Are there flowering plants that live in the seas? Yes, they are called sea grasses because, like land grasses, they are monocots, plants that only display a single leaf upon emerging from the seed. 

If you stoop down and look at an acorn seedling coming from the rooted acorn, you will see a tiny stem with a pair of similar leaflets facing out in opposite directions. The majority of flowering plants — the ones in your gardens and the trees and shrubs in the forest — are dicots. In salt marshes and shallow tidal water bodies, monocots greatly outnumber dicots.

The most common of the sea grasses belong to the genus Zostera, and the most common of the Zostera species is the one we treasure so highly locally, Zostera marina, or eelgrass. Of all sea grasses this one has the widest world distribution. It is found on both American coasts, in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and elsewhere throughout the world’s oceans. Almost all plants are autotrophic, and eelgrasses are no different. They require sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to make energy for growth and reproduction. The deeper the marine habitat, the less light penetration, thus eelgrasses are coastal as are most marine algae.

There may be no more important species in the world than eelgrass for providing food, cover, and other niches for vertebrates and invertebrates. Sea turtles, geese, fish, dudongs, and small crustaceans feed on it. Bay scallops, crabs, fish, and other animal life live in it. It is the keystone species for much shallow-water marine life. A healthy bay bottom is one with a healthy cover of eelgrass. Locally, all of Long Island’s tidal waterways were in large part once covered with eelgrass.

In 1931 a wasting disease, in the form of a slime mold, struck the waters bathing Long Island and the rest of our Atlantic Coast. There was close to a 100-percent die-off of eelgrass. But, as in most other such eat-and-be-eaten situations, once the prey species is eliminated, so follows the elimination of the predator. 

Eelgrass made a spectacular, if slow, comeback, and by the mid-1960s, it was so common that it almost became a nuisance, clogging waterways and making it difficult for powerboats to get around, and using up all of the available oxygen in the water.

As the eelgrass came back, so did the bay scallop population, so winter flounders and blue-claw crabs throve as well. Lake Montauk, Northwest Creek, Three Mile Harbor, Accabonac Harbor, and Hog Creek were chockablock full of eelgrass and associated marine life. It was a bayman’s paradise, but also a high time for the recreational fisher. When I started working for the Town of East Hampton in 1983, neither eelgrass nor its tasty inhabitants was in short supply.

But then, in 1985, all of a sudden the bay waters became broadly discolored. A new phytoplankton entered the scene, a brown algae species. The waters became opaque, sunlight barely reached the bottom, oxygen levels were greatly reduced, and there was a massive die-off of local eelgrass beds. Coincidentally, scallop harvests dropped off to almost zero. Only Napeague Harbor was spared, mainly, because its two inlets allowed for ample in-and-out tidal water and it was shallow enough to have sufficient light reach the bottom. While the attenuated bay scallop die-off was felt throughout the Peconics, Napeague’s scallops survived, if barely, and once the waters cleared, restarted the local population.

By 1995, the eelgrass situation was so dire that we enlisted Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County to help us plant back the eelgrass population, using stock from plants that had survived in Napeague Harbor. A few of the transplants — one in Three Mile Harbor — took, but year after year efforts were generally to no avail. Napeague’s stocks held out and in the early years of the new millennium the East Hampton Town Trustees declared the Napeague beds an eelgrass sanctuary. They were marked off by buoys, and shellfishing in them was discouraged. 

At the same time, and for some unknown reason, Hog Creek’s bottom was covered with a rich lawn of eelgrass. A few years ago, that population crashed as well. Three Mile Harbor’s remaining bed off the Duke estate and Springy Banks on the west side was gone by 2008.

The layman can get an idea of the health of local eelgrass beds without resorting to aerial photography, underwater videography, or visual inspection by simply walking the bay beaches in the fall and winter. That is when seaweeds and eelgrass plants wash up en masse. In olden days, there was so much dead, drying eelgrass on the beach that it was gathered up by the cartload and used for insulation in houses, put on planting beds to enhance growth as a mulch, even fed to livestock as a kind of hay.

In the age before plastic, fiberglass, and asbestos, dried eelgrass was the insulation of choice.

The slime mold did not do the eelgrass in this time around; it was several factors, notably a lack of light penetration, but also storms, pollution, and phytoplankton blooms. In March of 1984 there was a terrific northeaster that brought carnage to the shores of East Hampton all the way out to Montauk Point. Could that have been the trigger for the 1985 die-off? Large-scale roiling of bottom sediments during such storms changes the nature of the waters overnight and is hard on algae, eelgrass, scallops, and other marine organisms.

Springy Banks in East Hampton was once occupied by the local Native Americans. These days the only bit of Native-American lore left in that area is Wigwam View Lane. It gets its name from freshwater springs situated along the shore below the banks. This fresh water now contains a lot of nitrogenous chemicals that come from the septic systems of all of the houses on top of the banks and the hillside between the harbor and Springy Banks Road. Eelgrass does not do well in waters tainted by human waste products.

Then there is Northwest Creek, with very few houses around it and much less septic waste input than Three Mile Harbor. Yet this shallow-bottom waterway was one of the first to lose all of its eelgrass in the 1980s and remains bereft of eelgrass today.

Some say global warming is to blame for the die-off that now plagues both the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts. In the summer of 2016 I made a quick survey of local bay eelgrass beds from Montauk to the Shinnecock Canal. There was one area where I found a huge amount  of fresh eelgrass washed up — near the inlet of Bullhead Bay in Southampton.

Could this spot be the spawning ground of an eelgrass comeback? Sebonac Creek and Scallop Pond at its upper end, once rich with both eelgrass and bay scallops alike, is close by. 

Don’t hold your breath.

When I was a boy growing up in Mattituck I poked around everywhere and at everything, collecting many of the things I found, be they animate or inanimate, or, as they say in Twenty Questions, “animal, vegetable, or mineral.” 

I knew what each was after seeing or collecting it more than once, but I could not identify many by name, and none by its technical of scientific name. That came much later.

