Here’s where we get our electric energy from: hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), subterranean heat sources, the sun, wind, and hydrogen. 

A scientist in Europe who recently invented a system whereby electricity is produced by the fermentation of urea by specialized bacteria is trying to establish it in poor African countries.

There are lots of ways to produce energy, many of them without byproducts of noxious gases or ones that become heat shields in the atmosphere, e.g., carbon dioxide. The problem is storing it. Batteries of sufficient size and capacity have not advanced much beyond the standard 12-volt automobile battery until recently. Now there is just as much industrial might given to producing mega-load batteries as there is in developing alternative clean energy-producing systems.

Standard solar panels are the least intrusive and are nearly 100 percent clean, 100 percent noiseless, and 100 percent harmless to wildlife and nature. They can be installed anywhere where there is unused space, say on the tops of big box stores, schools, barns, storage buildings, and empty fields. Given the right conditions, one square foot of modern efficient solar panel can generate as much as 16.425 kilowatt hours of solar power in a year. The average U.S. household uses about 12,300 kilowatt hours per year. In other words, 750 square feet of solar panels, or say, 30 by 25 feet of solar paneling, can provide all the electricity one of those average houses requires year round.

Extra space is the key ingredient here. Wind turbines take up less space, but many people find them unattractive. They also kill birds and bats on land and birds in the water while befouling the undersea environment with sounds and vibrations that confuse whales, dolphins, fish, and other marine organisms that use hearing to echolocate and communicate.

While wind turbines need steady winds to generate electricity, solar only works when there is good sunlight and the exposure to that sunlight is right. North-facing roofs don’t work as well as south-facing ones. They don’t work in the dark, or when the sky is clouded over. There is much less sun in the winter months to radiate, consequently spring, summer, and fall are the best months to generate electricity, but winter can help, too.

That’s where Tesla and the big storage batteries come into play. One could rig up several 12-volt car batteries in a series to produce 110 volts or in parallel to run 12-volt lights and other electrical gadgets, but it would take an awful lot of space, and during long stretches of low sunlight or no sunlight, the batteries would have to be charged with an electric generator, the kind that cars and trucks have under the hood.

On the other hand, a combination of building climate enhancements along with solar can bring one a long way to independence from the electric companies and their grids. Barely 20 to 40 feet down the earth is about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Pumping up water at that temperature, which many of us do for drinking water, and running it though a system called a heat pump, akin to a car radiator, can capture a lot of heat, so during prevailing spells of chilly winter weather your heating system can start with air already well above 32 degrees while the bottom part of your house stays around 50 degrees throughout the year, which can moderate the summer heat, as well.

One needs a lot of space. Golf courses, farm fields, open areas on the ground, like the hundreds of grassland acres at East Hampton Airport, can provide some of that space. Farm fields often lay barren from the end of September through March; that’s six months of space to generate electricity using the sun. Arrays of solar panels can be put up to cover such areas in a matter of days. Like cover crops they would slow the wind and keep erosion down while producing much needed electricity. 

The North Fork would be ideal for such solar energy production. Couldn’t farmers use the extra money? They sure could. And for that matter, if you are going to kill a lot of birds out in the ocean with offshore wind cities, why not put the turbines up on shore where you can at least keep track of the dead birds and bats?

One acre of open space can provide for almost 40,000 square feet of solar paneling. If each square foot of solar paneling now in use can provide 16.425 kilowatt hours over the span of a year, multiply that by 40,000 square feet and you get 657,000 kilowatt hours, enough to power 53 average-size houses for a year. One hundred acres would produce enough to power 530 average-size houses. And much of the money would go to farmers who need it as much as we need to save on electricity costs. 

Think about it.

Meanwhile I will descend to the basement and get on my bicycle hooked up to the generator hooked up to the 20 12-volt batteries and pedal away. 

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

Pamela Rosenthal, who lives in the hills southwest of Three Mile Harbor, called the other day. She found a spider living on a toy that was left in the yard for some time. She was concerned that it might be a black widow, as it was black. She said it had two red spots on the back, but it didn’t have the telltale red “hourglass.”

I asked her if it was shiny black, and she replied that it was.

“Black widow,” I answered.

For some reason, black widows are becoming more and more common locally. I spent an entire childhood on the North Fork of Long Island looking for such a spider, but I was never able to turn one up. In fact, I didn’t hear of a black widow spider on Long Island until someone brought me one from the Northwest section of East Hampton five years ago.

This year a landscaper brought me an adult female black widow in all her glossy finery, complete with red abdominal spots, but she was not alone. She had her newly hatched family with her, scores of tiny spiderlings, not at all black and less than a millimeter big. This was the latest of about three black widow reports this summer and six or seven sightings in East Hampton since 2001.

Instances of another poisonous spider, the brown recluse, are becoming more and more common as well. Both of these are more apt to be found in southern climes and rarely in temperate New York State. One wonders if we are just more numerous and more careful observers these days, or is the number of what used to be newsworthy rarities actually increasing?

When one considers these two spiders together with chiggers, Lone Star ticks, and some other more southern arthropod species, as well as southern birds that have come to become resident breeders with us in the past half century, one might speculate that their increasing numbers here have something to do with increasing average temperatures and, perhaps, milder winters.

