I led a nature walk at Shadmoor State Park for a nice couple from Amagansett who won the walk in the East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society auction held on July 30. Their son and a girlfriend, as well as another woman friend and her son, also accompanied us. I took my large white towel along and swept the vegetation on the sides of the trails as we marched on in the chance that I might find a tick or two. Shadmoor is well known for its large deer tick and Lone Star tick populations.

We walked a bit more than two miles and the towel didn’t pick up a single tick. However, it did pick up a some seeds of a species of tick-clover, which have little barbs for clinging to animal hairs to maximize the dispersion of the species. When I got back to Noyac I checked my body and my clothing very carefully: completely tickless.

However, the next morning I woke up to some itchiness on my calves and ankles. I examined the causes and discovered five small pustules, white in the center, red around the edges — two on one leg, three on the other. Uh-oh. Chiggers, I thought! I went all last year without one chigger bite, but being in the field in Montauk in September of any year is an invitation to mayhem. I led people on a similar walk at Shadmoor in early August of last year and didn’t get a single tick or chigger. I should have known better this year.

The Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County, experts with respect to local tick populations, say that there are no chiggers on Long Island, but that we are actually dealing with the larvae of local ticks. 

I and several other non-entomologists beg to differ. Ask Peggy Conklin for example. She and I are of about the same age. She grew up in East Hampton and remembers chiggers and their bites as a young girl in the 1940s. In Mattituck during those years when I and my brothers and sisters would go berry picking in the woods and fields near our house, before we set foot out the door, my mother would warn us to be on the lookout for chiggers. 

There were wood ticks (also called dog ticks) around in those days, but not the deer or Lone Star ticks. They showed up here in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively.

Adult chiggers are variously known as red bugs, chigoes, harvest mites, and by many other vernacular names throughout the United States. They are more common in the South than here. In fact, in one small Texas town they are so common that the townsfolk there actually celebrate an annual Chigger Day. But I believe we have them as well.

Like adult ticks, chiggers have six legs as adults, but start out with eight legs as larvae. The larvae don’t bite; they extend a tubular mouth part down one of the skin’s hair pores and thereby secrete digestive fluids to feed on the flesh. They remain there until sated, drop off, and metamorphose into nymphs, just as ticks do. The nymphs feed on vegetation and the adults they eventually become are also plant eaters. The ticks that we deal with here are meat eaters throughout their entire life cycle.

Two common tick species that cause us problems are Trabicula alfreddugesi and Trabicula autumnalis from Eurasia. The “autumnalis” suggests that the larvae make their appearance in the fall, and that is when I’ve noticed that chiggers in Montauk’s wilds have been the most prevalent since I began going into the field there regularly in the 1980s. In fact, last year was the only one in the last 38 in which I didn’t suffer a single bite. Once, on a fall trip to Gardiner’s Island when Robert Gardiner was still holding down the fort, I came back with a serious case of what I’m sure were chigger bites.

The larvae of our tick species are tiny, but dark. I can make them out against the pale background that my skin provides. Every once in a while I find an adult Trabicula tick on a plant in my yard. I can see it with the naked eye, red against a green-colored leaf, a little bigger than the head of a pin. But I can’t see the reddish larvae, as small as .2 millimeter in size, with my naked eye. I only notice them after the fact, when the itching starts and the pustules appear, by which time they are gone. I have found a few larvae and put them under the microscope, where I can see them and even count their eight legs. 

Interestingly, chiggers don’t appear to be vectors of diseases the way ticks and mosquitoes are. But sometimes after two weeks of scratching I think I’d rather have a disease that I can cure in a day or two with a dose of antibiotics than suffer the slings and arrows of bites that seem to last forever.

The best way to avoid the discomfort is to stay out of the woods and grassy fields in September and October. There are chigger cures available in most drugstores. I don’t know if they work or not, as I have never tried them. What I do is pierce the pustule with a sharp needle and apply rubbing alcohol. Such an antidote can sting like hell, but somehow the pain is better than the itch.

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

When whippoorwills call and evening is nigh

I hurry to my blue heaven

Turn to the right, a little white light 

Will lead me to my blue heaven. 

I’ll see a smiling face, a fireplace, a cozy room

Some human domiciles are 1,000 years old or more. Several on Long Island date back to the late 1600s. Most houses, however, have lost their sense of permanence. Fifty years ago, one would never raze a house to build another one unless it was severely storm damaged or ravaged by fire. Nowadays, houses built in the last quarter of the 20th century are falling to new, larger ones right and left. Houses have lost their sense of permanence just as we who live in them have lost our sense of immortality.

There is another trend afoot, especially in the richer suburbs conveniently located near our larger cities. While families have become smaller and smaller over the years, houses have become bigger and bigger. On the North Fork, where I grew up in the middle of the last century, one would never think of building a big house in a neighborhood of modest-sized houses. It just wasn’t done. Now it seems, just the opposite is becoming the rule, build a house as big as will fit on a lot as per building and zoning regulations.

There was a good reason for building smaller houses in the past and that was so the rest of the building lot could be used to grow food, keep livestock and chickens, and still have room for young ones to play hide-and-seek, hopscotch, tag, and other pickup games that have been replaced by organized sports, computer games, and other more regimented activities. The land around the house was as important as the house itself. You may still be able to raise a chicken or two, but in most modern villages and towns here on Long Island that is verboten.

