A new species of glass frog recently discovered in southern Peru — the 7,000th known amphibian species — has been named after Andy Sabin of Springs, a herpetology enthusiast and president of the South Fork Natural History Museum.

    Centrolene sabini, or the Sabin glass frog, was found in a small stream in the Kosnipata Valley in Manu National Park, almost 3,000 meters above sea level. The inch-long frog is electric green, with partially translucent skin, small yellow dots, and a yellow underbelly. It has green bones and a long call consisting of 8 to 14 notes.

    Dr. Alessandro Catenazzi, a researcher and professor at Ganzaga University in Washington, made the discovery. Finding a new species of amphibian, he said, can be both encouraging and misleading. “We have both an increasing number of known species . . . and an increasing number of threatened or extinct species, a portion of those same 7,000 described species,” Dr. Catenazzi said last week. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, approximately 40 percent of amphibians are extinct or at risk of becoming extinct.

    Decline in amphibians has been used as a good indicator for suffering ecosystems, which makes the high number of at-risk or extinct amphibians a cause for concern. “The dramatic loss of amphibian diversity is due to a combination of factors, such as habitat destruction, emerging diseases, introduced species, [and] environmental change,” Dr. Catenazzi said. Identifying new species is encouraging but steps to protect their habitat can be difficult due to deforestation and rising carbon emissions.

    “The whole world’s environment is in trouble,” and even locally, “here in East Hampton, we’ve lost 95 percent of toads over the years,” Mr. Sabin said last week. In addition to his involvement in the South Fork Natural History Museum, which he helped found, Mr. Sabin has established the Sabin Conservation Fund and, in Russia, the Sabin Conservation Award, which acknowledges outstanding achievement in nature protection.

    He funds the Andrew Sabin International Environmental Fellowships, which provide up to $35,000 to selected students, as well as the Sabin Sustainable Venture Prize at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment for “a product, service, project, or program that advances a more sustainable way of life.”

    Through the South Fork Natural History Museum, Mr. Sabin often leads walks in search of local reptiles and amphibians.

   Technically, we’re past the dog days of summer (based on the “dog star” Sirius’s proximity to the sun), but since Saturday’s heavy rain the weather has felt doggish and dogfish have been caught from the beach in downtown Montauk.

    Dogfish as well as a small thresher shark, according to Sue Jappell of Paulie’s Tackle, big porgies, trigger fish, and, to complete the picture, dolphins have been feeding close to shore on the schools of squid in the area. At Ditch Plain Beach in Montauk on Sunday, keeper-size striped bass sashayed around legs of Boogie boarders standing in waist-deep water — dog days for sure.

    On the north side of Montauk big, very big bluefish have begun blitzing at Gin Beach and Shagwong Point. They are also schooling in Gardiner’s Bay.

    Nine-year-old Julia DeMeritt hooked into a 13.5-pound chopper blue on Sunday aboard Capt. Ken (Ahab) Rafferty’s light-tackle charter boat. She fought and landed the fish by herself. In recent days, Rafferty has been fishing east of Little Gull Island, where he found stripers in the 10-to-15-pound range. He also reported schools of false albacore.

    Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett seconded the false albacore report, saying he was surprised when he hooked a falsey that was less than a foot long. “I thought they were cocktail blues. I remember eight years ago they came in real small, the same way, because the water temperature was pretty high.”

    “It feels like we could be blasted by a hurricane any day. A year ago Thursday we got clobbered, and two years ago the same week,” said Bennett, who keeps a daily log of fishy, terrestrial, and extra-terrestrial events. Oh, and Bennett reported a “bumper crop of bottlefish,” blowfish, in Accabonac Harbor.

    Scott Leonard of the Star Island Yacht Club reported “big bluefish everywhere, on the north side, the south side, from here to Block Island and back.” He said their presence was due to a mind-boggling amount of prey, “large bunker, peanut bunker, white bait, and squid. There are a lot of weakfish too. People are catching them by accident while fluking.” He suggested targeting the weaks by live-lining squid or snappers. He said he had seen weakfish (one of the more beautiful and tastiest fish in the sea) up to seven pounds.

    The West Lake Marina reported that Russ Masciotti, fishing from the Lady Fin, caught a 42.55-pound albacore tuna, a yellowfin tuna, and 18 mahimahi while trolling in West Altantis Canyon on Aug. 14.

