Outdoors

A feather is a heck of a thing. Yankee Doodle stuck one in his cap and called it “macaroni” almost three centuries ago. Native Americans used feathers at the end of the arrows to make them go straighter when launched from the bow. Feathers are used far and wide and during the kill-for-plumes era here in America, several plume bearers such as the egrets almost became extinct, which led to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 in the United States, which banned almost all forms of plume hunting.

Last Monday morning, while lying flat on my back on a cold, narrow, operating room table in a Manhattan hospital, an inordinate number of thoughts raced through my mind. It’s not an everyday situation to find yourself in, and your brain tends to go into overdrive.

In biology there is something known as sexual dimorphism; the two sexes are different in one or more ways. It even applies to some insects such as the swallowtail butterflies. Almost all vertebrates exhibit some form of sexual dimorphism.

The jarring blast of chilling arctic winds that we experienced last week also abruptly created a thin glaze of ice on many freshwater ponds, and even a few saltwater coves and creeks. Most important, it served as a stern warning to me that having the very last boat still in the water at the marina may not be the smartest thing.

Water and air. Two of the basic elements of our planet, and when the water occupies the surface they are intimately related. These two forms of matter exchange gases both during the day and the night.

I’ve never been an early adopter of the latest fishing techniques, baits, and tackle. Instead, I’ve tended to stick to the tried and true ways I learned. Stubbornness is not a good trait.

Monday was the first really cold day of fall. Frost had formed overnight on lawns, but it was sunny. Victoria Bustamante picked me up and we were off to Caumsett State Park at the very northwest end of Suffolk County and the Long Island Sound. Once the estate of Marshall Field, complete with a dairy farm, it is now a beautiful 1,500-acre preserve with a local Matinecock Indian name meaning “place by a sharp rock.” The sharp rock was one of several glacial erratics left when the last advance of the Wisconsin glaciation swept down across the whole of northern America more than 10,000 years ago, creating the North Fork and the morainal line of Harbor Hills that runs along the Sound from Southold on the east to beyond Great Neck at the edge of New York City on the west.

Fall marches on! At 6:30 last Thursday evening on a trip to Southampton Village by way of Deerfield and Edge of Woods Roads, both lanes were clear and only a single leaf fell. Three hours later on the return trip the roads were half leaf-covered while three dozen leaves floated down. Fall had begun in earnest.

On Oct. 23, I joined a group of friends for a full day of fishing on the Oh Brother!, a charter boat out of Montauk whose captain, Rob Aaronson, and his first mate, Rudi Bonicelli, are seasoned pros who know the inshore and offshore waters around Montauk as well as anyone.

The post-noon photoperiod will lose an hour on Sunday, while the winter solstice is only 50 days away. Any day now the lawn will be coated with gray upon waking, and frosts will soon become an everyday phenomenon.

The ruby-crowned kinglet is as small as my nose

Everyone who fishes has his or her share of fish stories. Some are impossible to believe, while some are clearly embellished and need to be taken with a grain of salt, along with a wry smile of doubt. But some are actually the honest truth, no matter how far-fetched they may sound.

Bob Dylan did not write “the answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,” here on the East End — it was probably in a brownstone apartment in Greenwich Village — but if the Nobel laureate has been in these environs over the past 10 days or so, he most certainly would have been inspired to pen that familiar refrain, as the gusty winds have been unrelenting of late, thwarting many a planned fishing trip.

On Friday morning I had to make a trip to Riverhead and the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a new driver’s license. Not only was it set to expire shortly, but the picture of me on the front was at least 25 years old.

There is a raging battle going on throughout Long Island’s two non-city counties, Nassau and Suffolk. It splits the inhabitants into two camps, environmentalists and pro-developers.

It’s been almost two months since I last filled my boat up with diesel fuel. I hold about 85 gallons in each of two tanks below deck, and given the high price of fuel this year, I’ve consciously slowed down my cruising speed when heading out for a day of fishing or lobstering.

September is not only back-to-school month, it is also the end-of-harvest month and fish-after-fish month. It is the time of the great migration: birds, fish, whales, and even butterflies and darning needles are winging it south.

It’s not a national holiday, but Tumbleweed Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, passed by us a few weeks ago.

Every resident of Southampton Town knows about the notorious sandpit with the euphonious name Sand Land situated at the end of Middle Line Highway next to Golf at the Bridge in Noyac.

t was the wise Greek Archimedes who in 250 B.C. formulated the principle of buoyancy and that a chunk of something that drops into the sea and floats displaces its own mass. If it sinks below the surface, it displaces its own volume. When a glacier slides off a mountain face into the ocean, it displaces its own mass, and the sea rises proportionately. As it slowly melts away and becomes one with the sea, the sea rises a bit more.

It was bound to happen. Overwarm water temperatures this summer, backed by the unpredictability of Mother Nature and other factors, has resulted in an outbreak of a nitrogen-fueled rust tide in a number of locales, including parts of Three Mile Harbor, Noyac Bay, and Little Peconic Bay. The bloom has also been widely seen in other waterways on both the North and South Shores of Long Island in recent weeks.

Nature has many survival tricks up its sleeve when it comes to the possibility of being eaten. `We all know how the monarch butterfly is able to escape predation and fly 100 miles or more in a day during its annual migration without suffering a single molestation.

Summer is not over yet. In fact, the next few weeks may be among the best of the year for getting out on the water in small paddle craft like canoes, kayaks, and stand-up paddleboards. But storms and high winds can quickly turn a fun excursion into a dangerous situation, separating paddlers from their craft.

When boating or sailing, there are times as the season moves along that doing the same thing over and over becomes downright boring. The same is true for the pursuit of fish. I simply get burned out when chasing the same species day after day.

The recent to-do about Cartwright Island raises some interesting questions. We are sometimes prone to think of the present as the past, East Hampton today has always been, Southampton has always been, Lake Montauk has always been the way it is, etc., etc., etc. But in fact things, including our local landmasses and their surrounding waters, are fluxing every minute, during the day when we can see the change and at night when most of us are sleeping. So it is with the contours of the South Fork’s north and south coastlines.

Hands down, dawn is my favorite part of the day. No matter the season, I love to get up early and take it all in.

On Saturday the rains came, but it didn’t spoil the first ever release of bobwhites in the hamlet of Montauk by the Third House Nature Center group. Juvenile bobwhite after bobwhite fluttered off into the green tapestry of Montauk County Park atop the hills east of Lake Montauk. Such release of this quail species, native to most of the United States, but not common anywhere, could be the beginning of the comeback of it not only in Montauk, but in the rest of East Hampton Town as well. Two more release days are planned by fall in this five-year program.

Sharks are hot. As in the past few summers, shark sightings seem to be capturing a lot of headlines and attention of late. Ever since Steven Spielberg put the toothy fish on the silver screen several decades ago, the mystique and fascination continues to grow.

Last week’s unusually turbulent summer weather, which included extended wind gusts to over 30 miles per hour on several days mixed in with a few tropical downpours, certainly stirred up our local waters. Rip current warnings were posted up and down the coast for most of the week and weekend. It was best to stay out of the drink most days.

This column is about a failed plan to construct a failed recharge basin. It is another Humpty Dumpty story about engineers, town councils, town attorneys, contractors, and the like designing and trying to build a recharge basin to trap runoff water from a farm field in East Hampton on a site along Route 114 in 2010.