Humans are, perhaps, the only species that makes its domiciles progressively larger with each generation. In fact, the tendency in evolution is for a species to become smaller as the area it lives in becomes more crowded. Deer that live along both coasts are smaller than their counterparts, which live in the less populated interiors. Deer, raccoons, squirrels, and chipmunks don’t seem to be interested in the “more-and-more,” “bigger-and-bigger” credos. They want to go on living and raising their families in the same manner as they have practiced for thousands of years. 

Something is happening, however, with respect to blunting this trend of “bigger is better”: Local citizens are beginning to say enough is enough. Peace and quietude are becoming more and more sought after. Sag Harbor has recently passed a law limiting its basic house sizes to 4,000 square feet. East Hampton Town has been considering a similar plan of action. The North Fork doesn’t have the ocean and although it’s busier than ever with each progressive summer you can still get around and sleep a full night’s sleep.

So enough of this materialism! It is growing tiresome. It all started with “the gracious living” attitude that set in after World War II. Bigger abodes, more toys, furniture, TV sets, bigger beds with bigger mattresses, even one or more kitchen islands, swimming pools, tennis courts, and the like — too much, too much, too much. Our children just out of college are beginning to feel the pain of what we have collectively created. Churches should be the biggest buildings, not houses. A little house on a little lot with some trees and wildflowers, that should please most of us.

A little nest that nestles where the roses bloom. . . .

The domicile is the basic space to raise a family. Whether it be a cave, tree cavity, burrow, nest, fiddler hole, tepee, yurt, McMansion or something akin, it is that permanent or semi-permanent spot that is a centerpiece of a community. It can be a community of one, like the watery lodge of a beaver or treetop nest of an oriole, or it can be a community of many, like a group of close-lying prairie dog holes or a simple purple martin box atop a tall pole. For every organism, humans on down to insects and other invertebrates, there is a special home in which to raise a family.

In that respect (and in many others), we Homo sapiens are not so different from all of the other millions of species in the kingdom Animalia. We are not the only species to have more than one domicile per family, a trend that has gained great momentum among humans in the new millennium. House wrens often occupy several bird boxes, while raising a family in only one of them. Gray squirrels may use more than one tree hole, rats more than one burrow, mountain lions more than one grotto.

Among the primates from which we derive, most apes and simians raise their families in a roofless communal area, an encampment as it were. It can be on the bare ground, the side of a mountain, or in a tree canopy. It is a territory that is defended from use by other communal groups, sometimes groups of the same species, as with chimpanzees. For modern humans, the domicile has become the “house” or its equivalent in other languages. It is generally a roofed structure with doors, windows, internal partitions, and floors, and in most modern societies its size and general makeup are regulated by a municipality’s building and zoning laws.

Humans have contrived the most complicated of rules governing domiciles. They are generally owned and thus are deeded. They may be rented for long periods or short ones. They are generally in neighborhoods with streets, utilities, and other infrastructure. In America and most other modern societies, an outsider — be he stranger, officer-of-the-law, member of the armed forces — cannot enter such a building without just cause and a warrant.

Bluefish are born mean. A snapper, or juvenile bluefish, will attack just about any lure thrown its way. This silver assassin’s impulsive behavior and voracious appetite make it the perfect target for kids, first-time anglers, and those who just want to have some summer angling fun without committing whole hog to the sport. Even a grizzled surfcaster can enjoy fishing for snappers with an ultralight rod and reel. 

Never tried snapper fishing? Tsk, tsk. 

The gear can’t be any simpler. You can thoroughly enjoy catching snappers with an inexpensive spinning rod, reel, and must-have snapper popper. If you’re fishing with young children or someone who can’t cast a line then dispense with the popper and grab a float, long-shank snapper hooks, and a package of frozen spearing bait. Little ones love watching the red and white bobber unexpectedly disappear from the surface when a snapper grabs the baited hook. Snapper rods designed for kids are available in a variety of cool colors, so be prepared for “this-one-no-that-one” negotiations during the purchasing process. A local tackle shop is the best place to buy the right equipment and to get up-to-the-minute advice on where to catch the baby blues. 

Snapper hooks are very sharp and should be kept outside of the reach of small fingers attempting to touch a flopping fish. Avoid using lures with treble hooks, which are dangerous around kids and difficult to remove from the mouth of a small fish. Kids notice how adults treat their catch, so gently releasing the fish can be a teachable moment for future sharpies.

Snappers can be found terrorizing small baitfish in local harbors and along bay beaches. Maidstone Park on Three Mile Harbor, Little Albert’s Landing beach in Amagansett, and Long Beach in Sag Harbor are perennial hotspots for snappers.

There’s not much meat on a snapper, but it’s tasty compared to the oily flesh of its mature siblings. Links to some online recipes can be found at the @EHSTARFISHING Twitter feed. 

If you want to keep a few fish for the table, be aware that the daily possession limit per person is 15 fish, of which no more than 10 can be below 12 inches long, according to current New York State Department of Environmental Conservations regulations. 

Participating in a local Snapper Derby is a rite of passage for many East End kids and a wonderful way to introduce a child to fishing. The Shelter Island Snapper Derby is great family fun and proceeds go to charity. Participants receive commemorative T-shirts, trophies, and, of course, grilled snapper. The 2016 Snapper Derby is scheduled for Sept. 3. Details are available at shelterislandsnapperderby.org. Harbor Marina on Gann Road in East Hampton has scheduled its 2016 Snapper Derby for Sept. 11. Details will be announced shortly. 

