On Monday I found the first adult chigger, a k a harvest mite, climbing up the driver’s side door of my pickup truck. It was about the size of an adult deer tick and orangey. [Please see editor's note below.] Adult chiggers, themselves, are no cause for alarm, as they feed on plant material. It’s the thought of their babies that will emerge in August that distressed me, bringing to mind 26 years of annual chigger bite attacks here on the South Fork beginning in September of 1986.

    In the 1980s chiggers on the South Fork were only numerous in Montauk and on Gardiner’s Island. Since then, they have become widely distributed throughout eastern Long Island. In the late 1980s lone star ticks also made their appearance in Montauk and on Gardiner’s Island and since then have spread throughout the island, becoming the dominant tick.

    Why Montauk? Why Gardiner’s Island?

    The two are both common in the south. Some think that the United States Department of Agriculture is responsible. Now under the watchful eye of the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S.D.A. has been studying animal diseases on Plum Island since the mid-1950s. The agency has studied both the microbes that cause diseases such as “hoof and mouth” disease and the vectors of those microbes, including mosquitoes, ticks, and other arthropods. It is probably only a coincidence that the Lone Star tick and the chigger showed up at about the same time that there were problems at the laboratory with escapes of this or that organism.

    The most obvious explanation for the spread north of the Lone Star tick and chigger, as well as the deer, or black-legged, tick, is bird migration. Ticks and chiggers attach to birds just as they attach to mammals and reptiles. Mammals and reptiles don’t migrate, but most birds do, leaving the South in the late winter and early spring to go north, leaving the North in mid and late-summer to return south. Montauk happens to be one of the great stopping-off points for migratory songbirds.

    Don’t just blame the deer, as people are wont to do. Yes, deer move these parasites around locally, but not in long hauls the way birds do. And other mammals nurture and distribute ticks and chiggers locally, including the most populous animal of all, Homo sapiens. Most local mammalian species, including raccoons, foxes, opossums, squirrels, mice, rats, and feral cats have greatly increased their numbers in the last 50 years. Some of these increases are episodic. Populations of foxes, raccoons, and opossums, for example, fall off when they become badly diseased. Mice and vole populations drop when predatory birds and mammals are numerous.

    Bird populations have not increased by and large, with the exception of those such as the robin, starling, blue jay, titmouse, grackle, and house sparrow, which do not require wide open spaces in which to breed. Ground-breeding birds — the ones that are most likely to pick up ticks — such as towhees, hermit thrushes, and bobwhites have become less and less common over the years, but almost all birds have contact with the ground and the vegetation that grows close to it at some point in their life cycle. Perhaps the singularly most common grounded bird on the South Fork at this time is the wild turkey. I would bet that ticks infest turkeys at a fairly high rate.

    Local populations of chiggers and ticks, with the possible exception of the wood, or dog, tick, show no sign of decreasing in numbers. Lyme disease caused by spirochete bacteria and babesiosis caused by an amoeba-like protozoan carried by the deer tick show no signs of abatement. One type of ehrlichiosis carried by the deer tick and another type carried by the Lone Star tick should become more common as the ticks and diseases become more widely distributed. Some people on the South Fork have had all three diseases.

    Permethrin applied to clothing and shoes before entering the woods, shrubby patches, or grassy fields works well at thwarting would-be grabbing-on ticks. All local tick species would like to get to the face, particularly, to the furless ear and eye areas of mammals. Lone Star ticks are given to questing higher up on vegetation than deer ticks, as they are more specialized on deer than the deer tick, and so permethrin on the shirt as well as the pants can be helpful in discouraging them.

    The most tick-prone areas are game trails, particularly those traveled by deer. Trails maintained for hikers are also places where ticks are likely to be hanging out. Not brushing against the shrubbery and grasses that invariably edge these trails is a mandatory precautionary measure.

    Ticks that show up in the home on rugs and furniture are most often attributed to dogs and cats that go out and come in frequently. A high-powered vacuum cleaner going back and forth several times over the same territory will generally get even the smallest of ticks, the so-called nymphs that are the most likely to give you diseases.

    Don’t just blame the deer, as people are wont to do. Yes, deer move these parasites around locally, but not in long hauls the way birds do.

    August and September are the worst months of the year for ticks and chiggers. That’s when the larvae emerge from eggs deposited earlier by the females. Thus far, no diseases are attributed to chiggers and just-hatched tick larvae are clean. They can give you nasty bites but not the diseases, which they have to pick up from their mammalian hosts while feeding on them.