We know that the southern birds flew here, but wingless arthropods don’t fly, and it would take a spider or tick literally a hundred years to walk from Georgia to New England. Notwithstanding their extra pair of legs — they have four pairs, insects have three pairs — it is obvious that they didn’t get here by perambulation. And does this mean that it won’t be long before someone brings me a fire ant to identify? Let’s pray not.

The most oft-suggested mode of travel here is by way of garden plants imported from southern or even tropical nurseries. Literally millions of plants are imported into the New York area each year, and it’s a good bet that some of them are carrying a black widow, brown recluse, or some other noxious arthropod species.

If this were so, however, one would expect to find that most southern arthropod sightings here would be from places where these imported cultivars were being planted, not in remote parts of East Hampton such as Northwest, the Montauk moorlands, or Gardiner’s Island.

While we ponder the arrival of fire ants on imported plants and killer bees by air, we should note that the two spiders alluded to above are poisonous and can cause serious illness. May Berenbaum in her book “Bugs in the System” points out that 63 deaths during a pre-2000 10-year accounting period in the United States were attributed to black widow bites, while two resulted from brown recluse bites.

You are much more liable to die from a bee, wasp, or hornet sting; they account for about 50 percent of the annual deaths in America caused by the bite or sting of a poisonous animal. Snakes account for another 30 percent, scorpions only 2 percent. No one has yet to bring me a scorpion.

There is not one record of a verifiable black widow bite on eastern Long Island that I could turn up, but there are several records of brown recluse bites. While there are antivenins in production for both black widow and brown recluse bites, they would be hard to come by on Long Island. (Can you imagine how difficult it is to milk the poison from these two spiders and how many of each species you would have to keep on your spider farm in order to get even a thimbleful of the stuff?)

The complications caused by the spider bite are in most cases worse than the poison injected. Secondary infection from bacteria (carried on the spider’s mouth parts?) in the bite area is the most troublesome affliction to deal with. It can last for weeks, even months, and is difficult to arrest.

There are numerous home remedies that have been applied to spider bites. Rubbing alcohol, Adolph’s meat tenderizer, and witch hazel, for example, have all been used with some measure of success. While we should be careful in resorting to such decoctions and treatments, we have to remember that many of them date back to ancient times, when there were no doctors, but only lay practitioners and medicine men.

They have since been handed down from generation to generation and, while not at all preferable to what modern medicine has to offer, some of them work. One of these that has been used successfully on at least two of those afflicted is the application of a poultice of puréed raw potatoes directly to the bite.

A woman who used to work across the hall from my office was given this remedy by a friend shortly after she was bitten about 10 years ago; she tried it and it worked. My sister across the bay tried it on her spider bite a few years later and it also proved successful. It goes without saying that you should see a physician immediately if bitten by a poisonous arthropod or any other poisonous animal.

Where do these spiders hang out? A landscaper friend of mine who has since moved to Florida was bitten after taking a shower by a brown recluse that was hidden in his bath towel. Brown recluses are more apt to be found inside the house than black widows, and as the name suggests they tend to be hidden away from view, not at all exposed the way daddy longlegs spiders are so easily seen when in the house.

Look for the black widow in a dark damp area outside the house or in a damp spot in an unlighted basement. It would seem from the more and more frequent encounters recorded for these two spiders over recent years that they will only become more common, as will their bites.

One should avoid these spiders in the same way that one avoids bees or poison ivy. Thus, one should exercise caution in handling spiders and maintain the basement and yard area around the house in a sanitary, uncluttered condition.

Napeague was once famous for its bunker factory, the Smith Meal Company. Local fishermen purse-seined up menhaden by the ton and unloaded them at that menhaden reduction plant where they were turned into fishmeal. By the dawn of the 1960s, bunkers became rare, real estate for McMansions became much more valuable than for fish rendering sites, the wind had gone out of the purse-seiners’ sails, and it was time to catch and market other marine species.

While at the turn of the century there were at least five large bunker unloading spots on Napeague and Gardiner’s Bay (at Gerard Point, Barcelona, and Promised Land), by 1970 there were none. The bunker fishery had collapsed for good. 

The mid-November fish kill of menhaden experienced at Southampton Town’s Shinnecock Canal and the bay behind it by all accounts may have been one of the largest in American history. The Southampton Press reported that as of last Thursday, 374,000 pounds, or 147 tons, had been carted away from Shinnecock Bay beaches and marshes. An adult menhaden weighs a pound or so, so we can estimate that some 374,000 fish died, perhaps twice that many, as the cleanup is still in progress and many dead fish floated out to sea. 

A smaller kill registered at Fresh Pond in Huntington Town amounted to a piddling 11,000 dead menhaden. The menhaden, or mossbunker, is a member of the herring family, all which are schoolers and filter feeders. We have several species in New York waters including alewives, blueback herring, Atlantic herring, and shad. Unlike the menhaden, all of these others are fit to eat when properly prepared. An old recipe for menhaden goes something like this: Nail a fresh menhaden to a board. Heat the board on a grill without setting it afire. When done, throw fish away and eat board. 