The daily possession limit for black sea bass will increase to eight fish per person effective next Thursday, according to current D.E.C. regulations. The size limit remains at 15 inches total length.

A harmful level of blue-green algae has been detected in Hook Pond in East Hampton according to a notice posted at the Highway Behind the Pond access area. Do not fish, swim, or kayak in the pond until this dangerous condition has disappeared. Keep pets away from the water as well. 

Ken Morse at Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor reported that weakfish continue to eat strips of squid presented on Hi-Lo rigs in Peconic Bay and that big bluefish are harassing pods of bunker in Gardiner’s Bay.

Dave Reutershan at Gone Fishing Marina in Montauk reported a steady fluke and sea bass bite in the rips and at Shagwong. Striped bass continue to take eels, and anglers braving the wind found cod at Cartwright Shoal. The offshore bite remains disappointing, though one boat returning from Fish Tales caught two white marlin at C.I.A., added Dave.

Sebastian Gorgone at Mrs. Sam’s Bait and Tackle in East Hampton reported lots of snappers in and around Three Mile Harbor and fluke off Goff Point in Gardiner’s Bay. Anglers throwing chunks of clam on Georgica beaches are finding a striped bass here and there along with skates and dogfish, he added.

Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported that 11-year-old Ellis Whiteson from New York City caught a 20-pound striped bass on a bunker chunk while fishing from the beach at the Sea Crest Resort on the Napeague stretch. Blowfish are still in the bay and striped bass around 30 inches can be found at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett. There are reports of false albacore around Fort Pond Bay and along ocean beaches, Bennett said.

The most interesting catch of the week was a smooth puffer, which is typically found closer to Bermuda in the Atlantic Ocean. Ed Letsch caught a 4.4-pound specimen while fishing for sea bass in the north rips off Montauk Point. Parts of the smooth puffer contain dangerous neurotoxins, which can kill humans if consumed. Two weeks ago a smooth puffer was landed and released off the Jersey Shore. 

Follow The Star’s fishing columnist on Twitter, @ehstarfishing. Photos of prize catches can be emailed to David Kuperschmid at [email protected].

A Correction

The name of Capt. Tom Federico’s boat, on which he recently caught a 46-inch striper, was given incorrectly in a photo caption last week. It was the Surfmaster.

Long Island is the biggest island by far in the Long Island archipelago. This archipelago may not be a true archipelago like the Galapagos in the South Pacific off Ecuador or the Channel Islands off Southern California in the middle Pacific or the San Juan Islands off Washington in the northern Pacific. The status of Long Island as an island has long been in doubt, separated as it is from the rest of New York by the East River. The United States Supreme Court — lawyers, mind you, not coastal geologists or geographers — ruled 9 to 0 that Long Island is not an island but part of New York State’s mainland.

If we just stick to those islands included in New York State’s territorial boundary we have nine of them, not counting those that are part of New York City. If we throw in Block Island — part of Rhode Island, but equally close to Long Island — we get 10. The largest in New York State is Shelter Island, at a little more than 8,000 acres, while Gardiner’s Island is next at 3,308 acres, followed by Fishers Island at 2,224 acres, and trailed by Plum Island at 840 acres and Robins Island at 435 acres. Add up the other five — seven-acre Big Gull, Little Gull, North Dumpling, and South Dumpling, each an acre, and Wicopesset (the easternmost of all) at two acres and you add another 11 acres to the archipelago’s collective land mass. The last eight are in Southold Town. 

But let’s not forget the largest non-island island of them all, Long Island. It is 896,640 acres, or 1,401 square miles. So, the archipelago is 1,424.2 square miles in all, or 1.17 times larger than the State of Rhode Island. As sea level rises and coastal storms hit the archipelago, the very small islands will disappear soon unless protected by revetments, the rest not for centuries, and Long Island, probably never. In the future, based on current rates of loss of land to erosion into Long Island Sound, Block Island Sound, and the Atlantic Ocean, we are looking at a lot of shrinkage, as well as some complete overtopping. For example, Cartwright Shoal, a big sand spit at the south end of Gardiner’s Island, comes and goes with each big coastal storm. while the sand spit at the north end of Gardiner’s linking Fort Tyler with the rest of the island was under water throughout almost all of the 1900s.

Only one of these islands, Plum Island, is not completely in private hands; it is owned by the U.S. government, so Tom, Dick, Harry, or any other interested American citizen cannot take a walk on it without going through a very big length of red tape. Plum Island, part of the Department of Homeland Security, created after Sept. 11, 2001, is off limits to the publicsave for special arrangements.

I was lucky enough to visit Plum Island on Aug. 17. It was quite an experience. Not only were there harbor seals enjoying themselves on the north side of the island, but ospreys flew by with fish in their talons, an occasional turkey vulture drifted by, and the sky was full of tree swallows in the throes of migration, cleaning the air overhead of mosquitoes and other flying insects.

At least 10 monarch butterflies, as well as spicebush and folded-wing butterflies, were in attendance. There were quite a few patches of common milkweeds for monarch larvae to grow up on, but it was equally probable that these were migratory, having island-hopped from Massachusetts, Connecticut, or Rhode Island as they are wont to do when starting to move west-southwest toward that fabulous pine-covered mountainous overwintering spot deep in Mexico more than a thousand and a half miles away from their annual end-of-summer starting point.

