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.

   As of Monday, the red flowers of the swamp maples and yellow flowers of the spice bush are out, the wood anemones are about to bloom, and the smooth shads will follow shortly. It was a record cold March and April hasn’t been all that warm, but the native plants are beginning to show their colors.

    Notwithstanding the brrr-y spring, the migrant birds are returning from the south and even earlier. Some of them are beginning to bet on global warming and apparently don’t want to miss out, even in the face of unanticipated chills. On Monday, a walk in the woods of North Sea and Tuckahoe in Southampton Town produced a phoebe, a red-bellied woodpecker, and the songs of some early returns, including the diminutive blue-gray gnatcatcher, rose-breasted grosbeak, and a kinglet, against a backdrop of the continuous rattling of a Carolina wren, a bird that stays here throughout the entire winter like the mocking bird and sings on sunny January and February days no matter the cold.

    Prior to the walk in the woods, a side trip to Scallop Pond, the headwaters of Sebonac Creek, turned up both newcomers from the south and a few lingering winter birds such as the buffleheads yet to leave for the northern breeding grounds. There were double-crested cormorants diving and fishing, greater yellowlegs peet-peet-peeting, great white egrets with crooked necks bending low, stalking little fish, a snowy egret and, of course, ospreys, not one or two mind you, but eight of them.

    One osprey was occupying one of the platform nests, while two other platforms were barren. There are at least four nest poles in the area, so it may be that there will be enough to go around. One osprey was working on a silvery fish, perhaps an alewife, while perched on a low post near the occupied platform. Two pairs were perched on two duck blinds, perhaps making up their minds about what to do next.

    The Scallop Pond marshes, which are mostly taken care of by the Nature Conservancy are the most extensive east of the Shinnecock Inlet and have always been a favorite spot for nesting ospreys. Scallop Pond has fish — the Great Peconic Bay is but a few hundred yards to the north and Big Fresh Pond, with the largest alewife run on Long Island, less than a quarter mile away. To the west is Bullhead Bay, a few flaps farther, Cold Spring Pond. The Scallop Pond ospreys have more than enough water bodies to choose from and in a fish drought will be the last of the South Fork population to succumb.

    Some of these ospreys no doubt flew up here all the way from South America. Funny, most of the ospreys that nest in Florida stay in Florida year round. That’s because there are fish there year round and frosts and freezes are uncommon. Our ones are world travelers and rank right up there with Arctic terns, golden plovers, and albatrosses with respect to miles traveled.

    Long Island’s osprey population has yet to fully recover from the DDT era of the 1960s. Not all the ospreys come back each year. The ones that used to occupy the nest at the edge of Upper Sag Harbor Cove, a stone’s throw from Otter Pond, have gone missing for two years now. The pair that occupied the nest in the marsh next to John Steinbeck’s house on North Haven is absent as is the pair that nested on Long Beach between the road and Sag Harbor Cove east of Payne’s Cove. The Gardiner’s Island population has been suffering a decline in the new millennium and some of East Hampton’s ospreys are still missing.

    Part of the problem may be the continued buildup of the local spring and summer cormorant population, many pairs of which have been nesting in the tops of trees on Gardiner’s Island for the past 20 years or so. There is not a more adept fisher than the cormorant, and while ospreys hunt alone from the sky, cormorants hunt in packs and can round up fish for mass kills the way wolves round up caribou. Cormorants are protected, so it will probably take an act of Congress, as the old saying goes, to permit the thinning of their numbers.

    Late spring northeasters and early summer tropical storms also are hard on ospreys. The young can be blown out of the nest. Indeed, the entire nest can be blown off a pole platform. There is some truth to the notion that ospreys, unlike politicians, form strong and lasting conjugal relationships. It takes a lot of sitting and a lot of fish catching to raise osprey chicks, but a well-matched pair with some experience can carry it off. First-time nesters suffer much greater nest failure than seasoned performers.

    So, there you have it. The fish hawks are back. In fact, they are back on all the world’s continents with the exception of the Antarctic. As a species they’ve been around for a long, long time and as long as there are enough fish to go around and the populations of cormorants and seals don’t continue to rise exponentially, they will make it through at least to the dawn of the next millennium. At the rate human beings are killing each other off, the ospreys just might outlive us all. Now wouldn’t that be a great irony.