    Over the weekend at the Montauk Mercury Grand Slam held from Uihlein’s Marina in Montauk, Capt. Richard Etzel on the Breakaway captured first place and a brand-new Mercury outboard engine with 147.50 aggregate points. His party caught a 34.45-point striper on the first day, a 32.60 striper the second day, bluefish weighing 7.8 and 13.75 pounds on Saturday and Sunday respectively, two fluke, a 6.8-pounder on the first day in the rain, a 9.2-pound fluke on day two. The Breakaway also caught the largest black sea bass of the tournament, a five-pounder. Sal Zatkowski on the Oak took second place, and Richard Rade on the Maria E finished in third place.

    The Montauk Marine Basin is now an automated radio check host station, Sea Tow Services International announced last week. Boaters in Montauk Harbor and surrounding areas of Block Island Sound can check their V.H.F. radio signal by calling channel 26.

    This helps the Coast Guard to free up channel 16, the channel monitored by the Coast Guard, by reducing non-emergency communications.

    Automated radio checks are broadcast on V.H.F. channels 24 through 26 depending on the region. To find the dedicated check channel in a particular area, boaters need only visit seatow.com/arc, enter their city, state, or ZIP code, and find their location on an interactive map.

   People have been asking, “Where have the birds gone?” There are very few birds in my own backyard here in Noyac, An occasional blue jay, robin, Carolina wren, but no steady comers with the exception of crows, which visit regularly beginning at dawn.

    On the other hand, Terry Sullivan, who lives near the water’s edge in Sag Harbor, has no shortage of feathered friends. More often than not his birdbath is filled to capacity.

    Most of the birds are out foraging for insects, fruit, seeds, and the like away from residential areas. That old adage “birds of a feather, flock together” is particularly applicable at this time of year. When songbirds migrate, they fly together, before they migrate, they gather together, feed together, and molt together. Those marvelous spring feathers that are not only perfectly hewn, but also gaudily colorful, are great for courting and defending territories, but by the time August rolls around, tend to be worn out.

    Many of the most brightly colored ones, notably the males of the species, trade in those advertising feathers, for ones that will not only get them to points south, but when there, will make them harder to see among the greens that predominate on their wintering grounds. Thus the bright reds of the male scarlet tanagers and the brilliant oranges of the male Baltimore orioles are traded in for greens and yellows, cryptic colors which will hide them as they forage among the tropical vegetation until spring sends them north.

    Competitive singing mostly has to do with inviting females and maintaining territories in the spring and early summer. Competition ends in August and song gives way to species-specific call notes that are used to keep members of a certain feather together. They are particularly useful come the Christmas count season in December. Birders with good ears don’t have to see the utterer to identify a given species; the call notes are as telltale as the bird’s size, coloration, and form. Indeed, with the advance of high tech gizmos and applications, many Christmas counters now play a given call from their smartphones, evoking a return call from a real bird.

    In late August and September we play host to four kinds of birds, according to their habits. There are those such as the mockingbirds, blue jays, cardinals, house sparrows, starlings, Carolina wrens, and house finches that overwinter here. They look the same in the winter as they do in the spring. A few, such as the mockingbird and Carolina wren, maintain winter territories and defend them with song. Then there are the migrators, ones that leave Long Island for the south and others from farther north that stop over to rest and feed before traveling on.

    Oddly, perhaps, there is a small group of wrong-way birds, southern terns and such, that reach Long Island from the south as they wander north looking for food or, maybe, just checking things out. Some of these are considered “overshoots” or “accidentals” — they’ve gone too far. Others come from the west, such as the western kingbird and the dickcissel.

    Then there are a large number of northern species including songbirds, waterfowl, seabirds, and raptors that annually overwinter here. Among them are three species of scoters, or sea ducks, the evening grosbeak, pine siskin, winter wren, Ipswich sparrow, rough-legged hawk, goshawk, and purple sandpiper, to name a few. There are one or more species for each available habitat — forest, grassland, freshwater, seawater, dunes, beaches, and shores.

    I should add that there is a fifth category of species, some of the members of which refuse to migrate south with their brethren and stay the winter here. Among them are the Canada Goose, robin, towhee, and bluebird. If they make it through the winter, they have an advantage come spring. They don’t have to fight man and the elements to make it back here to carve out territories and begin the nesting season — they’re already here.

    Among these stay-behinds and winter loiterers are birds, such as eagles, that used to breed here but no longer do. The hope is that they will stick around for the four or five years it takes to reach maturity and settle down here in one of our many open spaces. Such has already occurred during this millennium, at least a couple of times. Turkey vultures have started breeding in Montauk, and the American raven as of late now breeds in Hampton Bays.