I didn’t see a single pitch pine or white pine on the island, but did see a few Japanese black pines of the kind that are forever dying away on the Napeague isthmus in East Hampton Town. There were lots of native oaks, eastern red cedars, black cherries, and other indigenous Long Island tree species, as well as lots of native shrubs including bayberry, groundsel bush, and beach plums, thus the name “Plum Island.” However, for every native shrub, there was also a multiflora rose, Tartarian honeysuckle, or Russian olive to be seen growing next to it. There were native fox grapes in concert with Asian bittersweet, poison ivy with Japanese honeysuckle, not at all an Eden for a Long Island naturalist such as I.

I should have known. After all, the island has a long human use heritage dating back to the Civil War. It’s been a training center and coastal battery for the military for years and years. Then, retired from that duty after World War II, it became a laboratory to study animal diseases from afar that have not yet hit the United States. The place is full of dilapidated old buildings and several newer ones like the laboratories and the center with its elaborate spacious main conference room.

According to our guide, the freshwater wetlands are among the largest on Long Island. And wouldn’t you know it, they are mostly edged with Phragmites australis, that Eurasian reed that has become so well established throughout much of America.

The beaches are comparatively clean; I could find only one or two pieces of plastic in 300 yards of reconnoitering. But, even more amazing, the beaches are practically devoid of shells — no scallop shells, mussel shells, jingle shells, or spider crabs, and only the occasional slipper shell. Puzzling!

The island has a physical geography similar to Montauk. It has eroded bluffs, 15 to 50 feet high on both sides, some small dunes here and there, and typical beaches with some typical beach vegetation — beach grass and saltwart — between the high tide line and the fast land in back of it. Oddly, there is very little seaweed or eelgrass wrack, or even much of a wrack line to mark the flood tide limit. 

Plum Island is a remote part of the Harbor Hill moraine, which is glacial in origin, as is the South Fork. Thus, there are some glacial erratics scattered here and about, but not nearly as many as you might see on a walk in the hills around Sag Harbor. Most that you come across are half submerged in the water; they’ve already been washed out of the coastal bluffs.

Apparently there are no foxes on the island, but there are raccoons and opossums. The feds exterminate any deer that show up. There may be one or two left that they haven’t gotten. I purposely wore shorts and flip-flops to test for ticks. I walked through every tall grassy spot or vegetated edge I could find. Not one tick. But then again, at least two tick species, the black-legged and dog ticks, are in serious decline in some parts of the South Fork while the Lone Star tick takes over the territory.

The hoof-and-mouth disease laboratory is carrying on as it has since the late 1950s, while ground has already been broken for a brand-new one in Manhattan, Kansas. The Plum Island one will wind down in five or six years. What then? The federal government has said it will sell Plum Island to the highest bidder, just as Little Gull Island was recently sold. Our local representative, Lee Zeldin, has introduced a bill that would have the government make the land public in some form of a park or wildlife refuge.

The bill awaits passage in both houses, which may be a long way off, but I can’t imagine the island becoming just another of all those presently in the Long Island archipelago system that are privately owned and off limits to you and me. And such a publicly owned island could serve simultaneously as a nature preserve and a site for generating green electricity, which are compatible if done right.

Wouldn’t it be super if all of those islands and the waters surrounding them would one day become a marine sanctuary of the kind that California has along its coast stretching from Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands north to beyond San Francisco, where commercial and recreational fishing, as well as recreational boating, are allowed, but no oil well rigs or wind turbines are permitted?

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

In June, early summer days were dominated by the songs and call notes of birds with high testosterone levels. Some humans lucky enough to live in Promised Land on Napeague or on Fort Pond Bay near Navy Road in Montauk, where whippoorwills still breed every summer, heard birdsongs during the day and at night. July was the hottest month yet and a transitional period: Birds became silent, insects began to dominate the dark hours with their mating songs.

On July 27 in the trees outside the old schoolhouse in Noyac, the snowy tree crickets made their debut. It was about 8 p.m., our Noyac Citizens Advisory Committee meeting had ended, our secretary, Sherry Kiselyak, and a member, John Anderson, and I were talking about summer night activities when we were kids, when all of a sudden we were bombarded on all sides by the charging notes of tree crickets overhead. They would sing for about 30 seconds as loud as can be, then go quiet for a minute or so.

This was the beginning of their ode to August. On Thursday morning they were back at it, like a symphony orchestra tuning up before a concert, but singing in full daylight, with the same gusto, punctuated in short bursts interrupted by longer silences. I gathered that the males were testing out the stridulatory edges of their wings to see if they were in proper condition for two months of night-after-night concerts without a day off.

It was 9:30 Monday evening, pitch dark, and I was listening with an amplified receiver and earphones. The katydids were going at it on center stage, the snowy tree crickets, trilling in the background. How wonderful! It is, in my mind, the best part of summer. There are those from urban areas who would feel more comfortable surrounded by honks, sirens, and radio music; the chorusing out here that I love so much would keep them awake at night. And if you lack a thermometer, you can figure out the air temperature in Fahrenheit within a degree by counting the number of pulses in 15 seconds and then adding that number to 40 according to Dolbear’s Law, formulated in 1897.

In August the insects hold sway. The gypsy moth males have found their non-flying mates; eggs have been laid on the barks of trees. The southern pine borers continue to ravage the Long Island pine barrens. Mosquitoes buzz you if you stand still outside in the dark. Lots of other insects somehow make it into your house if you leave the lights on.

But it is also a time for butterflies, not the same old cabbage moths, but tiger swallowtails and the like. It is time for the most bizarre looking insectsof all, the walking stick and the praying mantis. One very rarely sees more than one or two of these, the largest of our creepy-crawlies, in a season.

