Last Saturday, as a part-time participant in the New York State Waterfowl Count for the first time in years, I accompanied the Rubinstein sisters, Vicki Bustamante, and 12-year-old Hannah Mirando from Montauk. Readers may remember that Hannah also was a key observer in the 100-plus-year-old Montauk Christmas Bird Count held on Dec. 14 of last year.

    It was a pleasant day with an on-again, off-again stiff west wind. Our party’s territory consisted of Hook, Georgica, Town, Wickapogue, Fairfield, Kellis, Sagg, and Poxabogue Ponds and Bridgehampton’s north-south chain of ponds ending with Short’s Pond by the Atlantic Golf Club just north of Scuttlehole Road.

    It was also a big day for waterfowl hunting. Some of us were fooled by sets of geese and black duck decoys that we studied via our scopes and binoculars for longish times before we realized they were not the real thing — they didn’t move! About 2 in the afternoon, I was the lone observer at Kellis Pond just west of the Bridgehampton Commons when a flock of about 100 Canada geese flew in from the west, circled around and approached goose decoys on the west edge of the pond. Three of them made a pass at the decoys and were about to set in when three blasts from a blind on the edge of a shore resounded, one goose fell, the others all took off to the east. I stayed to watch a Labrador retriever emerge from the blind, swim out about 100 feet, and retrieve the downed goose.

    As per usual on such counts, Canada geese stole the show. Our party counted at least 9,000 of them, the biggest collection feeding in the grass farm field along the east side of Beach Lane in Wainscott where they numbered 3,504.

    Hook Pond had 1,750 and Shorts Pond another 1,200 or so. The latter venue was the last examined and geese kept settling in all the time, raising a loud cacophony from both the water and the sky above.

    There were 12 pure white snow geese grouped together among the horde of Canadas on the pond; they were quiet, apparently napping. When it’s not frozen, Shorts Pond and the two little ponds on the opposite side of the road are always productive in the winter and Saturday was no exception. There were also at least 10 green-winged teals, three American coots (not ducks), two American wigeons, three black ducks, 31 mallards, and 1 black duck-mallard hybrid.

    In the 1940s and 1950s, counts such as ours yielded many more black ducks than mallards. On this day mallards outgunned blacks, 253 to 159. Like Canada geese, lots of mallards breed locally and stay around during the winter, while only a few black ducks breed this far south. The Nature Trail on David’s Lane in East Hampton yielded the most mallards, 165, along with 4 mallard-black hybrids, while the largest collection of black ducks — 86 — were at Fairfield Pond in Sagaponack by the ocean off Daniel’s Lane. (I wonder if they get a kick out of hanging in the shadow of Sagaponack’s and the South Fork’s largest mansion.)

    Canada geese outnumbered all of the other waterfowl — some 26 different species — taken together by almost 12 to 1. They are by far our most common waterfowl on the South Fork, apart from the sea ducks such as the scoters, more than 40,000 of which were tallied on the Montauk Count. On Saturday, however, they were lacking. Our group counted only 156 scoters belonging to all three species.

    As for the mergansers, the species with the highest number was the hooded merganser. We counted 60. Red-breasted mergansers, or sheldrakes, which are generally the most frequent of the lot, came to only 54, while common mergansers accounted for 8, all of which were in their usual hangout, East Hampton’s Hook Pond. There were 82 ruddy ducks, 65 of which were in one of their favorite spots, Wainscott Pond; another 17 were found in Sagg Pond. Buffleheads, which do well in all kinds of water bodies tallied 37, with the most — 24 — counted in Sagg Pond. No brant, scaup, redheads, wood ducks, long-tailed ducks (or oldsquaw), or common goldeneye were observed, no doubt because our territory didn’t include any of the Peconic Estuary’s waters.

    Other duck species becoming more and more uncommon with each passing year are the canvasback, blue-winged teal, shoveler, and pintail. Only four, two, two, and one of each were seen, respectively. Perhaps the day’s rarest finds were the five white-fronted geese seen at Pots and Kettles and the two tundra swans (a k a whistling swans) on Hook Pond.

    Speaking of swans, 69 mute swans were counted in five ponds, the most — 45 — in Sagg Pond. What is this cockamamie idea that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has in mind with respect to the mute swan population? Some authorities want to eliminate them from the wild in New York State by 2025. I’ve been keeping a close eye on this swan’s South Fork population for close to 40 consecutive years now. If anything, there were at least three times as many of them around in the 1970s than there are today. They don’t migrate and except when inland water bodies are frozen solid, they are easy to find and easy to observe. They are one of the country’s largest birds.

    Who really cares that they are exotic? They’ve been here since the Civil War, and that’s a very long time. They don’t multiply like Canada geese, which, incidentally, are quite native. They are what ecologists call “naturalized.” Let them be, I say! They are an entrenched part of the freshwater ecosystem.