    It would seem that the beaches and their bathing waters are the safest place to avoid ticks and chiggers. However, there are often biting green flies and the waters may contain stinging jellyfish, flatworm cercaria that cause swimmer’s itch, even a shark or two. Perhaps, the safest place in the Hamptons with respect to all biting and stinging organisms is the wooden deck, but only during breezy, sunny days, not at night, especially not humid, still nights, when mosquitoes and no-see-ums are likely to fill the air and home in on the carbon dioxide, “the bad air,” one is continually exhaling.

    I guess God created parasites so that Homo sapiens wouldn’t get too smug. Not a bad idea.

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Editor's note: The presence of chiggers on Long Island has been consistently disputed by entomologists; no evidence for a population here has been found. 

   They say mako sharks come and go according to the number of bluefish, their favorite dish, in the area. On Friday, the first day of the Star Island Yacht Club’s two-day shark tournament, 25 makos were caught.

    True to form there seems to be a bumper crop of bluefish of all sizes, always a plus for vacationing neophyte anglers. Last weekend, a visitor from Queens booked a room at Lenhart’s Cottages in Montauk. Lenhart’s on Old Montauk Highway is a stone’s throw from the Atlantic Ocean.

    “Both Saturday and Sunday mornings were productive, with some feisty bluefish and a baby striper,” he wrote in an e-mail to Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett. Bennett had given him a few tips when he stopped at the shop on his way to Montauk.

    “Sunday was a little rough, with strong current but the bluefish were larger, two to three-pounders. And, the two-ounce Hopkins worked like a charm on the second cast, scoring a three-pounder with a bad attitude. I’m a bit of a newbie on the surf but had a great time in Montauk.” He caught a few bluefish in the surf and was over the moon.

    Meanwhile, across the Montauk peninsula at the Star Island Yacht Club, experienced fishermen with big expensive toys were using blocks and tackle to lift sharks — in one case a 422-pound thresher — from the decks of their sportfishing boats. Except for the prize money they were no more ecstatic than the visitor from Queens with his bluefish with a bad attitude. 

    About 1,000 anglers fishing from 156 boats got tossed around by strong east winds and a strong groundswell during the tourney, but the sharks were in good supply. The heaviest, the 422-pound thresher, was caught by Tom Ripoli III fishing from Mike Marro’s Bluefin, a Connecticut boat not to be confused with Montauk’s Bluefin IV.

    The biggest mako was a hefty 344-pounder wrestled in by Mike Ragano on Capt. Pat McFarland’s Little Mac. The second and third-place makos both weighed over 300 pounds. Mike Vultek, fishing aboard Ed Pollner’s P Pod, caught the biggest blue shark, a 237-pounder.

    The tournament collected 750 pounds of shark meat that was donated to the Long Island Council of Churches.

    Speaking of sharks (and this might seem to be one of the more oblique segues, but this is the “On the Water” column after all), Pat Mundus, daughter of Frank Mundus, Montauk’s late Monster Man, lives in Greenport these days, but is offering a movable feast of sorts.

    Mundus is retired from a career in the Merchant Marine, and more recently served as president of the Shelter Island Historical Society. She is an experienced sailor and has just launched a sailing charter Web site, eastendcharters. com, that puts boatless sailors together with sailboats for parties, destination trips, photo shoots, sailing lessons, et cetera.

    Back to fish. The 33 surfcasters vying for the one and only prize in the Montauk SurfMasters Spring Fling have been struggling, to say the least. The tourney, which targets striped bass, started on May 1. As of Monday no fish had been weighed in, not because bass had not been caught, but because competitors judged them to be too small to bother with.

    However, with fewer than 10 days left before the June 30 10 a.m. finale, and with over $1,000 in prize money on the line, macho casters, with notches on their rods representing 30, 40, and 50-pound fish, are swallowing their pride and sneaking to the scales with runts.

    On Monday, John Ward did just that, weighing in a striped bass that strained the scales at 71/4 pounds, and measured 281/4 inches long. The minimum legal size for bass is 28 inches. “We measured it four times. It was 281/4 inches, the skinniest bass I’ve ever seen,” Ward sheepishly confessed to Fred Kalkstein, a tournament organizer and fellow competitor. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

    The identity of last week’s mystery fish was correctly revealed as a black crappie (pronounced croppy) by Arden Gardell and by Jim Brzezinski. Both called within minutes of each other. Virginia Gerardi guessed white crappie. Both are freshwater fish. The one in the photo was found on the banks of Fort Pond in Montauk.

