Ready, get set. . . . It’s like surfers waiting for a forecast swell to arrive, or the first crack of the bat for those yearning to return to Mudville. Fishermen are with child for the arrival of fish, as is the case each spring, but this season’s cold temperatures seem to be drawing it, torturously, out.

    First and foremost in the waiting game is the news that the State Department of Environmental Conservation has announced a better-than-expected fluke season due to open on Wednesday. The season will run until Sept. 29 with a four-fluke-per-day bag limit and a minimum size of 19 inches. The relatively generous quota came as a result of the D.E.C.’s being able to convince other coastal states that the underharvested part of their quota might better be donated to New York.

    Small draggers have begun to work Montauk’s “backside” (ocean side) for their paltry 140-pound daily harvest, so the left-sided flatties have arrived from their offshore haunts.

    The state has also announced the black sea bass season will run from July 10 to Dec. 31 with a 13-inch minimum size and an eight-fish daily bag. The sea bass quota is also better than expected news for recreational anglers. Porgy season will see an improvement as well with a 10-inch minimum size and a 30-fish bag limit. It will run from May 1 to Dec. 31 for all anglers. Party and charter boats will be able to offer their customers a 40-inch bag limit from Sept. 1 to Oct. 31.

    Otherwise, flies are no doubt being tied, reels oiled and supplied with new line. Party and charter boat captains are planning their schedules, and in the case of the popular Lazy Bones head boat, the Bones’ brand-new deck is holystoned and ready to go.

    Then, there’s Capt. Len Giarraputo, who lives in Amagansett but charters out of the Gone Fishing Marina in Montauk. Captain Giarraputo brings people offshore to catch fish and to swim with da fishes — the latter in a nice way. He runs a burial at sea service from his Odd-Lot II boat for families who would like the ashes of their loved ones spread upon the sea.

    “I get a lot out of it,” he said. “People come out with a heavy heart, but are happy when it’s done. It’s a personal thing with me. I know how to do it, comfort people. I give them a certificate that shows the latitude and longitude, and I video the whole thing and download it to them if they want. It’s a good feeling for me.”

    Captain Giarraputo said the waters off Montauk were ideal. “I go five miles off Montauk. If you look at the current pattern, it goes up and around Nova Scotia and comes back down. They travel around the world.” Captain Giarraputo can be reached at burialsatseamontaukny.com, or by calling 800-308-4586.

    Montauk’s Viking Fleet of party boats has announced a rejuvenated striped bass fishing schedule due to begin early next month. The first change is an opportunity to join the fleet’s Moo Cow (as in big bass) Club’s loyalty program. Anglers who make five striped bass trips will get a sixth for free. Working on the big bass theme, Viking boats will venture out on Friday nights in search of Block Island behemoths. This will be an eight-hour trip to explore virgin grounds around the island named for Adriaen Block, the Dutch navigator who found and named the island in 1614. Imagine the size of the bass back then.

    Sunday and Monday evenings will feature Sunset Striper Slam trips that leave at 5:30 p.m. and return at 10. The Triple S trips are designed for beginners and families and there will be a reduced rate for women and for children 16 and under.

    Saturday nights will see a continuation of the fleet’s Flood Chaser trips. These trips are limited to 28 anglers on board the Viking Star. The fleet will also continue its limited Full Moon trips from 6 p.m. to midnight on Thursdays, Saturdays, and full-moon dates.

    Speaking of getting ready, Mrs. Sam’s tackle shop on Three Mile Harbor Road in East Hampton will soon open its new, expanded, and improved shop with an expanded assortment of lures and all things fishy.

    Harvey Bennett’s Tackle Shop in Amagansett has a sale on waders and clam rakes. Bennett announced that Napeague’s Beaman’s Creek was loaded with alewives. He said he heard tell of people pulling small striped bass from the sea at Georgica Beach and from the back of Three Mile Harbor using fly rods. He said he reckoned the gulls he witnessed diving off Promised Land earlier this week might have been reacting to the arrival of runner bluefish, the first to arrive, thin from their migration and ravenous.

