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.

   “Not knowing how to swim here, is like not knowing how to drive at the Indy 500,” wrote Lynn Sherr in her newest book, “Swim: Why We Love the Water.”

   The former WABC television correspondent was speaking of the East Hampton area, which she calls home for most of the summer. Also given praise in the book was the town’s junior lifeguard program, which made headlines this week when one of its trainees saved a drowning swimmer. “I am so impressed with them,” she said on Friday.

Ms. Sherr used the lifeguarded, marked waters of Albert’s Landing Beach in Amagansett to train for the iconic Hellespont open water swim from Europe to Asia that she entered last August, in Turkey. She participated in the geographically and culturally significant event, “because I wanted a challenging swim,” she said. Water flows in both directions along the three-mile strait from the Sea of Marmara to the Aegean Sea.

   She was also drawn to the history of the Black Sea region, including such events as Lord Byron’s 1810 swim across the strait inspired by the Greek myth of Leander. The legend had the swimmer cross the stretch to reach his lover, Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite, who lived on the European side.

    The race, she said, was “one of the most fun things I have ever done.” The book gives a glimpse into the race through her thoughts while swimming it. Interesting tidbits from ancient times and historic quotes demonstrate a timeless passion for swimming. She covers President John F. Kennedy’s noontime naked swims in the White House pool, built by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for treatment of his polio. The fun, light read also muses on the Zen of swimming and its health and longevity benefits.

    Ms. Sherr’s other books cover topics far from her work life, where she covers politics. They are written about “things that make me happy,” she said. An ongoing project is her study and scripting of the life of Susan B. Anthony, about whom she has written a memoir and is working on a one-woman play. While on safari in Africa, she said, “I fell in love with giraffes.” That resulted in “Tall Blondes: A Book About Giraffes.”

    Ms. Sherr will talk at BookHampton on Saturday at 5 p.m., touching on her passion for swimming, her experience of the Hellespont, and a range of other subjects from Egyptian hieroglyphics to Michael Phelps.

    The author encouraged other passionate swimmers to follow golden rules such as “Nobody should swim alone ever, ever, ever.” In rough water, she said, “you ought to have a very strong swimmer with you.” Most important, she said, is advice from the film “Finding Nemo”: “Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.”

   We are in the midst of a deep drought. Yes, we had almost three inches of rain locally two Sundays ago, but a drive by Chatfield’s Hole on Two Holes of Water Road showed that it hardly made a difference. The pond level was so low, that there were two ponds, a largish one to the north, a small one to the south. The small one had a tiny island in its center covered with the northern shrub of the heath family, leatherleaf.

    We have two kinds of freshwater ponds on the South Fork, ponds fed by groundwater and those filled by precipitation. The former are called water table ponds, they represent the top of the freshwater, or upper glacial, aquifer. The latter are vernal ponds, “vernal” after the Latin word “vernalis” for the season spring. They are so named because they tend to be filled in the spring, after winter’s snow and ice melts, and subsequent March and April rains.

    Vernal ponds rarely have fish in them, while all natural groundwater ponds do. Fort Pond in Montauk is fed by runoff from precipitation and the underlying groundwater, principally by that running in from under Hither Hills and, to a lesser degree, by the freshwater aquifer around the Montauk Downs golf course. Groundwater ponds almost never dry up. Indeed, even after the current prolonged drought, Fort Pond is still close to its record high level achieved after the eight inches of rain that fell in March 2010, which raised the top of the aquifer several feet throughout the entire South Fork. Until it was permanently opened to Block Island Sound during the 1920s by Carl Fisher’s developers, Lake Montauk — at over 800 acres in surface area — was the largest groundwater pond on Long Island by far.

    A third type of pond on Long Island is the coastal pond, such as Sagaponack Pond in Southampton Town, Georgica Pond in East Hampton Town, and Oyster Pond in Montauk. They are groundwater ponds that receive periodic inundation of tidal water from adjacent seas. Consequently, they tend to be brackish and populated by species that can tolerate a bit of saltwater from time to time.

    During this ongoing drought several vernal ponds such as Daniel’s Hole pond near East Hampton Airport in Wainscott dried up completely. It was dry from November through mid-April. Only after the rains of April 22 did the pond bed receive enough water to invite the neighborhood’s spring peepers to emerge from their winter quarters. When I went by on April 24 they were singing up a storm and in full breeding frenzy. Even so, unless it ains a lot in the next few weeks all of their frenetic reproductive efforts will be to no avail.