--

Larry Penny can be reached at [email protected].

    On Feb. 8, the Atlantic City Boat Show will present a series of seminars on striped bass fishing. Greg Myerson will be there with the plastic mount of the striper he caught in August 2011 off the coast of Connecticut. At 81.88 pounds, and angled according to the rules of the International Game Fish Association, Myerson’s lunker bass was, and remains, the world-record catch.

    There is a photo of the angler holding the fish horizontally in his arms, the broad tail draped over his arms down to his thigh. So big was the fish, that if the photo had been backlit so that man and fish appeared in silhouette it would look as though he were carrying a mermaid that was sleeping or had died a tragic death.

    Luck had nothing to do with it. Myerson was born to fish. At age 8, he plucked the feathers from his grandmother’s dead parrot to fashion his first lure. As time went on, he became addicted to striped bass, and in this he is not alone. He studied their habitats and hunting habits. He learned that lobsters are among their favorite foods, and this is where it gets a little weird.

    Myerson suspected that bass were drawn to lobsters by the sound they make as they move along the ocean floor. If he could mimic the sound, he might be able fool big bass. Instead of matching the hatch, he would match the rattle of lobster armor. In order to capture it, he placed a stethoscope to the side of an aquarium to listen to the scuttling of crayfish. Here’s where it gets weirder.

    How to replicate the sound? There must have been a great number of attempts, but by deduction, the angling Sherlock found that crack vials, with the right number of BBs placed inside, produced the same click and rattle as a lobster striding along the bottom in full battle dress. I know what you’re thinking. No, Myerson claimed he found the small vials at his job site. In any case, he succeeded in creating and marketing a sinker/lobster-rattle combination.

    I find the back story to Mr. Myerson’s record catch somewhat troubling. For instance, how exactly did his grandmother’s parrot perish? And, of course, the ease with which discarded crack vials came to hand is a serendipity that speaks volumes about society at large.

    According to Myerson, the big bass was caught using a live eel as bait. As East End fishermen know well, eels are also high on the striped bass menu.

    It’s not clear whether the crack-vial sinker was part of the fishing line’s terminal gear on that moonlit night in August of 2011, but if it was, if the wise old fish was tricked into believing it had come upon the ultimate prey, a freakish, Frankensteinian lobster-eel, a Gorgon, I fear it’s proof that what goes around comes around — a bad omen.

    You see, the Gorgons of Greek mythology were monsters covered with impenetrable scales, hair of living snakes, sharp fangs, and a beard. They were said to live in the far west, near the sea. They guarded the underworld, and those who beheld them turned to stone, or these days — and in the case of the world-record striped bass — plastic. Can you hear the clink and rattle of crack vials?

    This story begins at the East Hampton Town Airport, circa 2000, while I was serving as the town’s natural resources director. The town had received a grant to construct a fence around the airport at no small cost to keep deer off the runways. A deer vs. plane collision spurred the town to take steps to prevent similar accidents in the future. The contractor put up a wonderful fence. Only one problem, the deer could walk down the road from either the north or the south and enter the airport at their leisure the way vehicles and people do.

    I was familiar with the effective cattle guard grates placed on many roads in California and various other western states, including the ones on Highway 1, the main coastal artery running from California’s border with Mexico on the south to its border with Oregon on the north.

    I priced them out. A Utah company built reinforced ones for roads at a cost of around $15,000, not counting shipping. This seemed a reasonable cost, as the fence itself cost nearly $500,000. Two cattle guards might prevent deer from entering at will.

    The town superintendent of highways at the time gave me a loud “no,” worried about the possibility of pedestrian and bicycle accidents that might occur and the expensive liabilities that might ensue. An alternative plan was put into action — the town got a state nuisance permit, administered by my office, to take deer on airport grounds day or night. Deer continued to enter airport fields. Some of them were dispatched by nuisance hunters, to wit, members of the town police.

    Animal control has always been somewhat of a problem in East Hampton and on the South Fork in general. Nuisance trappers and exterminators dealt with the raccoons, opossums, foxes, squirrels, and rats, but their state licenses didn’t cover deer.

    Birds around airports could also present problems. At about the same time the fence was installed, I took a tour with an inspector from the United States Department of Agriculture’s office that handled nuisance wildlife at airports. When the she saw the numerous bluebird boxes which had been put up along the fields’ edges by Karylin Jones and myself three years earlier, she admonished me and said they should be removed. They never were (my fault), and more were added periodically in future years, leading to a healthy build-back of the bluebird population, which by the 1980s had been reduced to a few South Fork pairs. As far as I can tell, there has never been a collision between a bluebird and an airplane at the airport.