Hmmm, doesn’t that same recipe also work for coots, or scoters, a common winter sea duck along the Atlantic Coast?

There was also a massive bunker kill last year at the edge of Long Island Sound on western Long Island. That had to do with diminished oxygen levels in the water. This last had to do with a lock closure in the canal and piling — a fish stampede, as it were. No animal species is without its stampedes. Read the daily newspapers and it is hard to find a day when there isn’t a human panic stampede reaction in which many lives are lost, say outside a soccer stadium, during a Hajj processional in the Near East, from inside a burning nightclub, or at sea, from sinking ferries and flimsy overcrowded scows.

Flocking species such as the menhaden have an advantage. They have no trouble finding mates when it’s time to reproduce. Members of the herring family mass spawn — males and females mill around in compact groups releasing eggs and sperm in a cloud. A mature female menhaden can release as many as 150,000 eggs ripe for fertilization, in other words, enough to start a whole new massive school if each one was fertilized and each ensuing larva grew to maturity.

Filter-feeding organisms are often groupies: When one member finds a cache of food, all of those in close proximity also eat. The gill rakers of herrings that support the gill structure comprise “combs,” which sieve out plankton as the fish swims through a swathe of water with mouth open. They work in the same fashion as the baleen plates of filter-feeding whales like the blue whale, the world’s largest mammal. But many sessile organisms — barnacles, clams, mussels, and the like — are also filter feeders: Rather than pursue what they eat, they wait for it to come to them.

Immature menhaden take mostly phytoplankton, adults mostly zooplankton such as the swimming larvae of shellfish and crabs. When there are plankton booms there often follow filter-feeding fish booms. When there are filter-feeding fish booms, there often follow striped bass, mackerel, shark, dolphin, and whale booms, as well as cormorant, osprey, and eagle booms. A mature dolphin can swallow 10 to 15 adult bunkers in a single feeding. Is that what those dolphins bobbing up and down among the docks of Sag Harbor were doing the other day?

In a classic food pyramid or food chain, nothing goes to waste. From dust to dust without losing a single speck, to paraphrase the Bible. The late fisherman and local historian Stuart Vorpahl was also a student of massive comings and goings. He had a very long view of population dynamics. “No bay scallops around this fall? Wait a few years, they’ll be back.” Stuart was not what you would call a “regulator,” but more a “crapshooter.” He had no formal training in the theory of probability or statistics. He couldn’t tell the difference between an algorithm and a quadratic equation, but he was a formidable predictor of things coming or going. The old regulatory way was driven by the law of supply and demand. If it doesn’t pay, why bother?

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is responsible for setting catch limits on this or that species. It is an earnest group of informed scientists and commercial fishing regulators with a few management types thrown in who study fish population, fish harvests, and good and bad reproduction years in order to come up with probable figures for setting harvest limits along the Atlantic Coast.

But fishery biology is anything but an exact science and many a local commercial fisher would take up another line of business if he or she geared up and fished exactly according to the dictates of the fisheries commission. In actuality, many commercial fishers do end up in another profession where the outcomes are more certain. One might even posit that understanding the ups and downs of all animal populations, including the Homo sapiens, will never be precisely worked out given eons of data-taking and massaging. As the man said, “The more we know, the more we don’t know.”

In fact, many pundits would say we have just as much chance at understanding the workings and interactions of the universe’s macrobodies and nanobodies as we do understanding nature itself. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stop working at it. And, according to that brilliant British theoretician Stephen Hawking, we may have no more than 100 years to come up with the big answer, even less than that if we depend upon artificial intelligence to come up with it.

There will always be massive fish kills, there will always be stampedes, there will always be wars, there will always be political corruption, genocide, bigotry, bullying, and all the rest of man’s and nature’s destructive acts. Perhaps not.

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

You may remember the R & B group Earth, Wind, and Fire. The name contains two of the classic Greek primary elements, but leaves out the third, water. In fact in googling pop music groups over the past 60 years, I can’t find any containing the word water. Yet, the more we know the more we learn — and most often after the fact — how important water is to the Earth and life. Some of the 10 to 20 million species recorded thus far in the world can survive without air; none can survive without water.

Astronomers and astrophysicists say that water came to Earth by way of collision with comets. If that theory is borne out, then we owe our existence to comets, in other words to a chance extra-terrestrial source — another reason why we should never take water for granted. And isn’t it ironic and, perhaps, prophetic that those same microscopic cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, that are souring both fresh and tidal waters today around the world are the very organisms we owe our lives to, as they apparently started the ball of life rolling three billion years ago?

Yet we glibly roll along developing the countryside and reproducing at a great rate — there are now 7.4 billion of us — take daily showers, run our taps, and irrigate our lawns and landscapes with little concern for water’s future well-being. Yes, one cannot get rid of all of the Earth’s water — it covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and dwells under the dry land’s surface in large reservoirs as well — but the things we dump in it every day can make it unpotable and toxic to protoplasm.