    Vernal ponds generally occupy topographical depressions, some of which are known as kettle holes, formed by melting blocks of ice left by the glacier as it melted away and retreated to the north 12,000 years ago. Scoy Pond in East Hampton’s Grace Estate is one of them. Short’s Pond on the north side of Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton is another, while Big Fresh Pond in South­ampton’s North Sea, more a groundwater pond than a vernal one, is a third.

    Chains of separated groundwater ponds situated along a roughly north-south line are found between Sag Harbor and Sagaponack, north Bridgehampton and south Bridgehampton.

    The hamlet of Montauk has the most freshwater ponds and wetlands of any South Fork community. But only two are natural groundwater ponds, Fresh Pond, or Hidden Pond, in Hither Hills and Fort Pond. Yet the hamlet has loads of vernal ponds, largely because its “knob-and-kettle” topography offers a great number of depressions and its clayey soils are relatively impervious to water.

    If it weren’t for Montauk’s vernal ponds, there would probably be no blue-spotted salamanders on Long Island. They breed in temporary ponds such as those in Culloden and the Sanctuary. If they were left to breed in ponds with fish and snapping turtles they would never make it, as fish are voracious predators of salamander tadpoles. Montauk’s vernal ponds also support several distinct breeding populations of the eastern newt. The vernal ponds of East Hampton’s Northwest, such as those on the Grace Estate and Camp Regis, are a godsend for the spotted salamanders in the spring, and marbled salamanders, which uniquely breed in the fall. Late summer and early fall rains are not as likely as spring rains, but apparently there are enough of them to keep the marbled salamander going.

    Vernal ponds and their edges also support a great variety of freshwater wetland plants, most of which are not found on the edges of groundwater ponds. They very often have three different types of flora — aquatic plants that root in the pond bed or float on top, such as duckweed, permanent wetland plants such as red maple and tupelo trees, rushes, and sedges, and three episodic plants that only show up when the waters recede, exposing a wide, damp, muddy shelf where they can thrive.

    Such is the situation these days at Chatfield’s Hole in Northwest. Rare members of the sedge family and white lance-leaved violets are becoming dominant. After sufficient rains and the filling of the pond to its pre-drought level, these plants will be submerged and become dormant and will remain quietly in the soils underwater for several years, until the next drought comes along.

    Lastly, there is a variation of the vernal pond, which one might call the “very vernal pond,” as it’s more like a puddle than a pond. They pop up here and there throughout the South Fork and elsewhere on Long Island after an unusually heavy rainfall, in late May, June, July, or August. These very vernal ponds only last for a few weeks, but just long enough for the eastern spadefoot toads to dig out of the ground with a lot of grunting and groaning to find one in which to spawn.

    The spadefoot is one of the few amphibians in North America specifically adapted to take advantage of such opportunities. On the other hand, Australia’s outback, which is largely arid, has several different amphibians that remain underground, sometimes for several years, until one of these rain events comes along. Then all hell breaks loose. Several frogs and toads new to science have been discovered in this way. 

    The Montauk SurfMasters spring shoot-out tournament will begin at one minute after midnight tonight, or tomorrow morning, however you want to think of it. And, according to the few surfcasters who have already ventured to their favorite haunts, striped bass are schooling and ready to be caught.

    Bill Gardiner took his surf rod to a secret spot somewhere in Montauk in the dark over the weekend where he found lively action with a few nice fish in the teens.

    There has been a change in the tournament’s official weigh stations. This season, the Star Island Yacht Club and the West Lake Marina off West Lake Drive will do the weighing. For those not yet signed up, applications can be found at both weigh stations. They must be returned to committee members or to Gaviola’s Market no later than 7 this evening.

    Scott Leonard at the Star Island Yacht Club reported a big change for the better on Sunday in the fluke-fishing department. “You had to work for it, but it picked up in one day, mostly off the south side of Montauk — the Radar Tower and Frisbees. The biggest we weighed was 10 pounds.”