    The same department recently began shooting snowy owls at Kennedy airport during a bumper fly-down from the Arctic tundra beginning in November. Complaints were lodged from several quarters, including other federal entities, and the shooting program came to a standstill, replaced by a trap-and-removal program. The bluebird incident was the first time I became aware of the U.S.D.A. having such a role, as it seemed that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would do a better and more humane job at it. But when I later realized that the U.S. Geological Survey does most of America’s surveys of fish and wildlife, I realized how the U.S.D.A.’s role in wildlife control could have come to be.

    In the area of animal husbandry and farming, the same U.S.D.A. advised farmers to use lead arsenate in the 1930s and ’40s to deal with weeds and vermin, as that salt was a combination pesticide and herbicide. Today, half the nation’s farm fields, including those in East Hampton and the rest of the East End, have high arsenic and lead concentrations as a result.

    Now their sharpshooters are about to take on the deer here using high-powered rifles with night scopes and silencers. (No need to wake up the residents in the middle of the night; they have to go work the next morning.)

    There is a perceived deer problem. I guess there is some truth to the notion when you consider the size of the Long Island deer population in the World War II 1940s and its number now. That is one of the reasons the East Hampton Group for Wildlife hired a wildlife population consulting group, led by a wildlife specialist, Frank Verret, to undertake a scientific population count of the town’s deer early in the spring of 2006. The Natural Resources Department assisted them. The team spent two weeks here and counted 3,293 deer. Then the town hired a consultant to undertake a second deer count in 2013, this one from the air using special cameras and night-vision observations. This count tallied 877 deer throughout the town. Both counts were science-based and both are considered to be accurate snapshots of the East Hampton deer population in two different years. What could account for the drop in population from 3,293 to 877, a 73-percent decrease, over a span of seven years?

    I will try to explain. In 2005 there were only four parcels in East Hampton Town, other than those cooperative stated-county-town areas such as Hither Woods, where deer hunting by shotgun and bow and arrow were allowed, the largest of which was the Grace Estate nature preserve in Northwest. My office was in charge of all of the town nature preserves at that time, and when I discovered hunters hunting on town lands where deer hunting was prohibited, I had the department put up no deer hunting signs.

    Well you can imagine the uproar that arose from Montauk Point to the town line on the west. Such uproar caught the attention of the town board and a councilman took it upon himself to deal with the situation. He instructed the Natural Resources Department to look at all of the town’s nature preserves, which today number more than 400, and see which ones could meet the criteria for legal big game hunting — 500 feet from a road or buildings. We put together a list of 34, including the four already listed in the town code, and the board enacted a local law expanding considerably the town-owned acreage open to deer hunting.

    Yes, lots of deer succumb each year to vehicle hits, a few other drown or die from sickness, but I am fairly certain that local deer hunters and licensed nuisance hunters such as those covering the airport are largely responsible for the large drop in numbers. I was a hunter myself early on and I am not opposed to licensed hunters taking deer on town lands because they know what they are doing and hunt for meat as much as for sport. Our local hunters are as skilled as our local fishermen and in a very big way control the overpopulations of waterfowl such as Canada geese and mallards, as well as deer, cottontails, turkeys, and other upland game.

    I am also for contraception, which has come a very long way since the Fire Island deer control program of 1995, which I participated in and videotaped. Until the authorities choose that route, if we let the town’s hunters continue to balance out the deer population by allowing deer hunting in both the town and village, in my opinion, there is no need to repeat a scene reminiscent of those many carried out by the Nazis in Europe in World War II or by Stalin in the Soviet Union prior to that time. The Movie­tone news clips and newspaper photos of which still burn in my mind.

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

    Real life is seldom far removed from its cartoon version. The current plague of tattoos suggests the distance is shrinking.

    Elmer Fudd came to mind the other day.

    I was driving out to Montauk Point on Friday, past Deep Hollow Ranch, up the hill to the east overlook with its panoramic view of Oyster Pond and the shores of southern New England beyond it to the north. Halfway down the hill I spied an S.U.V. parked on the side of the road. Suddenly, a deer leapt across the road between the vehicle and me. As I passed, the two men inside, one holding a thermos, were laughing. The story unfolded in a flash.

    It was late afternoon on the last day of shotgun season. The men were hunters just back from the woods tired, deer-less, and, they were acknowledging, Fudd-like, that the deer, its white tail flipping the equivalent of the bird, had won.

    I drove onward to the Point to check the waves. Looking south I saw the guide boat that’s been taking duck hunters out after scoters all season. The boat was anchored about 200 yards offshore of Turtle Cove, its string of black decoys bobbing nearby. I walked into the cove, watched the waves for a while — a peaceful scene, the guns silent aboard the duck boat.