   Last Thursday, Karen Blumer, Vicki Bustamante, and I went north to Albany. After leaving Long Island it was bedrock all the way north along the Hudson River. The advance of the last ice sheet of the Wisconsin glaciation purportedly carved out the river basin that is over a mile wide in some places and stretches a good 200 miles. It is oriented north to south, so it makes sense that a quarter-mile-high glacier coming from Canada would be capable of making such a deep gouge and simultaneously creating the Palisades along the west side. As the northern hemisphere warmed up and the glacier retreated, its melt water filled the cavity, which then flowed south into New York Bay.

    I hadn’t been off Long Island for more than a year and so it was a special treat to plant my feet on solid ground. Whatever happens to Long Island under the coming siege of rising seas, warming atmospheres, and larger and more frequent storms will spare most of New York north of West­chester County. Upstate, the Atlantic Ocean’s tides will reach farther and farther up the river as sea level rises, there will be floodings of numerous rivers and streams, but solid rock formations wash away very, very slowly, not quickly like the sandy soils of which most of Long Island is composed.

    Global warming aside, it was blustery cold, a wind chill that stabbed the body with pain and agony whenever we had to leave one building and go to another.

    Our destination was the state capital and its museum, one of the oldest in the nation, ranking right up there with Philadelphia’s. The museum’s collections started more than 200 years ago, but the historic museum has been replaced by a modern multistory structure that sits on a pedestrian subsurface tiled concourse, which runs for more than a quarter mile under the city and which sports a grand assortment of shops and eateries.

     Most of one entire floor, the fourth, is filled with wall-to-wall cabinets in a maze of steel containing 200,000 pressed plant specimens, some collected as far back as in the early 1800s, and representing all of the state’s many habitats, even those that are now completely urban and suburban, but were once wild. Long Island is well represented. We were looking for plants collected from the East End, particularly the ones collected by one of Long Island’s preeminent naturalists, the late Roy Latham. Whether by motor vehicle, horseback, bicycle, or boat, Mr. Latham roamed the North and South Forks and the islands in between beginning in the early 1900s for a quarter of a century, observing and collecting specimens, everything from unusual fish taken from Peconic Bay pound nets to orchids collected in hidden-away fens on Gardiner’s Island.

    Each pressed plant had a label typed out on a piece of paper, sometimes scraps of paper, by him. The two main repositories for Long Island flora collected early on are the  State Museum in Albany and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Roy Latham was no academician squared away in an ivory tower, his work supported by government grants, he was the last of a breed going all the way back to the ancient Greeks called naturalists. He supported himself and his family by potato farming in Orient. When he wasn’t farming he was out and about studying the flora and fauna. Darwin was a naturalist.

    The ride up and down was just as enriching as the visit to the museum and a side trip to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, where the state’s Natural Heritage Program and its staff of biologists is maintained.  Crossing the Tappan Zee bridge is almost as exciting as crossing San Francisco’s Golden Gate. The river is no stone’s throw across, one wonders how in the days of the Revolutionary War the Americans were able to fabricate a heavy iron chain, long enough to stretch across from one side to the other at West Point, and strong enough to stop British frigates in their tracks.

    Both sides of the Thruway are dressed with native state trees, maples, oaks, poplars, birch, beech, white pines, hickories, tulips. We were passing through the Transitional Conifer-Hardwood forest, the northern extension of the Appalachian forest. There were trees everywhere, some reaching to more than 100 feet high, except where the sides of the roadway were bounded with sheer rock faces, 20 to 75 feet high, and sporting arrays of very long icicles and occasional wire fences to trap boulders should they be loosed from their purchase and otherwise fall to the pavement.

    We counted all of the birds, the few mammals, mostly deer, that we observed, and noted the hundreds and hundreds of patches of roadside phragmites, the genotype from Europe that competed with the native trees. The raptors were the most engaging. It seemed that in just about every mile of travel there was a red-tailed hawk perched on a branch with its whitish breast facing the sun. A few were soaring in circles and one or two dove at something on the shoulder, a mouse or a shrew perhaps.

    For the redtail it’s an easy life, but also a risky one. A couple that tried to feed on the edge of the pavement ­didn’t make it and went in the books as road kills. A few turkey vultures circled overhead and at one point three black vultures went by in a straightish line. The most ubiquitous and abundant birds along the way were, of course, starlings, they were especially abundant around entrances and exits where one could get gas and something to eat.

