Seal Walks
The last of the season's three-mile hikes to see seals and shorebirds with a Montauk Point State Park naturalist will take place on Saturday and Sunday at 9 a.m. The cost is $4 per person; children 3 and under are free. Reservations are required by calling 631-668-5000. Participants gather at the Lighthouse's lower parking lot 10 minutes before start time.
Jacob's Farm
Rick Whalen of the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society will lead a four-mile hike at the Jacob's Farm and East Side trails in Springs on Saturday at 10 a.m. The meeting place is the Jacob's Farm trailhead; there's roadside parking on Red Dirt Road about .2 of a mile east of Accabonac Road. Mr. Whalen can be reached at [email protected] or 631-275-8539 with questions. Face masks are required.
Southampton Trails
The Southampton Trails Preservation Society has hikes on its calendar on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday, it'll be a grassland to grassland hike with Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt from 9 to 10:30 a.m. at Poxabogue Park. Participants will meet just south of the railroad trestle on Old Farm Road in Sagaponack and hike to Vineyard Field in Bridgehampton with Dai Dayton in the lead. She can be phoned at 631-745-0689.
Whiskey Hill is the destination on Sunday at 10 a.m. for a short hike with ocean views that also passes kettlehole ponds and "an enormous glacial erratic" — that's one of the huge boulders dropped here by the glacier that helped form Long Island. Jean Dodds leads this one (631-599-2391), and the meeting place is Mill Path off Loper's Path in Bridgehampton.
Peepers This Week, Cruise Next
This Saturday at 7 p.m., Paul King III of the South Fork Natural History Museum will head up a search for spring peepers, whose chorus is one of the first signs of the new season. The walk begins at dusk, when their singing really kicks into high gear. Reservations are required at 631-537-9735, and all Covid protocols will be followed. The cost is $10 for adults, $7 for children. Museum members can join for free.
Looking ahead to next Saturday, the museum is promoting a nature and birdwatching cruise for adults and children 10 and older aboard Stony Brook Southampton's 45-foot research vessel, Peconic. The cruise runs from 9:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. and costs $40, or $35 for members, with reservations a must.
In other museum news, SoFo announced last week that Gregory Metzger, the chief field coordinator of its Shark Research and Education Program, is a co-author of newly published research in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
Mr. Metzger studied the travels of juvenile white sharks in the North Atlantic shark nursery and habitat area, concluding that the tagged specimens spent 90 percent of their time within 12 miles of Long Island's southern shoreline. The research confirmed the importance of this region to the white shark population and addressed "many questions on the ecology, behavior, and conservation of a highly mobile marine predator that have been challenging to explore," SoFo said in its announcement.
Research is ongoing. The full study can be read online at doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.643831.