With respect to Long Island’s water, every day one reads in Newsday about 120 or so new condos to be constructed, about the reincarnation of the Nassau Coliseum, about the fabulous Ronkonkoma hub being planned, but we also read about what Grumman left in the ground in the Bethpage area, and the M.T.B.E. in Manorville’s groundwater, the fire suppressant organic chemicals left in Speonk’s and Westhampton’s underground waters, and a hundred other Superfund sites that have befouled our aquifers. 

Just recently, we read about Suffolk and Nassau Counties’ outdated water treatment regulations. They date back to the 1900s, while millions of new gallons of untreated water are added daily from multi-residence housing, factories, shopping centers, institutions, hospitals, schools to the counties’ two major sewage treatment plants. These plants take out some of the nitrogen when they are working properly, but hundreds of other chemicals pass through the treatment gamut into the sea by way of outfall pipes.

True, Suffolk County has been rigorously testing new single-family residence septic systems. It has identified a few advanced ones that remove nitrogen wastes from urine to less than 10 parts per million, the state’s regulatory level for drinking water, but do not remove much else. And, yes, the five eastern towns this November passed a referendum allowing 20 percent of the community preservation fund’s future revenue to be used to deal with water-pollution problems, but the overwhelming volume of wastewater is still passing out through these large sewage treatment plants.

In a large way, blaming antiquated dysfunctional single-family residence septic systems for the rapidly escalating over-nitrification problem of Long Island’s waters, both fresh and saline, is a subtle political ploy — the real problem is all of the collective wastewaters flowing into the sea via our large sewage treatment plants and into the ground by way of our many new “package” treatment plants.

And aren’t we close to being built-out on Long Island where single-family residences are concerned? We are to the point where for almost every new residence erected an older one is torn down. And what about all the preexisting septic systems? Are we going to pay the price to replace them at $10,000 to $20,000 a pop? It is all a political pipe dream.

Meanwhile, all the thousands of preexisting septic systems on Long Island continue to vent their flows underground. All of the urine’s nitrogenous products, detergents, medicines, skin care chemicals, and what we put on our lawns and landscapes create a giant surplus of underground pollutants that flows to the surrounding seas at an average rate of a foot a day. If your septic is two miles away from the ocean, bay, or sound, it takes 29 years for your wastewater to get there.

Wake up, people! Long Island’s underlying three aquifers, one sandwiched above the other, are already reaching non-drinkable status, yet they are the only source of potable water we three million-plus inhabitants have. Still, we merrily continue to build shopping centers, multifamily, and single-family residences, and many other water-using structures with abandon while our well-paid bureaucrats, working under the thumbs of our equally well-paid political leaders and advisers, look the other way, coming up with grandiose project after grandiose project, while pretending to meet the problem head on. Meanwhile, the trade parade continues to clog the highways, houses come and go, and we are advised to take a shower at least once a day.

Talk continues about adding another golf course, another spa, another shop

ping center, another multi-unit development, another carwash or laundromat that recycles all of its water. Each developer says his or her endeavor will not only not contaminate the groundwater but will make it pure. Has there ever been such a wunderbar development in these parts? If there has, please show me. I stand to be educated. 

About five years ago Newsday ran an op-ed column by two Stony Brook University professors, Larry Swanson and Christopher Gobler, the gist of which was that Long Island is already built-out. I saved it. I’ll be happy to send it to all of the politicians who make our laws, rules, and regulations, so they can read it afresh should they happened to have missed it.

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

This the last weekly column of the year 2016, and I decided to write a little bit about my peculiar daily data-taking habits, which may come to an end one day soon. After Saturday I will begin saving a few trees and a little time. After all, there may be so little left. I will no longer be receiving and clipping The New York Times and Newsday daily; I will be reading them online. The nub of my everyday life revolves around prodigious note taking — two to three sides of lined paper each day. It started in 1980, and so, with the exception of less than 100 missed days, I have accumulated a log of about 33,000 sheets, almost all written in ink, and filed chronologically in filing cabinets, loose-leaf binders, and elsewhere.

You might say to yourself that there is a lot to be gained in terms of understanding life and the world by poring through all those pages, but my wife would disagree and I would have to, too. They are filed with eclectic data of a hundred different varieties — bird sightings, road kills, vehicles encountered, trees in leaf and leafless, roadside wildflowers, road-salt days, whether the waters I pass are calm or rough, whether they are blue or red, is it cloudy or clear, windy or calm, and so on.

This craziness started a year after I left Southampton College. Having a little extra time on my hands and increasing memory loss accelerated by undiagnosed Lyme disease, I got myself some lined paper and began writing down the daily events in shorthand, from the time I first arose in the morning until I turned out the lights and went to sleep. Someday in the distant future, I thought, I will read these pages like one reads a roadmap to see where I’ve been, what I did there, and where I’m going.

I have, on occasion, reread some of these diary pages and even started databases in Excel to record certain daily activities such as sleeping hours, napping hours, what I ate, how many cups of coffee I drank, my mental and physical state, etc., etc., etc. Very boring stuff, unless you are me, but even then, very boring stuff.