   John Ryan Sr. had, when the summer began, wanted very much for the East Hampton Volunteer Ocean Rescue Squad to come to a meeting of the minds with the resorts along the Napeague strip, which are not required by the Suffolk County Health Department to post lifeguards if they prohibit ocean swimming.

    Soon after a spectacular save in front of the Driftwood ocean resort just west of Hither Hills State Park in June, a save owing to the quick and effective initial response by a cabana boy, J.C. Barrientos, Ryan said Barrientos, who was not a certified lifeguard at the time, should not have been put in that position.

    He added that while he didn’t want to adopt an adversarial stance, he was hopeful that the resorts and homeowners associations along the strip between Amagansett and Montauk could be persuaded to amplify measures that would further ensure the safety of workers and swimmers. “If you put up chairs and umbrellas on the beach, you can’t keep people out of the water even if there are signs that prohibit swimming,” Ryan said at the time.

    “There’s still a risk — I’m disappointed the ocean rescue squad hasn’t done anything,” he said when questioned briefly following the East Hampton Volunteer Ocean Rescue Squad’s Gardiner’s Bay swims Saturday morning.

    In a separate conversation, Ryan’s son, John Jr., who heads the lifeguards here, said he too regretted that there hadn’t been a parley with the ocean resort owners to date. “The summer’s just flown by.”

    On the subject of saves, he said 30 or 40 swimmers had been pulled out of rip tides at Amagansett’s protected Atlantic Avenue Beach last week, and that on Aug. 4, also at Atlantic, the crew overseen by Ed Reid had saved the life of an elderly, semiconscious male. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation had been used, and, ultimately, a shock to the heart was applied with success in an ambulance on the way to Southampton Hospital.

   This can be an eerie time of year. Despite the 80-degree ocean temperature, or maybe because of it, we feel fall just under the horizon. One contributor to the pre-fall feeling is the false albacore, or little tunny. Each year schools of falsies arrive like clockwork, drawing light-tackle anglers to the East End.

    Capt. Ken Rafferty, who runs a light-tackle and fly-fishing guide service out of Three Mile Harbor and, come fall, Montauk, reported that his first albie catch of the season occurred on Monday.

    “There we were,” he began in typical Rafferty style. “East of Little Gull Island. We saw them last week, but by the time we rigged up, they were gone. This time we saw two schools. I had two rods rigged up. We saw them busting, so Michael Salzhauer began working the rod with a little white fly. You have to retrieve them fast. Albies’ eyes are so sharp, you have to suggest bait running. They go after it and can’t help themselves.”

    Rafferty also reported that after a hiatus caused by overly warm water, striped bass had returned to Gardiner’s Bay. “And, bluefish are really big. They don’t show. No birds diving. You can see them finning at slack tide.” Rafferty reported schools of smaller bluefish in the four-to-five-pound range farther east near Water Fence and Fort Pond Bay, Montauk.

    To the west, Ken Morse at the Tight Lines shop in Sag Harbor reported “loads of weakfish. The best run in years. There are a lot of small ones, but with a bag limit of just one, there are plenty over 16 inches,” the minimum legal size. These days Sag Harbor is also blessed with the presence of a vast number of blowfish. “I had one customer who caught 14. There are a lot of kingfish,” he said, referring to a species that looks like a Spanish mackerel. Morse said the harbor had a glut of porgies “and the snappers [baby bluefish] are incredible.”

    The Tight Lines shop will be closed Mondays and Tuesdays after Labor Day.

    Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk reports that surfcasters working the waters around the Montauk Point Lighthouse are finding small bluefish. The south-facing beaches are producing striped bass on occasion for those casting needlefish or darter lures. Bait fishermen are finding blood and sand worms to be productive on Montauk’s north side. The surprising porgy action that surfcasters have been enjoying from south-facing beaches has slowed, probably because of the recent east winds.

    Although the fluke fishing has slowed, it ain’t over. Kathy Vegessi of the Lazy Bones party boat reported that, on one trip a week ago, three anglers caught fluke in the “double digits” — 12.1, 11, and 10-pound doormats. The fluke-fishing season ends at the end of September for sportfishermen. Vegessi also reported sea bass, big porgies, and “beautiful” weakfish caught from the Bones.

    Speaking of black sea bass, the Star Island Yacht Club reports that Robert DeLuca, fishing from the Yolo, caught a huge 7.5-pound sea bass on Sunday. Star Island also reported that Dr. Steve Sachs returned from the Fish Tales section of Block Canyon with a 212-pound bigeye tuna over the weekend, and Jerry Passaretti found yellowfin in the 40-to-60-pound range.