    Leonard also had good striped bass news. “There’s a tremendous amount of bass up to 25 pounds,” he said, adding that the stripers were responding to jigs, as were the bluefish, and weakfish mixed in. The tiderunners — weakfish are known by a variety of handles including tiderunner, squeteague, and sea trout — were also being found off Gardiner’s Island and were also attracted by diamond jigs, “anything with a white tube.”

    Weaks are truly beautiful fish. When the fish are first caught, electric rainbow colors swirl on the surface against a spotted silver gray, even lavender, background and yellow-tipped fins. They make for delicious eating.

    Fly fishermen might want to boat over and take a look. Ken Rafferty, a light-tackle and fly-fishing guide who runs out of Three Mile Harbor this time of year, said flies that match the tiderunners yellow pectoral fins do the trick.

    “We discovered 25 or 30 years ago they feed on the surface at night and when they get into the bait, they slap their tails on the surface to stun them, then spin around and eat the prey. We’d be casting and catching by the tail because they were slapping at our lures.”

    Rafferty said a few trips west from Three Mile Harbor to Nassau Point near Robins Island found bluefish in the 5-to-7-pound class “busting everywhere,” and striped bass up to 12 pounds.

    The Lazy Bones party boat reported good fluking both Saturday, when a 9-pounder was caught, and Sunday, which produced a 9.8-pound fluke. Both fish were caught during the Bone’s morning go-out. The fluke being caught are said to be fat, most likely because the mild winter lured plenty of prey species to these parts early. The Lazy Bones sails two trips per day, from 8 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 5 p.m.

    Chris Miller of West Lake Marina said on Saturday that Paul Giangreco Jr., his wife, Claire, and sons, Paul and Johnny, were fluking off the Radar Tower in Montauk aboard their Sea Horse. They caught eight keeper fluke (over 19.5 inches long) up to 8.1 pounds. The bag limit is four per person per day.

    Miller also reported that Gary (Toad) Stephens and friends took to the sea after fluke. Toad angled an 8.9-pounder, John Denice, a 7.9-pounder.

   We birders are always looking for the odd bird, not the familiar one. Yet it’s the familiar ones that provide us with the most information, the ones that quiet us down when things go awry, and at this point in civilization, they often do. On Friday, it was the sweet song of the Baltimore oriole heralding his return that set my mind at ease; on Sunday it was the wheezy nonsensical notes of the catbird, gone from my brain since August 2011, that did the same.

    What if you woke up one late spring to a nice day but there was no robin tootling, no crow barking, no blue jay braying, no nail-pulling call of the grackle. Wouldn’t you think something was missing, something was a little haywire, something might be going wrong? That happened to Rachel Carson, and a little later on to Ralph Nader. It set them both a-dither.

    Even the prolonged absence of the ill-reputed starling and house sparrow would set one’s mind to wonder. Once I asked the late Roger Tory Peterson what we could do about the house sparrows that were interfering with the bluebird nesting trail that I and others were setting up on the South Fork. He just looked at me and questioned back, “It’s a bird, isn’t it?” In other words, it belonged just as much as the other birds, the so-called native ones, which I was preoccupying myself with.

    The Carolina wren is one of those birds that I would miss dearly if I didn’t hear its song at least once a week. There were no Carolina wrens around while I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s on the North Fork. But since I have been living in Noyac, beginning in 1979, I have not failed to hear one singing at least once a week, even in the dead of winter. This little southern fellow is not a migrator. It either makes it through the winter, no matter how mean and nasty it can be, or gives up the ghost. Enough have survived cold, sleet, snow, and ice over the last four decades that it is now one of our most common birds.

    How much we missed the osprey when its Long Island population waned to a precious few in the 1960s. When the house finches suffered through a wave of conjunctivitis in the l990s, we were put out. Perhaps no other bird has such a following as the Eurasian mute swans that live on Georgica, Hook, Agawam, and Town Ponds. When one mate is lost it’s as if a president has been assassinated.

    Yes, many of us have been complaining that the wild turkeys have overstayed their welcome, but if they suddenly went away, wouldn’t we miss them sorely? We carped at the red foxes when they were high in numbers, but cringed when they caught the mange and almost died off completely. Many of us are happy to see them back, with their glistening coats and nimble movements, head out in front, tail out in back. We curse the deer; they’re driving us mad. But, truthfully, aren’t they beautiful to behold?