It all started around the time I began a job at the Museum of Long Island Natural Sciences at Stony Brook University under the tutelage of Steven Englebright, a geology professor there. Driving the 40 miles or so back and forth from a base in Noyac each day was not to my liking, so I began jotting down observations along the route — road kills, flora and fauna, gypsy moth infestations, the coming and going of the seasons, recharge basins, vehicle types and counts, weather and highway conditions, and the like. It was better than listening to the radio and kept me in an attentive state throughout the commute.

Soon it became habitual. If I did not keep at it minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, I would feel guilty. I became tethered to all these eclectic observations. Almost nothing escaped my eye or the paper in the clipboard on my lap. 

I also began recording my physical and mental state — energy level, pain, mental acuity, affection, outlook, memory recall, and the like — three or four times a day. I started with four or five prime factors and kept adding others as the years rolled by. I now call these figures “S.S.” for self statistics, and they range from 1 to 10 and/or 1 to 5. A 10, say, for physical energy or mental acuity, would mean I was at the top of my game. Interestingly, I have never given myself a 10 for either category. Likewise, I’ve never given myself a zero.

For 30 years or so, many of the S.S. data has been written on the edges of Newsday and New York Times crossword puzzles, which I’ve done seven days a week for the past 40 years. But for better or for worse, I am slowing down. Over the last two years or so, I have only recorded the S.S. data once a day, and in almost all cases, just before retiring each night. 

As if I wasn’t kept busy enough writing down all of these happenings, in 1986 I began observing vehicles passing my house on Noyac Road in both directions — differentiating them into passenger cars, S.U.V.s, commercial trucks and the like, government and school vehicles, and utility vehicles — as well as their relative speeds and colors. Two four-minute observation periods one after another or spaced minutes apart, one to five times a day along with weather and road conditions. Since 2000, all of these records have been entered into a daily log database. 

For a long period, silver was the color of choice and chrome strips were out, but now they’re back. Two-tones disappeared, S.U.V.s began outnumbering standard passenger vehicles, there has been an upsurge in Mini Coopers, fewer and fewer military-type Jeeps. I also record pedestrians, motorcyclists, and pedal bikers and how many wear helmets and how many do not. 

As I convert this or that set of written notes and observations into digitized databases that can be subjected to rigorous statistical analysis at the rate of one or two a year, I tell myself that one day I will review all of these observations in an attempt to map out long-term trends — global warming, for example. But will I actually succeed? That is the question. Meanwhile I will continue to record this or that happening, this or that phenomena, this or that revelation. If I don’t get to making sense out of it all in some kind of documentary form before I go, Julie, my loving wife, who has had do endure this endless note-taking over for these 36 long years, says she will throw out the 33,000 lined notepaper sheets. Perhaps it is true: Two wrongs may make a right!

Yesterday, while I was motoring along the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, a rafter of turkeys crossed in front of me. Later on, at Sagg Pond, I flushed a gaggle of geese. On my way back home after checking out the ocean, a murder of crows flew over on their way to their evening roost in the trees of Barcelona while a herd of deer began congregating in the fields north and south of Stephen Hand’s Path. Then it got dark and wildlife activity subsided.

Why is it that some birds and mammals flock together while others are mostly solitary or in pairs? Through the millions and millions of evolutionary processes, the two different strategies have continued to be perfected such that both types confer excellent chances of survival in a world ruled by predation, parasitism. and poisoning.

Some species have evolved to the point where they are never apart from their own kind; they are referred to as colonial. Take ants, termites, or honeybees: None of them can survive without the company of their own in large numbers. Some fish — herring, silversides, and menhaden — spend their entire life in compact schools of the same species. On the veldt in Africa a lone wildebeest is a goner for sure, but its chances of survival increase 90 per cent when in the company of others.

Flocking is particularly apparent in organisms that migrate long distances for the purposes of feeding and reproduction. There are very few loners among the several antelope species, zebras, cape buffalo, and even elephants that live on the Serengeti. Caribou that ply the tundras of Siberia, Canada, and Scandinavia are rarely found alone. Single musk ox seeking protection from wolves and polar bears in the Arctic cannot form a protective circle to ward off predation.

Many would-be prey, however, fare far better as loners than as congregants. Cottontail rabbits, gray squirrels, white-footed mice, and chipmunks prefer to keep to themselves, except when mating. They are secretive, seeking the protection of brush, burrows, or holes in tree trunks.

While most bird species, such as the neotropical warblers, only flock while migrating, a good many species flock throughout the year, except while breeding. The European starling and pigeon, so common now throughout the Americas, are almost always flocking. A hundred eyes are better than one pair when trying to avoid a swooping merlin or Cooper’s hawk. Starlings and tree swallows are two local species that take group behavior to its highest form, the way some fish species do in the seas. They not only flock when flying from one area to another, they are formation fliers.

When a hawk is spotted, they form tight balls and other near-solid three-dimensional shapes while twisting and turning through the air, bewildering a would-be marauder again and again. They can tighten up and fly so close together that the would-be predator perceives them as a single giant organism, and one not to mess with.

Another kind of gathering is sexual. Except when breeding, and shortly after, some flocks are unisexual. Red-winged blackbirds, grackles, and robins travel north in unisexual flocks, the males arriving on the spring breeding grounds ahead of the females. Does absence make the heart grow fonder?