    Chris Miller at the West Lake Marina confirmed the action in the Fish Tales. He said Greg Zwirko on the Kennebunk returned with a 53.3-pound yellowfin tuna caught there by an angler, Cathy Teller. The Kennebunk crew also caught 18 mahimahi and 6 triggerfish while fishing close to a pot buoy. A swordfish in the 100-pound class also swam by the boat, not realizing it had been hooked. It soon found out and put up a fight before shaking the hook.

   Summer is winding down, but not with a whimper. It’s been a hot one, yes, but also one free of gypsy moths and cankerworms, and the woodlands as of this date are fully foliaged and resplendent in spots. We are blessed on Long Island with almost one of every kind of habitat in America’s lower 48, with the exception of deserts and alpine forests, and the East End has most of them, so it is an ecologist’s dream, at least this ecologist’s dream.

    Some of these habitats are largish in extent, such as the central pine barrens dominated by pitch pines and oaks. Some are smallish like the dwarf pitch pine forest in Westhampton west of County Road 31. Many are tiny like the cranberry bogs in Napeague. Put them all together and they comprise a colorful crazy quilt when photographed from the air.

    Putting the aquatic habitats — salt, brackish, and fresh — aside for the moment, North America has 8 major dry land habitat types, or biomes: deserts, prairies, transitional coniferous forest or taiga, eastern deciduous forest, southern pine woods, western and southwestern chapparal-shrublands, montane vegetation, and the great northern tundra. If we include Mexico we can add tropical forests. All of these are characterized by distinctive floras and faunas, however, none are etched in stone.

    For example, under the influence of global warming the tundra underlain by permafrost is melting away. Only 10,000 years ago much of Long Island was covered with glacial ice, it took less than 1,000 years to melt away. A couple hundred million years earlier tropical plants grew where the tundra is now. It could very well happen in another 100 million years. Even in our lifetimes we have seen significant changes in the boundaries of some of these biomes. These changes may be speeding up.

    On Long Island we once had the largest bona fide prairie in New York State. It was known as the Hempstead Plains and was inhabited by prairie chickens, the heath hen, now long extinct. Only 15 acres or so remain today, and they are not what they used to be. What used to be a bustling grassland in terms of wildlife and vegetation, is now a bustling, mostly paved area of commerce and residential life occupied by the Nassau Coliseum, Roosevelt Raceway, airports, tract housing, and much more.

    The second largest Long Island prairie was in Montauk. It stretched from Fort Pond to Montauk Point. It was flat in some places, like the Montauk Downs golf course west of Lake Montauk, and hilly to the east. The Shinnecock Hills just west of the Shinnecock Canal was a third Long Island prairie. It is rapidly growing up with taller vegetation, much of it invasive, and also has houses, golf courses, and a college campus. The golf courses are the closest in appearance to the original Shinnecock grasslands and still contain many of the prairie species of grasses and shrubs that once covered the entire area from Hampton Bays to Tuckahoe. There are plans afoot to restore undeveloped parts of it to its former stead.

    The South Fork has its own pine barrens of sorts, beginning in North Sea and running along the terminal moraine all the way to upland Amagansett, and thence to Montauk’s Hither Woods by way of the Napeague isthmus. Pitch pine is the dominant conifer, partially replaced in the Northwest section of East Hampton with white pine, the only other Pinus species native to Long Island.

    Elements of the great eastern deciduous forest, akin to the Appalachian forest, which runs from Georgia and Alabama into New England, are well represented here. Six species of tree oaks and three of hickories, as well as walnuts, tulips, black cherry, sycamores, tupelos, dogwoods, sassafras, hop-hornbeam, and a poplar growing here on eastern Long Island, are part of it. Further west and north, Long Island has a few trees that we don’t have, such as sugar maple and liquidambar. The white-tailed deer thrives in these kind of broad-leafed deciduous forests, as does the gray squirrel, ruffed grouse, and wild turkey.

    Tidal marshes, with their characteristic zonation, are a fourth major type of habitat on Long Island and are very well represented on the South Fork. Typically they consist of different zones, salt-water cord grass or intertidal marsh, salt marsh hay zone landward of the cord grass, and a shrub-dominated marsh boundary edge consisting of groundsel bush and marsh elder. Perhaps the largest intact salt marsh on the South Fork is the one in the hamlet of North Sea south of Scallop Pond.

