Outdoors

As the season changes from spring to summer, it’s always been a bit hard for me to fathom that our exposure to natural daylight is already on the downhill. A sunrise of 5:15 a.m. on June 21 in Montauk is 5:18 a.m. a week later. It’s only a three-minute difference, but the daylight does begin to erode rather quickly.

My memory of watching the movie “Jaws” for the first time shortly after its release in June of 1975 still stands clear in my mind. Its effect on me, and others at the time, was profound. Since that day, I’ve lost count of how many dozens of times I have seen it on TV, and yet I still get the chills watching several of its scenes.

The South Fork of Long Island has hundreds of beaches, woodland trails, sidewalks, and other stretches for walking and communing with nature.

On the South Fork it would seem that the stars get dimmer and dimmer with each passing year.

I went out looking for signs of gypsy moth infestations on Sunday, exploring the oak-hickory and oak-pine forests along the major Sag Harbor, Bridgehampton, Wainscott, and Northwest Woods roads.

Sunday night was cloudy and cool with a slight breeze. I set out for a second night on the trail of the once common but now rare whippoorwill. Last Thursday the Noyac and Bridgehampton hills were under my microscope. Sunday night it would be Northwest Woods in East Hampton and Napeague. I didn’t hear a single whippoorwill the first night. I was hoping that it would be a different story the second time out.

The summer birds are back in full force. Most are day birds, but some are nocturnal — the owls and the nightjars such as the nighthawk and whippoorwill.

Ramit Tandon, a Columbia University graduate who left Wall Street for the pro tour recently, swept through the S.Y.S. Open squash tournament this past week, defeating a fellow Indian, Kush Kumar, a member of Trinity College’s national-championship team, 11-3, 11-2, 11-3 in Sunday’s final.

When I was a boy growing up in Mattituck I poked around everywhere and at everything, collecting many of the things I found, be they animate or inanimate, or, as they say in Twenty Questions, “animal, vegetable, or mineral.”

Are there flowering plants that live in the seas? Yes, they are called sea grasses because, like land grasses, they are monocots, plants that only display a single leaf upon emerging from the seed.

It’s 3 p.m. on Sunday and the sun is shining in full glory following three days of cloudy rainy weather. The robins and cardinals are singing their territorial songs, the trees are beginning to leaf out, the red maples are flowering, and the scarlet and black oaks are following in their stead. By the time this goes to press, the shads and beach plums will be in bloom, to be followed by the dogwoods, then the mountain laurels. It is spring as I remember it.

It was, indeed, a very rough March. But April is here and things are starting to pop. One sign of spring is the number of male robins on the greening shoulders along roads. Why they hit these shoulders first before the lawns is a question that has been nagging me for years, but that’s the way it is. On Sunday afternoon along Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton there were several, all males, of course. Females usually return several days after the males.

I’m in my 80s and spend a good deal of time thinking about the 1980s, when all sorts of things for the good happened on the South Fork, North Fork, and Shelter Island. And yes, there were many bad things to overcome.

From long before our kindergarten years, the one thing that we all know for certain is that there is life on Earth, and we are immersed in it. In fact, according to the latest findings by scientists examining four-billion-year-old rocks on the shores of Hudson Bay, spiral-tubular minuscule life forms, early bacteria, have been around that long or longer.

I was born in a house next to my grandfather’s chicken farm in Mattituck, across the bay. White leghorn chickens may have been the first bird species I opened my eyes to, the first bird species I came to know intimately. Before someone coined the term “free-range chickens” in the late 1900s, that’s what they were, free-range. They ran freely over the expanse of old fields and gardens surrounding my boyhood area, feeding and carrying on as chickens left to their own devices do. At night they either roosted on tree branches or in chicken coops on rails.

Here’s where we get our electric energy from: hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), subterranean heat sources, the sun, wind, and hydrogen.