The walking sticks are so well camouflaged as they perch on a branch that you could walk by one, almost touch it with your nose, and not see it. The mantis is much more obvious as it stands stiffly half upright on a twig or plant stem, often for minute after minute, holding forelimbs just under its head, which turns and looks at you the way an owl can, without moving its body.

Mantids come in green or brown, are up to four inches long, and have eyes that can move independently to look at two different objects at the same time. In this way they keep one eye out for predators — birds, squirrels and the like — and the other out for prey. Males are much better fliers than females. They can fly to their prey — tree crickets, beetles, grasshoppers, spiders — while the female is mostly a stalker, stealthily walking along a branch with prey fixed in her sights, and then, quicker than your eye can detect, grabbing it with her forelegs.

Mantis comes from the Greek for “prophet.” Our local praying mantises came originally from either China or Europe; they were imported in the 1890s to combat the gypsy moths, another foreigner, which was just beginning to burst out in damaging form. It was a doomed experiment. Most such introductions are. There are never enough of the former to counter the outbreaks of the latter. Anyway, a female praying mantis would just as soon eat her mate as any other insect, but only after insemination. One fewer mantis to contend with is the idea.

After copulation, the female bulges with eggs, making her heavier than ever and preventing any sort of escape flight if she is attacked by a predatory bird or mammal. She lays her eggs in a foamy ecru mass on the branch of a tree or shrub, say a black cherry or beach plum. The eggs make it through the cold of winter and hatch in early spring into nymphs, which immediately get started hawking prey until molting produces a larger nymph. More eating, and yet a larger nymph, and so on and so on until an adult molts its final nymphal skin come late May or June.

On the other hand, catch a newly emergent praying mantis and put it in your flower garden. It won’t get every harmful insect, but it will stay around for the rest of summer and you will enjoy its presence. While you look at it, it will look at you.

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

Of course I did this on purpose, I told my wife, showing her the large silver hook dangling from my left ring finger. You think an experienced fisherman like me could accidentally hook himself, I continued, unsuccessfully hiding a smile. She rolled her eyes, called East Hampton Urgent Care in Amagansett, and off we went to free the shiny devil from my person.

The day began with a fast ride on calm seas from Three Mile Harbor to the waters off Montauk Point. About 30 boats were trolling, anchored, or drifting around the Elbow, a well-known fishing spot a relatively short distance from the Lighthouse. We joined the fleet and began dipping eels on three-way rigs, hoping for a take from one of the large striped bass I’ve been writing about for the last two weeks. We enjoyed many nice drifts but our rods never bent. 

I looked around and found glum faces on the boats surrounding us, including those poor gents who were dancing parachute jigs close to the bottom with long sweeps of their rods under a roasting sun. Perhaps the fish preferred to dine under an ebbing tide rather than a flooding one. Whatever the reason, our eels went unmolested and we moved on to Frisbees, a patch of water southeast of the Point, to try our luck with sea bass and fluke. 

Instantly and for a long time thereafter we caught sea bass large and small as well as a porgy and sea robin now and then. It was glorious. Having had our fill with sea bass action, we decided to head back to the waters off the Point in search of stripers and fluke.  

I connected a new hand-tied Tide Rite Double Bucktail Hi-Lo fluke rig to the end of my line, added some squid strips to the twin Mustad hooks, and sent it down with a six-ounce teardrop sinker. The current was hurrying and the six ounces of lead just weren’t holding the bottom. I retrieved the rig, laying the weight on the boat’s wide gunnel. I grabbed a three-ounce sinker from an old plastic rice jar, added it to the rig’s sinker loop, and, without knowing it at the time, sealed my fate. 

Before returning the rig to the sea, I decided to reposition the pennant of squid on the bottom hook. I held the monofilament that suspends the hook from the main line between my left thumb and forefinger several inches above the bait.  Maybe it was the wake of a passing boat. Maybe it was just a rolling wave. But something caused the two sinkers resting on the gunnel to tumble, instantly jerking the line from between my squid-slimed fingers and propelling the sharp hook across and then into the fleshy tip of my ring finger, where it penetrated deep beyond the barb. 

After several colorful outbursts, I cut the line above the hook eye to avoid further damage to my finger. I looked at the impaled hook again and again with disbelief, and then attempted to dislodge it with a slow and steady pull. No luck. It was stuck good. After dabbing the wound with an alcohol swab from an onboard medical kit, I attempted to cut the shaft of the hook with my fishing pliers to keep it from flopping back and forth in the wound. Fortunately for me, I failed in this effort. With gear now stowed away, we headed back to Three Mile Harbor. 

Those industrious fellows at Tide Rite Tackle use an odd-shaped hook for their fluke rig. It’s elongated with a flattened curve at the end. It’s great for holding bait and securing fish, but doesn’t lend itself to easy removal from one’s finger. 

The clinic’s office was scheduled to close at 5 p.m. but it graciously stayed open to accommodate me. Upon arrival I was led to an examination room, passing several staff who observed my predicament with a “this should be interesting” curiosity. 

Dr. Lukose greeted me with a confident smile and closely examined the damage, gently probing here and there. He then deftly administered two shots of the anesthetic Lidocaine into my finger and got down to business. 