    We don’t have lakes per se, but some of our ponds are mighty big, such as Fort Pond in Montauk, the second largest freshwater body on Long Island. These have two types of vegetation, aquatic vegetation such as water lilies and leafy pondweeds, which grow in and under the water, and edges of emergent reeds, rushes, and sedges. Unfortunately, a Eurasian genotype of the worldwide species, Phragmites australis, or common reed, has taken over many of these wetland edges, especially along the less shaded shores of Fort Pond, Hook Pond, Wickatuck Pond, Wainscott Pond, and Old-House Pond, to name a few.

    This same obnoxious “weed” has also invaded the brackish marshes of Georgica Pond and Scallop Pond, as well as cranberry bogs and small wetlands in the dune swales associated with the Peconic Estuary on the north and the Atlantic Ocean on the south. It is often accompanied by other invasive marsh plants such as purple loosestrife, also Eurasian in origin.

    Our swampy wetlands dominated by red maples and tupelos such as Crooked Pond and Scoy Pond in East Hampton’s Northwest, Fresh Pond and Hidden Pond in Montauk’s Hither Woods, Big Fresh Pond in North Sea, and Sagg Swamp in Bridgehampton, shade out the would-be phragmites intruders. They are the least sullied of our freshwater wetland habitats.

    Dune plant communities dominated by American beach grass, beach pea, marram grass, seabeach goldenrod, and beach plum are also extensive on the South Fork, especially along the ocean, but also here and there on the edges of Peconic, Gardiner’s, and Napeague Bays and Block Island Sound. On Napeague these dunelands have become heavily populated with Japanese black pine at the behest of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s former plant distribution program. Fortunately, they are shorter-lived than the native pitch pines and subject to a variety of diseases caused by borers, nematodes, moths, and other organisms as well as fatal damage at the hands of tropical storms and northeasters. In one Napeague spot recently named South Flora on the side of Montauk Highway, a dune form of pink lady slipper orchid grows, to my knowledge the only ones of its kind growing on a Long Island duneland.

    A particular kind of inner-dune flatland habitat is situated on the south side of Cranberry Hole Road, running along the north side of Napeague. It is like no other duneland on Long Island or north or south of Long Island. I call it a dune plain and it is covered with a thick carpet of beach heather and bearberry, a few shrubby bear oaks, lichens, and fine-stemmed grasses. In a few lower spots it has little boggy wetlands. In one spot surrounded by pitch pines, it is home to the rare pale crested orchis, Habenaria cristata pallida, which grows nowhere else on Long Island or New York State, except one small patch in Hither Woods on the other side of Napeague Harbor. The dune plain deserves special recognition by the New York State Heritage Office, which keeps track of state rarities.

    Then there is the shore vegetation that is found along the higher seagrass wrack lines at almost all of our marine beaches. The dominants here are sea rocket, beach clotbur, sea-blites, wormwoods, saltwort, seabeach sandwort, orache, and the like. Here we occasionally find the rare seabeach knotweed and the federally endangered seashore amaranthus from the south.

    Finally, in Montauk, along the ocean, are some of Long Island’s rarest plant communities. Here, three miles of windswept bluffs with plants growing on the bluff faces as well as the bluff tops have a unique flora found nowhere else on Long Island, with such rarities as the orchid Arethusa and a diminutive subspecies of the yellow-flowered sundrops. There are no other ocean bluffs on Long Island or, indeed, the Atlantic Coast all the way to the tip of Florida.

    A little inland from the bluffs, we find the heathlands, known locally as the Montauk moorlands. They are dominated by shads, purple chokeberry, highbush blueberry, arrow woods, southern and northern. In grassy and weedy spaces away from the small trees and shrubs in this dwarf forest, we have the federally endangered sandplain gerardia, and the New York State-rare New England blazing-star. Shadmoor and Amsterdam Beach Parks are wonderful examples of Montauk moorland, bluff-top, and bluff-face plant communities.

    Let’s face it. The South Fork not only has myriad different habitats and microhabitats, much of which has already been salted away in perpetuity, it’s a botanist’s and a naturalist’s playground. To keep it so, we must defeat the inroads already made by phragmites and other exotic species, while simultaneously keeping the destructive hand of man at bay. As the 350-year-old East Hampton Town Trustees and 400-year-old Southampton Town Trustees are wont to say, it all belongs to the “freeholders,” and we are the freeholders.

    As we know, time and tide wait for no man, or woman for that matter. There’s really nothing that can be done to stem the first part of the old saw, but being aware of our semidiurnal tide schedule is crucial for sailors, fishermen, surfers, and habitual beach walkers.  