Almost all reptiles live alone, except when denning up for the winter as many snakes do in temperate and northern America. Frogs, toads, and salamanders only gather together for reproductive purposes.

Many insects, especially those in the fly order, such as stoneflies and mayflies that start out as aquatic larvae then metamorphose into insects with wings, gather together. In certain years and areas, they can completely cover vehicles, roofs, lawns, and streets in thick carpets. Ladybird beetles lead mostly solitary lives except when it comes to winter, when they form tight overwintering colonies near heat sources.

Coral organisms cement themselves together as do ascidians that form spongy mats on hard surfaces. You very rarely find a barnacle on a dock post all by itself. Ribbed mussels and blue mussels cling together by their silky byssal threads. Bats often gather under the eaves of houses or when hibernating close together in caves. Purple martens eschew single nesting boxes while the closely related tree swallows prefer individual boxes to nest in. Bank swallows, say, those that nest in holes in Montauk’s ocean and Block Island Sound bluffs, dig out their burrows in close proximity to each other.

Some predator species, especially wolves, hyenas, and Africa’s wild dogs, cohabit. While it would be difficult for a single wolf to take down a caribou, or one hyena to tackle a zebra, a pack of wolves or hyenas becomes an efficient superpredator. 

A different kind of flocking takes place among our resident winter birds. Woodpeckers, chickadees, nuthatches, blue jays, brown creepers, juncos, and others travel together in loose flocks from feeding spot to feeding spot, whether in the woods or on a post in someone’s yard.

Finally we come to humans — gregarious or solitary, we can be both. The thought of gathering together by the hundreds of thousands in Times Square to watch the big ball drop at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve scares the dickens out of me. 

I’m a country boy and always will be, but I’m an oddity. Most people are urbanites and feel safer and happier in close proximity to other urbanites. The 10 largest cities in the United States account for more than 10 percent of America’s human population. According to the 2016 World Almanac, 80 percent of our total population is urban. While some can be both loners and joiners, urban and countrified, those who are exclusively city dwellers rule the roost.

Which raises the question: Which is safer, living in a city or in the boondocks? Who lives the longest, I wonder?

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

Tens of thousands of menhaden, also known as bunker, died in the Shinnecock Canal on Monday, and a cleanup effort is underway.

While state officials were still investigating the cause early Monday afternoon, water quality experts said that the fish likely died as a result of near-zero oxygen conditions in the canal overnight caused by predatory fish pushing them north, and not an algae bloom from high levels of nitrogen, as has been the case in other local fish kills in recent years.

"I think it's kind of just wrong place, wrong time," said Sean O'Neill, the Peconic Baykeeper, who was among those who went to survey the wall-to-wall fish choking the canal Monday morning. His organization sent a sample for a water quality test from the north end of the canal to Stony Brook University's marine science lab. Though the results will take a few days, both he and Christopher Gobler, who heads the marine science program at the university, believe water quality is not to blame in this case.

"The water is crystal clear right now. There doesn't seem to be an algae problem in that area right now," Mr. O'Neill said, calling the die-off a result of a confluence of events as the fish migrated south.

The State Department of Environmental Conservation did not immediately find any pollutants in the area.

Dr. Gobler pointed out that on Sunday "there were very dense schools of menhaden right up against the shore . . . pinned into shore by predators, striped bass and bluefish and even things like whales, believe it or not. It's possible that they're even chased up into the canal by some of these predatory fish."

At sunset, a large school of bunker was reported in the canal. The "giant tide from the supermoon" was another factor, Mr. O'Neill said.

As the tide turned, the locks closed, and when that happens the water in the canal no longer flows freely between Shinnecock Bay and the Peconic Estuary. Oxygen levels drop in stagnant water, and when the sun goes down and photosynthesis stops, the oxygen levels further decrease, Dr. Gobler said.

"With lots of fish in there, they're caught. They're also consuming oxygen. Oxygen levels dropped probably near zero. They don't live too long under those sorts of conditions," he said.

When the locks reopened at 9:30 Monday morning, the dead fish were flushed out, and some that were still alive swam through the canal, Dr. Gobler said. Many have also washed up dead in back eddies and near marinas.

The Southampton Town Trustees and the town's bay constable are trying to coordinate an effort with local commercial fishermen to harvest as many of the bunker as they can, and a cleanup is being mobilized to prevent the fish from stinking up the shore.

"It's the sheer number of fish -- I don't know think we're going to avoid the nuisance completely," Mr. O'Neill said. "It's definitely a little weird to happen at this time of year," when water quality is usually high.

But, the population of menhaden has grown intensely in recent years, the experts said -- good news for the fishery, but larger schools have led to more frequent fish kills.

In late spring of 2015, bunker died in two large fish kills the Peconic Bay, west of the canal, between the Peconic River in Riverhead and Reeves Bay in Flanders, an area that has chronically low-dissolved oxygen and increased nitrogen pollution. Dr. Gobler estimated that nearly 400,000 bunker fish died. The professor, who researches Long Island's coastal waters, said the cause was low oxygen from a dense algae bloom in the region.