    I continued around the Lighthouse, hiking its rock bulwarks to the northeast side of the peninsula and out of sight of the guide boat. There, stretched toward the horizon, floated a raft of scoters measuring at least an acre in diameter, Daffy gloating among them.

    It made me think of a scene — help me here — I think it was Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd, or it could have been Daffy and Yosemite Sam. In any case, one of them was duck hunting. Daffy had come up behind, shadowing the gunslinger step for step. Finally, he prods the hunter’s butt with a stick and says: “Shtick ’em up, or I’ll blow your brains out.”

    “What’s up Doc?” Are we the hunters or the hunted? I think both. We’re fast becoming caricatures of ourselves. The Looney Tunes are coming for us: Game Boy, Sarah Palin, Duck Dynasty, Dennis Rodman, Justin Bieber, the Wolf of Wall Street, Super Bowl, Governor Christie, Congress, Bad Ink, on and on. They’re creeping up our legs, our backs, our necks. If we’re not careful our hearts will soon be lost upon our sleeves. That’s all folks.

    “The seas will turn red,” it prophesizes in the Bible, having to do with the anticipated Armageddon. The seas are turning red, not with blood, but with red tide phytoplankton. They’re also turning brown, purple, all of the colors in the spectrum except green for the same reason. And it all has to do with more and more nitrogen products entering the seawater with each passing day. Seven billion-plus humans, more than half of whom live only a few miles from any one of the four world oceans, produce an awful lot of nitrogen compounds as waste products. Those wastes eventually reach the water.

    There are nitrogen compounds in the air; some of ours come all the way from China. When it rains, nitrogen compounds get into the water either directly or indirectly. Mammals excrete urea, birds and reptiles excrete uric acid, even fish and marine organisms excrete nitrogenous wastes.

    The earth’s atmosphere is 80 percent nitrogen gas. Nitrogen is as important as oxygen and carbon dioxide for growing protoplasm, the stuff of life. Amino acids contain nitrogen atoms. They are turned into proteins. If we tried to live on a diet without proteins we would first become weak and flabby, then we would die an agonizing death.

    In the cities and other densely populated communities, when we urinate, the urine goes down a hole into a series of pipes and tubes, and eventually through an outfall pipe into the nearest large body of water, in the case of New York City, into the Atlantic Ocean. In Albany, it first goes into the Hudson River, then into the ocean. They call the oceans “sinks” because eventually everything runs into them.

    Phytoplankton are single-celled organisms that make up the bottom layer of the marine food chain. They are made from proteins. When each divides into two daughter cells — yes, blame it on the women — the population doubles. The more nitrogen in the water, the faster they double. Dividing at a rate of every 24 hours, one phytoplankton, say, a diatom, becomes a population of 1,024 diatoms after 10 days, and if none are eaten, more than a half a million after 20 days. Even if half are eaten by zooplankton and filter-feeding shellfish and finfish, a quarter million are left to continue to multiply at the same daily doubling rate.

    Many of the phytoplankton that produce colorful tides also synthesize poisons. When they are consumed in large quantities by higher forms of sea life, that sea life can get very sick and even die. The same can be said for the highest form of life, us. If we eat mussels or clams that have been feeding on poisonous phytoplankton, we can die. Paralytic shellfish poison from eating shellfish that have been feeding on poisonous phytoplankton can be fatal to humans. That is why many coastal states such as California, where red tide is common, have signs posted telling humans not to eat mussels harvested from their waters.

    An even more profound problem arises when the phytoplankton, as was the case of the brown tide organisms in our local waters in the mid-1980s, become so numerous that they remove all of the oxygen from the water. Then they die, too, but take fish and other marine creatures with them. When the phytoplankton crop dies en masse, any oxygen left in the water is removed by the breakdown of the dead plankton cells into molecules of detritus.

    An overabundance of nitrates in the water leads to a different kind of calamity. Eelgrass is a flowering plant, not a seaweed, that grows on the bottom of shallow estuarine bodies. Eelgrass meadows are the best of all sea bottom habitat types, utilized by a host of different fishes, including winter flounder and other important marine organisms, for spawning. It is a favorite food of many waterfowl, including goldeneye, brant, and Canada geese.

    But it has a peculiar weakness for nitrogenous nutrients. It can’t stop itself from overindulging. It takes them up day and night until it runs out of carbohydrates to burn and literally dwindles down to nothing. That is most likely the reason for the disappearance of the major eelgrass bed in Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton. For year after year it thrived just off the Springy Banks shore, marking of the edge of the harbor’s southwestern part. Then all of a sudden a few years ago, it disappeared in a matter of a few weeks.

