Outdoors

   The Sunday Newsday crossword puzzle requested a five-letter word for “swamp plant.” I’ve been doing all of the Newsday and New York Times crosswords, seven days a week, since the early 1980s. In other words, I’ve done thousands of crosswords and saved them all.

    “Moooooooooooo,” was what Brian Ritter heard when he answered the phone at 4 in the morning one week ago. He recognized the voice, and he needed no translation. It was Mike Coppola telling him he’d caught a big cow, a female of the species Morone saxatilis, a striped bass.

    First, the birds in the trees greeted the sun with song and chatter. A woodpecker hammered away on an old catalpa tree pregnant with its orchid-like blossoms. Then came the low drone of boats leaving Montauk Harbor.

    It was 6 a.m. on the dot, the start time, the appointed hour of departure for the second day of the Star Island Yacht Club’s first shark tournament of the season, a type of derby that Capt. Frank Mundus, Montauk’s Monster Man and Peter Benchley’s model for Quint, the irascible charter captain in “Jaws,” declared vestigial years before he died back in ’08. 

   “There’s a tree in the meadow with a stream drifting by.” Some of you may remember that song from the 1940s. It’s old, but the message is still good. The tree stands for constancy, the stream for the passage of time. It’s important to many of us to see that same tree over and over. We may even take it for granted, but when it’s cut down or blown down, we grieve its passing.

   In many respects, sound and hearing in nature are just as important as sight. In those species that are more nocturnal than diurnal, sounds and the ability to hear, and differentiate, them is crucial to their survival. Whether an animal species is active in the day or at night, there’s a greater than 50 percent chance that it perceives sound waves or senses vibrations, another form of sound.

   Of course, the big news is the 44.7-pound striped bass that the surfcaster Ben McCarron caught on Saturday under the Montauk Lighthouse on a bucktail. The big bass puts McCarron in first place in the Montauk SurfMasters spring tournament, and the fish beat the competition in the weekend tournament held from Paulie’s Tackle Shop in Montauk.

    Geoff Bowen’s 21.7-pound striper and Nick Tamorino’s 15.46-pounder stand in second and third places in the SurfMaster’s adult division. Brendan Ferrell leads the youth division with a 13.64-pound bass. 

   I heard my first whippoorwill in the woods behind my grandfather’s chicken farm in Mattituck at 3 years of age. Once you’ve heard this magical, three-syllable, eerie chant coming out of the dark of a warm summer evening you’re hard-pressed to forget it.

    Let’s talk about the smell of fish. It’s often scorned, but the objectionable redolence is usually the result of proteins gone bad, spoiled. The truth is, fish fresh out of the water smell sweet, fish in the water sweeter still.

   Bruce Palmer oversees things at the East Hampton Town’s recycling center in Montauk, directing people with tires to the tire bin, people with old grills and lawnmowers to the metal container, checking for scofflaw dumpers dumping without benefit of a 2013 sticker — all these things with a mind that drifts seaward at times.

   Sunday saw a break in the Memorial Day weekend weather. Downtown Montauk was jam-packed, a perfect time to escape into the deserted Montauk outback, as Vicki Bustamante and I are retracing Norman Taylor’s epic 1923 monograph on Montauk’s plants, “The Vegetation of Montauk: A Study of Grassland and Forest.”

   Montauk is bipolar this time of year. When the summer’s southwesterly winds start to blow in May and early June, a Mason-Dixon line of sorts runs the length of the peninsula that is the east end of the South Fork.

    The land south of the line is shrouded in thick, cold fog where the winter ocean first meets warm air blowing off the land west to east. North of the line, where the cold sea has less influence, the land is often bathed in warm sunlight.

   The lilacs are in bloom, a sure sign that the fish local Indians called squeteague, and later dubbed tide runners, sea trout, or weakfish, have arrived right on their ancient schedule.

   I was at Morton Wildlife Refuge the other day when one of the private ferrying helicopters flew over on its way to East Hampton Town Airport. It’s hard to tell how high it was, but it seemed much lower than 2,000 feet and it made quite a racket as it passed over my head and, incidentally, over one of the osprey nests we put up around 1988 on the Jessup’s Neck spit. The ospreys were back. The female was sitting down low on the nest, and it was hard to tell if she was affected by the noise and vibrations as much as I was.

   Like the swallows to Capistrano (although I’ve read development has interrupted their instinctual return of late), Steve (The Perv) Kramer rolled into the Ditch Plain parking lot a few days ago from his winter haunts in Florida with a neatly trimmed beard. He is called Perv for no reason darker than his penchant for the odd, ribald observation. This does not make him a bad person.