   I went out on Saturday evening to listen for whippoorwills. It was a quiet night and near 60 degrees. The conditions should have been ideal for calling wills, but between dusk and 10:15 I covered 23 miles of back roads in Noyac, Watermill, and Bridgehampton, stopping at least 20 times with lights and motor off and did not record a single whippoorwill.

    The night sounds that I did hear, however, were compensatory. There were the long, fire siren buzzes of Fowler’s toads, the soft tremolos of gray tree frogs, and several different birdcalls and songs until it got dark.

     There were lots of passing vehicle noises, airplane and helicopter whines, the calls of kids playing from afar, and barking dogs. I could also hear the SoFo party music on the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike in full swing from at least two miles away. It was ironic, perhaps, that the sound emanating from the South Fork Natural History Museum, which is about preserving nature in the wild, was drowning out nature in the wild.

    In one field off of Deerfield Road, I saw an adult fox with tail straight out in back hightailing it to the north. There was a small herd of about 10 deer wondering what the guy just sitting there and peering out from the Toyota pickup was up to. Deer have very good hearing but I bet they hadn’t heard any whippoorwills either, maybe not at all this spring, and maybe not for the last several springs.

    Twenty years ago, these roads in the moraine such as Deerfield, Roses Grove, Noyac Path, Loper’s Path, Millstone, and Middle Highway had very few houses. Now, it seems, there is a house everywhere, a good 50 percent of them with outdoor lighting that made them stand out like carnival rides. Middle Highway wasn’t paved until recently; it was merely a dirt track with unsullied woods on either side. I felt almost as if I had awakened from a long sleep like Rip Van Winkle and the moraine was no longer empty and had become gentrified while I nodded off.

    I surmised that a nocturnal bird such as the whippoorwill would not feel safe or happy in a woodland now filled with lights and noises from parties, planes, and automobiles. I was reminded of a law that Nancy Goell coined when she headed up America’s Group for the South Fork. If there is a road named after an animal such as Canvasback Lane or Bobwhite Path, you can bet that there won’t be a canvasback or bobwhite for miles around. There is a Whippoorwill Road on the South Fork and I haven’t heard a whippoorwill calling on either side of it for the past 15 years.

    The night wasn’t a bust, however. I didn’t think that I would hear a whippoorwill. Even though on the same meandering route 20 years ago you could have heard at least 20 of them, I didn’t have my hopes up. On the other hand, I was gratified to see so many fireflies, or lightning bugs, the first of the year, I thought, and a little premature. Owing to the record warm spring they emerged early and were now firing up early.

     Generally it takes a few days of near 90-degree weather to get them going. But on Saturday night wherever I stopped to listen, fireflies were popping off. That’s the way the males find the females in the dark of night. In some neighborhoods there is a predatory lightning bug that sounds out the same coded bursts of light, and when the male comes down for a look-see, grabs him and gobbles him up.

    This evening should be hot and still, the perfect situation for a major firefly eruption across the entire East End. Still, this senior citizen wonders, what with all of the other amusements offered at night at this time of year and with so many young people busy texting or playing games on their smartphones, will the majority of fireflies slip by unnoticed?

    In the old days when we were kids on the block, chasing fireflies was as entertaining as going to a movie. These are the new days. I wonder.

    If you are fishing in Gardiner’s Bay and spot what looks like a brown cloud just beneath the surface with a few flashes of reflected light near the surface, chances are it’s a school of bunker.

    This is worth mentioning because such displays can easily be mistaken at a distance for a school of feeding bluefish or even fluke venturing to the surface. A few fruitless casts into the cloud are enough to give even the most hopeful angler the message. Best to leave bunker to industry for their oil, or for use as highly efficient striped bass bait. Of course, you could leave them be.

    The presence of a bunker cloud should make the heart of a light-spin-tackler soar like an eagle. The oily fish are high on the list of favorite foods for striped bass and bluefish. Casting a tin over a bunker school, allowing it to descend toward the bottom on a slow retrieve, will often result in a tug of war with a big blue or bass.

    Scott Leonard, who runs the tackle shop at the Star Island Yacht Club in Montauk, used a live bunker on Monday to land a striped bass that made the Yacht Club scales groan at 60.2 pounds. He was fishing from the Top Gun.

