Outdoors

Here it is half the year gone and I understand less about nature while studying it more. Friday evening was the perfect night for studying the flashes of the fireflies. It was calm, only partly cloudy, and gray tree frogs were singing from the wet spots.

It’s been an unusual season for the normally reliable bluefish this year. Catches were scarce in many locales the past two months, and the fish showed up only a week or so ago in Noyac Bay. Usually they could be found as early as the first week of May in this area.

After months of eager anticipation, the black sea bass season in New York finally opened on Sunday. While anglers in New Jersey and Connecticut have been allowed to retain the popular fish as of May 15 and 19 respectively, folks in New York have had to sit on the sidelines while their nearby neighbors have enjoyed bountiful catches for over a month. To rub salt in the wound, Jersey anglers could keep 10 fish per day, while those in the Nutmeg State could retain five. A huge, if unfair, advantage.

On Sunday night at 8 o’clock I began watching out of my front window on Noyac Road in anticipation of the firefly show to begin. The first flash down low in the herbage at 8:46 started what would become a barrage of flares, 127 of which I tallied until 9, when I stopped. 

Whippoorwills were once common throughout the woods of Southampton and East Hampton, especially in Wainscott, which is the center of the South Fork’s oak and pitch pine forest.

There certainly have been a lot of headlines about tension between the United States and China of late. Trade and tariff warfare have captured most of the attention, and it appears that this ongoing squabble is not about to end anytime soon.

Another week, another step toward summer. Sunday was pleasant, and I took a ride into Wainscott south of East Hampton Airport and explored the woods and shoulders, hoping for a lupine or two. I did find several wildflowers blooming, but not a single lupine, nor the remnants of any bird’s-foot violets, which would have been blooming several weeks ago.

Gold is alluring to just about anyone and will always be categorized as a very precious metal, valued at its market price on the commodities trading floor. Gold is golden. It’s a given. 

When it comes to the weather, I sometimes think that the Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan summed it up just right: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” It is famously featured in his song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” While Dylan does not hold a degree in meteorology, it’s kind of hard to argue with the meaning of those simple lyrics he penned over 50 years ago.

Last week was a busy one on the South Fork. I received an email with a photo from Mariah Whitmore of a sandhill crane near Multi Aquaculture Systems on Napeague. I immediately informed Terry Sullivan and a few other birders. Terry went out to see shortly after and came back with more wonderful pictures of the crane. Readers of “Nature Notes” may recall reading about the last sandhill crane to visit the South Fork a few years ago, accompanied by Terry’s photo of it.

Fishing is sometimes a gamble. Some days you are the hero, and the next outing you can be found sulking and wondering where the fish went. There are never any guarantees when you drop a baited hook and line. Fish markets make their livelihood this way.

For those entering a tournament, whether it be for a tiny flounder or a giant bluefin tuna nearing 1,000 pounds, the competition can be intense no matter the quarry at hand. And with that, a number of tournaments adorn the upcoming calendar for those seeking not only a tasty dinner, but a little extra cash in the pocket.

It is Monday evening. The Memorial Day weekend is over. The weather was grand. At noon traffic was streaming west past my house on Noyac Road at a rate of 961 vehicles per hour, presumably most of them were returning home to spots west of the South Fork. I took a ride around after 4 to parts east, mostly in East Hampton.

Striped bass have been running plentiful of late in the Peconics. A nice slug of fish, feasting on an abundance of menhaden, also known as bunker, has made catching a keeper-size fish a rather easy accomplishment.

All of a sudden it’s hot and humid, the time when all hell breaks loose in nature: eagles feeding their chicks, spring peepers crawling out of the water to climb trees, alewives spawning.

With the arrival of the month of May, for anglers of either the salt or freshwater ilk, it can be difficult to decide what to fish for on any particular day.

There were bobwhites around throughout my youth on the North Fork, but today, on the South Fork too, you almost never hear their telltale call.

Accabonac Harbor in Springs and Northwest Creek in East Hampton will receive a new degree of scrutiny after an expansion of a water testing program run by Concerned Citizens of Montauk.

I have never had so many reports of grosbeaks in town in the 37 years or so I have been writing my column for The Star.

Porgy, also known as scup or sea bream, sometimes gets a bum rap. Most prominent are the complaints that it’s a bony fish to eat, but that’s just hogwash.

Accabonac Harbor in Springs and Northwest Creek in East Hampton will receive a new degree of scrutiny after an expansion of a water testing program run by Concerned Citizens of Montauk.

From a fishing perspective, it was as quiet a season as I could ever recall.

Victoria Bustamante and her college-age son Chris visited one of the Atlantic white cedar swamps on Friday. There are four in North Sea, three on the north side of Little Fresh Pond and one on the south side. Conifers that do well with roots in standing water are rare across the globe and white cedars are our only native conifer with such a habit. In fact you almost never find one doing well on dry land.

When I was a boy growing up in Mattituck across the bay, there were no Little League baseball teams or summer camps to occupy our time and keep us from getting into trouble.

Birds continue to return north. Jane Bimson sent me a nice shot of an osprey perched in a tree at the edge of Fort Pond. Karen Rubinstein, who has overseen the Montauk Christmas Count for the past two years, and lives with her sister on Accabonac Harbor, reported that a pair of fish crows arrived and she observed an oystercatcher at Louse Point. She still has a pine siskin at her feeder that has yet to go north.

If you looked at The New York Times on Monday, you may have come across an article about saltwater crocodiles in the Philippine Islands and how they attack humans every so often and recently killed a fisherman.

The major question having to do with climate change before the East Hampton Town Board today is how do we save Montauk from global warming.

The dredge spoil deposited on Havens Beach in Sag Harbor in the spring of 2018 was full of a bunch of curiosities including pieces of concrete, crockery, rusted hunks of metal, and other junk.

Brrrr. We knew that the mild weather wouldn’t last. So here we are shivering our timbers and wondering what comes next. Then, however, March is only a month away. Let’s hope it’s a pleasant one.

The nation is shut down. It’s not for me to open it up. What’s worse to my locally oriented mind, however, is the stuff against nature that has been going down right under our noses here on the South Fork for the past several years.

Last Thursday was a rather blustery, chilly day mixed with intermittent rain. The dampness ran through my many layers of clothes and ultimately my body as I rummaged around in my garage securing my fishing tackle and gear for what would likely be my final fishing trip of 2018 the following morning out of Montauk.