    Springy Banks, as the name implies, is always weeping groundwater out onto the shore and into the shallows seaward of it. It provided freshwater from spring holes for local Indians prior to occupation by settlers from Europe. When the town’s Natural Resources Department sampled the water oozing up along that shore in the late 1980s it was found to be contaminated with fecal coliforms and rich in nitrogenous wastes. Why? Houses with conventional septic systems lined the banks. The increase over the years from more and bigger houses and their summer occupancies produced more and more urine. The eelgrass most likely ate themselves to death.

    A son of mine recently moved from Los Angeles to Nevada City in northeast California, not too far from Lake Tahoe and the Nevada state border. His new county, Nevada County, mandates septic systems and septic fields that remove nitrogen products from the waste stream. A day-and-night monitoring system hooked into the county’s Health Department by telephone lets the county know if something is amiss. It cost about $30,000 to purchase and install. It’s been working for more than a year now and is still turning out almost nitrogen-less wastewater. Not a bad investment, some garages here cost that much.

    What to do, what to do? Anthony Towhill, a land use attorney from Riverhead, once said at a Sag Harbor Village meeting that we were being Della Femina-ized, alluding to the large impact one individual had on the South Fork in a short span of time. Right now we are being Farrell-ized at a great pace which has a different impact. Lots of big McMansions spring up here and there, each with a conventional septic system, each with more than one bathroom and lots of capacity for accommodating humans and their guests during high times in the Hamptons, mostly in the summer.

    Conventional septic systems involve massive concrete rings placed underground (out of sight!) fed by a septic tank settling out solids and receiving human waste products, gray water from washing, etc., and anything else the homeowner or renter wants to put down the drain. The wastewater percolating out through the holes of the concrete rings leaches down and eventually makes its way into the groundwater, the freshwater aquifer, as it were, from which we derive all of our drinking water.

    Here on the South Fork, we are surrounded by lapping waters. All groundwater eventually leads to the seas. New houses, especially those monstrous ones should have septic systems that remove nitrogen and other harmful chemicals or are hooked up to community treatment facilities or septic treatment plants prior to any wastewater entering the ground.

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

    Sunday was friendly. At four in the afternoon, the Viking Starship returned to Montauk Harbor after a long day on a calm sea — cold, but calm and mostly sunny. Capt. Carl Forsberg smiled down from the Starship’s wheelhouse at the 80 booted, knit-hatted, and well-bundled anglers departing with coolers stocked with cod fillets. They had the look of a day well spent.

    An hour earlier I was skating on Fort Pond. The pond had not frozen like that in four years, solid except the spot in the center where it almost never freezes, where the underground spring refreshes the pond and the birds hang out. But otherwise, the ice was smooth and hard and I skated from Kirk Park on the south end all the way to Industrial Road, a good half-mile and back.

    Then I skated around with no direction. What a wonderful invention, skates, like the wheel in a way. It’s good to be friction-free even if one’s sliding resembles a curling stone more than the Olympian, triple-toe-looping figure skaters, hockey players, and short-track speeders competing in Sochi. 

    The kids had been on the pond most of the day, a group of about 12, skating along together, aimless like myself, the younger ones trying to keep up, a hockey stick or two, a dog, two bicycles, a few firecrackers that punctuated the stillness every now and then. A father had built a fire on the ice, a grill set on top of the wood. He was cooking hotdogs and there was a pot of hot chocolate. The kids had eaten much earlier. I, Norman Rockwell, accepted one of the two remaining dogs on a toasted roll. The chef said, “Wait,” took back the dog, placed a piece of cheese on it, and handed it back. I skated away eating the best cheese dog in America.

    An hour before that, I rode my bike with three friends from Lazy Point down Napeague Meadow Road, with its listing telephone poles — a lone fox way out on the snowy flats — to the ocean, scaring a blue heron into the air as we neared the railroad tracks. We peddled back across the highway and tracks, meandered around Lazy Point, and came to a road end. In the bushes, dirty, and nearly covered with vines was an old sign. It was a Town of East Hampton posting advising shellfishermen that a permit was required.

    It began: “Have you a shellfish permit?”

    Not, “WARNING — clamming without a permit is a violation of statute number 8675945, paragraph B” or, “Shellfishing without a permit is punishable by a fine of $10,000 and a mandatory prison sentence of no less than 20 years.”

    No, the sign was from a time gone by, the spare syntax said as much. We don’t speak like that anymore. It was put there by the East Hampton Town Trustees, the town’s oldest governing body, founded in 1686. And, while the sign did not read, “Have ye a shellfish permit?” its author seems to have had a homier, more neighborly mindset.

    “Have you a shellfish permit?” The sign was addressing good people, gently informing them, reminding them, suggesting that perhaps they’d left their permit at home. Thank you for checking. 

    Coolers full of cod, a hotdog cooked over a wood fire on a frozen pond, and a sign from another time that read: “Sunday was friendly.”

