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?

   Monday morning, the yard covered with a thick blanket of snow, but hints of global warming — six male robins and some starlings visited the privet and sniped the dark berries one by one. They were at it yesterday as well. The berries looked black, but when digested and defecated, they left deep purple stains in the snow. Privet berries must be emergency rations for berry-eating robins, which never feed on seed or suet.

    Each year more and more robins show up in local midwinter bird counts. They are invariably males. The females with less colorful breasts must all go south. It has not been determined if these winter robins breed locally, as cardinals, titmice, red-bellied woodpeckers, and mockingbirds do, or if they arrived from farther north.

    Having both migrating bird species in the wrong place in the wrong season speaks to climate change. But so, too, does certain changes in plants. In the last few years some remarkable changes have occurred among the Long Island grass species. The weather must have something to do with it, but there may be other causes working behind the scenes.

    Up until a few years ago when you rode along roads with open fields or shoulders on both sides, especially on the Sunrise Highway and Long Island Expressway, you were bound to see little bluestem grass among the non-native grasses. A two-foot high native that is tawny to mauve, slender and flexible in stature, and standing up proudly well into winter, it is one of the original grasses of the Long Island prairies, those where the Long Island Coliseum and airports now stand in western Suffolk County and Nassau County, as well as at the Shinnecock Hills and in Montauk, where extensive grasslands at one time covered more than 50 percent of the hamlet of Montauk.

    Lately however, the little bluestems have been replaced by two other grasses, broomsedge (Andropogon virginicus) and purple love grass (Eragrostis spectabilis). The first is straw-colored to tawny and taller than little bluestem, the latter is less than eight inches tall and is purple. It has a special mechanism for expanding its range not seen in many grasses.

    It turns out that little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) is in a group called cold-weather grasses. On the eastern seaboard it ranges far north, throughout New England and into Canada. Apparently, it was one of the first grasses to colonize Long Island after the glacier melted and retreated to the north about 10,000 years ago, before which Long Island’s surface was like a tundra. Dune bluestem (Schi­zachyrium littorale), a much rarer and much taller sibling cold-weather grass species found along the duny edges of salt marshes, also ranges north to Maine along our coast.

    Little bluestem likes cold winters, moist weather, and soils that are not sparing of nutrients. When many Long Island agricultural fields went out of cultivation, little bluestem gladly stepped in and became one of the dominant “old field” species. Things are changing rapidly, however. Broomsedge has been taking over its former territory, forming pure stands and outcompeting little bluestem. In Brookhaven Town, Southampton Town, and large areas of East Hampton Town, broomsedge is now the dominant grass. Little bluestem is making its last stand in Montauk where broomsedge is still uncommon.

    It turns out that broomsedge and purple love grass are warm-weather grasses. They get as far north as Cape Cod in Massachusetts but not to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. These two can handle poor sandy soils well, and eschew long periods of freezing weather and droughty conditions. Last summer was droughty and broomsedge thrived as never before. After Irene, with its highly desiccating gale force winds passed by in late August 2011, purple love grass became dominant along many of the major highways, forming a pleasing purple haze for miles on end.

    It’s not just global warming that is abetting the spread of these two grasses. They both bloom in late summer, and don’t shed their seeds readily, sometimes not until the following spring when germination time comes around. The love grass has a special attribute for spreading. It dries up into a loose ball about six inches in diameter after fruiting and becomes a tumbleweed, rolling over flat unimpeded surfaces as fast as the wind will take it. In the early fall when the winds are still warm and westerly, it travels east. I was standing on Cranberry Hole Road on Napeague in October of 2011 and watched one roll past me at more than five miles an hour. It traveled east some 100 yards before it passed out of sight.

    The seeds of broomsedge are held tightly within the inflorescence and it takes a lot of work to separate them out. Victoria Bustamante who specializes in gathering seeds and fruit from native Long Island species has spent many an hour extracting a few handfuls of seeds to germinate in her greenhouse. But once extracted, she says, “all you have to do is sprinkle them on bare earth slightly moist and they germinate overnight.” Highway mowers that begin mowing major Long Island roads as early as May can easily pick up and spread stalks with seeds attached and move them along before dropping them.

    Deer feed on little bluestem, but have yet to take to purple love grass, which is scratchy, and broomsedge, which is dry and stiff. That may be another reason for the recent success of these two newish grasses in our area.