    Every underpass had its flock of pigeons, a half-dozen to as many as 15.  They were flying or roosting, depending upon their mood. One wonders if all these feral pigeons, immigrants from the Old World, will over the course of many American generations and evolution in the wilds revert to the European wild type and all come to look the same.

    The prized bird species of the trip was the pileated woodpecker, a bird as big as a crow, and one only very rarely seen on Long Island. One flew across from east to west half the way up to Albany. It was only the second one observed during a lifetime of 77 years, at least 65 of which have been spent keeping a sharp eye out for birds.

   One more storm and then spring’s a-poppin’. In Noyac on Friday daffodils and daylilies began to sprout. Two weeks ago skunk cabbages were in bloom in Morton Wildlife Refuge in Noyac and at Big Reed Pond in Montauk. As of last Friday, deer ticks, both the blackish males and reddish-backed females, were crawling onto shoes, socks, and trousers in the shrub lands in Montauk east of the lake.

    For the past week cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, and Carolina wrens have been singing up a storm. Our year-round resident birds brave the cold for the opportunity to breed ahead of those coming up from the south. It’s a crapshoot of sorts. They breed ahead of the others, but there is the chance that early spring storms will wipe their nests and nestlings out.

    “Spring is getting a wiggle on,” as my mother used to say.

    Great horned owls are already feeding their young. In two weeks the ospreys will be returning. One or two will show up in less than a week. Piping plovers will follow on their heels.

    Male red-winged blackbirds and grackles have been putting up a chatter for two weeks now. For some reason they come up a week or two earlier than the females. Robin males also arrive first, but it’s hard to tell the snowbird robins from the ones that stayed with us throughout the winter. Since Feb. 20 they’ve been checking out the weedy road shoulders and larger lawns. It’s the early robin that gets the worm, and after last week’s rain melted the snow, little brown chimneys of dirt on local lawns announced the first emergence of night crawlers and red wrigglers.

    Alewives, what few are left in our marine waters, are massing in the harbors and bays at the mouths of streams running out of ponds such as Big Fresh Pond in North Sea, Jeremy’s Hole in Sagg Swamp, Mill Pond in Water Mill, and Scoy Pond in East Hampton’s Northwest. They’re the closest fish, behaviorally, to salmon and sea-run trout that we have on the East End. Long ago we had the Atlantic salmon nosing about come spring but those days are gone forever. Some of the alewives will be bearing well-developed freshwater clam larvae on their gills, which will be released into the alewives’ breeding waters to then settle down and start long lives as sedentary bivalves. Do these bivalves-to-be come back to the same ponds in which they were spawned? Science is still trying to answer that question.

    Elvers three or four inches long leaving the “glass” stage, becoming pigmented, will be swimming up the same streams a week or two later. They have to surmount dryish spots, wood snags, phragmites and all sorts of gauntlets to make it to headwater ponds where they, just as the clams, will grow up into adults. Obstacles in their watery path are no match for them. After all, they come more than 1,000 miles to get here, all the way from the Sargasso Sea!

    Andy Sabin observed adult tiger salamanders entering their Southampton breeding ponds as early as Jan. 15, but the other mole salamanders, the spotteds and blue spotteds that breed in the spring, are just coming out of their winter hibernacula now. When you hear the first spring peepers — those tiniest of Long Island frogs — begin to sing near the end of the month, you will know that the salamanders, which are silent, will be there with them sharing the waters, courting and laying and fertilizing their eggs in the same two-week time span.

    Ironically, at the very same time, the tadpoles of our fourth mole salamander, the marbled salamander, having been conceived in September, will be approaching metamorphosis time, leaving the water for a terrestrial existence as the other three species’ tadpoles are just getting started.

    The snakes and turtles will come out of hibernation a little later. If they get caught above ground in freezing temperatures for more than a few hours it could be curtains. Diamondback terrapins emerge from mud in salt ponds, snapping turtles from their winter hug-the-bottom still-life existence.

    The mammals are shaking off their winter sluggardliness. In two weeks you will see woodchucks sitting up watching the cars go by on the Sunrise Highway. Chipmunks will pop their noses out of their winter burrows and smell the air. Raccoons and opposums, which have been slumberous through the hardest parts of winter, will get up and get going. Pregnant females will be looking for birthing spots in chimneys, deserted sheds, hollow trees, under decks, and so on.