After testing that my fingertip was sufficiently numb, Dr. Lukose gently manipulated the hook’s barbed tip to point upward under the skin. Then with forceps and some force, he rotated the hook forward until the barb popped to the surface of my finger. Dr. Lukose then cut the barb off the hook with a small pair of red bolt cutters and removed the remains of the hook from the tiny wound. I didn’t feel a thing. A tetanus shot was suggested and declined because I had one within the last 10 years. I left with a white bandage, a script for antibiotics, and considerable admiration for the East Hampton Urgent Care team. 

Now what are the lessons learned here? First, make sure you have a medical kit with an alcohol swab or iodine in your car or boat as well as fresh water to immediately clean and sterilize the wound. Second, don’t cut off the shaft of the hook as I luckily failed to do. This makes removal of the hook more difficult, particularly if one wants to attempt the “secure and pop” hook removal trick using fishing line. Third, have at hand a pair of pliers capable of cutting an impaled hook from a dangling plug or lure. Fourth, don’t be an idiot like me and balance sinkers on the gunnel while holding a hook on slack line. Umm . . . maybe that should be first. 

Fishing remains red-hot around Montauk for boating anglers. Dave at Gone Fishing Marina in Montauk reported that hot weather is pushing stripers into deeper and cooler water and that chunky fluke and sea bass can be found at Frisbees and Cartwright. Big porgies are falling to diamond jigs in the rips and bluefin tuna in the 70-pound class have been hooked about 20 miles southeast of the End on spreader bars, he added. At Star Island Marina and Yacht Club in Montauk, a staff member reported that Sam Gershowitz, the owner of the facility, landed a 55-pound striped bass on a live-lined spot from his boat, Marlena.

Paul Apostolides at Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk said that surfcasters are finding bluefish with a nice striper here and there.

Sebastian Gorgione at Mrs. Sam’s Bait and Tackle in East Hampton said that a 40-pound striper fell to a nighttime angler live-lining eels into the rip off Bostwick Point and that staff at an East Hampton surf camp have been catching fluke from the beach on bucktails tipped with Gulp. 

Ken Morse at Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor said there are strong catches of weakfish in Peconic Bay with one angler hooking 25 fish from 2 to 4 pounds.

Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported bluefish along ocean beaches, porgies throughout the bay, fluke at Napeague, and snappers showing in Amagansett. 

Follow The Star’s fishing columnist on Twitter, @ehstarfishing. Photos of prize catches can be emailed to David Kuperschmid at [email protected].

Montauk, in my eyes, is one of the richest places for natural history in the United States. It has grasslands, forests, savannas, freshwater wetlands, tidal wetlands, ponds both permanent and temporary, hills, kettleholes, glacial erratics, cranberry bogs, dunes, ocean beaches, sound beaches, all matter of marine and freshwater fishes, blue-spotted salamanders, and the only ocean coastal bluffs north of the Caribbean Islands. That venerable Long Islander Teddy Roosevelt traveled the world, and he also visited Montauk. He must have loved it. Walt Whitman loved it. I love it.

I am a latecomer. If I had come here 300 years earlier, I would have witnessed the Montauketts and their domesticated wolves. If I’d arrived 200 years earlier I would have seen Montauk as the second largest New York State prairie, replete with prairie flora and fauna and a few prairie chickens, not to mention the relatively new Montauk Lighthouse. One hundred years ago, Hither Woods was changing from a grassland to a deciduous oak-dominated forest, the Montauk Downs were knee-high with flowering sandplain gerardias, now federally endangered, the coastal bluffs were retreating landward at more than a foot per year, and the Walking Dunes were inching to the southeast with a baby one just starting up to the north.

Montauk is growing up in more ways than one. I’m particularly interested in how it is growing up biologically. Tropical fish species are beginning to inhabit the shallows around the glaciers anchored in the sea. Japanese shore crabs are the dominant invertebrates among the rocks around the Lighthouse. Humans are now the most common vertebrates. 

Will Montauk eventually return to its island past? Will the grasslands grow up into a mishmash of native trees and foreign ones and disappear altogether? Will the sandplain gerardia, now hanging on by a thread, survive another 100 years? Will the deer, already small, become still smaller and ultimately dwarf Florida’s Key deer in size? Will coywolves (a.k.a. eastern gray wolves) replace their long-lost brethren as the largest four-legged predators? Will sea turtles lay their eggs on the ocean beach? Will Lake Montauk ever return to its historical status as the largest freshwater body on Long Island?

That is why I seized upon the opportunity to study one of the largest clearings undertaken in the Montauk moorlands in recent history, almost 20 acres in size. How will this clearing, just three months old, grow up? Will it return to moorland status? Will it stay low and add to Montauk’s dwindling inventory of maritime grasslands? Will it become another mishmash of Eurasian trees and endemic ones, not nearly as purely American as the longstanding Point Woods less than a quarter of a mile to the east?

I perused it on Friday in shorts and flip-flops. It was still low, less than a couple of feet tall, with about 20 white oaks, black oaks, and black cherries still standing but no more than 20 feet tall, typical for a moorland in Montauk. A few small patches of shade-loving New York ferns, for which the moorlands are famous, now exposed to the open sun, survived here and there. Shads or high-bush blueberries remained. Wine berries from Asia and olives from the steppes of Russia were everywhere, if only a foot and a half tall. Lots of other weedy species were popping up throughout. In some areas they were tussling with Tartarian honeysuckle for supremacy.