    And, bunker were what happened when Ken Rafferty, a light-tackle guide who fishes out of Three Mile Harbor, took Arik Roshanzamir onto the bay on Sunday morning. Roshanzamir pre­fers big bluefish to bass for their fight. Rafferty said at first he had trouble finding big bluefish in the areas he knows they haunt. Then he came upon two large schools of bunker feeding on the surface.

    “Needless to say, Arik and his friend Jason had their hands full landing 12-to-15-pound bluefish,” Rafferty reported.

    There can be little doubt about the vast number of prey species in the area. We have heard of porgies the size of hubcaps between the mouth of Montauk Harbor and Fishers Island.

    On Friday, a large pod of dolphins cruised by Ditch Plain Beach on the ocean side of Montauk when Dave Schleifer was out on his fishing yak in search of fluke, bass, or blue. Upon seeing the dolphins, Schleifer paddled back to shore. Fish have a tendency to vamoose quickly when the mammals come to town.

    The Montauk SurfMasters spring fling tournament will end with a whimper on Saturday at 10 a.m. unless someone finds a bass bigger than 28.8 pounds. Mike Coppola caught one that size and sits in first place. Rich Reilly has a 26-pounder on the board, and, believe it or not, Mary Ellen Kane’s 12.8-pound bass remained in third place as of Tuesday.

    The tournament’s finale lunch will be held at Star Island Yacht Club beginning at noon on Saturday.

    Harry Ellis of Montauk ventured offshore in search of bluefin tuna on June 19 and again on the 22nd. He caught one that weighed in at 64 pounds on the 19th. The water temperature that day was 62 degrees.

    When he returned to the same area, trolling within sight of land approximately 12 miles south of Montauk three days later, the surface temp had jumped six degrees. A satellite image of surface temperatures showed — in a spectrum from blue to bright orange — that a Gulf Stream eddy had moved in. Migrating bluefin like to feed on fatty cold-water species like mackerel and herring found in the cooler thermocline below and on the edge of the Gulf Stream eddies.

    On Sunday Ellis ventured with Arlen Allen to a spot west of Block Island where a 42-pound bluefin was trolled up.

    Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, could barely fit his head into his hat after being profiled in The New York Times Metro section on Sunday. As the story pointed out, Bennett has tossed bottles containing messages (or his business card) into the sea since childhood, with returns from as far away as Bermuda and England.

    The Englishwoman who found his bottle a few years ago wrote to him and accused him of polluting the shoreline. To Bennett the woman’s attitude proved the Revolution had been a good idea after all. He said his 17th-century forebears, among the founders of East Hampton’s English settlement, saw it coming.

    Bennett said large fluke were being caught off Napeague Harbor with regularity.

   The e-news just reported that sea level is rising on America’s East Coast faster than on the West Coast. What this translates into is the retreat of beaches and bluffs, the flooding of tidal wetlands, and the salting of drinking water wells situated close to the sea. On the other hand, while there will be losses and changes, there will also be more of the same.

    Each shoreline on the South Fork of Long Island is different. Some are backed by coastal bluffs such as those in Montauk, some are fronted by dunes like those in Amagansett, some are edged with salt marshes, some are stony, some are sandy, and some, such as the points and strands, are flat, low, and barren.

    Middle Atlantic Coast beaches are different from Gulf of Mexico beaches. They have two flood tides and two ebb tides in a 24-hour day as opposed to one high and one low in the same time period. The tides washing in and out with accompanying waves are responsible in large part for a given beach’s profile and character.

    The ocean beaches of the south shore are mostly sandy. On Long Island, one has to travel all the way to Montauk to find stony ocean beaches. Traveling east from Napeague they become progressively stonier and the bluffs behind them progressively steeper.

    Why is that? Well, the ice sheet that created the South Fork about 15,000 years ago reached no farther south than the morainal highlands that run east-west in a line dividing the northern half of Southampton and East Hampton Towns from their southern halves. Montauk is an exception, however, as the glacier dropped and pushed its load of rocks and other debris far out into the ocean.

    Thus Montauk’s south shore and subtidal waters are mostly lined with rocks known as glacial erratics. Striped bass fishermen stand on the tops of the larger ones in the water while they fish. Boulders brought 15 millenniiums earlier from New England and Canada continually wash out of the bluffs, roll onto the beach, and in less than 100 years are partly underwater or completely so as rising sea level claims more and more of the retreating shore. The really big ones move hardly an inch or more over time while the sea overruns them. The biggest ones are shown on hydrological charts created by the Department of the Interior and they serve as important navigation points for boaters.