I knew what a spider was and could separate many different kinds by their appearance. Having learned about black widow spiders from media accounts early on, I would check each blackish spider to see if it had a red spot on its abdomen. I checked hundreds of dark colored spiders as a child; not one had any red on it. It was not until I taught at a community college in Salem, Ore., that I saw my first bona fide black widow up close and, in fact, began raising them in jars in the laboratory I worked out of.

When I came back to Long Island in 1974 as a professional terrestrial and marine ecologist I continued to examine every spider I came in contact with — no black widows. Then in the 1990s Stuart Vorphal called me up to say he had a black widow for me. He had lived here all his life and it was the first one he ever saw here. I was surprised to see that the red spot on the abdomen was on its back, not on the bottom as with the West Coast black widows. 

After that, I received a black widow report, sometimes with photos, every two or three years. They all had the red spot on the back, not the bottom. Rusty Hines, a surveyor, sent me a picture of one he found in his driveway. Another surveyor once brought me a black widow with its web of eggs. I took it home.

My house in Noyac has been occupied by one or more black widows ever since. One lived between window sashes for several years before disappearing a couple of years ago. As the reader may have already guessed, the common name for these poisonous spiders in the genus Latrodectos, found throughout much of America and elsewhere, comes from the fact that the female, after insemination by the male, frequently kills him and dines on his innards. In fact, prospective males can tell if she has eaten another by a scent from the silk in her web, which causes many of them to back off.

The large praying mantis, which itself is common to these parts, could also be named a widow if it weren’t for the fact that her posture so resembles someone praying. She, too, is known to devour her male mate after copulation. Nothing goes to waste, neither in the black widow household nor the female praying mantis’s. While we go out of our way to avoid contact with black widows, we don’t mind Mrs. Mantis because she feeds on a lot of insects that eat our flowering plants. She is our Lone Ranger of sorts.

Sexual habits of organisms in nature vary widely. Originally, humans were known for their “missionary” form of sexual contact, but in the modern world there are now many, many variants. 

Infrahumans, as we sometime refer to them, are still single-minded when it comes to their reproduction. For them, sex is solely about reproduction, not necessarily about pleasure and ecstasy. In other mammals, females come into “heat” mostly once a year, sex occurs, and the rest has to do with prenatal and postnatal development. It may sound boring to many of use neo-moderns, but it still works to keep the population going.

Many, many insects only have sex and reproduce once in a lifetime. This is especially true of the crane flies, an insect that resembles a giant mosquito and is known by that name in several parts of the world. 

My daughter, Angela, in San Francisco recently emailed me about a large number of giant mosquitoes suddenly appearing there. Having just witnessed a local crane fly eruption, I wrote to tell her what they were. Crane flies are harmless to humans. They don’t bite and many don’t get to feed after pupation into adults. They exist for the singular act of mating and then laying eggs, after which they die. We might think, “Not much of a life,” but it does work. Witness the fact that there are about 15,000 different species of crane flies worldwide.

To get back to poisonous spiders and away from reproduction for the moment, a second poisonous spider, the brown recluse, Loxosceles reclusa, has become just as common as the black widow in this area. I was bitten by one on my left leg just below the knee in my room at home a week ago. I’ve been bitten or stung by so many arthropods — ticks, mosquitoes, gnats, green-eyed flies, hornets, bees — hundreds of times over a long lifetime, but never bitten by a spider until I encountered the brown recluse in my room. It was an unusual bite; it hurt more than it itched. It swelled upward and outward, and became hard and discolored at the same time. I treated it like a tick bite. I lanced it, drained it, and soaked it in ethyl alcohol. After two days it was nothing more than a tiny pustule and gave not a shred of pain.

Black widow bites, on the one hand, can make one sick, feverish, and achy, and they hurt like the dickens. The brown recluse bite, if not treated immediately, can grow in size and depth to the extent where a limb needs to be amputated. You may ask how I know it was a brown recluse bite. I know because I have the culprit, about three-quarters of an inch long, wrapped up in a snug silky web and still very much alive, fastened to the outside of the windowpane closest to my bed.

If you would like my brown recluse, I might part with it, but only if you first agree to take care of it.

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

It’s 3 p.m. on Sunday and the sun is shining in full glory following three days of cloudy rainy weather. The robins and cardinals are singing their territorial songs, the trees are beginning to leaf out, the red maples are flowering, and the scarlet and black oaks are following in their stead. By the time this goes to press, the shads and beach plums will be in bloom, to be followed by the dogwoods, then the mountain laurels. It is spring as I remember it.

There is another part of spring’s coming that is just as precious to me, and I was reminded of it by reading Nancy and Benny Graboski’s late son’s poem, written when he was 16 in last week’s local weeklies.

It recalled the wonderful prelude to the annual spring plowing and the planting of the first potatoes on the Graboski farm in Bridgehampton. Potatoes were king on eastern Long Island for more than three-quarters of a century, long before Idaho got into the business.

Many people do not know that potatoes are one of the many vegetables grown here that are not started from seed. Instead, they are started by cutting up “seed” potatoes in March into three or four sections, each with an “eye” that is a pale green bud just starting out. On the North Fork the Polish women would sit in a small shed on improvised seats and with deft strokes of sharp knives carve the potatoes into viable sections for planting, all the time chatting and having a grand time, or so it seemed to me as I sat and watched and cut up a few potatoes myself.

They diced the potatoes as quickly and expertly as the oyster and scallop shuckers removed the shellfish meats, another seasonal rite practiced every fall when potatoes grown from the spring eyes are still being harvested. John Deere, Farmall, and Massey-Harris tractors would then be started up for the first time in the new year and the potato pieces would be put into the ground with a planter in tow. Up and down, back and forth, the tractors would put-put until in a few days thousands of acres of loamy soil would become seeded and ready to sprout.