    “They get here the last part of April and the beginning of May.”

   It was a bright, sunshine-filled Sunday afternoon when I pulled into the parking lot of Morton Wildlife Refuge in Noyac with my daughter, Angela, from San Francisco. The parking lot was jammed packed with vehicles. I found the only open spot — half in the woods, half out. With my camera and bag of black sunflower seeds at the ready, Angela and I proceeded into the reserve and followed the east trail, the one that takes you to the pond, the large tulip trees, and the state-endangered swamp cottonwoods.

    The refuge was more ramshackle than ever, as Sandy had knocked down a lot of trees and half pushed over others. The trees were draped with the dead vines of Asiatic bittersweet, which had been cut through a couple of years before and had yet to fall to the forest floor. There were the usual invasives complementing the bittersweet — the honeysuckle, new garlic mustard seedlings, sweet cherry, phragmites, chickweed, and others. The vegetation along the main trail to the beach where the piping plovers and ospreys nest was festooned with a tan curtain of dead mile-a-minute weed, a vine that came to the refuge within the last three or four years and has already taken half of it over.

    As soon as we stepped through to the park’s entrance, a black-capped chickadee came to greet us. I held out my hand, palm-up, with a few sunflower seeds and down he came, landing gently on my hand, he took about three to the nearest perch and worked on them, one by one. I persevered, but he flew off. It was already 3 in the afternoon and the mob of walkers and bird feeders had begun before noon. All of the birds should have been so full of seed by the time we came onto the scene that they probably wouldn’t have cared a fig about one more well-meaning human with an outreached hand. At first I thought that the little black-and-white featherweight that took the seeds from my palm was just being polite and didn’t want to slight me. But, then I thought, no, the bird was good at P.R. If people stood motionless for several minutes and there were no takers, they might be so discouraged as to not come back.

    The wildlife refuge is one of the most popular in the tri-state area. And just think, the man who, while governor of California, said, “If you seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all,” Ronald Reagan, entertained the idea of selling it and the others on Long Island to save money when he became president. Our then very able representatives in the U.S. Congress, George Hochbrueckner and Patrick Moynihan, prevailed. The president’s plan never even passed first base. The refuge was saved and its future will probably never be in doubt again.

    It was Elizabeth Morton, the last private owner of the land, who donated it to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. On maps such as the Hagstrom Suffolk County Atlas, the land occupied by the refuge is known as Jessup’s Neck after the Jessup family, who staked a claim to it and farmed it in the early 1700s, when Long Island was still part of England’s colonial empire in the Americas. At least one of the Jessups is still interred there, Abigail, the daughter of Isaac and Sarah Jessup, who died at about 11 years old, possibly from smallpox. The narrow “neck,” a remnant of glacial land that juts out into the Peconic Estuary between Little Peconic and Noyac Bays, almost reaches to the North Fork and may have at one time. It is less than a quarter mile wide at its thickest point and loses up to five feet a year from either side. Given that the erosion rate is expected to increase as sea-level rise accelerates, the neck part of the refuge may be gone before the beginning of the next millennium.

    Which will win, erosion and loss to the enveloping seas or 100 percent occupancy and at the hands of the invasive plants? That is the question? For the time being, however, it is the closest thing to Walt Disney’s “Snow White” this side of New York City. The birds, tiny as chickadees, large as turkeys, brightly colored, abide the multitude of visitors. They fly onto their outstretched hands or feed on the ground at their feet, follow them around singing, chirping, croaking all the while, staging a gay and merry scene that Disney or Mother Goose themselves would have found impossible to improve upon.

     There are some new colorful signs posted that discourage feeding lest rats and raccoons take over and the birds and chipmunks become indolent and sedentary, thus losing their wildness. But who are they fooling? It would take a very mean and nasty fed to enforce such a law. The children who flock to the preserve with their parents love the birds and the chipmunks, and the birds and the chipmunks love them back. There is no teasing, no bullying, no injuring, only a shared love of nature and nature’s gifts. I would even venture that having a tiny bird, a miracle of being, light on the hand of and take seeds from a very depressed person would surely be as curative as a day or two in a halfway house or psychiatrist’s office.