    The north shore beaches lining the Peconic Estuary, a series of bays beginning on the west where the Peconic River runs into the estuary and endng on the east with Block Island Sound are quite different from the ocean beaches. They are much stonier and have a lot more shells, different ones that you find on ocean beaches. The tides and storms drive the larger materials back and forth in a never-ending process called “sorting” by geologists. The sediments are sorted according to size and weight. Sand is lighter than gravel and gravel is lighter than stones and stones are lighter than rocks and so on. There are glacial erractics, as well, here and there along north shore shorelines. Drive over the Route 114 bridge from the Village of Sag Harbor into the Village of North Haven and look to the northeast at ebb tide. Sag Harbor Bay’s northwest side is littered with glacial erratics. They haven’t moved an inch in ages.

    Continue on to Long Beach Road around the corner of Route 114 and you will find perhaps the best hydraulically sorted beach on the South Fork, situated between Noyac Bay and Sag Harbor Cove. On any given day, there are at least four different zones running the length of the beach from North Haven into Noyac. At the top is fine sand and some dried seaweed left by storm and moon tides. A little farther down is a layer of empty slipper shells and jingle shells, purplish and yellow. Gravel also makes up this layer, lying beneath the shells because of its greater density. Then comes a layer of finely polished stones, mostly white quartz, followed by a layer of larger stones, or rocks, also well polished but much heavier than the stones in the more landward layer.

    You will also find another mode of transportation from sea to shore ongoing among these larger rocks. Rockweeds, Sputnik weed, and other algae attached by their holdfasts to rocks that are among the largest and most seaward. The buoyancy of the attached seaweed makes these rocks a little lighter and more mobile than those without seaweed and so they move closer to shore with each large wave. One gets the notion that the seabed is continually purging itself of rocky sediments.

    The north side of Orient Point, Fishers Island, Gull Island, and Plum Island — all formed by the glacier that created the Harbor Hill moraine that runs along the north shore of Long Island out into the ocean — also have stony beaches that show a similar horizontal zonation from seabed to upper shore to that on Long Beach.

    Some South Fork shores show a zonation of sands. White quartz sands are the most common, while garnet sands often form red wrack lines high up on the beach along with iron, or magnetite sands, which are blackish. One responds to a horseshoe magnet, the other doesn’t. Such differential sanding is common along Napeague Harbor’s shoreline, but also occurs on all the shores and points of the Peconics, as well as on some upper ocean beaches.

    While Lion’s Head Rock and the other massive boulders will likely last until the end of earth as we know it, semidiurnal tides and storm-driven seas are eternally grinding and grinding silicate against silicate against silicate, rock against stone against gravel against sand grains along our marine shores in a different kind of “food chain,” one that creates smaller and smaller particles from larger ones.

    What is the end point? That’s what I would most like to know. After the wind takes over, do the finer and finer sands eventually become atmospheric dust, which ultimately reduces to single and separate molecules, maybe even individual atoms? Think about it.

    One need not fret over it, however. The earth is not shrinking; it is growing larger. It loses far less material to space than it receives from it in the form of asteroids, meteors, and meteorites. The earth is slowly becoming obese.

    Last week, charter captains and private boaters sailing out of Montauk were finding striped bass, bass, bass. Nice plump ones. This week, the bass flurry slowed, but the slack was taken up by some doormat-size fluke and vast schools of bluefish. Then, there’s the news from California about radioactive bluefin tuna. Read on.

    The Lazy Bones party boat has been hot with left-handed flounder with fish up to nine pounds. If you stand them on edge, summer flounder, or fluke, have both eyes on the left side; the upward-gazing eyes of winter flounder are on the right side.

    During last Wednesday’s morning and afternoon trips, Lazy Bones anglers caught 8 to 10 keeper fluke measuring at least 20.5 inches long. Kathy Vegessi, shoreside support for the Bones, took a busman’s holiday on Sunday and was rewarded with an 8.5-pounder. “It was a long time coming,” she said of both hooking into a sizable doormat, and of getting the big fish off the bottom.

    “Becky [Vegessi, her daughter and one of the Bones’s mates] kept screaming at me, ‘You’ve got to keep reeling. Did you forget how?’ ” She did not. Her secret? “Two strips of squid, two spearing, and a white teaser.”