While the farmers and their sons and helpers were planting those potatoes, another memorable rite of spring would be in progress. Trap fishermen would be setting their traps along the shores of the bays and harbors, haulseiners would be mending their quarter-mile-long beach seines, lobster and conch fishermen would be setting their pots. Commercial fishing and big farming went hand in hand. The rest of us took part as bystanders, whatever we were doing, wherever we were doing it, you could see it, smell it, hear it. The promise of spring was in full motion and our spirits were looking up.

From then on, every time you passed a freshly tilled field you would look for the first green sprouts. Every time you went by a waterway your nose would be sniffing for the scent of bunkers, eyes searching for dark moving patches of water.

You knew the very moment the fish arrived. The gulls would go crazy, the terns would be diving for killies and spearing, the ospreys for larger fish. All of a sudden the lands and waters that had lain dormant during those long winter months were buzzing with activity.

Those two rites of spring are still palpable today, but one has to look a little bit harder to find them. Some of the fields have been taken over by big houses, some of the waters by pleasure boats. Farmers and fishermen have walked the earth and plied the waters since Homo sapiens became bipedal and began paddling and rowing. They will be with us until the very end. It is a way of life that never grows old. One can make more money plying other trades, but there is no substitute for fresh, locally grown fruits and vegetables and fresh, locally caught fish and shellfish.

Big media, TV sitcoms, bad movies, yellow journalism, iPhones, tweets, Snapchats, robots, space exploration, rap music, and the rest of it will always be available and continue to take up much of our free time, but the oldest arts — fishing and farming among them — are still the best and will never betray us. Enjoy!

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

I was born in a house next to my grandfather’s chicken farm in Mattituck, across the bay. White leghorn chickens may have been the first bird species I opened my eyes to, the first bird species I came to know intimately. Before someone coined the term “free-range chickens” in the late 1900s, that’s what they were, free-range. They ran freely over the expanse of old fields and gardens surrounding my boyhood area, feeding and carrying on as chickens left to their own devices do. At night they either roosted on tree branches or in chicken coops on rails.

During the day, my grandfather kept a loaded single barrel shotgun beside him. He always kept an eye out for hawks. Whether it was a red-tail, a Cooper’s, a sharp-shinned, or a falcon, to him — and to me as I grew up and began working on the farm beside him — every hawk was a “chicken hawk,” a potential stealer of chickens. He rarely had to use it — hawks were scarce in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s — but every hawk that flew into town was unwelcome and would be shot at.

Growing up with BB guns, later on I inherited my grandfather’s shotgun and did what every other male Tucker did in his spare time — shot at ducks, squirrels, rabbits, and, yes, hawks. In those days, first you became a hunter, second, for some, a birdwatcher. It wasn’t until the ’60s came along that I stopped shooting at hawks. Fortunately, I was a bad shot and hawks were so few in variety and numbers that I never bagged one. 

When I went back to Cornell in the early ’60s after serving Uncle Sam in Japan, New York State’s whole attitude toward hawks had changed. Before I enlisted in the Army, there was no season on hawks. All but ospreys were considered vermin. Then New York did a 180-degree U-turn and began to protect hawks and owls. By the 1990s, for the first time in the history of the United States, there were as many birdwatchers and bird lovers as there were hunters.

Hawks, owls, and eagles began to make a comeback. Ospreys were decimated by a different kind of act of man, the use of DDT to control mosquitoes. Suffolk County was among the first counties in the United States to ban the DDT. On annual bird counts we began to count hawks, mostly harriers, Cooper’s, and kestrels. Then red-tails moved back in, followed by sharp-shinned hawks, merlins, peregrines, and a few other species. Ospreys began their comeback. Great horned owls began to hoot shortly after dusk and just before sunrise.

By the turn of the new millennium, several species of hawks had begun to nest on Long Island again: red-tails and broad-wings through the pine barrens and pitch pine-hardwood forests, peregrines on the roofs of urban skyscrapers, Cooper’s and sharp-shinned hawks in parks and treed open spaces. Osprey platforms put up in the last decades of the 20th century became occupied shortly after. The place was alive with raptors. 

Although a bald or golden eagle was seen now and then around these parts prior to 2000, the former, along with turkey vultures — the new kids on the block — began to nest here, and the turkey vultures, perhaps for the first time ever, were seen in Montauk. In the summer of 2016 there were no fewer than four bald eagle pairs nesting in eastern Suffolk County. They had been gone as nesters on Long Island since the Great Depression. 

So here we sit, waiting for the first ospreys to return from the south to occupy their designated nesting platforms. A few eagles are around, immatures from past nestings and their fathers and mothers, ready to nest here again. There is no gunning season for hawks or owls. In New York State and the rest of the U.S. they are all protected.

Shoot an eagle and you’ll end up in jail. Turkey vultures and the occasional black vulture contend with crows for roadkills.

On Sunday morning, Jean Held had three vultures sail over her house in Sag Harbor. On Monday Terry Sullivan saw and photographed a mature bald eagle. On Monday morning while driving from North Haven into Sag Harbor I looked up and there, a quarter mile above me, was a single vulture wending its way easterly without the flap of a wing. My chipmunk has been bush-feeding below my bird feeder all week long. Get ready folks, it’s becoming a jungle out there. 

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

From long before our kindergarten years, the one thing that we all know for certain is that there is life on Earth, and we are immersed in it. In fact, according to the latest findings by scientists examining four-billion-year-old rocks on the shores of Hudson Bay, spiral-tubular minuscule life forms, early bacteria, have been around that long or longer.

The Earth itself is believed to be about 4.5 billion years old, in other words, life as we know it got going early. These first bacteria fed on iron. They were what biologists called anaerobic; they did not need oxygen to carry on metabolism, grow, and reproduce. It was another billion years or so before the first photosynthetic organisms came along and they were very much like what we call blue-green algae today. 

We really should be calling them cyanophytes, bacteria that have chlorophyll with which to make sugars and starches from carbon dioxide and water, a waste product of which is oxygen. True algae have nuclei with chromosomes and their chlorophyll is bound up in chloroplasts, organelles that were once living organisms and which were incorporated into early plants cells for reproduction and photosynthesis.