    A rose is a rose is a rose. A refuge is a refuge is a refuge.

   The East End is heading back to the future to harvest deer. Figures compiled by the State Department of Environmental Conservation show that of the 1,451 deer harvested in Suffolk County during the regular hunting season that began last October and ended at the end of January, over two-thirds were killed by arrows. The overall harvest in East Hampton Town was the highest on record. Only 143 deer were taken during the regular January shotgun season.

    Deer killed by hunters (some who were guns for hire) using special deer-management permits and deer-management assistance permits, issued for the purpose of culling deer from specific areas, totaled 1,451 in Suffolk County.

    Because of bow hunting’s growing popularity and because it has proved to be an efficient means of culling herds of white-tailed deer, the D.E.C. increased the duration of the bow hunting season from two months to three in 2001. Statistics show that bow hunting is also far safer for both hunters and the public at large.

    The last bow hunting season began on Oct. 1 in the county and ended on Dec. 31, one day before the annual shotgun season began. The gunning season runs through the end of January, weekends excluded.

    Statewide, 242,957 deer were harvested, an increase over the 2010-11 season. In all, 118,993 bucks and 123,964 anterless deer, females and fawns of both sexes, were taken. In Suffolk, those hunting under the state’s regular big-game license harvested 1,147 deer, 1,004 by bow hunters, 143 by gunners.

    In East Hampton Town, 525 deer were harvested, 447 in Southampton Town, the vast majority by bow hunters. Andy Gates of East Hampton’s Department of Land Acquisition and Management said the harvest was the highest on record.

   Time will tell, but it looks like the era of blood-and-guts shark tournaments could be coming to an end. In late July, the Montauk Marine Basin will host a tag-and-release tournament that promises to engage the public long after the fishing stops.

    The recreational shark fishery pioneered by Capt. Frank Mundus starting in the late 1950s exploded after the release of the movie “Jaws” in 1975. Shark tournaments proliferated along the East Coast, many of them in cooperation with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

    Marine scientists studied the ever-increasing catch, performing juicy necropsies beneath the gibbets onto which sharks were ceremoniously hoisted, weighed, and left for a time to be ogled as much for their value as a side bet as for their magnificent nature. In recent years shark tournaments have become three parts medieval fair, one part science, and largely unjustifiable given the number of sharks killed worldwide in order to satisfy the Asian taste for shark-fin soup.

    To highlight the plight of sharks, the Marine Basin will hold a no-kill tournament on July 27 and 28. Circle hooks that lodge in the fish’s jaw and are easily dislodged will be used exclusively. No sharks will be brought back to the dock. Instead, mako, thresher, and blue sharks will be fitted with satellite tracking tags that monitor their travels after release.

    Tagged sharks will be named by the anglers who catch them. Each time the shark’s dorsal fin breaks the surface its position will be picked up via satellite, offering a shark’s-eye view, of sorts.

    The public will be able to follow the sharks online via the Ocearch global shark tracker Web site. The tournament, called Shark’s Eye — a revolutionary tag-and-release tournament bringing recreational fishermen, conservationists, and scientists together — is supported by the Andrew Sabin Family Foundation, the Montauk Chamber of Commerce, the Fishermen’s Conservation Association, Montauk Boatmen, Inc., and the Concerned Citizens of Montauk group. The Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation will provide $10,000 in prizes, and April Gornik of North Haven will donate a painting.

    In the small jaws department, Mickey Russo of East Moriches stood on his electric-motor-powered sharpy Tuesday morning on Montauk’s Fort Pond proudly holding up a nice-size walleye he had just caught.