    Scott Leonard of the Star Island Yacht Club reported no weigh-ins yet in the Montauk SurfMasters spring shootout tournament, although one lucky (or masterful) caster not in the contest found a 33-pound striper under the Montauk Lighthouse using a needlefish lure.

    Star Island’s private boaters did well on stripers over the weekend. A slower pace was made up for in size. Two fish hit the Star Island scales at 30 and 36 pounds. The marina’s first shark tournament of the year, its 26th annual, will take place on June 15 and 16, with the captains meeting on the 14th.

    May and June is the time of year when bluefin tuna make their appearance off Montauk on their annual migration from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Maine and Canada’s Atlantic provinces.

    No news yet of any local sightings, but a very troubling report about bluefin in the Pacific is found in a study undertaken by Stony Brook University in cooperation with Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. The study has found that migrating Pacific bluefin are carrying radioactivity to the waters off California after being exposed in the ocean to leaks from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plants. The plants were damaged during the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

    The contamination does not pose a health threat. You will not glow if you eat sushi. Levels are relatively low, the study found. But, the findings represent the first documented case of radioactivity being transported in the sea through biological migration. The study, “Pacific Bluefin Tuna Transport Fukushima-Derived Radionuclides From Japan to California” has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.

    The radioactive tuna may not grow to Godzilla size, but they could have a marked effect on the price of prized sushi flesh. Radioactive conservation. Time will tell.

    It’s coming, it’s coming. This is the year of the Big One. Batten down the hatches and prepare to go without electricity for a week or so, or buy a generator ahead of time and have an electrician who knows what he or she is doing install it. Rising sea level and increased ferocity of storms is no longer a topic for idle discussion.

    Let’s face it. The surface of the globe is heating up. Yes, we can speed up the conversion to green energy, but we can’t do it that fast. Whether it’s gasoline-guzzling supervehicles, coal and oil-burning factories and electrical power generation stations, volcanic venting, forest fires, or flatulent livestock, herd animals, and humans, the writing is on the wall. We are in for some rough weather, some rough times.

    We on coastal Long Island are living on borrowed time. Take a place like Accabonac Harbor in Springs. It will take less than a foot of sea level rise to flood much of its peripheral roads — Springs-Fireplace Road, Old Stone Highway, and Louse Point Road. Then there’s Gerard Drive. Forget it, it will be gone in a flash.

    Fort Pond in Montauk overwashed its banks during the March 2012 record rainstorms. Put a record rainfall together with a very high flood-driven tide in Fort Pond Bay, and the two bodies of water will become one. Add higher winds, bigger ocean waves, and three water bodies will become one.

    Lake Montauk is sure to flood to the south and, as Stuart Vorpahl once said, all of Ditch Plain’s ditches will run south instead of north, the way they do now. Montauk is liable to be cut off to motor vehicle traffic in two places — at the south ends of Fort Pond and Lake Montauk. The Long Island Rail Road had to stop running in March of 2010 because part of the tracks was under water. Don’t count on the railroad for help during an evacuation.

    Then there is Napeague, juxtaposed as it is between Montauk on the east and the Amagansett mainland on the west with one two-lane thoroughfare connecting the two ends. In very big storms such as the 1938 Hurricane it becomes a sitting duck. You will need an amphibious vehicle to cross it. Montauk Highway is only five or six feet above sea level at its belly, and its belly is very wide.

    In the 1938 storm, the ocean came all the way up Ocean Avenue and into Main Street in the Village of East Hampton. A late summer 2010 storm flooded the basement of Guild Hall. What a Category 2 or 3 storm might do in the coming years is anybody’s guess. There isn’t much topographical difference between Pantigo Road and Hook Pond in East Hampton. Next time, the ocean could reach the doorstep of Nick and Toni’s on North Main Street.

    Georgica Pond will also be problematic in a big storm. It is generally highest, anyway, during late summer before the annual fall let-out. It could flood north over Montauk Highway all the way to the railroad tracks and pretty much wipe out the Wainscott sand pit on its way north. We dodged a bullet with Irene last August. By the time it hit us it was a mere tropical storm, yet it flooded streets along the ocean here and there and raised the levels of Hook Pond and Georgica Pond simultaneously.