    One thing is certain, whether it be climate change, storms, wildfires, foraging competition, or some other chain of events, species both animal and vegetable will continue to change in range and population numbers. Some common ones will become scarce, the way deer were in the mid-20th century, some will flourish, as broomsedge and phragmites are doing now. Each species has different needs, and as we humans rapidly change the landscape, water, and the air around us, some will take advantage of it and some will fall by the wayside.

   The Montauk SurfMasters fall tournament will come to an end at noon on Sunday. What promised to be an exciting finale, with plenty of big striped bass for the final weeks of the hard-fought contest, was curtailed by Hurricane Sandy. The big storm with her fierce easterly winds looks to have speeded migrating bass in the direction of their winter haunts and away form Montauk’s casters.

    There are still striped bass around. Gary Aprea reportedly took an 11-pounder over the weekend, which may win him $100 for being November’s biggest bass, but otherwise only small “rat” bass are said to be in the wash.

    So, as of Monday the final standings are as follows: Gary Krist has the first-place fish in the tournament’s wader division, a 29.15-pounder caught on Oct. 3. Klever Oleas and Aprea stand in second and third places with a 26-pound and 22.7-pound bass respectively.

    John Bruno is alone in the wetsuit division with the 40.3-pound striper he caught on Sept. 29. Christine Schnell’s 18.8-pound striped bass caught on Oct. 2 puts her in the lead of the women’s divison. Mary Ellen Kane and Cheryl Lackner hold second and third places with 14 and 11.8-pound fish.

    Dylan Lackner and James Kim Jr. caught twin 13.5-pound bass to tie in the youth division with Phillip Schnell’s 13-pounder putting him in third. Brian Damm caught a 14.6-pound striper on Oct. 8 to put him in first place in the 7 to 11-year old Kids division, and Witt Holmes stands in second place with a 13.8 pounder caught on Sept. 26.

    These will be the winners if no larger fish are caught by Sunday at noon.

    Goose and puddle duck hunting seasons will open tomorrow.

    Oh, and to add insult to injury, Atilla Ozturk, master surfcaster, hungry for fish, took to a boat on Sunday with his trusty rod. What happened next was blamed on a “rogue wave,” but Fred Kalkstein suggested it was googinism pure and simple responsible for Ozturk’s departure from Gary Stephens’s boat. Soaked and freezing after being helped back on board, Ozturk was forced to disrobe and return home in his underwear — without a fish.

   Two big storms in a row; will God try for three? As Bob Dylan recited so eloquently, “Something is happening, and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” It’s like that now in the world of geoclimatology and geopolitics. The two are meshing in a most confusing way, and while wasteful wars besmirch the earth, people by the thousands are dying for no good reason and sea level rises with no sign of abatement.

    Who said “Think globally and act locally?” He was spot on. If he were to have a second coming, Plato would be wisely advising us to take care of our family first, our house and property second, our community third. But current day run-of-the-mill politicos mostly haven’t read Plato and are as scientifically astute as some of our past ones were. And frankly, Scarlet, they don’t seem to give a damn.

    Yes, there is a “fiscal cliff” to worry about, but there is also a physical cliff, and that is the higher-than-sea-level land at the edge of the sea. Nature doesn’t care about you and me and the politicos who “strut and fret their way across the stage and then are heard no more.” Nature has its own long-term plan under foot, one that was written out 13 billion years ago and has been unfolding ever since. It’s time that we start paying serious attention to nature’s way of doing things and stop messing up the earth with our strutting and fretting.

    It wasn’t more than 50 or 60 million years ago when the seas reached all the way inland in America to the Appalachians. The expanse between our present Atlantic coastline and those mountains is chock full of marine fossils. The land rises and falls, the seas follow suit. It’s been going on forever and ever. During those eons millions of species, including a few hominoid ones, have been created and 90 percent of them have bit the dust.

    Long Island is not so different than thousands of islands throughout the world that are in peril, many in immediate peril. In fact, although it is many times bigger than a good many of the islands, it is vulnerable in ways many of those islands are not. The islands in the tropical seas are large and surrounded by coral reefs that serve as a kind of a first response barrier to storm-pushed waters. Yes, many of these coral reefs are in trouble for lots of reasons, most of them anthropogenic, but they exist and efforts are being made to conserve them. Islands along our West Coast are surrounded by kelp beds that are rooted at the bottom to rocks and other hard surfaces. They can create a forest hundreds of yards wide that reaches more than 100 feet in height, that is to the top of the water column. They are strong and sway back and forth with the waves and currents, damping their energies before they hit the shore.