    Russo shouted that Fort Pond was his favorite freshwater body. Walleye, largemouth and smallmouth bass, and perch live there, as well as some hefty carp. It does not hold chain pickerel, however, a feisty freshwater fish of the pike family. Chain pickerel, named for the chain-like pattern on its green sides, are found in Crooked Pond in Bridgehampton and other older kettle-hole ponds.

    They put up a great fight for a fish that averages about two pounds, and like the walleye are tasty if one is willing to deal with the small bones. They are aggressive hunters that ambush their prey from cover in a rapid lurch, even taking flight after flying insects. Pickerel will charge at anything shiny, like snapper tins. A steel leader or tippet is a good idea given the pickerel’s sharp teeth.

    Casters working the small jetty at Ditch Plain are taking “rat” striped bass, the small ones that usually begin feeding first. Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk recommends casting on an outgoing tide using small swimming lures or little bucktails. Bait fishermen are catching bass on sand worms.

    In other news, Montauk’s Viking Fleet has announced that the new Viking Fivestar will arrive next Thursday at about 3 p.m.

   On April 22, I drove down to Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., with my daughter, Angela, who was visiting me from California. It was a bright sunny day with nary a cloud and not much of a wind. From New Jersey through Delaware through Maryland to Virginia, the sky over the highways 60 to 100 feet above the pavement was filled with sailing turkey vultures. We must have seen more than 25, mostly singles, sometimes in pairs.

    What was remarkable about the observation was that not one vulture flapped its wings; they did nothing but glide on wings spread in dihedral angles. When conditions are right, the sun is shining brightly, it is warm, and the winds are light and variable, it is conceivable that a turkey vulture could make the same trip that we were making without using a single stroke of the wing. No wonder a single road kill goes such a long way where vultures are concerned.

    Turkey vultures are black like their siblings, the black vultures. They absorb heat by day through their feathers when the sun is out. All black land birds — grackles, boat-tailed grackles, cowbirds, crows, fish crows, redwing blackbirds, starlings, ravens — similarly absorb the sun’s rays. They can pick other flying blackbirds out visually as much as a mile away. And all American blackbirds are flockers, except during the nesting season. Some, such as grackles, redwings, and cowbirds, travel about in mixed flocks, others keep to their own species. Interestingly, the three species of black waterfowl that ply our marine waters, the scoters, are also flockers, but so are many non-black waterfowl species.

    All black land birds are omnivorous, save for vultures, which are carrion feeders. In general, black birds are very successful in terms of numbers. Only the raven has become rare to the degree that it is considered “threatened” in several states. In New York and on the West Coast, however, the raven is making a strong comeback. Indeed, ravens, absent from Long Island for hundreds of years, have begun to breed here. Last Thursday, I visited the Hampton Bays Water Tower site to see if last year’s pair had returned. They had. The female was sitting on the nest 100 feet up and the male was flying around uttering its hoarse crow call. I could clearly see its scruff of throat feathers and wedged-shaped tail.

    Two weeks ago, Vicki Bustamante saw a pair of ravens contesting with crows near the Suffolk County Water Authority water tower in west Amagansett, north of Montauk Highway. Water towers apparently mimic the high rocky crags where ravens have nested for centuries. Long Island doesn’t have such nesting sites, but it does have lots of water towers and a plentiful supply of roadkill upon which ravens often feed.

    Another black bird making great strides on Long Island, including eastern Long Island, is the fish crow. It used to be a rare visitor from the south. In the last 20 years, it has become a serious breeder here. Sag Harbor has one of the largest fish crow populations around, but they can be found in Southampton Village, Hampton Bays, Springs, and other local spots near the water as well. The fish crow is slightly smaller than the common crow and has a nasal caw, not unlike the sound of a baby common crow. On Saturday I saw one carrying food and heading to the north over the North Haven bridge. It could have been taking it to young in a nest on North Haven.