    At first, the sound made me bolt up out of a deep sleep and reach for something to defend the house against an intruder, but now, I simply roll over and reach again for the arms of Morpheus. It’s only a deer eating the ivy off the cedar shakes, and ivy’s not good for the shingles.

    It’s what happens when snow covers the deer’s usual browse. The nibbling came again last night and before Morpheus took me back to dreamland, I thought about snow, the sight, sound, feel, and even the smell of it. I love snow, maybe because I was born in upstate New York during the blizzard of ’47.

    I like the way it changes the landscape, our perception of things, like the unusually low, full moon tide earlier this week that allowed one to walk back in time, out onto the rock reef in Montauk and view the cliffs and dunes, far away like they appeared when the beach was as broad, even at high tide. 

    In these parts, and especially in more urban areas, folks moan about snow. It paralyzes roadways, eats into budgets, closes schools, waaaaa!

    There was a time when I spent winters in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and like other places in the mountain West, snow, deep and continuous snow, was, and is, the norm. We would see the storms coming via the news channel from Blackfoot-Pocatello just over the Tetons in Idaho. You could smell it. What is the smell? Ozone, perhaps the smell of pine and rocks captured and carried by the snow?

    As it began to fall, the local radio would advise people to get to where they were going. If we were skiing — feeling, more than seeing our way down — word would pass around the mountain. The road back to town would likely be closed before long.

    Not a bad thing. There was one night spent sleeping on the floor of the Mangy Moose. Upon waking, I looked out the window and watched as a drift began to move. Out from under five feet of snow emerged two malamute dogs yawning awake in the morning sun. And there was the night I awoke in the back of a pickup buried under four huskies.

    The wild animals came down out off the mountains and foothills when the snow got deep. The elk herd gathered close together in the valley. Eagles watched from the treetops. Antelope pushed through the snow to find food, got their footing on roads until the plows came through and buried them. Coyotes pounced up and down on their forefeet to root out the mice and rabbits they heard or smelled beneath the snow. Huge moose wandered the roads of Jackson, or bedded down beside a car that had become a mound.

    Snow fell in feet until it buried the house that I shared with my friend Bob (Wheels) Barrows and Laurel, his pretty, red-haired wife who hailed from the California desert and used “gooder” in place of “better.” You felt enwombed, cocooned. The world was muffled, all its edges swaddled in cotton.

    Right about then, the deer must have quit the ivy. I slept until wind woke me at dawn, and the snow was falling once again. 

    I believe I’ve discovered the identity of the first person to ride Montauk’s waves, at least on a surfboard, and also where the surfing took place. Before I proceed, I would like to recognize this as one of those Columbus-“discovered”-America claims.

    We know from 17th-century eyewitness accounts that the local Indians fished from canoes, even chased whales with them. It is inconceivable they did not use ocean swells to help propel them back to shore. And, surely they enjoyed the push — surfing defined.

    This said, I believe it was a man named Richard Lisiewski who first rode a surfboard in Montauk. The year was 1950. The Korean War was raging.  Lisiewski was in the Army stationed in the metropolitan area. The Jersey Shore native is now 86. Memories begin to fade at that age, but with the help of his son Michael, who runs a surf shop in Brighton Beach, N.J., Lisiewski recently recalled how he came to surf Montauk.

    That he marched to the beat of a different drummer is an understatement. In 1949, he became obsessed with the idea of surfing. Michael Lisiewski said it was unclear if his father had watched surfing demonstrated by one of the sport’s early prophets. Duke Kahanamoku himself, “the father of modern surfing,” visited New Jersey and Long Island not long after the turn of the 20th century, and there were others who planted the Hawaiian seed here after the Duke.

    However the bug bit, it bit hard. Richard Lisiewski found the plans in Popular Mechanics magazine for a wooden semi-hollow board from a design pioneered by an innovator named Tom Blake. A Kook Box, as the boards became known, was built with the help of one or two of the crafty types who frequented the family-owned tavern. Michael Lisiewski said his father was adept at securing leave from his Army duties, so he stuffed his 12-foot-long, 100-pound surfboard into his Cadillac convertible and hit the road.

    He drove to Montauk because he knew about Camp Hero, which was an active Army base at the time, complete with antiaircraft batteries. The batteries drilled using live ammunition fired at drones towed across the sky out over the ocean, scaring charter boat customers in the process.

    Apparently, his comrades in arms at Camp Hero welcomed the soldier-surfer. He remembered riding waves in a very rocky area, which the beach and reef at Camp Hero certainly was — and is. In 1953, the Army turned the installation over to the Air Force so that by the 1960s when Montauk started to become a popular surfing destination, Lisiewski’s pioneered spot had become known as “Air Force Base.”