    Long Island does have a kind of barrier, surrounding parts of it, especially along the ocean. We call this barrier the “barrier beach.” It runs in a near continuous strip from the Rockaways on the west all the way to Shinnecock Bay. From Shinnecock Bay east it pops up here and there as at Mecox Bay in Bridgehampton and Georgica Pond in East Hampton. In a way, the Napeague isthmus is a barrier beach; it’s the only one on Long Island that separates the ocean from the sound.

    Unlike, perhaps, the coral reefs and kelp forests, the barrier beaches move toward the mainland away from the sea. That’s what happened to most of those between Montauk Point and Shinnecock Bay. They moved progressively to the north until they fused solid with the mainland.

    But locally, the land at the edge of the Peconic Estuary is protected by many smaller barrier beaches. In East Hampton Town these include the spit between Northwest Harbor and Northwest Creek, Cedar Point (which has been growing westerly, nourished by sediments washed off of Hedges Banks to the east), Sammy’s Beach at the north end of Three Mile Harbor, Cape Gerard and Louse Point fronting Accabonac Harbor, and Hicks Island between Napeague Bay and Napeague Harbor. Lately, just like Cedar Point, the Hicks Island barrier beach has been growing as the channel between Goff Point and the island has filled in and it is possible to drive a four-wheel vehicle from the point to the west end of Hicks Island.

    In Montauk, the land bounding Fort Pond on the north where the Long Island Rail Road and Navy Road run is a kind of barrier beach, while the spit bordering Oyster Pond is also one, or should I say, was one, as it has almost been entirely removed by the ravages of Sandy. Lake Montauk used to have a barrier beach fronting it, but it was removed to build a permanent inlet in the mid-1920s.

    These Peconic side barriers play a very important role. They protect the salt marshes in back of them. Remove Cape Gerard, and there goes the Accabonac Harbor salt marsh. Take away Sammy’s Beach, there goes the expansive salt marsh to its south. In North Sea in Southampton Town, the barrier beaches protect the largest and perhaps healthiest salt marsh on the South Fork, the one on the south side of Scallop Pond and Sebonac Creek.

    The latter two salt marshes are largely intact and have very little in the way of phragmites intrusion. But with rising sea level they are threatened in a different way. They need the deposition of fine silts from overwashes, mainly during storms, to keep up with the rising sea level, otherwise they will drown. Salt marsh islands in Jamaica Bay and the Great South Bay are already becoming inundated and efforts are underway to bolster them with sediments deposited, not by the action of waves and tides, but artificially by man.

    Secondarily, these very salt marshes that face prospects of permanent submergence protect the uplands they front, especially in the case of Accabonac Harbor. One can easily visualize the harbor’s waters routinely reaching to Springs-Fireplace Road on the west, Old Stone Highway on the south and Louse Point Road on the east. This last road will be the first to go underwater.

    So the hordes of politicos and the army of bureaucrats have to get together and do some strenuous planning and mitigation. Can we count on the feds and the Army Corps of Engineers to solve the problem? Probably not, after all, in the 40 years it has been going on, they have let the Fire Island to Montauk Point barrier beach study sink into a deep black hole. At this point it may not be possible to retrieve and finish it in time to save what’s left of that barrier. Will we submerge as the sea level rises indifferently, or will we rise above it? That is the question.

   On Sunday at noon while sitting in the living room counting cars going by on Noyac Road, there was a sudden spate of bird activity swirling around the front yard. There were purple finches, red-breasted nuthatches, white-breasted nuthatches, chickadees, titmice, a downy woodpecker, and a Carolina wren. They hung around for about 10 minutes before picking up and heading west — all except the Carolina wren, which was not part of the group.

    This was a typical winter, mixed traveling flock, going from feeder to feeder, wood to wood, yard to yard. There was no feeder to be found on my premises and so they stayed for only a short time picking at things here and there. Apparently they came by from next door, where Ellen Stahl has been generously feeding birds year after year. We stopped feeding three or four years ago after the rats began to outnumber the birds.

    The species of birds making up these roving winter flocks are all territorial come the spring and breeding activity. Robins and bluebirds are extremely territorial in the spring and summer. By fall they also flock up, but not with other species. They keep to themselves.