    On Saturday afternoon, while studying the plants making up the flora of the Culloden Nature Preserve in Montauk, Vicki Bustamante and I were also keeping an eye and an ear out for birds, especially spring arrivals. We flushed a great-horned owl, which quietly flapped its way out of sight, chased by a couple of blue jays, one of which hit the owl in the head. As we approached a high spot overlooking Block Island Sound in the northeast sector of the preserve, all of a sudden a very large black bird sailed over and around, less than 50 feet above our heads. It was a turkey vulture and we wondered why was it circling again and again so low in the sky around this one spot.

    Twenty paces further along we found the answer, with our noses first, then our eyes. It was the remains of a dead deer, pretty much reduced to a few bones and a thatch of fur, but its odor was as foul as an odor can be. We were quickly reminded that unlike almost all other bird species, vultures have a refined sense of smell. The stinkier, the better.

    We wondered if this was one of those that bred and fledged two chicks next to Navy Road and Fort Pond Bay six years ago, a first for Long Island.

    When the trail took us down to the beach, the vulture that disappeared from our view a few minutes earlier showed up and it was not alone. It had a mate, and the two sailed back and forth, circling around and around low over a marshy area behind the beach and may have landed. All the while, more than 10 minutes, not making a single sound, not moving a wing up and down, but holding them at that same 30-degree angle with the horizon, going this way and that.

    They disappeared into that black hole. Maybe they had found a palatable cadaver. A few minutes later, two ospreys loomed a quarter-mile up in the sky to the east. We wondered if ospreys would ever breed in Montauk again. Up ahead, directly under them, was a tall, improvised osprey platform standing at the northwest edge of the Culloden Preserve. A nice lady walking by in the other direction said it had been put up only a few days ago. Could the two ospreys be checking it out?

   Like the swallows to Capistrano (although I’ve read development has interrupted their instinctual return of late), Steve (The Perv) Kramer rolled into the Ditch Plain parking lot a few days ago from his winter haunts in Florida with a neatly trimmed beard. He is called Perv for no reason darker than his penchant for the odd, ribald observation. This does not make him a bad person.

    To prove that the spring run of striped bass had arrived in Montauk he held out his hands, cut and bleeding from handling and unhooking the early arrivals, most of them young — the young ones being especially thorny. Most of the action had been at the small jetty whose rocks have been jumbled into several un-jetty-like piles by Hurricane Sandy and the northeasters that followed over the winter.

    I have a theory about why the rats, as small stripers are known, school at this particular spot each spring. The location of the jetty, or what’s left of it, corresponds to where the shoreline of the South Fork takes a 20-degree turn to the north. It’s an elbow.

    On the west side of the elbow the bottom is sandy. On the east side the bottom is a rock reef that stretches all the way to Montauk Point. Now, in most places along the East Coast, striped bass are known as rockfish because it’s where they prefer to feed. I believe the early arrivals migrate west-to-east along the South Fork over sandy bottom.

    When they hit the Ditch Plain elbow and its rocks they gather to feed on mussels, the little black snails the French call rosettes and the Italians call babalucis. They feast on crabs and other rock denizens as well as any finned creatures that happen along. Kramer has been using a small bucktail with red pork rind.

    Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reports bass “all over on the south side,” especially the beaches to the west of Montauk. Small tins and bucktails are doing the trick, and, according to Paul Apostolides, for those who prefer throwing bait, sandworms are “clobbering the fish.”

    Meanwhile, draggers working the backside, offshore of Ditch Plain and towing along the coast to the west, have been welcoming fluke, the summer flounder. They are permitted 140 pounds per day — not a lot. Despite the hearty east wind over the weekend, at least one party boat was doing the same. Those catching fluke for sport are enjoying a far better shake from the State Department of Environmental Conservation than they got last year; a four-fish bag limit for fluke at least 19 inches long.

    Tanya Miller at the West Lake Marina reported “quite a few boats” headed out after fluke on Saturday despite the wind. Most huddled off Montauk’s iconic radar tower, a majestic relic of the cold war built to detect incoming I.C.B.M.s launched by the Soviet Union bound for the Big Apple. Thankfully they never flew. “There were a lot of short fish, Miller said, “but everyone came back with a few keepers. A lot of action.”