    He also remembered a beach with cabanas, obviously the ones at the Montauk Beach Club, created by the developer Carl Fisher in the 1920s and located on the beach in downtown Montauk. So, it’s possible Lisiewski was also the first to ride the waves at the beloved surf spot named Atlantic Terrace after the hotel that overlooks it. The soldiers at Camp Hero allowed him to keep his board on base. He returned again and again.

    In 1961, Lisiewski formed Matador Surfboards, one of the first modern foam-board businesses on the East Coast. Several of his old Kook Box boards can be seen at the New Jersey Surf Museum.

    Speaking of Kook Boxes, an enduring mystery regarding the history of surfing in Montauk was a young man’s discovery of an old wooden semi-hollow board, covered in seaweed and barnacles, washed up in one of Montauk’s moorland coves in the 1970s. The board was given to Lee Bieler, a Montauk surfer who once owned the popular Blue Parrot bar and restaurant in East Hampton and it hung for many years on the wall behind the bar.

    The board, a large ding in its wooden rail repaired by the renowned shaper Billy Hamilton, now graces the wall in Bieler’s house in Princeville, Kauai.  The question is, whose board was it? Where did it come from, and how long had it been in the ocean? If it was a seed, it has taken root big time.

    It will be hard to top the prediction first made in this very column in the spring of 2012 for the Big One, Sandy, which came in the last days of October of that year, but here goes.

    It’s been a quiet year, 2013, but expect a tumultuous change and another Big One come 2014. It won’t be as big, but it will hit while South Fork municipalities, the county, state, and feds are still deciding what to do about Sandy, so it will cause an equal amount of damage.

    The Eurasian invasive species, phragmites, or ditch reed, will begin a long-anticipated retreat from various salt marshes as has been happening over the last four or five years for the Napeague marshes on either side of Napeague Meadow Road in Amagansett. Phragmites in fresh marshes on the South Fork, however, will continue to prosper.

    After a hiatus of 12 years, gypsy moths and canker worm moths will begin their comeback. Look for largish areas of hardwood trees bereft of foliage come June and July.

    Nitrogenous wastes from septic urine disposal will continue to seep into coastal ponds, tidal creeks, bays and harbors. The ocean won’t be affected as much as the estuarine waters of Great South Bay, Shinnecock Bay, and much of the Peconic Estuary. Efforts to abate the growing problem will continue, but will not make much of a dent, especially if the homeowners on the north side of the Great South Bay have their way and the breach caused by Sandy is filled in. Better that humans urinate on the ground, say, in the woods, like the other wild animals do.

    The rise in sea level will accelerate as the glaciers melt faster and faster. As a result, fresh ponds such as Fort Pond in Montauk and all coastal fresh marshes such as those surrounding Napeague Harbor, Fort Pond, Hook Pond, Wickapogue Pond, Sagg Pond, and the rest of the coastal ponds between Montauk Point and the Shinnecock Inlet will experience expansion landward while the water levels will rise accordingly as they are buoyed up by the denser salt water intruding beneath them.

    The scions from the bald eagle pair nesting on Gardiner’s Island, the raven pair nesting on the Hampton Bays water tower, and the turkey vultures nesting in Montauk will begin to nest locally as well and by 2020 will have established stable Long Island populations. They will be joined by peregrine falcon young from the adult pairs nesting on top of a Nassau County building and the tall bridges spanning the East River and Hudson River. Cellphone and radio transmitting and receiving towers scattered around offer stable nesting sites. Don’t be surprised if the first pair of eastern Long Island falcons to nest in Suffolk County nest near the top of the long-standing communications tower on Napeague or the top of the non-functioning radar building at Camp Hero State Park.

    The South Fork red fox population, which is rebuilding as we speak, will almost reach its peak before succumbing to the mange that thinned its population to near zero in the late 1990s. Commensurately, cottontail rabbits, rats, voles, and white-footed mice will become scarce. The local raccoon population, which is presently peaking, will succumb to a distemper endemic of the kind that decimated its population in the early 1990s.

    Hunters, not sharpshooters hired by the United States Department of Agriculture, will decrease the local deer population, hopefully to be followed by the use of contraception. The lone star tick population will continue to grow, while the black-legged, or deer, tick population will continue to diminish. As the rodent population falls, cases of Lyme disease and babesiosis will decrease accordingly.

    The local fishermen will continue to ply their trade and make a modest living despite all the rules and regulations governing their activities. They are the soul of Southampton and East Hampton towns.

    Until we stem the noise of helicopters and the ambient nightlights from McMansions and businesses, whippoorwills and hermit thrushes will stay away, ospreys will suffer and piping plovers won’t do so well, especially in combination with the fox buildup.