   Spring is definitely here, there is no going back. The oaks, hickories, red maples, and sassafras are unfurling their leaves, March’s dull and dreary landscape is behind us. The month of May promises to delight all of our five senses, especially those that deal with vision, scents, and hearing. Helicopters and unmuffled motor vehicles be damned, we will not let them destroy our vernal pleasures.

   On April 22, I drove down to Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., with my daughter, Angela, who was visiting me from California. It was a bright sunny day with nary a cloud and not much of a wind. From New Jersey through Delaware through Maryland to Virginia, the sky over the highways 60 to 100 feet above the pavement was filled with sailing turkey vultures. We must have seen more than 25, mostly singles, sometimes in pairs.

   Time will tell, but it looks like the era of blood-and-guts shark tournaments could be coming to an end. In late July, the Montauk Marine Basin will host a tag-and-release tournament that promises to engage the public long after the fishing stops.

    The recreational shark fishery pioneered by Capt. Frank Mundus starting in the late 1950s exploded after the release of the movie “Jaws” in 1975. Shark tournaments proliferated along the East Coast, many of them in cooperation with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

    Ready, get set. . . . It’s like surfers waiting for a forecast swell to arrive, or the first crack of the bat for those yearning to return to Mudville. Fishermen are with child for the arrival of fish, as is the case each spring, but this season’s cold temperatures seem to be drawing it, torturously, out.

   It was a bright, sunshine-filled Sunday afternoon when I pulled into the parking lot of Morton Wildlife Refuge in Noyac with my daughter, Angela, from San Francisco. The parking lot was jammed packed with vehicles. I found the only open spot — half in the woods, half out. With my camera and bag of black sunflower seeds at the ready, Angela and I proceeded into the reserve and followed the east trail, the one that takes you to the pond, the large tulip trees, and the state-endangered swamp cottonwoods.

   The Montauk SurfMasters spring shootout tournament will begin on May 10. The first of Montauk’s annual fishing tournaments targets striped bass.

    The entry fee is $110, all but $10 of which will go into the winner’s pot. The ten bucks is for lunch on awards day, June 29. The tournament has no divisions. Waders, wetsuiters, adult men and women compete against one another. An extra prize of $100 will be awarded for the first legal-size bass (28 inches long or longer) that’s weighed in.

   As of Monday, the red flowers of the swamp maples and yellow flowers of the spice bush are out, the wood anemones are about to bloom, and the smooth shads will follow shortly. It was a record cold March and April hasn’t been all that warm, but the native plants are beginning to show their colors.

   So, there I was driving down the hill on Flamingo Avenue toward the Montauk Firehouse early in the morning last week. Up ahead on the other side of the road was a jogger at the start of her climb. Whoa! What’s that behind her?

    The Sportsmen’s Expo that is coming to the Amagansett Firehouse on April 20 will pretty much cover the waterfront when it comes to outdoor pursuits.

    Terry O’Riordan, one of the organizers, said during a conversation this week that “we’ve got 30 to 40 exhibitors, about 10 more than we had at our first expo last year.”

   People have been asking me about the completely browned-off white pines that resulted from the passing of superstorm Sandy at the end of last October.

   Well, we finally had a spate of spring-like weather. On Saturday, a phoebe was calling around my house, joining the two-week siege of grackle, redwing blackbird, cardinal, Carolina wren, and tufted titmouse calling and singing. Phoebes show up when the insects begin popping out, and they started popping out over the weekend like mad.

    There was a time in early spring, not all that long ago, when baymen set fykes on the bottom of Lake Montauk to trap the winter flounder as they rose from their muddy hibernation. There were enough flounder, in fact, for hook-and-line flounder anglers to get their nose out of joint over the presence of fykes. No more.

If only Robert Moses, New York’s supreme 20th-century planner and doer, could revisit one of his first parkland acquisitions, Hither Hills State Park, and take a look as the gem of that park system, the Walking Dunes, he would feel very confident that his decision was well made.

    Keeping a weather eye can be a challenge in these parts, especially as the seasons change. Anglers who have begun the process of getting rods, reels, boats, and trailers out of mothballs might also think about getting back in touch with the weather gods.

   The Ides of March, the days on and around March 15, were the start of the new year on the ancient Roman calendar. It was considered a propitious time full of promise unless you happened to be Julius Caesar, or the old men back in ancient Greece — long before Medicare — who were first dressed in animal skins, then beaten, and finally driven from town to celebrate the expulsion of the old year.

   Skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, is a plant of the Northern Hemisphere and a species that occurs throughout most of North America except for in the South and West. A flowering plant in the Jack-in-the-pulpit family, it is one of the first plants to flower each year and thus is a true harbinger of spring. The second half of its scientific name refers to its fetid smell, not unlike the effluvia emitted by a defensive skunk or the scent a red fox uses to mark its territory.