    In this maddening millennium, many of our favorites are no longer with us. The whippoorwill, hermit thrush, bobwhite, and clapper rail are no rarer than hen’s teeth.  When is the last time you saw a weasel or a striped skunk?  Little brown bats are plagued with white noses caused by a fungus from abroad.

    Maybe we can agree on a few natural and unnatural entities that we wouldn’t mind seeing bite the dust for good. I’m talking about ticks, chiggers, gypsy moths, mosquitoes, no-see-ums, and low-flying jets and helicopters.  Hmmm, and maybe some of the politicians.

    The bartering has begun. A plumber installing sinks and toilets at a Montauk motel in the throes of gentrification showed up late, sunburned, and begging his employer’s indulgence. 

    “I had to go fishing,” he said, fully expecting he’d be forgiven, especially because his cooler was filled with Ziploc bags bulging with striped bass and bluefish fillets, coins of the realm this time of year.  It’s as though Nature’s treasury has opened its vault to issue Ziplocked stimulus packages throughout town — blowfish, bluefish, fluke, striped bass — bags of freshly-caught currency for gifts or trade. The employer’s frown exacted promises of future tuna from the plumber. The frown vanished. It was replaced with a smile, and a friendly “Get to work.”

    This season, one is struck by the size and plumpness of both striped bass and bluefish. Normally, early-arriving bluefish, called “runners,” show up long and lean. But, because spring arrived early with her migrating prey species including sand eels, both bass and bluefish were feasting long before most anglers wet a line.

    Not much action at the start of the Montauk SurfMasters tournament for striped bass that got under way on Friday. No fish had been weighed in at the Star Island Yacht Club weigh station as zof Monday.

    However, the fish are around and close enough to shore to catch. Atilla Ozturk made a pre-tournament foray last Wednesday and found a few “rats” and one sizable striped bass while casting from the East Deck jetty at Ditch Plain in Montauk. He was using an ounce-and-a-half bucktail. David Rattray tossed a jointed yellow bomber into Gardiner’s Bay from the north side of Napeague and hooked a 33.5-inch bass that, upon cutting, revealed it had been dining upon small sand eels and inch-long silversides.

    The West Lake Marina in Montauk reported excellent fishing over the weekend, Saturday more productive than Sunday only because Mother’s Day kept anglers at bay — the appreciative, responsible anglers at least.

    Chris Miller reported that several nice fluke were delivered to the West Lake scales. The Double D charter boat brought in a 7.7-pounder last week. The Top Hook charter boat had a 25-pound striped bass on Saturday dragged up on a parachute. It had three undersize fluke in its belly, which led Miller to suggest that conservation authorities should begin patrolling the bottom.

    Jim Collishaw and his son Kenny and Al Gregg limited out on fluke aboard the Mako Wish on Saturday, 12 keepers in all, the biggest weighing 7.75 pounds. The Mako Wish was fishing off the radar tower in Montauk, a spot that has proved especially productive recently.

    “Fat and feeding” was how Miller described the stripers and bluefish being caught on diamond jigs in the area off Montauk Point known as the Elbow.

    Nat Miller, an East Hampton Town trustee and commercial trap fisherman, said there was a charge of bunker in Gardiner’s Bay last week. The oily fish were drawing the attention of seals that were chomping on them and eating their roe and sparing bluefish and weakfish, his money fish. 

    Richard Peltonen of Montauk correctly identified last week’s mystery fish as a northern stargazer. He said the gazers can be caught on rod and reel, but anglers should know that they give off an electric shock. A southern variety has surprised the feet of bathers in shallow water.

    Ralph Carpentier’s guess, a deep-sea angler fish, fell short, but he is a fine painter nonetheless.

    The fifth annual Ducks Unlimited striped bass tournament will begin on June 9 from the Star Island Yacht Club. The tourney’s $250-per-boat entry fee and a live auction will benefit Ducks Unlimited’s wetlands restoration programs, and there will be cash prizes.

    A captains meeting will be held on Friday, June 8. Eligible fishing areas will include all waters east of a line from Shinnecock Inlet northward to Mattituck Inlet. The awards buffet and auction will be held at the yacht club starting at 5 p.m.

   Orioles, towhees, great-crested flycatchers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, catbirds, and a ton of warblers have all come back to roost. The most spectacular avian visitor in a while was the white-faced ibis that was seen and photographed at Scoy Pond in the Grace Estate nature preserve over the weekend by and Pat Lindsey and Angus Wilson.