Yet, not to be discouraged, there were several native plants scattered over the premises, among them flowering joe-pye weeds, bonesets, late-flowering asters, hyssop-leaved thoroughworts, slender fragrant goldenrods, and fireweeds, which were among the tallest of the forbs at two feet in height or more. This last species is one of those pioneers that takes over cleared areas, as it did with another pioneer, Pennsylvania sedge, when the Grace Estate forest was partially destroyed by gypsy moths at the turn of the century.

Some native grasses, sedges, and reeds were also present, along with a few non-native ones. At this early stage of re-growth the plant cover was roughly 50 percent indigenous and 50 percent foreign. Interestingly, three of the most troubling invasives that are rampant elsewhere on the South Fork — garlic mustard, mugwort, and mile-a-minute weed — were not in attendance.

If Long Island’s Karen Blumer of Growing Wild had her way, the cleared land would be left alone to revegetate, hopefully back into a moorland vegetation type, so prominently seen at Shadmoor State Park to the west, and not found elsewhere on Long Island outside of Montauk. The worst possible solution for filling in the newly created open space would be to play God and plant 50 of these, 50 of those, etc., etc., etc. It’s been tried over and over again, sometimes out of guilt, other times as a judicial sentence, but it rarely works and five years later you are looking at a classical hodgepodge.

The most pleasurable result of my walkthrough: I did not encounter a single tick or mosquito. Could this be the new Montauk in transition?

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

Five traditional boats, tools, and maritime equipment will be for sale on Saturday when the East End Classic Boat Society holds its annual fair from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Hartjen-Richardson Community Boat Shop at 301 Bluff Road, Amagansett, behind the East Hampton Town Maritime Museum. 

Each year, the nonprofit society builds and raffles a craft of classic design to help defray expenses. This year’s project, a 12-foot, 10-inch Pooduck sailboat, will be on display, and the winner of the raffle, to be announced in December, will also receive a LoadRite trailer. Also to be displayed on Saturday are plans and templates for the society’s next project, a 10.5-foot Sunshine Tender sailboat.

Pierce Hance, the society’s vice president, said the five boats to be sold are being offered at “heavily discounted, attractive negotiable prices.” They include an Old Town canoe, an American Trader canoe, a 12-foot Bevin’s skiff, a 19-foot, two-masted sharpie, and a new Sailfish with a dolly. 

Visitors to the fair also can tour and learn about the restoration efforts under way in the society’s workshop for a 1955 Dunphy runabout with a deck that now glows with eight coats of varnish and a 1921 Herreshoff 12 1/2 sloop, which the club is bringing back from a state of near-total decay. 

The society welcomes new members. Annual membership is $35 for an individual, $45 for a family. The boat shop is open Wednesday and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. 

There is a very pretty grove of green-leafed trees with bright red-brown flowers and developing fruit on the west end of Long Beach in Noyac, less than 75 feet from the lapping waters of Noyac Bay. On Monday I examined them and found them to be trees of heaven, Ailanthus altissima. I see scores of trees of this species every time I ride along one of the South Fork’s more populated highways. In places Noyac Road is overrun with them, but most of the flowers are much more green than red.

Stands of this species are not uncommon on the banks that separate the shore from seawater, especially where homes once stood close to a bay or creek. Where East Hampton’s Grace Estate meets Northwest Harbor, the site of the old Kirk residence, there is another stand of trees of heaven. Norman Taylor, who wrote the definitive guide to the flora of Montauk in 1923, found a similar stand on the edge of Block Island Sound. 

Victoria Bustamante rediscovered this stand in 2012. It must have started when Montauk was a thinly populated hamlet, more known for fishing and fattening livestock than entertaining and fattening tourists.

This is the same tree that Betty Smith celebrated in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” 

 “There’s a tree that grows in Brooklyn,” she writes. “No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. . . .” She was not an arborist, but she hit the nail on the head. The tree of heaven, known also as the ghetto palm or stinking spring, survives under the most ill-advised conditions. Once started, it takes over and often is the only tree left standing after a calamity.

It is revered in early Chinese writings that date back as many as 2,000 years. It’s the only species of the several in the genus that grew outside the tropics and made its way from the temperate Orient first to Europe and then to the United States in 1774 as an ornamental. Arborists and horticulturalists who distributed it widely here knew little about its evil side, its ability to poison would-be competitive plants by secreting a toxin from its roots, an allelopathogen named ailanthone. It kills just about every tree, shrub, or herb in its proximity. Somehow, the white ash, Fraxinus americanus, is alone immune. Among our native trees, walnuts, beeches, and maples are capable of doing the same, but none is a match for the tree of heaven.

Depending how you look at it, it’s either devilish or angelical. In China, early on, the tree was known more for its heavenly side than its evil one. All of its separate parts were used to treat a variety of maladies, including senility, cancer, dysentery, hemorragia, and much more. The species is also a silk tree and was used in China along with the white mulberry. The larvae silk moths fed on it and produced a fine silk. Attempts to use it to produce silk in this country have yet to pan out.

Perhaps because of its toxic ways, the tree of heaven is very rarely populated by lichens or mosses. Birds rarely nest in one and you very rarely find any of our harmful native insects using it for food. If you rub against it, it can produce symptoms like those of poison ivy or poison sumac. Interestingly, it can be confused with the latter native; both have compound leaves. Examine the leaflet of the tree of heaven and you will see a tooth or two near its base. Poison sumac leaflets are toothless.