    “Yesterday afternoon I had five guys fishing. We had 15 keepers, the largest five and-a-half pounds,” Michael Potts, captain of the Blue Fin IV charter boat, reported on Monday. He also reported that cod fishing had gone to the dogs, meaning dogfish, the bane of codfishermen and about every other kind of fisherman too.

    The Shark’s Eye, a no-kill shark tournament scheduled to take place on July 27 and July 28 from the Montauk Marine Basin, has begun to generate excitement. It’s attracted the attention of the National Geographic Society, which has expressed an interest in filming the event, according to Carl Darenberg, the Marine Basin’s owner. A major television network, which Darenberg said he could not identify until it formally commits, is also interested.

    The country music star Craig Morgan will perform, and feelers have gone out to get Jimmy Buffett to help make the first-ever no-kill shark tournament a community event. Buffett keeps a sportfishing boat in Montauk Harbor during the summer months. Also on hand will be the Paxton Brothers, who run charter shark-diving trips and are involved in shark conservation.

    Darenberg said organizers had come up with a strategy to prove that a catch is indeed legitimate, in recognition of fishermen’s tendency to, er, exaggerate. Participating boats will be given a secret number known only to the fisherman and organizers, which must appear on a chalk board when photos are taken when a shark is released.

    Fishermen interested in participating in the July Shark’s Eye tournament have been encouraged to contact Carl Darenberg at the Montauk Marine Basin. “This is the future,” Darenberg said.

    There was a time in early spring, not all that long ago, when baymen set fykes on the bottom of Lake Montauk to trap the winter flounder as they rose from their muddy hibernation. There were enough flounder, in fact, for hook-and-line flounder anglers to get their nose out of joint over the presence of fykes. No more.

    In recent years, the absence of the favored flatfish from the lake and other popular haunts including Sag Harbor has virtually removed the blackbacks from our otherwise robust list of catchable spring and summer fish. Nonetheless, the State Department of Environmental Conservation has, in its wisdom, decided that blackbacks are fair game despite their low numbers. The season began on Monday and will run through May 30.

    It’s possible that Capt. Mike Vegessi’s Montauk-based party boat Lazy Bones, traditionally among the earliest winter flounder hunters, will give it a try in the coming days. If so, it could provide a bridge of sorts to get jonesing anglers through what appears to be a waning cod season to the start of striped bass fishing on April 15. By the way, the Bones got a new deck over the winter as well as a new head, the latter just as important as the former.

    What had been a pretty fair cod season tanked, or at least showed a marked slowdown over the Easter weekend, according to charter and party boat captains. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the full moon that follows the vernal equinox, which occurred early this year. Last year Easter fell on April 24 and coincided with great cod fishing. Perhaps the cod will appear en masse once again later this month.

    Aphrodite Montalvo, spokeswoman for the State Department of Environmental Conservation, verbally shrugged over the phone when asked about this season’s regulations for the recreational fluke (summer flounder) fishery. Last year the season began on May 1 with a four-fish bag limit and a 19.5-inch minimum size. “Nothing yet,” Montalvo said. “It’s a wait-and-see game.”

    The trout season got under way on Monday although you’d be hard pressed to find one in East Hampton Town. You can find them in Southampton, where several freshwater bodies are stocked by the D.E.C. Out-of-towners may fish in Southampton, but not without hiring a guide. A list of guides and trout-friendly water bodies is available at the office of the Southampton Town Trustees, 287-5717.

   People have been asking me about the completely browned-off white pines that resulted from the passing of superstorm Sandy at the end of last October.

    On Sunday I took the northern route, 25A, to my house on the South Fork. It was slow going, but I wanted to see how the white pines there fared in Sandy. Although there were lots deciduous trees knocked over along the way, I couldn’t find a single browned-off white pine. It wasn’t until I reached the Manorville pine barrens on Jericho Turnpike that I began to notice browned-off white pines here and there, almost all situated in people’s yards and planted as shade trees, no doubt.