    Perhaps the greatest damages to be experienced as sea level rises into the middle of this century — possibly as much as two feet, some scientists predict — is that the freshwater aquifer on top of it under the mainland will rise concomitantly, as freshwater is less dense than seawater. That means that freshwater ponds and wetlands will increase in surface area, akin to the contemporary situation in Ronkonkoma in the middle of Long Island, where the Island’s largest lake already chronically overflows onto roads and waterfront properties when the water table rises after years of above-normal rainfalls.

    And look at downtown Sag Harbor, which was largely built on swampland and has wetlands poking their heads up here and there throughout the village. It is already flood prone. Its underlying water table rises up, periodically flooding store and residential basements and requiring days of pumping out to dewater them. Bridgehampton and Sagaponack will be connected to Sag Harbor, not just by the chain of ponds but by one very large pond combining them all. What shall we name it?

    Evacuation by motor vehicle during the Big One will also become problematic. The main two coastal evacuation routes for East Hampton and Southampton Towns are Montauk Highway and Noyac Road. Scuttlehole Road, between the two, is only an alternative for part of the way between County Road 39 and the Sunrise Highway. Noyac Road (including Long Beach Road connecting to the Village of North Haven) already has “Coastal Evacuation Route” signs posted, as does Montauk State Parkway connecting downtown Montauk with Napeague. Yes, the parkway is high and dry for most of its length, and it’s a safe bet, until you descend onto the Napeague isthmus, which is likely to be dangerously flooded over and completely impassable.

    And notice that the big storms are coming earlier and earlier. We have already had two named tropical storms in May. Unheard of! Irene hit last August, during the height of the tourist season. Don’t be surprised if we get hit hard in July this year.

    The safest places in Montauk during the Big One will be the high rise at the foot of Fort Pond, Montauk Manor on the hill east of Fort Pond, and, ironically, the Lighthouse, now a National Monument and just recently made seaworthy again by the combined efforts of the Montauk Historical Society, Greg Donahue, and Patrick Bistrian Jr.

    If I’m in Montauk when the Big One hits, I’ll opt for the Lighthouse as I did during the Perfect Storm of October of 1991. It’s the safest bet in town and will surely outlive us all.

   The Montauk Chamber of Commerce will hold the annual Montauk Old-Timers round-table discussion and dinner at the Inlet Seafood Restaurant on East Lake Drive on Tuesday starting at  4 p.m.

   This year, Perry B. “Chip” Duryea III and Stuart Vorpahl will serve as historians to help put in perspective the observations of Jimmy Lester, Milton Miller, Teddy Stevens, Dave Krusa, John Rade, Bobby Byrnes, Scott Bennett, and John Nolan. Carl Darenberg of the Montauk Marine Basin will serve as moderator.  

   In addition to describing the evolution of longline, side trawl, seine, and western trawl gear, the fishermen will discuss the history of Montauk Harbor beginning with developer Carl Fisher’s opening of Lake Montauk in 1927. The late lobsterman Bobby Huser will be honored in memoriam.     

   The public is welcome to the free round-table discussion and, at 7 p.m.,  for the price of $35, dinner and one beer or glass of wine. Raffle prizes will be presented after dinner. Tickets can be gotten from the Montauk Chamber, 668-2429, at the Montauk Marine Basin, 668-5900, or at the door. 

    Ken Rafferty is a light-tackle and fly-fishing guide who sails out of Three Mile Harbor this time of year and moves to Montauk in the fall when the false albacore make their appearance.

    In spring he likes to stalk striped bass as far west as Peconic Bay, with stops at places like Big and Little Gull Islands. Last week, he and his clients, James Kayler of East Hampton and Mike Tuscano of Amagansett, found plenty of stripers in Little Peconic Bay around Jessup’s Neck, and then bluefish galore at Cedar Point.

    If there were any doubt as to whether striped bass of the fat kind are about, any spearfisherman will answer in the affirmative. Eric Flaherty of East Hampton is one such fisherman, and while secretive as to favored spots, he allowed that a fellow diver had shot a bass over 50 pounds during the past week. Turns out the spearman was Dashiel Marder, the spot was somewhere in Montauk, and the size was 531/4 pounds.

    Chris Miller at the West Lake Marina in Montauk reported that Bill Widder and five other anglers visited the rips off Montauk Point trolling parachutes and harvested their limit of striped bass, all weighing between 20 and 25 pounds.

    None of this can make competitors in the Montauk SurfMasters spring tournament feel good. A month in, and as of Monday there were no bass on the board.