    Flocking, whether in mixed-species groups or within one species, has a lot to offer. There is strength in numbers, and members of a flock look out for each other in various ways. If one sees a predator, say, a hawk or cat, it immediately informs the others by uttering sharp warning notes. Soon all of the birds are taking cover in dense vegetation and some of them begin scolding, especially if the predator continues lurking about. Blue jays are usually part of these bands and they have the loudest, most aggressive calls, encouraging the others — notably the chickadees, nuthatches, and titmice — to join the chorus.

    The calls both confuse the would-be predator and tell all the smaller birds in hearing distance to be on their guard.

    If one of the flock finds a food source on its own, it shares it with the others, even though it may selfishly cache the seeds it doesn’t have room for in its crop in a secret place, like behind a piece of tree bark or in a tiny hole in a tree trunk. On the West Coast, the California woodpecker stores its acorns in special acorn-sized niches drilled into the trunk of a tree. It is not unusual when out hiking to come upon a tree trunk stuffed with acorns up and down and around, enough to get a woodpecker through an entire winter.

    Of course, other birds in the flock or outside of it are always looking for the food niches of the hiders and, undoubtedly, the hider loses a part of its stash throughout the long winter.

    Blue jays tend to store the acorns on the ground, under leaves or buried in shallow holes. Squirrels do the same. Like the blue jays, they remember where they put them here and there, but unlike the jays, which depend on their memories and eyesight, squirrels can sniff the acorns out. Sometimes the jays even watch where the squirrels hide their nuts, and vice versa.

    Feeders make everything easy, and one wonders if the birds don’t become lazy and assume an air of entitlement. I know of some yards with feeders where the feeder gets scolded by the jays and other freeloaders if the food is not forthcoming according to schedule.

    This fall has started out as few others in this millennium, as there are numerous northern birds among the feeding flocks. If you stock your feeder amply you are liable to not only get the common feeder birds — the house finches, house sparrows, song sparrows, gold finches, chickadees, et al. — but also the rarer ones like the crossbills, the grosbeaks, the redpolls, the purple finches, pine siskins, and maybe a sapsucker or two. Many of these are in town as this is being written.

    No doubt there will be squirrels, wild turkeys, and, eventually, Norway rats, but that is part of feeding. All things in nature big and small have to eat. All life also needs water. For bluebirds and robins, which like to glean their winter food from trees, bushes, and vines, water is more important than birdseed. Having just read what I wrote, I think it is time that I get over my rat phobia, promptly put up my feeders, and also get the watering holes going again. One cannot always depend on the rain to fill them. Next time, perhaps, the wandering flock will stop at my house for vittles first before going over to Ellen’s.

   We just learned something Monday as reported in both Newsday and The New York Times. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues to rise; it’s up 3 percent over last year. Every time we inhale, we 7 billion humans breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. If that isn’t enough, all of the other billions and billions of organisms including both plants and animals with the exception of a very few, also respire, i.e., consume oxygen and discharge carbon dioxide.

    Plants, however, produce way more oxygen than they use up, they are oxygen contributors, while taking in carbon dioxide to make carbon based products — fructose, glucose, cellulose, and a bunch more — both for short-term use, annual storage, and long-term use. A 2,000-year-old California redwood is chock full of stored carbon molecules that came from carbon dioxide.

    Forest fires, which have been on the rise in this millennium, account for the release of much carbon dioxide, all that carbon stored up in the trees now reduced to ashes. But we humans collectively around the world produce more carbon dioxide via burning carbon fuels (natural gas, oil, gasoline, wood, coal, peat, etc.) than sporadic forest fires, which don’t happen day in and day out in the same predictable fashion.

    Jimmy Carter as president was far ahead of his time when he proposed keeping heating thermostats down to 65 degrees rather than the oft-recommended 72 degrees, even at the White House during his four-year tenure. Too few of our leaders and industrialists took him seriously. Economic bubbles came along, yes, they put people to work, but they also produced bigger houses to heat, bigger motor vehicles to drive around in, more airplane passenger trips, etc., etc., etc. No wonder CO2 continues to increase in the atmosphere.