    The unseasonal coolness of May has slowed the advance of spring. We are just about back to normal and the drought shows signs of giving way to a precipitous late spring. Mosquitoes are beginning to hatch out and ticks are running amok. On Sunday afternoon I took out my tick flag, nothing more than an old white towel, suspended from the end of a snow shovel and went about ticking. The grassy spot on the southwest side of Route 114 just north of Stephen Hand’s Path was the perfect spot to put it to the test.

    Holding the makeshift tick sampler in front of me, I walked through the two-foot-high lush grass and at the end of two minutes I had 29 ticks. You might be surprised to hear how they sorted out: 28 Lone Star ticks, 1 female deer tick, and 0 dog ticks. A little more than half of the Lone Star ticks were nymphs, pinhead-size. There was one adult male and the rest were adult females, the ones with the white spot, the “Lone Star,” on the back. The results were not unexpected as the Lone Star tick, Amblyoma americana, has become the dominant tick in this millennium, greatly outnumbering the other two.

    Just think, it wasn’t even here in the 1980s, showed up in Montauk and on Gardiner’s Island and Fire Island in the early 1990s, and has mushroomed into the super tick. The nymphs and adult females are the chief carriers of the bacteria that cause ehrlichiosis. Expect the incidence of this disease, which can be very serious, even fatal, to grow by leaps and bounds, perhaps even rivaling the incidence of Lyme disease by 2020.

    Aside from the ticks and the beginning of the mosquito season, the South Fork’s outback is resplendent. In terms of foliage and flowers, but, oh yes, pollen, the spring’s colors have been magnificent. While the shads, dogwoods, and beach plums were all in bloom by the end of April and the oaks of the black and red oak group were atypically in full leaf by the end of the first week in May, the white oaks, sassafras, hickories, and tupelos have behaved more normally. They are as late to leaf out as in other springs. What we see when we drive along the back roads is a freshly verdant green haze, which more than compensates for the ticks and the other things that make up spring’s downside.

    A Friday afternoon walk on Barcelona, né Russell’s Neck, proved just how uplifting spring in the Hamptons can be. Admiral butterflies were courting, wildflowers were bursting forth, birds were singing, ospreys were anticipating the hatching of eggs, yellowlegs and egrets of two species were about in the marshes, fish crows and common crows cawed overhead, and, save for a few golfers on the golf course, there were no humans.

    We stopped along the west trustee trail here and there to view the many different flowers: yellow cinquefoils, purple violets, white strawberries, blue-eyed grasses, lavender beach peas, and many more. The most spectacular of them all and the ones we most wanted to see were the rare wild pinks, which manage to burst forth at precisely the same time each spring on Barcelona. They are a rarity on Long Island and on the New York State Heritage List. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Deer for sparing them.

    The bluffs at the north end of Barcelona continue to erode away into Northwest Harbor, but as they do, they grow taller. How is that? It turns out it’s not the bluff crest that grows higher, its the swelling dunes on top of them. Not all of the erosive sediments wash out to sea; a good lot of them are blown up the exposed bluff faces by winter’s northwest winds, then settle on top. Here they sit, no more than 100 feet apart — three dunes from west to east, each one taller than the last in line, the easternmost one reaching 50 feet high.

    Walking dunes, bluff-crest dunes, perched dunes. Call them what you will, but they are a geologic oddity that is extremely rare along both coasts where high bluffs hold sway. Unfortunately, just as we were standing atop the highest dune and praising its majesty while listening to the uplifting song of the prairie warbler, two low-flying helicopters flew over on their way to East Hampton Airport, almost destroying what had been a glorious late afternoon.

    Ancient geology, new geology, seas, shores, beaches, upland forest, tidal wetlands, freshwater wetlands, Indian relics, age-old trails, rare wild flowers, and spectacular views, Barcelona has it all. It was only 25 years ago when a certain Mr. Ben Heller tried to develop Russell’s Neck and build on the order of 75 houses on it, all with spectacular water views. Thank God and then-New York State Governor Mario Cuomo for the state’s purchase of it. Mr. Heller made off with a bundle, but in the final analysis, the acquisition was certainly well worth the cost. I feel certain that the Russells resting peacefully in their little cemetery not more than a stone’s throw away from the clubhouse would much prefer the Barcelona as it stands today to having it become just another dull and dreary replica of western Suffolk and Nassau Counties. And they probably would not be pleased as the whirlybirds roared over, shattering their quiet slumber.