"We need to do the best job possible at minimizing low oxygen in our waters," Dr. Gobler said. There are plenty of other areas, including in the Town of East Hampton, such as the back of Three Mile Harbor, that experience very low levels of oxygen at night, particularly during the summer. "There are dozens of examples," he said. 

However, the fish kill Monday morning was simply an unfortunate set of circumstances. "To me, it seems pretty cut and dry," he said. "Once those locks shut, those oxygen levels just start dropping. It doesn't seem very fishy, if you will."

Having worked as the environmental protection and natural resources director for East Hampton Town for a long time, every so often I ride through the roads to see how the town and its village and hamlets are faring. Naturally, I check out past carnages to see if there have been any redemptions of sorts and, happily, in most cases there have been. 

I know the old adage “Don’t cry over spilled milk,” especially true long after it has been spilled. Many of my contemporary retirees just moved on, or both moved on and moved away. I just can’t do that. I am still bonded by an umbilicus to the town that I worked in and for, for 28 long years. 

This past Monday I took one of those trips to see what has transpired and what might transpire. I started out by visiting the beginning of Town Line Road north of Montauk Highway. A friend had told me about a large clearing that had occurred recently on the Southampton side of the road. Lo and behold, there were two huge side-by-side clearings of pine and oak woods and two Southampton Town stop-work-order signs posted on trees next to each. The name on the realty signs next to the Southampton postings was Farrell. I was not surprised. 

Then I scooted on over to the Nature Preserve in East Hampton Village. Someone had emailed me in California from East Hampton that a new bridge was in the offing over the northern neck of Hook Pond and that it would go from one side to another. I was flabbergasted to learn that the span was to start in one wetland on the east, end in another one on the west, and would be anchored with stanchions. I was familiar with the two wetland areas and had identified ladies’ tresses orchids and other plants rare to Long Island growing there in different years. While I was examining the area close up, a Wilson’s snipe worked the southern edge of the eastern wetland, darting in and out, and two almost fully grown cygnets nibbled the sedges while a circumspect adult looked on. 

I stopped in at the town offices at Pantigo Place, and, after reporting my observations, learned that several longstanding disputes were still in limbo. One was a driveway on the west side of East Lake Drive. I had worked on this matter myself at the beginning of former supervisor Bill Wilkinson’s time in office. This driveway, more like a one-vehicle-wide dirt trail to the waters of Lake Montauk, took entry a little north and west of Big Reed Path. It had once accommodated baymen and recreational clammers, but a property owner to the north of it questioned the town’s ownership of the land, and the matter has yet to be resolved by the court. 

The town owns 2.5 acres of underwater land, which is served by that road. There is also a culvert that runs under the road from east to west through which stormwater enters the lake. Back when I was the town’s natural resources director, while working on reducing pollution from such culverts on all sides of the lake, I had Cornell Cooperative Extension test the outflow after a rain, and it was found to be high in coliforms as well as nitrogen products and other pollutants. 

The idea had been to reclaim the land and put in a small retaining basin to catch the runoff from the culvert and settle out the silts while removing contaminants biologically via wetland plants and aquatic organisms. Between 2006 and 2011 such remediation had been carried out successfully at four other culvert outputs feeding the lake. The catchment ponds that were created were successful in reducing pollution.

The Natural Resources Department applied for the permits, but the project was opposed by Harry Ellis, the neighboring property owner, who sued the town, questioning its ownership of the property. (The suit named Mr. Wilkinson, the Natural Resources Department and yours truly, among others.) 

The matter has yet to be decided, and the culvert continues to dump runoff directly into the pond without any kind of pretreatment. 

I still believe it would be fair and right to take the steps to correct a longstanding wrong and to work to open the disputed right of way to the town and its taxpayers. 

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

Some like it hot. Some like it cold. When the thermometer rises or falls, we humans simply adjust a thermostat or add or subtract layers of clothing to achieve our personal comfort level. Fish don’t have that luxury and must skedaddle when the surrounding water temperature exceeds the range their cold-blooded bodies can tolerate. 

Typically, fish migrate north when southern waters become too hot and push south when northern waters become too cold. Some species, like blackfish, move west to east as the mercury falls.  

It’s important for fishermen to know what temperatures their target fish can tolerate, their local water temperature, and what factors determine water temperature.

Striped bass are happiest in water that ranges from 55 to 68 degrees. The unseasonably warm weather is keeping Massachusetts and Rhode Island coastal water temperatures above 60 degrees and western Long Island Sound temps near 65 degrees, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration buoy data, which is available online at ndbc.noaa.gov/obs.shtml. Until these waters dip into the mid-50s, anglers shouldn’t expect new bodies of baitfish and gamefish to pass our shores in large numbers. Fortunately, this can happen very quickly with a multi-day cold front combined with strong south or west winds. 

Warm and less dense water sits on top of the ocean’s surface. Northeast winds push this warm water close to coastal shores, which keeps gamefish fat and happy where they hang. But south and west winds have the opposite effect. They push the warmer inshore water away from the coastline, producing an upwelling action where a pool of cold water holding at 50 to 60 feet below rushes up to replace the vacating warm water. Ever churn a hot bath with your hand to make it a little cooler? Same idea. 

