in the year. Debbie’s report was soon followed by other reports, including one by Vicki Bustamante several days later, of a bald eagle flying around in the same area.

Then came a report from Terry Sullivan, who received a photo of two eagles from the unsung bald eagle expert Greg Boeklen, who has been keeping track of America’s national bird here on the South Fork ever since they took up residence early in this decade. A pair of bald eagles was mating on the ice at Kellis Pond, in other words in the same Mecox Bay watershed to which Ms. Kuntz’s eagle was headed.

Last year there were reports of both ospreys and bald eagles flying or roosting in the vicinity of Kellis Pond, fishing but not reproducing. Mr. Boeklen’s photo was the icing on the cake. Somewhere near Kellis Pond and Mecox Bay two eagles were taking up residence on the South Fork and seriously involved in the act of procreation for the first time in more than a century.

Last year was a record year in terms of bald eagle sightings. People spotted both adult and immature eagles, but there were no reports of nest-building here. 

It was Mary Laura Lamont, a federal ranger assigned to a sanctuary in Mastic,  who first opined that bald eagles were again nesting on Long Island after an absence of more than 70 years. Year after year, she and her husband took part in the annual Christmas bird count for Montauk, which included her census territory, Gardiner’s Island. It was 2008 when she noticed a humongous nest in a tree there and a pair of adult eagles hanging around. With each subsequent December count there she became more and more convinced that a pair of eagles was regularly nesting there.

In the spring of 2015, Mary Laura looked up while at the Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge in Shirley and saw a mature bald eagle. Later she found a nest. Then in mid-spring 2016, I got a call from Clarissa Tybeart at the Nature Conservancy’s Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island. Eagles were nesting there and were feeding two chicks, perhaps in the same nest that Mary Laura had seen on a previous trip.

Bald eagles were nesting on Long Island once again! Four active nests were reported in 2016.

In 2017 they were joined by another. Newsday reported on March 30 that two eagles were nesting on the Great Neck Public School campus in Nassau County.

Apparently, bald eagles do nest early, before the ospreys return. Thus, the adults have to catch their own fish and other prey, rather than steal it from fish hawks, a favorite pastime. An email to Mike Scheibel at Mashomack further elucidated the local eagles’ breeding situation. Mike, the natural resources director at Mashomack, is a former New York State Department of Environmental Conservation wildlife employee and longtime osprey census-taker who regularly checks out the wildlife on Robins Island in the two Peconics. A pair of bald eagles has been nesting at Mashomack every year since their nest was first discovered in 2014, he said. In 2014 two young fledged, in 2015 there were three, in 2016, three more, and in 2017 there were two fledglings.

Parenthetically, after a very long and very valuable service tending to Long Island’s natural history, Mike is retiring come May. Some of you may remember another steward of our natural environment, Russell Hoeflich, once head of the South Fork Nature Conservancy, who moved on to Oregon’s Nature Conservancy, was head of the Peregrine Falcon Fund in Boise, Idaho, and now leads the advocacy group 1000 Friends of Oregon. 

While at Southampton College, he served as an intern with Mike in the early days of the D.E.C.’s endangered and threatened species program. Excuse me for rambling, but did you know, too, that our very own Marge Winski, native of Montauk, keeper of the lighthouse, and fellow graduate of Southampton College, took care of some of the first peregrine falcon chicks that fledged from atop the New York’s Con Edison Building?

The college is now defunct, but Russell and Marge continue to help look after the natural world. If it weren’t people like them, as well as Mary Laura and Mike and many other dedicated naturalists, many of whom work locally, bald eagles and peregrine falcons would still be on the federal endangered species list. Notwithstanding politics, we are making progress.

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

Concerned Citizens of Montauk has released results of ground and surface-water tests for illness-causing pathogens from samples taken in January.

Four of the 13 sites in East Hampton scored high for the presence of enterococcus bacteria. One site had a medium score; the remainder were low.

The highest counts recorded in East Hampton were taken from a man-made swale behind the Methodist Church, across Montauk Highway from the East Hampton Post Office, which registered 1,010 colony-forming units, and at the Village Green bioswale, opposite the East Hampton Library, where 710 units were detected.

By comparison, medium levels were found at the Georgica Pond kayak launch off Montauk Highway and low levels were detected at Pussy's Pond in Springs.

The study was conducted by C.C.O.M. in partnership with the Surfrider Foundation's Blue Water Task Force.

The study is designed to establish a baseline of pollutants at individual sites over time. The information may be used to identify the sources of bacterial contamination and to develop effective wastewater management.

Water samples are collected monthly in Montauk, Amagansett, East Hampton, Sag Harbor, and in other Long Island areas.

In tests taken this month, the Methodist Church swale bacteria level had declined to 86 units, a medium level; the Village Green site remained in the high range, C.C.O.M. announced on Wednesday.