When the Earth was born along with the other planets, there was very little oxygen to be found. In fact oxygen is toxic to many bacteria that metabolize iron and other primitive elements. The cyanobacteria bridged the gap between the anaerobes and true plants. They manufactured oxygen as a waste product, so that aerobes like you and me ultimately developed following a long line of this and thats. We would not be here if it were not for those first cyanophytes and the photosynthetic plants that followed in their footsteps.

But having gotten us started, now those cyanobacteria are warring against us. The modern ones secrete a variety of poisons and other chemicals that can kill us and other members of the animal kingdom or make us very sick. The dog that died after drinking the befouled water in Georgica Pond a few years back may have presaged the coming of a horrible set of circumstances that could rival the Middle Ages’ bubonic plague and other historic scourges.

For the past 15 years or so, blue-green algae “blooms” in freshwater and brackish ponds, both locally and around the globe, have been increasing in intensity and duration. They may be abetted by global warming, but their chief growth stimulus is nitrates from waste products that we and all the other aerobic organisms have been willy-nilly disposing of in water, on the ground, under the ground, and into the atmosphere.

You may have seen the metallic blue-green waters of many Florida harbors and creeks on TV. There, a combination of effluents and tropical heat have sent the local cyanophytes into a frenzy of growth and reproduction. And it is happening all over. Here on Long Island, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which started looking at this problem seriously back in the first years of the new millennium, has documented many ponds that have developed serious blue-green algae problems: Lake Ronkonkoma, Georgica Pond, Lake Agawam, Mill Pond, and Hook Pond among them. This past summer, Wainscott Pond, Kellis Pond, and Wickapogue Pond joined the ranks of the damned.

As Christopher Gobler of Stony Brook University has shown in the last few years, just about every tributary and ditch running into Shinnecock Bay, including such longstanding polluted ones as Weesuck Creek in East Quogue, has serious blue-green algae problems. There is a train of nitrate-laden groundwater as wide as the length of Long Island running from the Island’s central highlands south into the ocean. It is a slow train — it only travels a foot a day or so — and as it proceeds down the gradient toward the ocean it becomes richer and richer in polluting nitrogenous products and other nasties.

In the long run, landlocked ponds such as Penny Pond in Hampton Bays, Little Fresh Pond in North Sea, Slate Pond in Bridgehampton, Fort Pond in Montauk, Round Pond in Sag Harbor, Upper Seven Ponds in Water Mill, and Chatfield’s Hole in East Hampton do not have a chance. The only thing that could save such a pond is being in an area surrounded by permanent open space, as is the case with Fresh Pond in Hither Woods. 

Little Fresh Pond in North Sea is one of 20 or more ponds on the South Fork that have been given an “impaired” rating by the D.E.C. Impaired means that it is not pristine like Fresh Pond in Hither Hills, not quite as bad off as Agawam Pond in Southampton Village or Mill Pond in Water Mill, which may be beyond the point of return. Kellis Pond across from the Bridgehampton Commons between Montauk Highway and Mecox Bay is halfway between “impaired” and runaway polluted.

Some scientists are presently studying a possible causal relationship between blue-green algae and Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cases of which have been increasing in number over the past 20 years. The potential multiple impacts, both direct and indirect, on the health of humans and other vertebrates by blue-green algae are finally drawing increased medical attention and scientific research.

Last week seven planets that revolve around a sun smaller than ours named Trappist-1 have caused a stir in astronomy circles as they may have atmospheres and water of the kind that might support life. They are to be studied in great detail in coming years. But there is a catch: They are 30 light-years away. A light-year is the distance a beam of light travels in a year. At the rate of 186,000 miles per second that adds up to a very, very, very, very long time!

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

I’m in my 80s and spend a good deal of time thinking about the 1980s, when all sorts of things for the good happened on the South Fork, North Fork, and Shelter Island. And yes, there were many bad things to overcome. 

The Group for America’s South Fork and Concerned Citizens of Montauk were the major environmental action groups, but then Russell Hoeflich, who had just graduated from Southampton College, came along and activated the South Fork Nature Conservancy, which had been all volunteers until that moment.

The most active environmental attorneys locally were Tom Twomey, Christopher Kelley, Steve Latham, and then a little later on, John Shea. They played a huge role in the defeat of the Long Island Lighting Company’s Shoreham nuclear plant project as well as a second nuclear plant planned for the Hallockville area near Long Island Sound in the hamlet of Northville on the North Fork. They also were instrumental in knocking out the proposed South Fork bypass — twice, mind you — that was to run along the moraine through Southampton and East Hampton Towns.

The East Hampton Town Baymen’s Association was a potent force for the good as well. Led by Arnold Leo and Stuart Vorphal, the likes of fishermen like the Lesters, Kings, Squires, Millers, and others were spurred to activism by the very painful and costly cessation of more than a century of ocean beach haulseining brought about by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Peter Matthiessen, with the help of Adelaide de Menil, wrote a book about it called “Men’s Lives.”

East Hampton Town Supervisor Mary Fallon did away with the East Hampton Town Planning Department in the early 1980s, replacing it with a consultancy firm and causing a huge uproar. It moved Russell Stein, who had been the assistant director of the Group for the South Fork and helped found a nonprofit called the Peconic Environmental Resource Center, to write a manifesto on saving the East End from greedy developers. Zig Schmitt, another East Hampton Town attorney, came along in the nick of time and, with Russell Stein’s help, wrote a law creating the first (and only) town natural resources department in the State of New York. Until 1984, when Judith Hope became the supervisor, it was a one-person office manned by a half-time consultant. 

The Planning Department was reinstated by Supervisor Ron Greenbaum, who replaced Ms. Fallon, in 1983, and a new planning director was appointed, George Brundage. Lisa Liquori, Peter Walsh, and yours truly manned it.

Thousands of acres were being considered for subdivision and a boatload of applications were being parsed by the zoning board. 