It is not a nice plant, yet it is a survivor, just like Japanese knotweed, mugwort, and garlic mustard, to name three other invasives that are taking over our road edges and wastelands. Interestingly, the tree of heaven is one of the last trees to sprout leaves in the spring. As such, maybe it avoids leaf-eating insects and other disease organisms that are busy attacking already developed leaves. It cannot tolerate being shaded out by taller trees. Thus, you find it on edges but not in the interiors of woods. Clear a piece of land, however and it is one of the first species to settle, growing faster than most would-be competitors, six or more feet each year, eventually reaching 50 or 60 feet in less than 20 years.

Like the invasive olive trees and olive shrubs, it is able to come back when cut down to the ground, and when only two or three years old, it sends out suckers — those same vegetative parts that produce the herbicide ailanthone — from which new trees sprout up and reoccupy the cut-over land.

Although most trees of heaven are male or female, as with American hollies, some have flowers with both sexual parts and thus are capable of producing fertile seeds without the intervention of a neighboring tree. One tree dropping its samaras in an open area can quickly give rise to a tree of heaven forest.

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

The dog days of summer are supposed to wait until mid-August, but decided to come in July this year. Ouch! Having said that, the way the climate has been heating up in this decade, come August, the days could get even doggier. 

It was only 25 years ago when most of us drove around in cars sans air conditioners. I’m reminded of Wernher Von Braun, a Nazi rocket scientist imported by the United States military establishment, who, when asked how it was coming from northern Germany to live and work in the 100-degree days at the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, replied, “I live in an air-conditioned house, drive back and forth to work in an air-conditioned car, and work in an air-conditioned office.”

The birds have suddenly gone quiet. The night chorusing of snowy tree crickets has yet to start. It’s hard to find a breeze at midday to evaporate the beads of sweat. If it weren’t for the vehicles swooshing by one after another all day long, there would be no breeze at all. The sizzling hot humid days are helping to create conditions that are just right for growing blue-green algae. Throw in a little nitrate, ammonia, and phosphate and you have got yourself a blue-green bloom and a pea-green soup. Not the kind of water you want to swim in, or even smell or look at.

On the other hand, the gardens and farms are flourishing. Potatoes are back and blooming big time. Sweet corn is just around the corner. The fishing community is still eking out a living providing us with fresh fish and shellfish. If it weren’t for the local farmers and local fishermen summer would not taste the same as it did when I was growing up in Mattituck across the bay.

There are four or five coyotes or coy-wolves wandering around now on the South Fork. They’ve been seen in Water Mill, Wainscott, Sagaponack, and elsewhere. Well, when Europeans first settled here, there were lots of wolves, bobcats, and other predatory mammals. They took care of any overpopulation problems amongst their prey. They do a much better job at it than our clumsy United States Department of Agriculture sharpshooters and those that cut the ovaries out of living does in the name of population control. Hell, we can’t even control our own population, let alone those of other vertebrates.

The shorebirds that nest on the tundra each summer after stopping by for a bite or two on the way are already wrapping up their breeding activities, and are already moving south, stopping along the way in places like Mecox Bay, Shinnecock Bay, and any other local waters with shoals and mud flats at low tide that provide a couple of hours of good picking in daylight. A few shorebirds — oystercatchers, least terns, willets, and piping plovers — don’t go much father north than Long Island to breed. Somehow they manage on our beaches and in our marshes year after year, but not without a little help from their human protectors. If you go near their nests when they are raising young they let you know it in no uncertain terms.

You may have noticed an uptick in woodchucks and flying squirrels here on the South Fork. The former are vegetarians, the latter rival crows and grackles in the way they steal nestlings for protein. 

Notwithstanding the renewed competition with eagles and the age-old competition with cormorants for food, the ospreys are having a very good year. There are at present four nests within a couple of miles of one another on either side of Long Beach Road, which runs between Noyac Bay and Sag Harbor Cove. All have at least two young beginning to flap their wings in anticipation of their flight lessons. Apparently, there are enough fish around to feed us and the fish-eating birds, a very good sign if you are a fisherman or fisherwoman.

This year, for the first time ever, I would guess, there are more fish crows around than common crows. Outside my window every afternoon the fish crows’ calls drown out the others. It’s as if the larger species and longtime inhabitants, have given in to the smaller interlopers. But since fish crows are suited for urban and suburban areas, it’s also a sign that the East End is becoming more and more citified with each passing year. Newsday quotes a local official that Montauk is becoming upscale, a euphemism for “gentrified.” 

As we run out of open parcels on which to build, no worry, just raze another house and replace it with a bigger one. If it weren’t for the 2-percent community preservation fund tax where would we be?

Then we have the green energy people getting more boisterous by the minute. A bunch of them now want to cut forests down to make room for solar panels, another bunch wants to muddy up the seas with wind turbines. Add up all of the free spaces represented by residential house roofs, those of big box stores, schools and institutions, parking lots, and other non-vegetated spaces and you could produce enough solar energy to light up the entire South Fork. Maybe we should return to the ways of the 1930s and play all athletic contests, professional and amateur, during the day, and use only LED lighting for public and commercial spaces. How about our political leaders preaching conservation of our resources? Drive less, take trains and buses, bike more, walk more, turn out lights when not in use, pee on the ground instead of in the toilet, have smaller families, live in smaller houses, and raise veggies and chickens in the backyard. What ever happened to the notion of zero population growth? If we had taken President Carter seriously back in the late 1970s we would be much further ahead than we are now.

Several scientists have been quoted as saying the oceans are dying. The Gulf of Mexico, an important arm of the Atlantic Ocean, may never recover from British Petroleum’s $51 billion oil spill. Come on, folks, it’s now or never.

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