    Flowers will start to pop when the spring peepers begin to sing. Witch hazels have been blooming for almost a month. Members of the mustard family, the brassicas, both native and exotic, will follow along with the trailing arbutus. Then come the shads, dogwoods, cottonwoods, bird’s-foot violets, star flowers, and wood anemones. To paraphrase Shelly, “when winter comes, can spring be far behind?” Fasten your seat belts, folks, spring’s a-comin’ and it won’t stop for no one.

   Who was it that said you can make naturalist into a scientist, but it’s almost impossible to teach a scientist to become a naturalist?

   Darwin, the author of the “Theory of Evolution,” was a naturalist. The term naturalist, meaning one who observes and studies nature, has been around since at least 1587. The word scientist, one who practices science, didn’t come into vogue until about 1834. Darwin, if he were alive today and referred to himself as a naturalist on his curriculum vitae, would have a hard time finding a job in a credible college or university. Naturalists paved the road to modern science, but don’t refer to yourself as one while at a gathering of academic biologists, chemists, biophysicists, biochemists, ecologists, physicists, geologists, meteorologists, climatologists, astrophysicists, botanists, and nano physicists, etc., etc.

    Yet before the Big Bang theory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, or Stony Brook University came along, it was the naturalists on Long Island that described our flora and fauna, our aquatic and marine life, our weather and our firmament. Interestingly, these 19th and early 20th-century lovers of nature were driven by curiosity, not by grant money or academic advancement. When a professor of science retires, he or she is given the title of professor emeritus, when a naturalist passes on — naturalists never retire — he or she is referred to as the late so-and-so.

    Naturalists never used the higher education bromide “publish or perish.” That’s because they were never given tenure, they never practiced their art for money, yet many naturalists, say, Henry Thoreau, published and published. Our own East Ender Roy Latham, who continued to observe, collect, and write about Long Island’s natural history into his late 80s, even after he became legally blind, was one of them. When I recently visited the State Museum in Albany and saw how many of the thousands of plants there he had collected, identified, and neatly pressed (transporting them all the way from his home in Orient to the state capital), I was flabbergasted. Each pressed plant had its own ID tag pasted below giving the species, date of collection, place of collection, and other important information which is part of every natural history museum’s tradition.

    At times I call myself a scientist, at other times, a consultant, but deep down I am a naturalist, following my nose, as was and still is the naturalist’s modus operandi. Now two individuals have come along and, in a kind of revival, have created a school for naturalists with courses and a certificate of graduation at the end of it. They are hell bent against letting the art of the naturalism die. Mindy Block is a longstanding Long Island naturalist, author, and the wife of the late Ray Corwin who, himself, was a naturalist, and did such a wonderful job running Long Island’s Central Pine Barrens forest for so many years. She and a partner, Tebbe Butler, have put together the Quality Parks Master Naturalist Program, a series of all-day Saturday classes beginning in April and ending on June 2.

    The classes as they appear in order cover the following topics: Long Island explorer, Long Island wildlife, Long Island geology and plant communities, trails, greenways and living sustainably, and marine ecology. There will be longstanding naturalist instructors in addition to Mindy and Tebbe conducting the courses, and at the end, diplomas will be awarded during a graduation ceremony. Registration information can be found at qualityparks.org.

    Yes, the Island has been raked over from the East River to Montauk Point and Fisher’s Island many, many a time by birders, herpetologists, mammalogists, entomologists, botanists, ichthyologists, invertebrate zoologists, and geologists, but by my accounts, we have only scratched the surface. As climate changes, so will the biota of Long Island.

    Many, many habitats Island-wide are sick and dying. They need the green thumbs and observational powers of trained naturalists to heal them and make them well just as doctors and nurses heal sick patients so they can re-enter society, function, be good parents, and make a living. Habitats were here first. They even preceded the Island’s various Native American groups. It wasn’t­ these early aboriginals who laid waste to the environment and its many wonderful natural creations, it was us. Master naturalists can help heal not only their environment, but themselves, while also looking out for the future of the natural world.

   The Ides of March, the days on and around March 15, were the start of the new year on the ancient Roman calendar. It was considered a propitious time full of promise unless you happened to be Julius Caesar, or the old men back in ancient Greece — long before Medicare — who were first dressed in animal skins, then beaten, and finally driven from town to celebrate the expulsion of the old year.