A major accomplishment of that era was the enactment of the Water Recharge Overlay District law, which protected the major part of the Upper Glacial Aquifer, but without five-acre zoning. Yes, there was also a natural resources statute on the books, but no wetland law, nor law protecting coastal dunes and bluffs. Tony Bullock and Randy Parsons arm-wrestled Mr. Greenbaum as much as possible in order to keep the town from falling back into a rush to develop vacant lands.

Hither Woods, the Bell Estate, Barce­lona, the Grace Estate, Culloden, the Sanctuary, and Shadmoor were all up for grabs, as was much of the area near the East Hampton Airport. The turning point occurred in the last week of Mr. Greenbaum’s term when the town’s chief building inspector refused to give a last minute building permit that would have allowed a set of condominiums to be constructed on Three Mile Harbor’s southeast shore.

Near the end of Mr. Greenbaum’s term, the re-created Planning Department under Mr. Brundage tried but failed to upzone a large part of East Hampton from one and two-acre zoning to five-acre zoning. When Ms. Hope took over in 1984 (Mr. Greenbaum had been appointed to replace Ms. Fallon), the former town planner, Tom Thorsen, was rehired and set to work with the planners and volunteers writing an entirely new comprehensive plan, which included five-acre zoning as well as many other restrictions. 

Southampton Town under Supervisor Marty Lang and the then-town attorney, Fred W. Thiele Jr., set an example for East Hampton when it upzoned acres and acres of land, including the moraine and pine barrens, to five-acre lots. In both towns, the upzoning was not only based on protecting the best groundwater resources but also protecting natural features, including endangered and threatened flora and fauna.

When Mr. Thorsen left for Southampton Town, Lisa Liquori became the planning director and steered the ship of planning and land use in the same determined direction. The Natural Resources Department became a bona fide office manned by a full-time director, yours truly. Debra Foster became head of the town planning board and the draft environmental impact statement became a well-used tool to cool down the rush to develop. Previously, the state’s freshwater wetland protection law, enacted in 1973, only considered wetlands of 12.4 acres or more in size. In 1984, the town attorney, Russell Stein, wrote a wetland law that protected all East Hampton wetlands regardless of size. The Natural Resources Department enforced what become known as the “pink ribboner,” after the thousands of colored plastic ribbons tied to the edge of wetlands where adjoining uplands were under consideration for development.

Although the combined planning and natural resources staff amounted to fewer than 10 members, they reviewed at least 3,000 acres up for development. They also wrote grant applications to New York State for money to purchase prime open space. One after another, these lands became permanent open spaces purchased by the town, county, state, or a combination of the three. The Grace Estate in Northwest Woods. Barcelona. Hither Woods and the Sanctuary in Montauk. 

In the 1990s, a large part of Culloden bordering on Block Island Sound in Montauk became parkland, and finally in the early 2000s Shadmoor on the Atlantic bluffs in Montauk was purchased by the town, county, and state with help from the Nature Conservancy. The Nature Conservancy also helped the town and state create the Amsterdam Beach preserve nearby in the Montauk moorlands.

Ms. Hope’s administration and the one following it, led by Tony Bullock, also saved and refashioned a large building on the old Montauk marine lab site on Fort Pond Bay which became the town’s center of marine aquaculture, raising shellfish, including hard clams, scallops, and oysters. As this column is written this facility is still very active and the town is well noted throughout the state because of its annual production and long-term contribution to the harvests by commercial and recreational shellfishers.

The momentum toward making East Hampton a model for sound environmental planning that got going full force in the mid-1980s is still being perfected. 

The Peconic Bay Region Community Preservation Fund, initiated in the towns of East Hampton, Southampton, Shelter Island, Riverhead, and Southold in 1999, further filled this area’s environmental hope chest almost to the brim. 

With the modification of this act, shepherded into state law by Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and approved by voters in November, a portion of preservation fund income can now be used for water quality improvement projects such as removing nitrogenous products that cause deadly colored plankton and cyanobacteria tides from the underground and overland waste streams. 

We are almost where we wanted to be when we started out in the 1980s.

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

It was, indeed, a very rough March. But April is here and things are starting to pop. One sign of spring is the number of male robins on the greening shoulders along roads. Why they hit these shoulders first before the lawns is a question that has been nagging me for years, but that’s the way it is. On Sunday afternoon along Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton there were several, all males, of course. Females usually return several days after the males.

Terry Sullivan went to check on a sandhill crane still making a living in Wainscott in the vicinity of Wainscott Pond and west of it. The crane has occupied that territory for several weeks now, and the red patch on its head continues to brighten. It was digging deep into the soggy soil with its bill, finding something to eat. Perhaps there are loners in crane populations just as in human populations, as it doesn’t seem to mind being all by itself as it spends each day in roughly the same spot. Where does it roost, on the ground or in a nearby tree? That is the question.

On his way past the East Hampton Airport, Terry counted three bluebirds. The bluebird boxes there, originally put up in the latter part of the 1980s, have served bluebirds and tree sparrows alike. This spring the bluebirds got back first.

On March 27, Victoria Bustamante, who was one of the first to see a returning osprey, reported by email that the ospreys that have the very big nest on the telephone pole at the corner of Route 24 and Route 105 near Indian Island in Riverhead were back. The thickness of a nest is a good indication of the number of years ospreys return to raise their young in it. They never raze their houses and build new ones in their place the way we humans do. They merely remodel them a bit each year upon their return.

On March 25, Terry was checking on the single osprey back on Long Beach in Noyac that he had photographed a week earlier, when he observed two more ospreys in nests there. The oldest of these nests is the one in the marsh south of Short Beach Road. It was put up in the late 1980s and has been occupied annually ever since. Terry reported that not only was it tilting dangerously, but the post had a large crack that weakened it. He photographed it and sent the photo to the Southampton Town Trustees, who protect piping plovers and least terns that breed on Long Beach annually. 

Peggy Conklin reports that the osprey nest on Scuttlehole Road was reoccupied as of Sunday.