    Alfonso Marino stopped casting into the Georgica Pond gut as the water flowed into the sea. He stopped casting flies and watched in awe as Mother Nature did her spring thing shortly after the pond was opened to the sea on April 2 by order of the East Hampton Town Trustees.

    Trustees open it each spring and fall — when storm-driven ocean waves do not — in order to accommodate the fish that leave as fry and return to spawn as they have for millenniums.

    “I had never seen the alewives come up until this year. I stopped fishing to watch them. How interesting it was to see how some were smarter than others, swimming around on the sides while others fought the current. The gulls peck at them to wound them.”

    “They’re a beautiful iridescent fish. Fascinating to see how they reacted. The birds were on them. That’s how I knew they were there. They were coming in pods, singles, or four or five together.” After his fit of amazement, Marino caught and released several stripers. He fishes with barbless hooks.

    He’s a fly fisherman, for the most part, and ties flies during the winter months in preparation for “every day,” when the striped bass begin their run.

    “I fly-fish exclusively. I do have a spinning rod for emergencies, like when the wind blows 40 miles per hour,” he said. His usual schedule takes him to the Georgica gut and other oceanside spots for the early run, and Montauk every day during the fall. “If my friends are there with spinning rods, they let me in,” he said alluding to a blocking strategy that protects him from the often-aggressive territoriality of spin-casting surf fishermen. 

    He has 9 and 10-weight rods, bigger flies, and heavier line to deal with conditions on the ocean side, but prefers a 6-weight to catch bass up to 34 inches in the bay. “That’s a really good fish,” he said, a good size for a light rod. “If you give the fish pressure immediately, it has a shot,” a sporting chance, he said. “I don’t care about the next fish, I’m enjoying this fish. I can enjoy the little ones, and I can beat the bigger guys.”

    While a magnificent fish, striped bass are not the best fighting fish, he said. “I’d rather catch a bluefish any time.”

    Except for the month of October — “just looking at my logs,” Oct. 10 was the best — last year’s surfcasting fell short of expectations. Marino blames sand eels for staying too far offshore. “If bait is not on the beach, when the peanuts [peanut bunker] aren’t on the sand, especially in the fall, the fly-fishing is no good. The peanuts bring the blues, the bass come in right behind them.”

    The bigger flies Marino displayed at the sportsmen’s expo held at the Amagansett Firehouse on Saturday were designed for stripers of the rotator-cuff-tearing size, the ones feeding on herring and bunker flies. “I use different colors, just leave them in the water, you don’t have to ‘strip’ them [lure fish with line-retrieval finesse].”

    Nor does he strip the deceiver flies that he ties with feathers on top of them rather than on the sides in the style of fly-fishing guru Ken Abrames. “When the feather gets in the current, it undulates. You don’t have to work it. You need current.”

    Most of Marino’s catches are returned, but every once in a while he keeps a bass to cook “Italian style” with a Livornese sauce — “capers, tomatoes, onions. I’ll simmer the sauce first with the bass in another pan just to give it a hit. Then, I let it sit in the sauce for 10 minutes. You don’t want to overcook the fish.”

    Fishermen often link themselves to the food chain, so it’s worth mentioning that squid and blowfish have entered Gardiner’s Bay in healthy numbers, a development pleasing to both striped bass and human lovers of calamari and blowfish-tail scampi.

    It was while dressing a table-bound fish that Marino was drawn to the stomach contents, which included several species of crab. “My head told me the bass were on the bottom. You need things with eyes [lead] to get down there,” a type of fly known as a Clouser. Using photos of the crabs in mid-digestion, Marino designed crab-pattern flies that have proved very productive. “My workhorse flies.”

    Speaking of fly-fishing and alewives, Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett recalled his younger days tramping along the banks of Little Reed dreen in Montauk tracking alewives as they worked their way up into Big Reed Pond from Lake Montauk. “Me and Charlie Whitmore would cast Mickey Finns at them, red and yellow freshwater flies. It pissed them off. They’d hit it and jump about three feet in the air. We’d laugh our asses off.”