    One way or another, the two sides of Ides are felt by everyone, routinely by charter and party-boat anglers who have gotten used to feeling at turns optimistic then betrayed and beaten by a Byzantine regulatory system. In the case of fluke (summer flounder), some anglers are driven from their native New York by New Jersey’s more liberal catch limits.

    This will not change in 2013, much to the dismay of Montauk’s charter fleet. Because of a larger quota given New Jersey by the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council, based on historic landings, that state’s conservation department has decided to permit anglers five fluke measuring at least 17.5 inches long per day, from May 18 to Sept. 16 — very appealing to UpIsland anglers. But wait. . . .

    For the first time ever, it looks as though other coastal states that never seem to fill their annual fluke quota may agree to pass a portion of their share to the Empire State. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, whose job it is to divvy up New York’s perennially smaller quota among users, would have offered anglers a reduced catch. The size and bag limits would have remained the same, four 19.5-inch fluke per day, but the season would be shortened, running from May 17 to Sept. 4 instead of May 1 to Sept. 30.

    The possibility of “lending” New York quota is being discussed among Mid-Atlantic Council delegates, and if the give-back comes to pass, New York may be able to keep the size limit the same, but extend the season by over a month, from May 1 to Sept. 30.

    “There’s a high probability of borrowing 72,000 pounds of fluke from another state,” said Tom Jordon, T.J., of the Gone Fishing Marina in Montauk and a member of the Marine Resources Advisory Council. “If so, fluke will remain status quo for this year. But there’s a small possibility we’ll get even more and they would contemplate a slight loosening of regulations, possibly even lowering the size limit by a half-inch.”

    A half-inch doesn’t sound like much, but it could make a big difference to a number of day-tripping party boats that don’t venture too far offshore when larger fluke are found.

    Jordon said fishermen were probably looking at catch reductions in the popular black sea bass fishery.

    Ken Morse of the Tightlines shop in Sag Harbor reported an absence of fishing activity in his neck of the woods, but spent a few minutes decrying the D.E.C.’s decision to keep the winter flounder fishery open despite the dramatic absence of the species in local waters.

    “I’m in the business and I can’t promote it. The state should shut it down. I recommend, don’t go flounder fishing. Go to a stocked pond. They’re beating on a species that’s beaten down,” Mr. Morse said, going on to remind anglers that trout season begins on April 1 with local freshwater bodies in Southampton and parts west stocked by the D.E.C.

   Skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, is a plant of the Northern Hemisphere and a species that occurs throughout most of North America except for in the South and West. A flowering plant in the Jack-in-the-pulpit family, it is one of the first plants to flower each year and thus is a true harbinger of spring. The second half of its scientific name refers to its fetid smell, not unlike the effluvia emitted by a defensive skunk or the scent a red fox uses to mark its territory.

    It also occurs in eastern Asia, suggesting that it came here from there, or came there from here by way of Beringia, the land bridge across the Bering Strait connecting Siberia with Alaska over which early Mongolians traveled to North America during the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago.

    In part of its range, its malodorous habits give it another name, polecat weed. In California, Oregon, and Washington, it is replaced by a look-alike, yellow skunk cabbage, but just like our local one, you note its presence before you come upon it. It has a similar skunky odor. The flowers, on the other hand, are sweet smelling, and when they are the only blooming flower in town early emerging honeybees frequent them. However, it was a surprise to me when I discovered by way of a friend that deer browse on them. If the plant were not a perennial, that would be a problem, but it is able to survive such foraging and bloom again the next year.

    In our area, skunk cabbage sends up its leaves and begins to flower when the garden daffodils, crocuses, and hyacinths are still waking up. These last are somewhat frost tolerant, but not to the degree that the skunk cabbage is. Once it spreads it unfurls its leaves as early as the first week in February. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow, even freeze, it’s a survivor. It’s one of those few native plants that has an antisfreeze that keeps it going through bitter cold.

    Maybe, that’s what I tasted when I put a handful of the yellow skunk cabbage in my mouth to demonstrate to my Chemeketa Community College biology class in Oregon in 1972 that it would make a nice salad. One bite and I couldn’t open my mouth for five minutes. It was as astringent as alum. Like the deer, I should have tried the flowers. I might have gotten an A instead of an F for my demonstration.