    What does it do up there? It dramatically increases the greenhouse effect. It traps heat reradiated from the earth’s surface and air temperatures increase. When air temperatures increase, glaciers melt faster and shed their melt waters to the ocean, and sea level responds by rising concomitantly. The seas also get warmer, and thus expand in volume adding to sea-level rise. They also become more acidic as more carbon dioxide is dissolved in seawater, which, in turn, increases the amount of carbon-based acids available to lower the pH from its normal, and healthy, alkalinity levels. Marine organisms of all kinds suffer. The ocean’s biomass and biota both fall.

    Locally, shellfish shells become thinner, making them more susceptible to predation. The Peconic and Great South Bay estuaries become fresher and fresher. It becomes a lose-lose situation throughout.

    Yes, global warming will lower heating fuel consumption to a small degree, but more people driving more vehicles, flying here and there, and cruising the oceans while commensurately using cellphones and iPads will offset any savings realized by lowering the thermostats. Then too, it takes a lot of carbon-based energy to drill and pump the oil, drill and decant the natural gas from shales, mine coal, and even cut firewood. When we purposely burn firewood (or peat, as in some countries) we are further releasing the stores of carbon.

    Hydroelectric power doesn’t produce any carbon dioxide to speak of, but most of the prime spots for producing it have already been exploited. Dams also interfere with the ecology of rivers, especially those used by diadromous fishes such as salmon and steelhead trout. Nuclear power is carbon-free, but it has long-lasting detrimental side effects and the capacity to produce disastrous acute affects, as recently demonstrated in Japan. Electric cars don’t emit carbon or any other injurious gases, except, perhaps, for ozone, but if they aren’t charged with hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, or solar power, they are, in fact, producing a lot of second-hand carbon dioxide by way of the carbon fuels that are burned to charge their batteries.

    Wind, geothermal, and solar energies release very little, if any, carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Of these, drilling into the deep “hot rocks” zone promises an almost unlimited amount of thermal energy, but worries about drilling-induced earthquakes have put the development of such a cheap, non-polluting energy source on hold. Wind turbines, whether land-based or offshore, are very clean and relatively efficient, but their effects on wildlife, especially migrating birds and fish, can be devastating, as accumulating empirical evidence is revealing.

    Solar seems to be trouble-free, at least, at the moment. It also lends itself well to local residential, industrial, and institutional use. A solar roof on every home hardly impacts the visual quality of the landscape, but can you imagine a wind turbine at every home site? Not pretty! Big box stores were never intended to be pretty; putting solar panels on top hardly diminishes their aesthetic qualities. Large parking lots are ideal spots for solar panel arrays, too. And when it rains, your car doesn’t get wet. Ironically, the same oil-rich parts of the world controlled by OPEC also get a disproportionate amount of sunlight and therein may lie part of the solution.

    There is a law in physics that no transformation from one form of energy to another is 100 percent efficient. Otherwise, it would be possible to construct perpetual motion machines. Idealistic efficiencies for such transfers stop at around 50 percent. When sunrays impinge on solar panels they produce electricity at a fairly high rate of exchange. The waste energy that results from the transformation is heat for the most part, so on a cold day, the solar-powered residence gets a little bit of extra warming. Not bad.

    Before we fill the seas with wind turbines or build any more dams, we should push on with the development of solar power to the maximum extent. Astronomers and astrophysicists tell us that the sun isn’t going anywhere for at least several billion years. My bet is on solar. What’s more, on Long Island it could even help pay off the troubled Long Island Power Authority’s $3 billion debt.

   Friday afternoon I was driving my pickup along Daniel’s Hole Road passing East Hampton Airport when three healthy looking female deer jumped the low fence on the edge of the airport side of the road and bounded across in front of me to the mowed field beyond. I saw them from a fairly long distance and slowed accordingly.

    I hit my first deer in 1961 on my way to Cornell, and in the 38 years since then that I have been driving Long Island roads, I have hit two other deer, one on Cedar Street in East Hampton and the other on Ferry Road on North Haven. The one in 1961 caused serious damage; the other two, no noticeable damage. The North Haven deer was the last and left barely a scratch. It shouldn’t have taken me that long to adjust to deer, but these days I drive very differently and much more cautiously, giving the deer the benefit of the doubt.

    From September through December is the crazy season for deer, and that is when drivers should be the most cautious. When deer are preoccupied with breeding, they cast some of their customary cautions to the wind. While rutting, their movements are very unpredictable. Females with fawns along roads in the other months act responsibly, often waiting by the side of the road until approaching vehicles have passed, then crossing with their little ones in tow. In the human species, the funny season often lasts 365 days, so one always has to be on one’s guard. I think I trust deer far more than I trust humans in that respect.