    Bennett explained that, like spawning salmon, alewives would not bite on the flies because they were hungry — they are filter feeders — but because they aggravated them.

    In other fishy news, Steve LaPani, a freshwater aficionado, caught and released seven largemouth and one smallmouth bass in Montauk’s Fort Pond on Saturday, a perfect day to play Huck Finn.

    And, a reminder: The recreational fluke season will get under way on Tuesday with a 19.5-inch minimum size and a four-fish-per-day bag limit.

    The Montauk SurfMasters spring fling competition is scheduled to begin on May 11 and run through June 30.

    On April 10 I went with some friends to the meeting of the Long Island Botanical Society held at Stony Brook University. When we were approaching the campus from the north end of Nichols Road, a red fox streamed across the road from east to west with outstretched tail. When we arrived back at Warren’s Nursery in Southampton (our starting point), a red fox ran across Majors Path into the nursery, its tail in the same position. That made sense, there is an active den with fox kits at that site.

    All evidence points to this being the year of the red fox. They seem to be everywhere, and always hurrying with tail straight out. If you go outside and smell what you think is the scent of a skunk, it’s probably emanating from a red fox. If you hear strange yelps in the night that you haven’t heard before, they’re probably being uttered by a red fox.

    There has been an approximately 15-year hiatus between peaks in the fox population on the South Fork. Between 1994 and 1999 they were very common. Then the mange struck and the population was quickly decimated. Prior to that time, the last peak occurred in 1982, following which the mange knocked the their numbers down as if overnight. Thus it would seem that the fox population rises and falls in a 12 to 14-year cycle.

    In the early 1990s when raccoons were as common as they are today, distemper hit them hard and until the start of the new millennium, their population remained down. For reasons unknown, our local population of opossums hit a low in the early 2000s, then sprang up to another high point by 2007. They and raccoons are still going strong today. All of our mammals, including gray squirrels, chipmunks, cottontail rabbits, voles, and shrews, have cyclic highs and lows, perhaps with the exception of deer, which continue to thrive from year to year.

    In the old days we referred to these comings and goings as “the balance of nature,” a phrase that had gone out of fashion in scientific circles, while to us laypeople, the notion still holds water. Walk around on the average South Fork lawn and you sink in, the voles have been tunneling back and forth creating mazes of weaknesses in the soil structure. Why so many voles? Too few foxes!

    Cottontails, although not nearly as common today as they were 60 years ago, when almost every yard had one or two, have been increasing in number while foxes were down. They have been held in check somewhat during the interim by red-tailed hawks; the number of pairs breeding locally has never been higher. We can expect to see cottontails’ numbers plummet now that Reynard is back in town.

    Little foxes need meat, meat, meat, and lots of mother’s milk, prior to weaning come midsummer. Vixens have to work really, really hard to keep their young in good health until they are ready to go out on their own.

    It will also be interesting to see what happens to the wild turkey population in the face of this spate of foxes. Like white-tailed deer, wild turkeys — reintroduced on Long Island after an absence of almost two centuries — have probably never been so common as they are today. Adult turkeys are a bit much for foxes, but poults are easy picking.

    The red fox also enjoys a certain momentum that species invading new territories for the first time often exhibit. Our red fox and the Eurasian one are practically synonymous, you can’t tell one from the other by their looks. The North American red fox came from Asia (but was also later imported from Europe by fox hunting enthusiasts), probably at about the same time Asian humans arrived here. It probably happened during the last ice age when the seas were hundreds of feet lower than they are today and one could practically walk across “Beringia,” the icy land bridge connecting Siberia with Alaska.

    Long Island’s common (and, maybe, only) fox in pre-Columbian times was the gray fox, a small number of which persist here today, particularly so in the Central Pine Barrens but also in Montauk. Once established in Alaska and western Canada, the red fox spread quickly throughout the rest of North America, then down into Central America, and from there into South America. Its population is still expanding. Until something happens to dramatically lower the red fox population on Long Island for a very long time, the gray fox will have to play second fiddle.

    Global warming will probably not affect the red fox population as the species has adapted handily to living in the tropics. Indeed, it might be the other way around. Frigid winters are largely responsible for doing in mangy foxes as they are left with little fur to insulate them from the cold. Some mangy foxes may be able to eke out an existence during a mild winter such as the one we have just experienced.

     Let’s keep an eye out to see what happens.