The contour of the coastal bottom will determine the extent of the water temperature mixing action, so different sections of the same shoreline can have different water temperatures. We’ve all noticed this peculiar circumstance while swimming or surfing at beaches. This small difference in temperature also can have a major impact on where fish congregate and how eager they are to eat, so anglers should prospect a beach if fish aren’t visible.

When waters dip and firmly remain below 55 degrees, it’s almost time to put away the pencil poppers and grab a half-bushel of green crabs to target the hard-fighting and tasty blackfish, which thrive in cold water as low as 45 degrees. As water temperatures plummet, these fish will move to deeper water. While tautog can be caught from a jetty under the right circumstances, productive fishing usually involves the use of a private or charter/party boat. Open season for blackfish runs until Dec. 14. 

Those adept at anchoring over rock piles in gusty winds have been rewarded with bounties of blackfish. Areas around Plum Island, Fishers Island, and Rhode Island wrecks have been productive.

Capt. Merritt White reported catches of striped bass, bluefish, and false albacore by charters, but numbers were low toward the end of the week as tides weakened.

Paul Apostolides at Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk reported slow action under the Lighthouse, but ocean beaches were producing stripers and big bluefish for those putting in the time. Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett said that a female angler visiting from Delaware culminated a full day of surfcasting in difficult conditions with a nearly 40-pound striped bass at Hither Hills State Park at sunset. 

Birds have been working along Georgica Beach jetties during daylight hours, but anglers haven’t had much luck finding fish there. Those looking for more of a sure thing along town beaches should set the alarm clock for an early wakeup or head out as the sun falls.

Sebastian Gorgone at Mrs. Sam’s Bait and Tackle in East Hampton said that one-piece rods were returning in two pieces after anglers tussled with mean and monstrous bluefish in Accabonac Harbor. Rods were faring better against stripers at Sammy’s Beach, Gorgone added.

Ken Morse at Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor said the wind kept boaters at the dock while some surfcasters had luck on Southampton beaches.

The Viking Fleet reported sea bass and porgy action around Block Island. Federal waters, those beyond three miles off Montauk Point, are again open for sea bass.

There have been no changes to the Montauk SurfMasters Fall Classic leader board according to the tourney’s website.

The Star’s fishing columnist can be followed on Twitter, @ehstarfishing. Photos of prize catches can be emailed to David Kuperschmid at fishreport@ ehstar.com.

As we go deeply into the autumn and the leaves fall at an ever-quickening pace, thoughts of the next spring gird us for the coming winter. We hope it will be as wonderful as the last and that the flowers and leaves will burst out with a vengeance, having slept long and deep through the cold and snow of winter.

The South Fork has just about every kind of habitat found on Long Island: pitch pine barrens, oak and hickory deciduous forests, grasslands, wetlands of a hundred different varieties, and beds of underwater eelgrass and marine algae. No matter all of the slings and arrows that the habitats and niches have had to contend with as the land was cleared for houses and farming, then for paved roads and railroads, all of the different mini biomes have survived to date in some form or fashion.

Housekeeping reforms and community preservation funds came into being in the nick of time to ensure that this wonderful collection of multicolored parts lasts into the future, no matter what storms, fires, and other acts of God may beset them. We are evolving into better stewards of the landscape, not destroyers of it, with each passing day, and not a minute too soon.

That is why, having come this far in a matter of decades, it is very puzzling to think that we would resort to our barbaric past and remove this or that part of the natural landscape because some higher authority would have us do so. In this case, I’m thinking about the Federal Aviation Administration, which wants the town to cut down a large number of trees around the airport, trees that are removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, battling the exhausts from the planes and helicopters while doing so.

One of the arguments raised by the local powers that be to support such a move is that the flora on the edge of the already-cleared airport lands is not as diverse and unusual as that inside the deeper part of the woods. Just the opposite is true. The edge flora in the form of an “ecotone,” a transition area between biomes, is the most interesting of all, and the most likely to contain the rarest species.

Some readers may remember the wonderful ecotones that thrived between the pavement and the trees in East Hampton’s Northwest Woods 20 years ago. The shoulders of Old Northwest Road, Bull Path, Two Holes of Water, and Swamp Road were ablaze with wild violets, blue lupines, orange milkweeds, at least two orchid species, and many other pretty and rare plants that bloomed until the asters and goldenrods set seed in October. The Highway Department unwittingly brought in soils to raise the shoulders of those flowers disappeared and have yet to return.

Ironically, one of the few spots where some of these very same flowers have persisted is in the ecotones between the mowed airport fields and the surrounding woodlands. The lupines are particularly resplendent in these ecotones, especially at the west end of the field that reaches all the way to Town Line Road. 

Now, the town is thinking of doing these in, too. I’m reminded of an earlier time when an agent from the F.A.A. stopped me at the airport and said I should remove the bluebird boxes from these same airfield ecotones. “Hmm,” I thought to myself. “You mean the beautiful bluebird, the state bird of New York, could harm one of those large jets or helicopters?” I told her I would think about it (but not for very long).

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