    If prepared properly, skunk cabbage is quite edible. In their “Flora of the Northeast,” Dennis Magee and Harry Ahles provide a recipe. To paraphrase, the root or rhizome is edible after peeling, cutting into thin slices, and drying for six months. The same applies to the young leaves, when tightly rolled, cut up, and dried for six months. In either case, for those hikers and campers who are very hungry, the recipe won’t be of much use. The two authors also say that powder made from the dried rhizomes can be used to make a tea or applied to wounds to dress them, again, not much use to a thirsty guy in a swamp or one who has just cut his hand on a bull briar.

    They must exude a plant pheromone, as well, one that keeps most other plants from growing in their midst as they form a tight carpet which can cover more area than your living room. The foul odor may serve as a deterrent to some, an attractant to others, those organisms that would feed on the flowers, the pollen, or the seeds. In terms of looks, skunk cabbages are not unattractive. Their leaves are variegated with purples, greens, and yellows. They would go nicely in one of those rain gardens the greenies are heralding for catching roof and lawn runoff and removing its chemicals.

    I don’t know anything about propagating them. Both the rhizomes and seeds may need the right soil mix and a special growth environment. Vicki Bustamante, who is able grow almost every local native plant species from a seed, cutting, or other propagule, is going to try. It may be easier to grow them than eat them. One shouldn’t have to wait six months to judge the outcome.

   It was gently snowing with big and little flakes on Monday morning when I went into the living room with my coffee to see if Noyac Bay had frozen yet. I was greeted by a flutter as something whizzed past my head and ended up on top of one of the Venetian blinds where it twitched nervously. The twitching little body, white stripe over the eye, and cocked tail gave it away immediately — a Carolina wren. Poor thing, it didn’t like the freezing cold and falling snow any more than I did.

    Some seven years ago the same thing happened. A Carolina wren popped in and sang its shrill repetitious song. Inside my house the song was as loud as the helicopters that fly over, but, I’ll admit, much more melodious. The wren was setting up its territory, as Carolina wrens often nest in old sheds, barns, under decks, and the like. After all, the little guys are from the deep South; they don’t enjoy the cold. That time I merely opened the door to the outside and he flew out. In this last case, I hesitated. It was nasty out, but I made a tough decision, the wren would probably fare better outside than in. I opened the front door and he flew out with gusto.

    That’s the chance you take if you’re a southern species and you’re pioneering in the north country. Of the several American bird species that have extended their range to the upper latitudes during the last century (and are full-time residents), the Carolina wren is the smallest and most likely to succumb to frigid Januarys and Februarys. Indeed, there are years when the various Long Island Christmas bird censuses only pick up one or two of this bird.

    By the turn of the 21st century, these southerners had become more ubiquitous than many of those winter inhabitants that turned up on the first Christmas bird counts almost 100 years ago. The mockingbird, the cardinal, the white-breasted nuthatch, red-breasted woodpecker, and the Carolina wren would be only very rarely encountered when I was a boy growing up on Long Island in the 1940s.

    And it wasn’t global warming that invited them northward. It was the natural bent of all species to further themselves and their numbers, just as we humans have come to occupy every inch of continental land and almost every island across the face of the earth and now number more than 7 billion. A species that is not expanding is on the way to extinction. These birds came first and then it got warmer.

    Birds in deep southern climes breed all year round. They sing all year round. It is no coincidence then, that our local mockingbirds, cardinals, and Carolina wrens sing their territorial and courting songs in the winter as if they were still in the southlands.

    One February morn in my final semester at Cornell University in Ithaca in 1961, I was awakened by the lucid monotonal notes of a male cardinal singing outside my married-student housing window. Then I heard the same notes coming from inside. I got up, looked, and found that the inside whistles were coming from my 15-month-old daughter, Angela. Lying in her crib on her back, she was dueting with the red bird outside her window, and the red bird was answering back accordingly.

    I tend to be a stay-at-home, but many humans are pioneers in spirit. Americans from Europe went west in their new country long before Horace Greeley told them to do so. Some birds are the same way. The finches that got to the Galapagos Islands in the South Pacific came east from the South American mainland. For a while they had the island chain all to themselves and so they radiated into several different species, each one developing a different niche, as Darwin so precisely described in the middle of the 19th century.

    We call today’s adventurous humans trekkers. They are always on the move, going there, going here. One or two don’t return after each trip. They settle down far from home and become stay-at-homes like me.