    For this reason, Peter Spacek, an artist, illustrator, and the person responsible for The Star’s weekly Startoons, has created a must-have T-shirt for the tidally dependent. Spacek has printed a fresh batch of Ts that feature four months’ worth of tide charts on the front, complete with corresponding phases of the moon.

    So there you are on the deck of your boat. The fish will start biting on the turn of the tide, but you left your Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book at home. It looks like slack tide, but looks can be deceiving. How long will you have to wait? Should you move? Your guests, who have driven here from upstate, are getting antsy.

    Then you remember you’re wearing Spacek’s tide shirt. You don’t even need to slip it off to read (and in the process reveal the Budweiser tumor you’ve grown over the winter), because Spacek has printed the charts upside down. All you have to do is look down, pull your shirt away from your waist (skip this step if your belly is large enough), and voila! Your friends will think you’re one with the sea, pure salt. Just be careful not to spill coffee or ketchup on it or you could miss the tide.

    Spacek also has Ts with the tide charts on the back and a ruler up the front with the minimum sizes of popular species clearly marked. The shirts are available on line at ditchink.com, at Gone Local in Amagansett, and at the Curiosity shop in East Hampton.

    Sue Jappell down at Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reported surfcasters making wonderful but unlikely catches along Montauk’s sand-bottomed ocean beaches. Porgies, some in the two-to- three-pound range, are being landed, along with the occasional fluke, striped bass, and bluefish.

    “Twice, tourists have come in and I’ve outfitted them with rigs and they’ve come back with one of each kind I told them about. One person with a high-low rig had a fluke on the bottom, a porgy on top,” Jeppel said on Monday. She reasoned the bottom feeders were probably attracted to an extensive mussel bed lying within casting distance from shore.

    There have been a few reports of green bonito in the ’hood. Greenies, for those of you who don’t know, are often mistaken for false albacore. They too are bullet-shaped mini-tunas, somewhat smaller, but they arrive earlier than the falsies, and unlike the albacore the greenies make for delicious eating. They are arguably among the very finest eating fish in the sea.

    Anything pushing bait along the surface in the immediate future could well be a green bonito. They share, with false albacore, sharp eyes. Tins and other small lures should be retrieved very quickly.

    Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported sightings last week. Ken Rafferty, light-tackle and fly-fishing guide, agreed that “it’s a perfect time for them. The problem is, they mix in with the bluefish. They’ve such good eyes that you can’t use wire leader, but if you don’t use wire, the bluefish will take the lure. Don’t cast without wire leader unless you see an actual school of them.”

    The light-tackle guide said the schools of bunker that were seen in eastern Gardiner’s Bay and Block Island Sound seem to have moved west to around Shelter Island. “When I see a school of bunker, I cast a surface plug across the top. Big bluefish come up thinking it’s a wounded bunker. I used to go out every day searching for a black hole,” Rafferty said, speaking of the dark mass that marks a bunker school.

    Brian Fromm returned from a two-night trip in the offshore canyons on Monday with a big-eye tuna weighing 173 pounds. The boat also had 15 yellowfins that dressed out to about 50 pounds each.

    “There’s a nice amount of striped bass around. Friday was stupid for midsummer. We had a 45 and a 48-pound striper weighed in. Most were in the 20-to-30-pound class. All big fish, and all caught on live eels. Every drift, every rod bent. You see that at times in September and October,” said Chris Miller of the West Lake Marina in Montauk.

    Harvey Bennett said fluke continue to be caught off Napeague. He said he was given two giant fluke fillets the other day. “They were like two feet long and about 18 inches wide. The fish had to be 15 to 16 pounds. Garlic, salt and pepper, olive oil, and lemon.”

   As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, “What’s all this fuss about chickens?” 

   Having been born and raised next to my grandfather’s chicken farm in Mattituck, where he tended a flock of up to 5,000 chickens, I am quite partial to them. You might say the first bird species I learned was the once-wild fowl, Gallus gallus, or in this case, white leghorn, and the first bird I ever heard sing was the rooster.

    On Monday I took my grandchildren from San Francisco to see the old homestead. It was still there almost in its original form, but the chicken farm next door was now occupied by myriad greenhouses, 20 or more. I had known something was up when I Googled it on Google Maps in April, and all I could see from the air were lots of rectangular glassy looking buildings laid out side by side.

    Mattituck was as rural as the Midwest in the 1940s and 1950s — farm fields end on end, little fishing boats plying the waters of Long Island Sound and Peconic Bay. For a boy growing up it was the best it could be. I would gladly trade the sound of the motor vehicles that buzz by my house now at 1,000 per hour or the sound of the helicopters flying back and forth for the occasional crowings of a couple of roosters.