    After eight years of major disappointment, East Hampton Town will once again be properly governed, Montauk and townwide beaches will become a tad more peaceful in the summertime, helicopters and jets will be grounded, and we will be able to see the stars at night and listen to them sparkle.

    At Thanksgiving time I was with my wife, Julie, staying in the Bronx looking after her mother, Grace, who is 94 years old and was recuperating from an illness at Providence Rest at the edge of East­chester Bay just south of Pelham Bay Park. We parked in a restricted area and I stayed in the car with the motor running while Julie made a last-minute visit before we headed back to Sag Harbor. It was in a residential neighborhood called Country Club and mid-afternoon.

    I was watching two eastern gray squirrels hunt for food in the largish treed yards of two residences. The gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) is a member of the rodent family that ranges from the tip of Florida and south Texas all the way up to Alberta, Ontario, and the Canadian Maritime provinces and west from the Atlantic to the Dakotas, Kansas, and Nebraska. Gray squirrels are tree dwellers and the great prairies must have slowed their progress. They never got to the Rocky Mountains and never to California. The western gray squirrel, Sciurus griseus, probably got there from Asia by way of the ancient land bridge, Beringia, which linked Asia and North America during the height of the ice age when sea levels were lowest.

    These squirrels were very busy going here and there, climbing up and down trees when my eye caught something black moving at the edge of the house. It was a cat, and then I saw another. The cats and squirrels didn’t pay much attention to each other and at times were motionless side by side.

    Then I saw another black animal, presumably a cat, but a smaller one, and when I screwed up my eyes and took a closer look, it turned out to be a squirrel. It was joined by a second and except for their inky coloration they were of the same size as the gray squirrels and carried on similarly. I began to realize that I was a voyeur to the famous melanistic gray squirrels of New York City’s East Side and eastern Westchester County to the north.

    One could plainly see that the black squirrels were as much at home as the gray ones in that microhabitat of trees and lawns less than 200 yards from a tributary of Long Island Sound. There wasn’t much interaction between the grays and the blacks, but every once in a while one of the cats would take a swipe at one of the black ones.

    It turns out that the two colors keep to themselves with respect to reproduction, although in some other locations scattered across the Midwest and East some grays and blacks hybridize to give birth to brownish squirrels. According to several studies, two black squirrels never give rise to gray progeny; two grays never bear black young.

    In some Midwestern populations where black squirrels have been introduced, the blacks have been out-reproducing the grays to the point where they outnumber them. Certainly the New York ones are native, as are many of the other local black squirrel populations. It is said, but never has been documented, that the original Kellogg, of Kellogg’s cereals, introduced black squirrels on the campus of Michigan University in order to eradicate the red squirrels there. They are so highly prized in other areas that they have become the official mascots of Haverford College in Pennsylvania and Kent State University in Ohio. The latter institution has a special Black Squirrel Day celebration annually. Even the Harvard of the West, Stanford University, has a thriving population of black eastern gray squirrels. Apparently, they appeal to college kids.

    There are some pre-settlement accounts stating that black gray squirrels were already here when the first European white colonists arrived. Black gray squirrels have been introduced in several English communities and are apparently doing quite well. The British Isles’ gray squirrel population, itself, was a result of early introductions.

    The success of the black squirrels is puzzling. There is a rule in mammalian ecology coined by Constantin Wilhelm Lambert Gloger in the early 1800s. It states that the more tropical the population of a given species or group of species that has a wide range, and the more tropical the individuals, the darker the members of that population.

    Bears are a classic example of Gloger’s Rule, as are polar bears and foxes. In the far north they are white, while their relatives much to the south are brown, even black.

    This rule apparently doesn’t apply to gray squirrels, as they are darker here than in the south.

    On the other side, it has been argued by some that the blacker the hair, the warmer the mammal in colder climates. Dark bodies absorb more solar rays than light bodies. It has also been postulated that there were more black squirrels here in the early-17th century than now because the area settled by the Europeans was largely forested, thus dark, and later became cut over, exposing squirrels to more openness which would favor gray over black in evolution. Interestingly, of the four squirrel species in the genus Sciurus in the United States, the West Coast gray squirrel, confined to the very dark coastal coniferous forests from south to north almost all the way to Canada, is gray, not black.

    I searched my foreign mammal books and could find no accounts of black gray squirrels in Asia, Europe, or Japan, where squirrels of the genus Sciurus are common and range widely. Many of those squirrels are brownish, but not black.

    A few black gray squirrel sightings in Sag Harbor have been reported to me over the years and I once noted a black road-kill squirrel near Otter Pond in Sag Harbor. However, to my knowledge there are no enclaves of black gray squirrels resembling anything like the Country Club population and that of Stuy­vesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in New York City.

    Let’s hear it for black gray squirrels!