    As for the Carolina wren, “Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the morning,” unless it is to be in Sag Harbor in the summer after successfully outlasting another difficult winter.

   Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania and Staten Island Chuck didn’t see their shadows on Saturday while Malverne Mel and Holtsville Hal did. It’s hard to believe that Pennsylvanians and Staten Islanders will be blessed with an early spring, while we Long Islanders will suffer prolonged winter, as we are relatively close to those areas and prevailing climate conditions stretch for hundreds of miles. What weather conditions eastern Pennsylvania has, we should also enjoy.

    Groundhogs and woodchucks may differ as weathermen, but they share one major attribute, wherever they may roam they are one and the same species, Marmota monax, and except for beavers, they are the largest rodents in North America. And, along with the eastern chipmunk and bats, they are the only truly hibernating mammals we have on Long Island. If they had anything to say about it, notwithstanding their appearances in the newspapers and on television every February, Phil and the rest of them would almost certain prefer not to be roused from a sleep that would otherwise extend into April for 15 seconds of fame.

    According to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the name “woodchuck” comes from the Ojibwa Indian word, otchig, which also applied to two members of the weasel family, the fisher and the marten. The Cree Indians called groundhogs and the like otchecks. “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” was a standard limerick line in my kindergarten days in Mattituck on the North Fork.

    We recited the jingle before we saw the woodchuck in real life. I was 8 when I saw this largish brown furry animal with large buckteeth approach me from inside my grandfather’s chicken yard. I was on one side of the wire fence, it was on the other side. It studied me as much as I studied it. I had no inkling at the time that I was looking at a woodchuck, a quite friendly one at that, and the only one I ever saw until I saw another nine years later come out from under a pile of branches on the dairy farm down the street from my house in the Oregon Road area of Mattituck. That one became a regular and I would visit it often.

    The next woodchucks to cross my eyes were in a field north of Riverhead in Northville, close to the old Iron Pier on Long Island Sound. It turned out that in the mid-1950s the population began to build rapidly, the way the deer population began to build in the 1960s. In those days people didn’t hunt woodchucks, they weren’t much good for eating, their pelts didn’t fetch a farthing, and rifle shooting in the field was banned on Long Island.

    However, during my Cornell years upstate in dairy farming country, woodchucks were common and they were a solid fixture in the “varmint” category. They would be shot with .22-caliber rifles in a sport called “plinking” and left where they fell. It wasn’t until 1974 when I came back from the West Coast to teach at Southampton College that I began to notice woodchucks through a biologist’s eye.

    By then they had become rather common north of Riverhead and in fields and highway shoulders in western Southampton Town and eastern Brookhaven Town. Beginning in the 1980s in late spring through early fall, a motorist traveling along the L.I.E. or Sunrise Highway west of Hampton Bays through the Central Pine Barrens was bound to encounter a woodchuck or two. They dug their burrows in the banks behind the road shoulders and fed on the vegetation in the shoulders. Road kills began to show up regularly along those highways as well, as the grassy medians became a regular part of their foraging territories.

    Nuisance trappers tending to complaints about raccoons and opossums began trapping woodchucks as well. One of Long Island’s longest-standing nuisance trappers and a close friend of mine, the late Pearson Topping, specialized in woodchucks. It was by way of my visits with him that I first found out that woodchucks are excellent climbers, just as the other of Long Island’s two hibernators, the chipmunks, are. Beavers, on the other hand, don’t climb trees; they cut them down.

    It wasn’t until the late 1990s that woodchucks began to show up on the South Fork. It was just a matter of time before they expanded eastward. No one knows how they got here. Did they swim the canal or cross one of the bridges? But they did get here, and by all accounts are doing quite well. The first ones reported to me showed up south of Bridgehampton near the ponds around Mecox Bay. About five years ago I got a call from a former supervisor of East Hampton Town, Bruce Collins, who lives off of Cedar Street in East Hampton. One was in his yard and he took a photograph of it.

    I have yet to get a report of woodchucks having made it across the Napeague isthmus to reach Montauk, but more than likely come spring, one will be standing up in some Hither Hills spot next to its borough looking every bit like a big prairie dog. What will the Montaukers name it? Montauk Max, or Montauk Mary if it turns out to be a female? Next to its borough looking every bit like a big prairie dog. What will the Montaukers name it? Montauk Max, or Montauk Mary if it turns out to be a female?