    At night we might hear a plane go over or a couple of cars go by, but mostly we listened to the night music of tree crickets, katydids, whippoorwills, and barking dogs. One could almost imagine how nice the Native Americans had it 400 years earlier.

    My family had chickens — barred rocks — Muscovi ducks, goats, and pigs, and very big vegetable and flower gardens. We canned, we pickled, we cured, we smoked, we shucked, we ate fresh. On weekends we clammed or fished. In other words, we were a typical rural eastern Long Island family. We lived to survive, not to entertain or make it into the pages of Better Homes and Gardens.

    Well, here we are on the South Fork 60 years later and things have changed. Real estate is bigger than farming and fishing, horses have replaced cows, there are more automobiles and boats than you can shake a stick at, and very few vegetable gardens and few chickens. The wild turkeys and deer are the only things that keep us from becoming completely citified. When I worked for East Hampton Town I got lots of complaints about both.

    One wonders what would happen if the economy keeps sinking and we find ourselves carrying on like a third world country, eking out a day-to-day find ourselves carrying on like a third world country, eking out a day-to-day existence and hanging on with our finger nails. A McMansion will not ensure survival as much as a little Bonac house. Those who have a garden, who have chickens, who know how to clam and fish, will get by. Those who don’t will be dependent upon those who do and will not be in a position to complain about roosters crowing.

    I don’t have any chickens in my Noyac neighborhood, but if I did, I would welcome them with open ears. I get by with the crickets and katydids and the multi-pitched barking of neighbors’ dogs. When they go so will I.

    Old McDonald had a farm, E I E I O, and on that farm he had some chickens — with a cluck, cluck here and a cluck, cluck there, here a cluck, there a cluck, everywhere a cluck, cluck. . . . See if you can finish it.

    Thirty-three boats brought 13 mako sharks — the largest a 148-pounder — to the scales at the 20th annual mako shark tournament held from the Star Island Yacht Club over the weekend, but it’s the number of large sharks being caught and seen relatively close to shore that has folks wondering.

    While fishing for porgies in Gardiner’s Bay, John Rade, a veteran commercial rod-and-reel fisherman, witnessed a white shark leap from the water chasing prey. Last Thursday, Mike Young was fishing for fluke from the Lazy Bones when he hooked into a thresher shark that gray-hounded across the surface before breaking the 30-pound-test, braided line. The thresher was caught in the north rips off the Montauk Lighthouse.

    Trap fishermen with pound nets in Gardiner’s Bay have found at least three relatively large sharks, two identified as sand tigers, and one blue shark in their traps. The sharks were caught in the same area in which a young great white weighing an estimated 200 pounds was caught, also in a trap, in July of 2003.

    Nat Miller, an East Hampton Town Trustee and a bayman, said the trapped sharks were caught at Albert’s Landing in Amagansett south of Accabonac Harbor, and at Water Fence off the beach at Hither Woods in Montauk.

    “It’s just warm. It’s crazy. Gardiner’s Island has seals year round. There’s always sharks in these waters. The white sharks breed in shallow water. The water’s warmer this year. They come closer to the beach, and there are bunker, porgies, bluefish” to draw them in, Miller said.

    Nancy Kohler, a shark biologist from the National Marine Fisheries Service laboratory in Narragansett, R.I., said, “It’s not unusual to see sand tigers. They are around this time of year. It’s common. A blue shark, however . . . it’s either the temperature or food bringing them in.”

    As for the thresher caught on a fluke rig: “Big threshers come close to pup, but they usually pup in May or June.”

    And what about the white sharks of “Jaws” infamy? “If they take up year-round residence it could be a problem. They are spending more time in this area. Seems like now there are 200,000 gray seals living on Cape Cod. It’s become a mecca for them. We’re going to see predators following them,” Kohler said. Cue the “Jaws” theme.

    “They like to eat marine mammals,” she said. Great whites have traditionally fed on dead, young, or sick whales, a fact that Capt. Frank Mundus, Montauk’s “Monster Man,” discovered and used to his legendary advantage. But, with the influx of seals, the adult whites may be moving closer to shore. “They are not changing their habits. We are just seeing a different aspect of their feeding. They take seals down because that’s what’s there,” Kohler said.

    Winner of the Star Island tournament with the 148-pound mako was the boat My Rock, captained by Mike Hegarty. Chuck Lamitie was the angler. The Tomi Chris boat, with Tom Russo at the helm, landed the second place, 147-pound mako reeled in by Warren Hensel. John Trzcinski won his battle with a 142-pound mako to take third place for the Thor 2 boat and Capt. Dave Meberg. Humans seem to be winning, so far.