    I’ve been tallying roadkills on Long Island roads since 1980, in which time I have clocked about 300,000 miles, everything from major arteries like the Long Island Expressway to the most minor ones, only a few hundred feet long, ending in a blind cul-de-sac. The species on the top of the road-kill list varies from year to year and depends a lot on the size of the population during a given year, the amount of available food for a given species during the year, and the season.

    Adding up the 32 years of roadkills, which I have yet to do in a scientific way, I can state authoritatively that gray squirrels are the species most frequently run over. Their killing season is maximal in September and October, mirroring the deer road-kill frequency, but for different reasons. The deer are looking for mates; the squirrels are looking for food. In the summer, as many fawns are killed on the roads as adult deer; not so for the gray squirrel. I have never encountered a baby gray squirrel roadkill. They tend to stay in trees, where they are safest, and away from roads.

    After squirrels come opossums and raccoons, including some young-of-the-year individuals. Squirrels, opossums, and raccoons are not fast runners, and take longer to cross highways and streets. Thus, the probability of one being clipped is much greater than for, say, a fox, which can run at speeds approaching 30 miles an hour. Opossums and raccoons are also very often active at night when they are less likely to be seen by motorists, especially on roads that are not street lighted.

   Then, too, and unlike deer and squirrels, there are years when raccoons, opossums, and foxes are few in number. Statistically, they are less likely to be run over at that point. One gets a rough idea of the population size of a given road-kill species in any one year by counting them and comparing the numbers to other years. In the early 1990s, for example, raccoon numbers fell dramatically. As the local population was beaten down by distemper, the raccoon road-kill counts throughout the South Fork in those years were very low.

    On the other hand, the red fox population, which hit a high in the middle to late-1990s, but then because of the mange, stayed low until 2010, when it started to build again. As of yet, it has not attained nearly the high numbers witnessed during those previous years. In fact, for the years 2000 through 2008, there were very few fox roadkills. The gray fox, although native to Long Island, has always been outnumbered by the red fox, and in 32 years I have recorded only one gray fox roadkill.

    In upstate New York skunks are among the most common of road-kill mammals, but not on Long Island, where for the past 60 years or so, skunks have been quite rare. It’s hard to miss a skunk roadkill, if you don’t see it, you almost certainly will smell it. Muskrat roadkills show up when fresh water ponds begin to dry up, at which time the muskrats look for more aqueous habitats. I count five or six every year. Long-tailed weasels are either very rare or very wary. I seldom record more than one dead on the road in a given year. In the last five years I have come across none.

    When I was a boy in Mattituck, in vegetable crop country, cottontail rabbits were the most commonly encountered roadkills by far. When you drove along a country road at night you would likely see four or five feeding along the shoulders in every mile. Not so on the South Fork. In the last five or six years, dead cottontails on the road have become quite frequent, almost as frequent as squirrels, apparently having to do with the scarcity of red foxes. But there are quite a few red-tailed hawks flying around out there, and more than a handful of great-horned owls, both of which are very fond of rabbits. Rabbits can be active throughout most of the 24-hour day. If the red-tails and foxes don’t get them during daylight hours, the great-horned owls are likely to get them at night.

    Songbirds that feed on the edges of roads, at times picking up insects and worms off the road surface, are the most common avian roadkills encountered. Catbirds and robins are the most common birds on my road-kill lists. Grackles, particularly just fledged grackles, are next. Then come herring gulls, a scavenger species that finds its goodies along the roads, but also one that drops crabs, clams, and other shellfish on hard surfaces, i.e., any paved road close to marine waters.

    Turkeys have become quite common, but in the 20 years since they were first reintroduced here in Montauk, I have tallied an average of less than one turkey roadkill per year. They walk around like they own the roads, more than any other mammal or bird, and are quite watchful of passing cars. It’s hard to miss a turkey on the highway; they are among the biggest of American birds and seldom travel alone. I have never come across a roadkill Canada goose, nor a black duck, but count several mallards, almost all males, among the recorded kills each year. They are the tamest and most trusting of the local waterfowl and, perhaps, it is their unwary nature that gets them into trouble.