    Later in the trip, it seemed that every white pine south of the Long Island Expressway, whether in a woods or someone’s lawn, had turned a tawny brown. Not one was spared.

    It must have had something to do with Sandy’s fierce winds, but why were the 10 or so in my yard on Noyac Road mostly spared? Less than 10 percent of their needles had turned tan. Yet they were subject to winds that were strong enough to snap three utility poles a few feet above their base in the same neighborhood and drop a giant oak limb on my roof, causing considerable damage. These winds came in from the north, sweeping in from over Noyac Bay. One would think they would have been as salty as the ones from the south, which blew in over the ocean.

    Salt probably had something to do with it, but desiccation was probably just as much to blame. The few white pines growing on the edge of the Sunrise Highway were pretty much all brown a week after the storm, while the pitch pines next to them were as green as ever. White pine needles, five to a fascicle, are slender and flexible when compared to the pitch pine ones, three to a fascicle, which are stiff and thick, and hardly bend in the wind.    Everywhere I looked, as far away as Islip, the pitch pines appeared unaffected.

    On the other hand, while so many large oaks and other hardwoods were bowled over, mostly snapped off a few feet above the ground by Sandy, not a white pine could I find that was downed. Pine is a soft wood and gives when subject to gale force winds. Oaks are hardwoods and although they are sturdy, they can be snapped in an instant, just as the three telephone poles mentioned above were. (The forests are full of downed trees, not just from Sandy, but from a spate of previous storms, of which we have had so many in the new millennium.) The ones downed by Sandy still had most of their fall leaves attached. The direction in which they fell indicated the direction of the winds that downed them.

    White pines have shallow root systems, but the roots fan out, forming an impressive disc that is as wide as the canopy above. They are hard to tip over, especially when the ground has not been saturated by the rain. Oaks have deep roots, equally anchoring the trunks above, and only go over all at once when the ground is wet. If the roots don’t give, the trunk does.

    Some of the magnificent white pines that comprise the bulk of East Hampton Town’s Northwest forest were touched by the storm — the ones on the edges of the stands — but the ones deep in were not. The white pine forest is the only one of any size on the whole of Long Island and owes it existence to the high water table in the Northwest area and the fact that groundwater averages about 55 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the year. White pines are common upstate and in New England all the way to Canada. They like it cool. Here they never stop photosynthesizing as long as their roots are in water that is warmer than the atmosphere, while in the summer they are kept cool by sucking up the relatively cold groundwater.

    Pitch pines do well in sandy soils subject to frequent droughty conditions. They send their roots down a long way to get what water they can filch from that seeping down after rains. They also sequester rainwater behind the brown plates that make up their rough-skinned trunks. Check them after a rain and you will see that their trunks have changed from brown to almost black because of their wetness.

    I have yet to answer the question concerning the fate of the browned-off white pines. My gut feeling is that the large majority of them will recover, but if the spring is dry and they are attacked by pine borers, they might not. Hundred-year-old pitch pines are like 100-year-old humans — rare. They are relatively short-lived trees compared to white pines, which can live more than 250 years.

    Even so, the pitch pine stands will outlive the white pine ones here on Long Island for two main reasons. They tolerate warmed-up climates and they are a fire-climax species, that is, pitch pine stands are used to being burned over regularly. Adults will be killed but the waxy glue holding the pine nuts close inside the mature cones will melt in the heat and the seed will drop into the burned-over duff and start a whole new stand. Global warming will gradually do in the white pines here, just as it did in the hemlocks, spruces, and other cold climate conifers that used to call Long Island their home a few hundred years ago.

   So, there I was driving down the hill on Flamingo Avenue toward the Montauk Firehouse early in the morning last week. Up ahead on the other side of the road was a jogger at the start of her climb. Whoa! What’s that behind her?