You’re spinning, I’m spinning, we’re all spinning. Everything is in motion. If you are standing in an island in an ocean transected by the Equator, you are moving easterly at more than 1,000 miles per hour. You just don’t feel it or notice it because the island, the water surrounding it, and everything on it are moving at the same speed. If you are standing upright and motionless on one of the poles, north or south, you are near stationary, except that you turn completely around once every 24 hours. From infancy to old age, you and I, assuming that we have been in the same neighborhood all of these years, have been moving easterly at almost the same speed, but not exactly.

When I dropped out of Cornell University for the second time in 1957 I was about to be drafted. We were not at war then, having settled the Korean police action some four years earlier, but, nevertheless, I didn’t think I was cut out for the infantry so I enlisted. I wanted to go into intelligence so I took my chances on getting into the United States Army Language School in Monterey, Calif. I landed a slot — the last available — in Russian. I thought I would be sent to Europe at the end of the course, but instead I boarded a troop ship in San Francisco, sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge, and headed for Japan.

We are solidly into winter. My yard is covered with 11 inches of snow thanks to the back-to-back snowstorms of last week. Noyac Bay, 100 feet to the north, is beginning to freeze over, and it will, there being not a wisp of a breeze for several hours now.

This the last weekly column of the year 2016, and I decided to write a little bit about my peculiar daily data-taking habits, which may come to an end one day soon. After Saturday I will begin saving a few trees and a little time.

You may remember the R & B group Earth, Wind, and Fire. The name contains two of the classic Greek primary elements, but leaves out the third, water. In fact in googling pop music groups over the past 60 years, I can’t find any containing the word water. Yet, the more we know the more we learn — and most often after the fact — how important water is to the Earth and life. Some of the 10 to 20 million species recorded thus far in the world can survive without air; none can survive without water.

Napeague was once famous for its bunker factory, the Smith Meal Company. Local fishermen purse-seined up menhaden by the ton and unloaded them at that menhaden reduction plant where they were turned into fishmeal.

Pamela Rosenthal, who lives in the hills southwest of Three Mile Harbor, called the other day. She found a spider living on a toy that was left in the yard for some time. She was concerned that it might be a black widow, as it was black. She said it had two red spots on the back, but it didn’t have the telltale red “hourglass.”

Having worked as the environmental protection and natural resources director for East Hampton Town for a long time, every so often I ride through the roads to see how the town and its village and hamlets are faring. Naturally, I check out past carnages to see if there have been any redemptions of sorts and, happily, in most cases there have been.

Yesterday, while I was motoring along the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, a rafter of turkeys crossed in front of me. Later on, at Sagg Pond, I flushed a gaggle of geese. On my way back home after checking out the ocean, a murder of crows flew over on their way to their evening roost in the trees of Barcelona while a herd of deer began congregating in the fields north and south of Stephen Hand’s Path. Then it got dark and wildlife activity subsided.

My plan was to take advantage of the warm day with light southwest winds and head toward Montauk Point, where striped bass were attacking bait on the surface, according to reports. I had been looking forward to a day of casting at bass blitzes for weeks if not months. But an unexpected late start forced me to reconsider the value of making the 16-mile trip from my dock in Three Mile Harbor.

As we go deeply into the autumn and the leaves fall at an ever-quickening pace, thoughts of the next spring gird us for the coming winter. We hope it will be as wonderful as the last and that the flowers and leaves will burst out with a vengeance, having slept long and deep through the cold and snow of winter.

It’s that time of year again when all of the local birds finish raising and weaning their second broods. The migrants among them have already flown south, and the year-round residents are out foraging and mapping the locations of all of the feeding stations in preparation for winter.

Striped bass and bluefish soon will begin their migration south and, we hope, come within surfcasting range. Fishermen hoping to bend a rod and others eager to observe the spectacle of birds diving, fish crashing bait, and rows of anglers launching lures into the surf will slowly roll their cars off the hard pavement into the soft sand.

I’m looking out my window at pines that are more brown than green. “Oh, darn, the dreaded pine beetle,” I say to myself. Driving around the roads today I saw lots of pines already gone and lots of others on the way out.