    Among amphibians, bullfrogs are not uncommon as roadkills. Like muskrats, when their ponds dry up, they seek other waters and have been known to travel a mile or more over land for such purpose. As for reptiles, snakes are very scarce roadkills, while in some years turtles are as common as raccoons and opossums. They are very slow, yet determined. Big as or bigger than a brick or largish rock, and only afoot during daylight hours, one would think that they would be easily observed and watched out for. It is even possible that there are some motorists out there who make it a point to hit one once seen. I will say this, however, box turtle roadkills are becoming less and less common each year. Either their population is dwindling or drivers are more watchful and respectful of their presence. I hope it’s the latter.

    As animals have “cultures” just as we have them, let’s hope their cultures are progressing accordingly with each generation and that fewer and fewer of them will be crushed by radial tires than in years past. Let’s also hope that the human culture progresses as well. To some observers it seems to have come to a standstill.

After achieving a historic low in the 1960s, owing to wide use of DDT and other pesticides, the Long Island osprey populations have bounced back and are still rising. But the increasing number of cormorants and seals in our waters since the 1990s is nettling their comeback, and now there is a third competitor on the scene to contend with — one most of us are happy for: our national bird.

Yes, the bald eagle is making a comeback, having disappeared as a breeder in the area in 1936. Seventy years later it looks like the species is back to stay. The past winter witnessed a record number of them, and the chicks in the three local nests have almost reached fledgling stage.

Just about every layperson I talk to has seen one of these magnificent birds fly over; a few have been able to photograph them. At last count toy dogs and house cats are still running rampant; apparently these eagles are pretty much confined to feeding their young fresh fish.

Mary Laura Lamont, one of the first to make note of eagles breeding locally, as far back as 2006, is a ranger at the Fire Island National Seashore. She has kept track of the nest on that preserve since it was first established three years ago. This year there are three chicks in the nest. They got started early and are almost big enough to go out on their own.

She has observed that their diet is almost entirely fish, and there is a fishing war of sorts in progress as a result. An osprey nest is located only a few hundred yards away and, as usual, the osprey chicks are also reared on fish, the Great South Bay being a little more than a stone’s throw away.

Ms. Lamont observed that the new bald eagle pair is up to its old tricks: It catches some of its food with its talons from just beneath the bay’s surface, but it harvests just as much from the osprey parents, as eagles are wont to do. This is not a recent phenomenon. Eagles have been snatching ospreys’ catches since before Ben Franklin. Just about everyone has heard the story of why that early American statesman argued against making the bald eagle our national bird — because it was cowardly and stole from ospreys and other fish-catching birds. He was for the wild turkey, as American a bird as ever there was.

At any rate, Fire Island ospreys have to work that much harder to provide for the eagles’ young and their own. Between catching fish and nourishing their young, ospreys have their own way of getting back at eagles. They fly over the eagle nest and harass the chicks in the same way the eagles harass them and their nestlings. Inasmuch as this kind of war has been going on forever, it appears that both species will continue to prosper locally.

Long Island bald eagles have another advantage when it comes to competing with ospreys. Breeding pairs don’t migrate. They stay throughout the winter. Thus while ospreys are returning to their habitual breeding grounds from the south, as much as a couple of thousand miles away, the eagle pair has already brought its nest up to speed and the female is already incubating eggs by the time the ospreys return.

Bald eagles will also take fish and other carrion when the opportunity presents itself. So, in a way, to refute Franklin’s more idealistic conception, the bald eagle is much more American in character than the turkey. It is as bad as it is good!

While the Fire Island eagles are about to finish their procreation duties for the year, the Shelter Island pair at the Nature Conservancy’s Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island is bringing up two chicks this year, one fewer than last year. Mike Scheibel has been watching over them like a mother hen. The chicks should be out of the nest and on their own by the end of May. (Osprey chicks don’t fledge until the end of June or beginning of July.)

There is also a new eagle family coming along at the United States Fish and Wildlife Wertheim Refuge only a few miles away from the Fire Island nest and another family on Gardiner’s Island. It is the latter nest that we know the least about, as Gardiner’s Island is run like an armed encampment, protected by video cameras and other modern means of detection. The Gardiner’s Island nest predates the others by several years. Ironically, Gardiner’s Island had the last known nest before the long nesting drought that began in 1936.

We hope that the eagles, like our Representative Lee Zeldin, along with a host of East End conservation organizations, have their eyes on Plum Island. It could become a protected stepping stone towards reestablishment of eagles on Fisher’s Island to the northeast and then Nantucket Island and so on and so on all the way up the coast.