    The porgy fishing around Gardiner’s Island continues to excite. The scup may be a bit smaller, but during an outing on Saturday afternoon off Eastern Plains point, double-headers were common. Rocky bottom in about 20 feet of water also draws sea bass and false albacore in late summer. With everything else ahead of schedule, no one should be surprised if the falsies show up early.

   A month ago on a record hot Thursday, I attended a “poisonous plants” course conducted by Susan K. Pell, Ph.D., at the New York Botanical Garden. It was my first visit to that institution and one that turned out to be directly related to the vegetation in my Noyac yard.

    I had wondered for more than 20 years why many of the plant species have been consistently untouched by the deer that routinely visit the yards of my neighbors.

    It turns out that about two thirds of my plants are poisonous. Half of these are native to the South Fork, and half are exotic, mostly Eurasian in origin. One wonders if the deer in most cases already know which is which. In at least a few cases they learn. As spring progresses and this and that poisonous plant develop side by side with the non-poisonous ones, the deer will experiment. One day they will take the tops off many native spotted jewel-weed or touch-me-not, Impatiens capsensis, which is lush and succulent and on the face of it looks as if it would provide a good meal to any herbivore that happens by. Thereafter, they will invariably leave them be.

    They never try the vinca, or periwinkle, an exotic ground-hugger that covers half the front yard. Nor will they nibble on the common import lily-of-the-valley, which covers the other half. The latter contain glycosides that can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, irregular heartbeat, and more, similar to the glycosides found in the ornamental foxglove, which contains digitalis, a chemical used medicinally in the past to treat irregular heart rhythms or as a diuretic.

    The deer stay away from pokeweed, a foreigner from the tropics, all of the parts of which are poisonous in mature plants, but not to catbirds, robins, and thrushes, which come by in late summer and early fall to reap the purple berries. They also leave the poison ivy alone (I wish they wouldn’t), and pay no attention to the bittersweet or daffodils. You may have noticed where daffodils spring up or are planted on shoulders of local roads, they always seem to bloom without interference from the deer, even though, as on Stephen Hand’s Path, they graze the grasses and forbs growing in between them.

    I have no tomato plants, which deer seem to leave alone where they are planted widely in South Fork farm and garden plots, but I do have other members of the tobacco genus Solanum, just about all of which are toxic if ingested. The deer don’t touch the two poisonous nightshades that inveigle their way between and overtop many of my native wildflowers every year. Several insects prey on the Solanum species, while almost all mammals, except perhaps for Homo sapiens, steer clear of them.

    I don’t think my several varieties of asters and goldenrods are poisonous, but they do not score high on the lists of preferred deer foods. One native plant which the deer totally avoid, to the degree that it has totally taken over my back yard, is white snakeroot, Ageratina altissima, the foliage of which contains tremetol, which makes cow milk and steer meat poisonous once ingested. On the other hand, deer like to browse the fresh spring growth at the tips of the yew branches. Yews contain taxane, which causes a bunch of maladies when ingested, but also contain taxol, a chemical that has been used to treat certain cancers in humans. Are the yew-eating deer defending themselves from developing cancers or are their metabolic systems immune to the poison?

    Queen Anne’s lace, Daucus carota, a foreigner which is common throughout our area, is quite poisonous when eaten, I was surprised to discover. After all, it is the ancestor of the edible carrot. If you’ve driven along the Sunrise Highway between Westhampton and Southampton Village lately, you will see waves and waves of three-foot tall Queen Anne’s lace in full bloom. Deer abound on the shoulders of the Sunrise, but apparently they’ve come to realize that Queen Anne’s lace will give them a tummy ache.

    The orange milkweed, or butterfly weed, common milkweed, and dogbane in and around my yard are also eschewed by the deer. They contain the poisons that make the monarch butterfly, whose larvae feed on them, distasteful to almost all would-be predators.

    Deer don’t eat my mountain laurel, hollies, or lady ferns, all of which contain toxins. I have other native and non-native plants in my yard. But one thing has become quite clear over the 31 years I’ve resided at this address: The plants that are outright noxious and poisonous to deer passers-by are thriving. It’s all I can do to keep them at bay. In the bigger picture, one can imagine a day in the distant future when only poisonous plants and those with thorns thrive and almost all of the edible ones, except on farms and botanical gardens, will have perished. If only we could train deer to eat phragmites. Wouldn’t that be grand?