    In the tuna department, Miller said Brian Fromm left at 4:30 a.m. to steam south in search of tuna on Saturday. He was hoping to beat the wind and weather back to Montauk that afternoon. He did not succeed in beating the weather, but he did succeed in catching a 40-pound bluefin tuna.

    Carl Safina of Amagansett has written a blog that addresses the finding by scientists at the State University at Stony Brook that bluefin caught off the California coast are showing elevated levels of radiation. According to the study, the contamination was the result of the pelagic migrators swimming in the vicinity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant damaged during last year’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

    Safina’s essay, “Knocking on Heaven’s Shore,” can be found on The Huffington Post’s blog page. Safina recently won the 2012 Orion Book Award for “The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World.”

    Speaking of the view from Lazy Point, much of which includes Gardiner’s Bay, the porgy action there is being described as steady.

    Too bad the season for winter flounder ended last Thursday. The West Lake Marina reported that really nice flounder were caught on the 30th, fat ones up to three pounds in the lake. This is a good sign, of course — blackbacks, as winter flounder are called, have been in very short supply in recent years.

    Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett predicted that Venus’s transit across the sun on Tuesday would have a marked, positive effect on the fishing.

    As proof, he offered the fact that people fishing from the town pier in Fort Pond Bay, near where the old Hanger Docks were once located, were catching “bottlefish” (blowfish) one after the other.

    He said the porgies were so thick in the bay that anglers were food fishing for them from the beach at Accabonac using clam and squid baits. “The hard-core guys use sandworms, but they are $7.50 a dozen.” He added that the bluefish and striper action in and around Three Mile Harbor had been “pretty active.”

    Then there was his story of Richard Onisko of East Hampton, a man who Bennett said had not wet a line in 30 years, coming into his shop for a new rod to go nighttime fishing for bass and blues. Bennett sold him a diamond jig with a tube tail, and a leader. “He’s addicted, gave up golf.”

    It is the season of procreation.

   Arnold Leo called last week, concerned about a spotted white-tailed deer fawn, if not a newborn, then very close to it, that was sitting in the center of a yard near Georgica Pond on a property he had been caretaking. He was able to go up to it and touch it, and the fawn didn’t move a hair. He was worried it might have been abandoned, but as it turned out, the fawn had been “parked” by Mrs. Deer, probably while she was off foraging. She came back for it later on.

    Parking is a common occurrence in deer rearing. The fawn is programmed to sit very quietly, without moving a muscle, during which time it is odorless and has no scent to be picked up by a passing predator. Such protection apparently works very well, especially so in an area where there are no large predatory cats or canines.

    The migrating warblers and other songbirds that breed farther north have mostly passed through by now. Those that stay and nest are well into the period of egg incubation and feeding young. You can tell when the young are ready to fledge. The males no longer sing their territorial songs, but utter warning notes: “Keep your heads down, a crow is flying over.”

    As the season grows progressively more songless, you know that the serious business of raising and fledging young is well under way. The weather hasn’t been all that propitious and some nests have already failed. Fortunately, most birds that nest locally can nest again after a failing the first time around. Not so for the larger birds like the raptors, however.

    Joann Dittmer got back late from Florida only to find that the ospreys that have nested next to her house at Lions Beach on the west side of Hog Creek for nearly a score of years were only slightly in attendance. No incubation, no feeding young, just an occasional visit by one of the ospreys depositing a stick or two in the nest.

    The female osprey that arrived early and laid eggs early on Sag Harbor Cove east of Bay Point was still sitting low in the nest, head only visible from Long Beach Road, on Sunday. Maybe the eggs are not going to hatch.

    Two Wednesdays ago, my wife and I walked down our driveway preparing to walk on Long Beach in Noyac when we spotted a good sized menhaden, or bunker, appearing quite fresh but headless on the asphalt. Had an osprey been disturbed by crows while eating it atop one of our large oaks, or had it dropped it after eating only the head? Two days earlier, an osprey circled around and around overhead with a fish in its talons; it could have been the same osprey, but with a different fish.

    The cool dank weather is affecting the foliage of many trees. The pitch pines on both sides of Montauk Highway on Neapeague are looking frazzled. The sycamores along Further Lane in Amagansett are looking wan. Flowering dogwood leaves here and there are showing blight and signs of anthracnose damage. Large clumps of fungus-y oak leaves, almost black in color, have been dropping around the house for a week now. Something unhealthy is going on overhead.

    We need a few sunny cloudless days to straighten things out and return everything to proper order.