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

   The last of the Long Island Christmas Bird Counts — the Orient Count — took place on Saturday. The count compiler over the last 20 years has been Mary Laura Lamont of Northville in Riverhead Town, and as of Sunday night all of the results had not been turned in to her. Nonetheless, after talking with Mary Laura, it is obvious that this was a very good count, especially for the North Fork territories and Shelter Island. Our part of the count was Cedar Point County Park on the east to Morton Wildlife Refuge on the west.

    As they do every year, Terry Sullivan and Al Daniels covered much of Sag Harbor and North Haven. Barbara and Karen Rubenstein, Angus Wilson, Vicki Bustamante, and I covered Cedar Point, the Grace Estate, and Barcelona (Russell’s) Neck.

    It was a quiet morning accompanied by calm waters followed by a rainy afternoon with building winds. The owlers were out early; at least six screech owls were heard calling on this side of the bay, in the Greenport part of the territory, there were 13 of them out trilling. One saw-whet owl, the tiniest of our lot here on the East Coast, was also heard, with its seemingly never-ending series of toot-toot-toot-toot-toot calls.

    In our territory we were almost raptorless, while Terry and Al had a merlin streak across their windshield in pursuit of small birds, as well as an immature bald eagle. The same eagle was seen over western Sag Harbor by the Morton Wildlife Refuge party and perhaps later over Shelter Island. Across the bay a kestrel (a rarity in these times) and peregrine falcon were observed.

    The rarest duck was the Barrow’s goldeneye observed in upper Sag Harbor Cove. Not a single canvasback on our side, but scaup, both the green-headed greater and purple-headed lesser, were seen in respectable numbers. Hooded mergansers were almost as common as red-breasted ones. The most common sea ducks east of Sag Harbor were common goldeneyes. With more than 400 counted, they outnumbered Canada geese, black ducks, long-tailed ducks, buffleheads, and the three species of scoters combined.

    There was an unusually large number of common loons, and Angus came up with two red-throated loons as well as two razorbills, one of the auk species in Gardiner’s Bay. Two northern gannets were also tallied over the bay off of Hedges Banks. There was a fair share of horned grebes diving along with the loons in Northwest Harbor and Sag Harbor and Noyac Bays. The loons, grebes, and gannets, as well as the mergansers, wouldn’t be here at this time if there weren’t a copious supply of small fish to get them through the winter.

    Sanderlings were common on the outer side of Cedar Point feeding on a Sandy-sculpted stony shore edge with herring and ring-billed gulls. Mike Scheibel covered Mashomack on Shelter Island, where he came up with a semipalmated plover. Purple sandpipers, winter visitors, and a killdeer that didn’t go south were observed on the North Fork. Vicki and I had a great blue heron fly over our heads more than once, apparently looking for open water. In the State Department of Environmental Conservation-owned marshes west of Mile Hill Road, Vicki played Virginia rail calls more than once from her smartphone and was answered back by two real Virginia rails. On the other hand, her smartphone calls to spook out marsh wrens went unanswered.

    The Barbara-Karen-Angus party came up with all the local woodpeckers, including nine red-bellied woodpeckers, two hairy woodpeckers, and a yellow-bellied sapsucker that apparently forgot to go south. They also observed 2 brown creepers, 8 eastern bluebirds (our state bird), and 24 robins. A third member of the thrush family, a rarity in the winter, a wood thrush, was picked up on the North Fork.

    Red-breasted nuthatches were almost as common as white-breasted ones. There were a fair number of chickadees and titmice, and almost all of the sparrows — tree, field, white-throated, song, fox, and, on the North Fork, two white-crowned sparrows. Mary Laura had three of the northern finches, which are apt to visit us every winter — redpolls, pine siskins, and purple finches. We didn’t see a single yellow-rumped warbler, which was a surprise, but two warblers, the palm warbler and common yellowthroat, were observed on the North Fork.

    No pheasants, not a single bobwhite, but Angus and crew did come up with six wild turkeys, the game bird on eastern Long Island that in this millennium has come to outnumber quail, pheasants, and ruffed grouse combined. It was unusually quiet as far as birdcalls go throughout the day. Yes, the blue jays and crows were typically vociferous, and the Carolina wrens rattled out their rat-a-tat songs throughout the day, but most of the others were mute. Were they anticipating the rain, freezing rain, and snow that would fall later in the day?