Outdoors

Montauk, in my eyes, is one of the richest places for natural history in the United States. It has grasslands, forests, savannas, freshwater wetlands, tidal wetlands, ponds both permanent and temporary, hills, kettleholes, glacial erratics, cranberry bogs, dunes, ocean beaches, sound beaches, all matter of marine and freshwater fishes, blue-spotted salamanders, and the only ocean coastal bluffs north of the Caribbean Islands. That venerable Long Islander Teddy Roosevelt traveled the world, and he also visited Montauk. He must have loved it. Walt Whitman loved it. I love it.

Of course I did this on purpose, I told my wife, showing her the large silver hook dangling from my left ring finger. You think an experienced fisherman like me could accidentally hook himself, I continued, unsuccessfully hiding a smile. She rolled her eyes, called East Hampton Urgent Care in Amagansett, and off we went to free the shiny devil from my person.

The dog days of summer are supposed to wait until mid-August, but decided to come in July this year. Ouch! Having said that, the way the climate has been heating up in this decade, come August, the days could get even doggier.

There is a very pretty grove of green-leafed trees with bright red-brown flowers and developing fruit on the west end of Long Beach in Noyac, less than 75 feet from the lapping waters of Noyac Bay. On Monday I examined them and found them to be trees of heaven, Ailanthus altissima. I see scores of trees of this species every time I ride along one of the South Fork’s more populated highways. In places Noyac Road is overrun with them, but most of the flowers are much more green than red.

We are well into summer. It’s been warm, almost hot. The worst is yet to come. We’ve had just enough rain to make the oaks, hickories, maples, sassafras, and the rest of our native trees as lush as lush can be. I’ve been giving them all a 10 as I drive past and through them, which is unprecedented, but I may becoming dotty or too sentimental.

One doesn’t need a boat to fish the East End. There are many productive saltwater and freshwater spots from Montauk to East Hampton where anyone with the right gear, a little local knowledge, and persistence can catch fish for fun or for the table.

Five traditional boats, tools, and maritime equipment will be for sale on Saturday when the East End Classic Boat Society holds its annual fair from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Hartjen-Richardson Community Boat Shop at 301 Bluff Road, Amagansett, behind the East Hampton Town Maritime Museum.

Local Sports Schedule

Mary Lee is a 16-foot, 3,456-pound great white shark. She’s about the size of a Honda Accord, or an Audi A5, for those who favor European rides. Mary Lee was captured, satellite tagged, and released on Sept. 17, 2012, in the waters surrounding Cape Cod by OCEARCH, a marine research organization that focuses on keystone marine species including great whites.

No two springs or summers are the same. June may continue the string of warmest months since records have been kept. It was also dryer than usual. Do high temperatures and droughts go hand in hand? There used to be a local guru I could call for answer that question, but Long Island’s most longstanding and celebrated weatherman, a farmer and resident of Bridgehampton, Richard Hendrickson, is no longer with us, having passed away earlier in the year.

Wet a hook in the bay and you might find a porgy or other commonly caught fish at the end of your line. But lurking below are visitors from afar, waiting to turn your ordinary day of fishing into a fish story of a lifetime.

Perhaps during no other time in the history of modern man have so many people from so many countries and territories been on the move to seek new lands in which to live. This is the age of emigration and immigration, born of choice, vocational opportunity, the need to survive, mostly the latter. But it’s not just humans that are on the move. With global warming becoming more and more of a reality, plants and animals of all kinds are extending the ranges, moving from one place to another.

I’m not a world traveler, but I’ve been around. If I had to name my 10 favorite places of the thousands I’ve spent time in, Montauk would be very close to the top of the list.

Shucks, only 12 more days before the days begin getting shorter and the nights longer. You might say that’s the zenith of activity for each new year. After that things start going downhill.

This time of year large striped bass take temporary residence in the rip that forms between Bostwick Point at the northern tip of Gardiner’s Island and Gardiner’s Point Island, where the crumbling remains of Fort Tyler, known locally as the Ruins, stands today.

Open a fisherman’s tackle box and you’ll see lures of every imaginable color. But what color catches the most fish?

How much wood could a groundhog chuck if a groundhog could chuck wood? It’s not quite as much of a tongue twister when you substitute another name for the species.

After achieving a historic low in the 1960s, owing to wide use of DDT and other pesticides, the Long Island osprey populations have bounced back and are still rising. But the increasing number of cormorants and seals in our waters since the 1990s is nettling their comeback, and now there is a third competitor on the scene to contend with — one most of us are happy for: our national bird.

Spring is moving right along in good stead. A car ride through the local roads gives one an up-to-date reading of its progress. Today, for example, during a back-and-forth, up-and-down trip through the back roads of Northwest Woods, the signs of advancing spring were readily apparent.

Following the end of World War II there was a big building boom across the country as our servicemen came back from the European and Pacific theaters to resume the American way of life that they missed during four years of nonstop fighting against the Germans and Japanese.

Some people say that we on the South Fork are going to hell in a handbasket. We look across the Peconics and see mostly green fields of grapes, vegetables, and other produce. Here most of the farmland is up for grabs, but thankfully that wonderful organization, the Peconic Land Trust, is out there grabbing. It is not only keeping viable farmland in production, it is revitalizing farm plots that have long stood dormant and recruiting young farmers, mostly the sons and daughters of old farmers, to make the land fertile once more. In a way, it’s the same way with fishermen.

By all accounts, winter has finally descended upon us. But as of the date for this column, there are only 39 days until crocuses begin blooming. It’s one of the oddest winters I can remember, one with very few winter birds, only a handful of waterfowl, and, as of yet, no ice skating. One wonders if such a winter will be good for all of those coastal ponds of our area that are in trouble, or will it worsen them?

I started this environmental and natural history column in 1981, and except for about four years in the latter part of the 1980s it has been going ever since. I hope to keep it going on into the 2020s. We will see. Nature and the environment are in a lot of trouble and need all of the help they can get. Who wants to live on Mars?

A recent study published in The New York Times observed that the female and male humans’ brains were identical in anatomy, yet males and females are so different behaviorally and physiologically in so many ways. How is it possible the brains are the same?

As many of you readers have observed (or heard falling in the night), there was a tremendous crop of acorns this year, notwithstanding the dryish summer. More acorns should produce more squirrels, which are famous feeders on acorns during the winter months, having squirreled hundreds away during the fall.

The Montauk SurfMasters Fall Classic ended on Dec. 1, with fewer contenders than usual, due largely to a season that Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle described as “tough, tough, tough.”

The winter birds are here until March and April. It’s time to stock the feeders for the long winter haul. Most of us who feed the birds will be carefully watching, identifying, and counting, and so will a bird or two whose powers of observation far outstrip our own — those pesky hawks with the sharp beaks and vice-grip talons.

I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said any village that you couldn’t walk through, one end to the other, in an hour or so, isn’t worth the trip.

The United States Army Corps of Engineers and their contractors did in a few days what Hurricane Sandy of 2012 never did, or Irene a year before Sandy, as well as a host of storms prior to those two.

The black and scarlet oaks with their lobed and pointed leaves may be on the way to becoming live oaks, the ones in the South and California that never lose their leaves in the fall and are, thus, evergreens. It will take thousands of years for such a conversion, but global warming may shorten that time span a bit. We’ll see.