Great horned owls, woodcocks, and bald eagles are the first birds to breed each year, then red-tailed hawks and screech owls. Stephanie Baloghy has the perfect screech owl nest hole across the street from where she lives in Amagansett. She couldn’t resist snapping a picture of it as it sat in the hole and stared back at her. It is one of the red-phase screech owls, by far the most common phase for such owls on Long Island, although every once in a while a brown-phase one of the kind that is common upstate is observed here.

If you don’t know Stephanie, she is a longstanding graphic artist who, with the late Ralph Carpentier, created those wonderful dioramas depicting fish and wildlife at the Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett.

There have been several bald eagles, both white-headed and mature as well as brown and immature, seen on the South Fork recently. There are at least four established eagle nests in Brookhaven, Southampton, and Shelter Island Towns, while a new one popped up at the top of a large tree next to a public school in Great Neck, as reported in Newsday. It should prove very hard to teach math and ancient history to those students who from their desks each school day can observe the nest through the classroom windows.

On March 27, I heard the first nasal “caw caws” from crows outside my window at 9 a.m. Then on Tuesday I was roused out of a deep sleep at 7 a.m. by the sound of honking geese south of me. For the next 15 minutes or so the honking got louder and louder but finally trailed off as a huge flock of migrating Canada geese passed over my house and headed out over Noyac Bay on their way north. Ah, I thought to myself as I drifted back into reverie, they must know something that I don’t. 

For the past two weeks I have been querying Howard Reisman, a former Southampton College professor of ichthyology who lives next to Long Island’s most successful alewife gathering area — and starting-off point for their annual trip to Big Fresh Pond — North Sea Harbor. “Are there any alewives running yet?”

Lots of “no”s and “not yet”s, but finally, on March 28, a “yes.” “Today I observed eight dead ones on the culvert apron where they pass under North Sea Road on their way west,” Howard said. 

“Ah,” I said to myself, “the alewives are back three days after Terry saw the three ospreys back on their nests at Long Beach. There must be a correlation.” And I knew there was.

Elsewhere, a big hurrah for the baymen and East Hampton Town Trustees for questioning the transmission line under Block Island Sound and Gardiner’s Bay proposed by the Deepwater Wind company to carry electricity from the proposed offshore wind turbines to the substation in Amagansett. 

Not too many years ago, and before the late Rusty Drumm’s wonderful columns addressing the fishing scene, Susan Pollack wrote The Star’s fishing column and covered the exploits of baymen and offshore commercial fishermen in detail. There was talk of oil drilling and sea-bottom mining and other activities that would have further limited the fishermen’s efforts to make a living and provide fresh fish and shellfish to the area.

Many here still carry on such an arduous life — with very little fanfare and not too much support, mind you. Thanks to Ramesh Das, who wrote the East Hampton Town Waterfront Revitalization Plan and helped draft the town statutes that put an end to some of those worries, there have been no oil drilling rigs or the like here, but there is no end to what people with big money will do to our ocean and its seabed in order to make a few extra bucks. We can never take our eyes off it.

On Friday the daffodils on the shoulder in front of a tall hedge along Route 114 on North Haven were blooming, as they have every year for the 38 years I have resided in Noyac. It’s Monday afternoon as I write this, and I just checked the humble supply of daffodils and forsythia Julie and I have. They are just beginning to bloom. 

As Frank Loesser wrote in 1944, “Spring will be a little late this year.” Yes, but finally here it is!

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

We are solidly into winter. My yard is covered with 11 inches of snow thanks to the back-to-back snowstorms of last week. Noyac Bay, 100 feet to the north, is beginning to freeze over, and it will, there being not a wisp of a breeze for several hours now. 

I was at the Bridgehampton Commons last week and, while there, decided to stop in at Wild Bird Crossing. I had seen one of these squirrel-proof feeders at a friend’s house a few weeks ago, and it worked perfectly. Little birds passed in and out effortlessly.

Having not fed a bird all last winter, I decided to go into the shop. I bought a squirrel-proof cage feeder and a bag of feed to fill it with. The vertical feeding tube with feeding holes is at the center of a cage with openings in a steel meshwork slightly more than an inch wide and long. I filled the central tube with seed from the bag and hung it up outside of my bedroom window a few days before the first snowfall.

For a day and a half it just hung there without any visitors, even though I could see birds in the neighbor’s yard in the distance. Then, after a very long wait, a Carolina wren showed up and darted in, grabbed a sunflower seed, and darted out. The rest of the day the feeder sat birdless. The next day, however, not only did the Carolina wren return, but titmice and chickadees visited and, after making a quick inspection, slipped inside through the rectangular holes and began feeding. It was apparent that they were familiar with such types of feeders; birds are not dummies.

The next day, juncos and white-throated sparrows visited. Unlike the chickadees and titmice, which came and went every 15 minutes or so, they did not feed from the holes in the central tube, but sat on the bottom and fed on seeds dropped there during the other birds’ feeding activities.

Not only that, the juncos and white-throated sparrows lingered there, while the other two species came and went with the same frequency. The male junco was particularly persistent, and when other juncos and sparrows tried to get in, shooed them away. It was apparent that he was an alpha male, and he had taken over the feeder as his own.

When the junco was not around, the white-throated sparrows took their time feeding on the bottom, not minding the comings and goings of the other species, such as the wren, a female downy woodpecker, female juncos, and a song sparrow.

A single blue jay came by after two days of snow and tried to get in but was too big to fit through the holes. It would not leave without putting up a fight, however. After a few minutes of head-scratching, it managed to stick its head and neck just far enough in to reach the feeding holes in the central column and flew away with more than one, but never came back as far as I could tell.

The feeder was only three feet from my eyes as I followed all the activity from my bed, lazy bird-watcher that I’ve become. The birds didn’t mind my prying eyes; maybe, they knew that they were benevolent. I was reminded of all of those times feeding the birds from the palm of my hand at the Morton Wildlife Refuge just down the block from me in Noyac. Chickadees, titmice, and nuthatches came readily to the open hand to feed, while sparrows and juncos hung around nearby on the ground and waited for me to drop some of the stuff in my hand. They never did visit my hand, but managed to get fed anyway.