    I slowed as I approached the jogger, who kept looking over her right shoulder and picking up her pace despite the challenging incline. She looked worried, and now I could see why. Two big tom turkeys in full-blown mating-season fledge — like the gobbler on a box of Bell’s stuffing seasoning — were closing in fast. The hen, for whose affections they were vying, looked on from the shoulder of Flamingo like Guinevere before some prehistoric test.

    In the seconds it took me to don my cape and fly into action, I realized the scene mirrored the one in “Jurassic Park” where the velociraptors come after the little girl. Turkeys are dinosaurs, of course, 70 million years removed but still armed with the same eviscerating claws on their three-toed feet. The jogger realized she could not outrun the raptors and began to panic.

    I pulled over and ran at the birds, flailing my arms. They laughed — or gobbled the equivalent — stopping their advance long enough for the jogger to get to cross the road and skedaddle back down the hill.

    The turkeys started for me. I headed for the safety of my car with the birds hot on my trail. They were in the middle of the road coming on strong when their advance was interrupted — deus ex big machina — by a slow-moving Cadillac Escalade that came between me and a confrontation of the Cretaceous kind.

    Undaunted by its tyrannosauric size and obvious power, the raptors took off after the Escalade. The distraction allowed the jogger, me, and the hen to escape, although I think she must surely have been impressed by the pluck of her suitors.

    Benjamin Franklin wanted the wild turkey to be the country’s official bird. Hmm.

    What this has to do with fish is this: Turkeys are birds in heat this time of year, as are ospreys. Four of the fish hawks were busy building their nests on Napeague over the weekend. One observer thought he saw one enjoying an alewife for lunch atop a telephone pole. Alewives, members of the herring family, are among the first fish to arrive on their spring migrations, and as with turkeys, and ospreys, they arrive bent on reproduction.

    Oily alewives are just what bluefish and striped bass need after their long swim here from parts south and west. Alewives are usually first seen farther west in the Peconic Estuary, moving up the tributaries whose scent was imprinted on them as fry.

    Over the years the alewives’ accesses to breeding streams have been blocked off by narrow and/or crumbling culverts. East Hampton has been attempting to clear their ancient pathways, but the effort is stalled.

    In the days before the state outlawed the ocean seine, local baymen made their first sets on or about Easter, usually midmonth. Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett said on Tuesday he had no doubt that some striped bass had already arrived. “They’re here, but they’re not eating.”

   The Montauk SurfMasters spring shootout tournament will begin on May 10. The first of Montauk’s annual fishing tournaments targets striped bass.

    The entry fee is $110, all but $10 of which will go into the winner’s pot. The ten bucks is for lunch on awards day, June 29. The tournament has no divisions. Waders, wetsuiters, adult men and women compete against one another. An extra prize of $100 will be awarded for the first legal-size bass (28 inches long or longer) that’s weighed in.

    Young surfcasters under 18 are invited to compete for free. First, second, and third-place finishers will receive plaques. In addition, the first caster to weigh in a legal-size bass will receive a rod-and-reel combination compliments of John Ward Plumbing and Heating. The weigh stations for the spring shootout will be the Star Island Yacht Club, West Lake Marina, and Paulie’s Tackle.

Surfcasters who are not Montauk SurfMasters and would like to join the tournament are asked to contact Fred (Eelman) Kalkstein at 907-0610.

   This year’s striped bass season began on Monday, but apparently no one thought to inform the bass. Kalkstein said he had queried the usual early-season suspects, all of whom reported no sign of bass. There’s a good chance that a colder than normal ocean temperature, 44.6 degrees as of Tuesday, is to blame. And, it might take a while for fishermen and striped bass to come together.

   It’s probable that Superstorm Sandy and the four northeasters that followed rearranged the bottom nearshore. In other parts of the coast, stripers are called rockfish because of their preference for rocky bottom. Could be that outcroppings around Montauk favored by stripers have been covered with sand, or areas usually covered with sand have been denuded by strong currents. The spring striped bass season will be interesting to watch once the fish arrive.