Other sites with high bacteria counts in the February tests were South Beach and West Creek in Lake Montauk and in the creek at Fresh Pond in Amagansett.

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This article has been updated to clarify that the United States Geological Survey in not involved in the bacteria testing. The U.S.G.S. will be a part of a new project to try to identify sources of contamination in Lake Montauk.

The leaves, except the very lowest, are off the local hardwood trees, most of which are oaks, with fewer hickories, beech, sassafras, and maples. As one drives along the back roads and looks up to either side, the globular bundles of dried leaves and twigs stand out. They’re mostly the size of soccer balls — we would have a hard time trying to fit inside — but they are the perfect size for gray squirrels, our most common mammal larger than a rat.

Squirrels, especially flying squirrels, like holes with cavities in the boles of trees, but these are hard to come by here and most are taken by the likes of woodpeckers, bluebirds, crested flycatchers, owls, and even white-footed mice. So the majority of our gray squirrels tough it out during the cold winter months in what are called “dreys.” Almost no one who isn’t a squirrel zoologist or mammalogist uses the term drey, but it can be handy when writing about squirrels.

Because the acorn crop was unusually bad in 2017, while other nut-bearing trees didn’t make out so well either, one might surmise that the number of dreys would be down compared to the very good nut year of 2016. Also, gray squirrels crossing roads looking for nuts have become the most common roadkill, outnumbering cottontails, raccoons, and opossums in total.

But a drey can be the perfect place to get the population going again. The female spends most of her winter months preparing for the young that will issue in mid-spring. In some cases a drey is used again and again, with the drey keeper taking time out from her busy day to keep it tight and nearly rainproof. 

I’ve been counting the dreys of Southampton and East Hampton lately as I drive from place to place on business, the way I count deer, birds, roadkills, and other things of natural history interest. On Monday I cruised the back roads of East Hampton for two and one-half hours looking for dreys. One can windshield-survey about 50 feet in on either side of the road, so you miss a lot of the deeper-in ones. My hypothesis was that there should be fewer this year than in previous years because of the record low acorn crop. I started on Route 114 between Sag Harbor and East Hampton, then I checked out several back roads all the way to Old Stone Highway in Amagansett. 

Several roads in northwestern East Hampton have as many conifers, almost all pines, as hardwoods, and you don’t find many dreys in such areas as Swamp Road or Old Northwest Road. The southern flying squirrel, which has been building its numbers and spreading its distribution on the South Fork since the late 1990s, prefers conifers for nest building and very much prefers cavities to leaf nests, but it does make them.

Monday was mild and calm, so it was a good day to check out the diseased pines that had been cut down and were still lying out in plain sight. I was quite surprised at the extent of them; they started on the east side of Route 114 and appeared on and off all the way over to the west side of Three Mile Harbor. By the looks of things, the southern pine beetle is far from finished.

I wondered whether the busiest roads I traveled, such as Route 114, would have as many nests per mile as the less traveled roads, and would dreys be more common around houses than in sparsely populated areas where there is much less feeding of winter birds? 

The former guess seemed to hold water, as I couldn’t see one drey on either side of 114 throughout its length. Last week I traveled the length of Sagg Road in eastern Southampton Town. It runs from Sag Harbor all the way south to the ocean and has many fewer houses per mile than most of the other roads here and not nearly the traffic that, say, Noyac Road, the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, or Route 114 has. From Montauk Highway to the end of Sagg Road in Sag Harbor, there were at least 30 dreys to be seen on either side of the road, with the west side outnumbering the east side.

On Monday the road with the most dreys, 29 per mile, was Neck Path in Springs, which runs from its junction with the north end of Accabonac Highway and Old Stone Highway east for a mile to meet the eastern part of Old Stone Highway. It revealed 36 dreys from one end to the other, from 20 to 40 feet high in trees on both sides of the road. It has very few houses and relatively little traffic. Three Mile Harbor Road, from its intersection with Abraham’s Path to where it becomes Hog Creek Road at its northern terminus and running east to Springs-Fireplace Road, had 8.66 dreys per mile, for a total of 39, followed by Springs-Fireplace Road, at 6.9 dreys per mile.

In all, 36.5 miles of East Hampton roads produced 232 dreys, or 6.5 dreys per mile. If one had X-ray eyes and could see hundreds of feet into the forests on both sides of the road, the number would be several times higher. The very busy Noyac Road, which runs about 10 miles from North Sea to Sag Harbor, accounted for only eight nests on Monday morning, suggesting that in spite of the fact that it is mostly bordered on either side by oaks and other hardwoods, its heavy use is a deterrent. 

On the same morning, but earlier, Route 24, which connects Hampton Bays with Riverhead and runs for miles, had only one or two dreys. It may be that its low squirrel population has to do with the fact that the bordering hardwoods are not as numerous as the bordering pitch pines.

So it would seem that the roads well traveled and the roads ensconced in evergreens had fewer squirrels than the other kinds.

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