After the snow piled up, visits were less frequent. The birds were either keeping warm in the snow-covered conifers or feeding at some other table in the neighborhood. Eventually they returned, snow or not, and by Tuesday they were back in force.

The two squirrels in the neighborhood were not to be outdone by the little birds, but try as they might, they could not solve the puzzle. They even tried grabbing through the bars, but their forelegs were too short. They tried dislodging the hanging feeder, but could not. They appeared frustrated. How is it that the birds could get at the food so easily, but they could not? They seemed angry and, ultimately, departed.

I wondered how is it that when local stores and shops are going out of business left and right, Wild Bird Crossing could be there for more than 20 years, open almost every day, selling little more than bird items. There must be an awful lot more people feeding birds than I thought. And why not? It is more entertaining than television, and you can do it without leaving your house or, in my case, the bed. 

Seventy years after I started feeding birds, at first just tossing breadcrumbs onto the ground behind my boyhood house in Mattituck, I was back at it. Not only was it very satisfying, it was also therapeutic. I wonder if it is therapeutic for the other bird-feeders? I bet so. I have taken a few friends to feed the birds at the Morton Wildlife Refuge, and they came away with different frames of mind. It worked for St. Francis of Assisi, perhaps it could work for those battling opioid addiction, kids being bullied in school, or lonely oldsters, a group in which I include myself.

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

When I dropped out of Cornell University for the second time in 1957 I was about to be drafted. We were not at war then, having settled the Korean police action some four years earlier, but, nevertheless, I didn’t think I was cut out for the infantry so I enlisted. I wanted to go into intelligence so I took my chances on getting into the United States Army Language School in Monterey, Calif. I landed a slot — the last available — in Russian. I thought I would be sent to Europe at the end of the course, but instead I boarded a troop ship in San Francisco, sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge, and headed for Japan.

At that time the U.S. foreign relations tack hinged on the “domino theory.” As the communist menace grew and nations one by one came under the dominance of it and the Soviet Union, President Eisenhower gave perhaps his most famous speech of his terms in office in 1954 after French Indochina had fallen to Ho Chi Minh and what would become the North Vietnamese state. He vowed that the United States would oppose the communist usurpers and protect those nations that resisted the communist takeovers.

When I got to Japan in January of 1961, I was put on a train headed north on the island of Honshu, then on a ferry, which crossed the sea to Hokkaido, the second largest and northernmost of Japan’s four main islands. A military transport picked me up there and carried me to Chitose, the Asian headquarters of the Army Security Agency, the military’s equivalent of the National Security Agency in Arlington, Va. I soon learned that my tenure there had to do with carrying out the mandate central to the domino theory.

It was a presidential election year, Nixon versus Kennedy. Most of the military was on the side of Nixon, so I had to be careful in espousing my fondness for J.F.K. That was the first time I took the domino theory seriously. In order to keep the unit up on developments, we would regularly hear from the N.S.A.: how they were laying down the groundwork, say, to protect South Vietnam from its northern opponent. I began to realize what my training in the Russian language was all about. I translated the Russian transmissions we intercepted into English and dabbled in decoding some of the more secret ones.

When my stint was over, I returned to the states, then returned to Cornell to finish my wildlife biology major. By that time Castro had taken command of Cuba, the eyes and ears of the U.S. were fixed on that island nation and busy with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. But, at the same time, we were strengthening our interests in South Vietnam, where we eventually would become involved in a full-scale war with the north.

By the fall of 1961, I was back in San Francisco, married with children and majoring in biology at San Francisco State, teaching, and translating Russian scientific papers to help pay for our room and board. The environmental movement was just starting but was diffuse and playing second fiddle to our growing anti-Vietnam involvement. The feds under Kennedy, then under Johnson, had their hands full with Vietnam and integration issues; the environment came in a very distant third.

In 1964, after I got my master’s degree I found myself at the University of California Santa Barbara, where I continued my biological education, teaching and translating Russian scientific papers on the side. I began to notice the environment. The California condors were almost gone, sea otters were few and far between, California highways were among the most congested in the country, citrus and walnut orchards were being bulldozed to make way for Levittown-type developments, the water was getting mucked up, and Los Angeles was as smoggy as Beijing.

I was torn between the Vietnamese conflict and the environment. At that time there were almost no national environmental laws, the last major one, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, having been enacted in 1918. California was bursting at the seams. What better place than it to enter into full-time environmental activities. 

I left U.C.S.B., helped Get Oil Out fight Union Oil and offshore oil rigs after a major spill of 1969, helped start the Santa Barbara Environmental Resources Center, and edited the “Survival Times,” a monthly environmental magazine. Ronald Reagan was the governor then. Regarding the redwoods that were up for grabs, he basically said, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.”

Then came a turnabout, the infamous Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, and lo and behold, he began to champion the environment while he worked to end the Vietnam War. In 1969 he signed the Environmental Policy Review Act, which led to the creation of the environmental impact statement, a formal review of actions that could possibly harm the environment. Then in 1970, he created the Environmental Protection Agency to cover all aspects of environmental degradation. 

Until that time, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service handled environmental matters, but only where protected wildlife and fish were concerned.

In 1970, the Clean Air Act was signed into law and administered by the E.P.A. with the help of other government agencies. In 1972 the Clean Water Act became the law of the land along with the Marine Mammals Protection Act. Whales, dolphins, sea otters, and other marine mammals are protected by this act, which is enforced by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Coast Guard. Finally, in 1973 the Endangered Species Act became law and was entrusted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

State fish and game, natural resources, and environmental conservation departments were created with the federal acts in mind. At last the environmentalists had a comprehensive body of laws by which to work to save the environment and all of its attributes.

Having related all of the above, I also realize that President Nixon had another not so lawful way of acting: One might go so far as to call him a scoundrel. He resigned before he was impeached. However, as I examine the political scene since then, there are many other equally bad politicians on all levels and on both sides of the aisle who, unlike Nixon, have contributed very little. 

If the present-day Republican politicians now in charge choose to retreat from the Nixon administration’s strong environmental policies and actions, that will be a sorry day, indeed, and it could be their downfall. 

They will be kicked out in a jiffy, come the next election.

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

You’re spinning, I’m spinning, we’re all spinning. Everything is in motion. If you are standing in an island in an ocean transected by the Equator, you are moving easterly at more than 1,000 miles per hour. You just don’t feel it or notice it because the island, the water surrounding it, and everything on it are moving at the same speed. If you are standing upright and motionless on one of the poles, north or south, you are near stationary, except that you turn completely around once every 24 hours. From infancy to old age, you and I, assuming that we have been in the same neighborhood all of these years, have been moving easterly at almost the same speed, but not exactly. 

We are slowing down a smidgeon with each passing year. We in America are very, very slowly drifting westerly, an effect of continental drift. This fact was brought home to me a few years ago when William Walsh, a longtime Montauk surveyor, informed me that one of the geodetic monuments in Montauk that he has been referring to for ages has been moving westerly at much less than one millimeter per year. It is fastened to the Earth’s crustal plate, which has been moving away from the Eurasian plate for millions and millions of years.

Nothing is completely standing still. While the tectonic plate moves beneath our feet, water has moved up and down ever since the Earth began receiving it, according to one theory, from the impacts of comets that are largely made of ice. The tides have been rolling in and rolling out as long as there have been expansive seas. They move in the form of waves, but even when the water is dead calm it is rising up or down depending upon the gravitational pull of the moon. When the moon is full and bright or new and we can’t see it at night, it is pulling on the seas, causing them to rise. 

But the moon is also pulling on the Earth and vice versa, so that the Earth is moving toward the moon as well, and moving away from the seas on its opposite side, causing a bulge outward — a rising tide. When the moon is lined up between the sun and the earth, the gravitational pulls on the three bodies are maximized and we get our highest high tides, called spring tides, and our lowest low tides.

We see the full moon in all its splendor as it rises up, but those beings on the opposite side of the Earth don’t see it because it is in the Earth’s shadow, and vice versa, when the full moon is on the opposite side of the Earth from where we stand. Fullness and darkness occurs roughly every 24 hours, thus there are two high tides and two low tides in a day. They are called semi diurnal, or twice-a-day, highs and lows. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans both have semidirurnal tides. But the Gulf of Mexico, which is sorta halfway between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, has only one tide a day which is dirurnal.

While the tectonic plates are moving laterally and the seas are moving up and down, rivers flow from high areas to low areas, topographically speaking. A few rivers flow east to west or vice versa, depending upon which side of the continental divide they are on. Where eastern California meets western Nevada, there is a high spot. Water on the west side flows southwesterly down the American River of California to Sacramento and into the Sacramento River, which runs to San Francisco Bay and out under the Golden Gate Bridge into the Pacific Ocean. Water on the east side of the tippy-top of the Sierra Nevadas flows northeasterly down the Truckee River in Nevada.

Some continental divides are east-west, i.e., on either side of a north-south trending mountain range. Others, however, are north-south. Thus the Red River, or Riviere Rouge du Nord, originating in Minnesota, runs north via North Dakota to Lake Winnipeg in Canada, while a little to the east, the Mississippi runs south to the Gulf of Mexico. In Europe, the Volga River runs south to the Caspian Sea, while on the other side of the divide, the Elbe River runs northeasterly, ultimately dumping into the North Sea.

North-south rivers tend to be deflected to the west by a phenomenon known as the Coriolis effect after the physicist Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis, who discovered and described it.

Imagine that you own a big piece of land in the Midwest and you also own a big lake that sits on that land. You want to drain the lake so you can farm the fertile bottom. You dig a trench to a down-sloping area to the south of the lake’s edge and the water starts running out south. As it runs south, the Earth is turning easterly so that with each passing hour the new stream is moving slightly westerly. The water starts out south, but the Earth moving east under it deflects it to the west.

Coriolis force is also responsible for the westward migration of inlets to the ocean along Long Island’s south coast. As the water moves south from Great South Bay through the barrier island, for example, the water moves slightly to the west relative to the lay of the land, which is moving under it to the east. 

The inlet-outlet to Mattituck Creek in Southold Town on the North Fork has been moving to the west under the influence of the Coriolis effect. Its entrance was stabilized in the 1930s by jetties, so its inlet-outlet is now fixed in space well into the future. Shinnecock’s inlet is also jettied on both sides and so cannot migrate westerly as it started to do after opening in the 1938 hurricane.

Then there is the water beneath our feet, the water in the aquifers piled one atop the other, that provides all of our drinking water in Suffolk and Nassau Counties. If you were standing on the line dividing Southampton Town from East Hampton Town halfway to Sag Harbor, halfway to the ocean, and you had eyes like Superman, you could see the top of the topmost freshwater aquifer, the Magothy, about 30 feet above sea level in wet years, 20-plus during prolonged drought. This mound of water is not static. From its highest point it moves south to the ocean, north to the bay at the rate of about one foot a day. In other words, a drop just beginning to ooze south from the highest point today will take more than a thousand days to reach the ocean three miles away.

Groundwater, like all matter on Earth and under its surface, is pulled by two sets of gravitational forces. The Earth’s own pull toward its center, and the combined pull of the moon and the sun. When the moon is full, groundwater under that full moon is pulled slightly but measurably up. 

I remember standing barefoot in one of the mosquito ditches in Accabonac Harbor one summer day when the tide was just starting to rise from a moon-tide low. I was astonished when I felt the colder groundwater around my feet and looked down to see it bubbling up. Estuaries are tidal but have freshwater inputs, both from the surface of the land and from under it. Accabonac Harbor, itself a contributing water body to the Peconic Estuary, was acting as its own microestuary at that very moment.

All of this motion, up and down, back and forth, rapidly easterly, very, very slowly westerly, is making me dizzy. I think I’ll go to bed and conjure up a static dream to repair my equilibrium.

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