Outdoors

    The sloop Leilani ventured east from Montauk Harbor early in the afternoon on Sunday, arriving in the cove off Oyster Pond at dead high tide. White clouds of screaming terns hovered and dived over schools of fish.

   I’ve never heard anyone utter anything nasty about butterflies. About moths, yes, but not butterflies. In just about every other animal group, particularly within the many insect families, there are hordes of species — bedbugs, mosquitoes, yellow jackets, termites, carpenter ants, deer flies, weevils, locusts, what have you — that have been called every curse word in the book. But butterflies have been spared. Why?

   The big striped bass are here. Star Island Yacht Club has reported that three bass over 50 pounds were weighed in during the past week.

    Scott Leonard, who runs the tackle section of the Yacht Club’s store, caught a 60.4-pounder on June 26. On Friday, Mike Ajello, fishing aboard the Susan A, reeled up a bass weighing 56.3 pounds, and on Sunday Anthony Vaccaro caught a 50.7-pound bass.

    If you are fishing in Gardiner’s Bay and spot what looks like a brown cloud just beneath the surface with a few flashes of reflected light near the surface, chances are it’s a school of bunker.

   The first ocean lifeguard test of the season, held at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett on June 16, drew 29 hopefuls, a record number, said John Ryan Jr., the town’s chief lifeguard, who has been helping to oversee East Hampton’s beaches for 30 years.

    All but two of those who took the arduous two-and-a-half-hour test passed. “We don’t say ‘failed,’ ” John Ryan Sr. said. “They can always take the test again and we urge them to.”

   The e-news just reported that sea level is rising on America’s East Coast faster than on the West Coast. What this translates into is the retreat of beaches and bluffs, the flooding of tidal wetlands, and the salting of drinking water wells situated close to the sea. On the other hand, while there will be losses and changes, there will also be more of the same.

   I went out on Saturday evening to listen for whippoorwills. It was a quiet night and near 60 degrees. The conditions should have been ideal for calling wills, but between dusk and 10:15 I covered 23 miles of back roads in Noyac, Watermill, and Bridgehampton, stopping at least 20 times with lights and motor off and did not record a single whippoorwill.

    The night sounds that I did hear, however, were compensatory. There were the long, fire siren buzzes of Fowler’s toads, the soft tremolos of gray tree frogs, and several different birdcalls and songs until it got dark.

   They say mako sharks come and go according to the number of bluefish, their favorite dish, in the area. On Friday, the first day of the Star Island Yacht Club’s two-day shark tournament, 25 makos were caught.

    True to form there seems to be a bumper crop of bluefish of all sizes, always a plus for vacationing neophyte anglers. Last weekend, a visitor from Queens booked a room at Lenhart’s Cottages in Montauk. Lenhart’s on Old Montauk Highway is a stone’s throw from the Atlantic Ocean.

   On Monday I found the first adult chigger, a k a harvest mite, climbing up the driver’s side door of my pickup truck. It was about the size of an adult deer tick and orangey. [Please see editor's note below.] Adult chiggers, themselves, are no cause for alarm, as they feed on plant material. It’s the thought of their babies that will emerge in August that distressed me, bringing to mind 26 years of annual chigger bite attacks here on the South Fork beginning in September of 1986.

   “Not knowing how to swim here, is like not knowing how to drive at the Indy 500,” wrote Lynn Sherr in her newest book, “Swim: Why We Love the Water.”

   The former WABC television correspondent was speaking of the East Hampton area, which she calls home for most of the summer. Also given praise in the book was the town’s junior lifeguard program, which made headlines this week when one of its trainees saved a drowning swimmer. “I am so impressed with them,” she said on Friday.

    Ken Rafferty is a light-tackle and fly-fishing guide who sails out of Three Mile Harbor this time of year and moves to Montauk in the fall when the false albacore make their appearance.

    In spring he likes to stalk striped bass as far west as Peconic Bay, with stops at places like Big and Little Gull Islands. Last week, he and his clients, James Kayler of East Hampton and Mike Tuscano of Amagansett, found plenty of stripers in Little Peconic Bay around Jessup’s Neck, and then bluefish galore at Cedar Point.

    It is the season of procreation.

   Arnold Leo called last week, concerned about a spotted white-tailed deer fawn, if not a newborn, then very close to it, that was sitting in the center of a yard near Georgica Pond on a property he had been caretaking. He was able to go up to it and touch it, and the fawn didn’t move a hair. He was worried it might have been abandoned, but as it turned out, the fawn had been “parked” by Mrs. Deer, probably while she was off foraging. She came back for it later on.

   The Montauk Chamber of Commerce will hold the annual Montauk Old-Timers round-table discussion and dinner at the Inlet Seafood Restaurant on East Lake Drive on Tuesday starting at  4 p.m.

   This year, Perry B. “Chip” Duryea III and Stuart Vorpahl will serve as historians to help put in perspective the observations of Jimmy Lester, Milton Miller, Teddy Stevens, Dave Krusa, John Rade, Bobby Byrnes, Scott Bennett, and John Nolan. Carl Darenberg of the Montauk Marine Basin will serve as moderator.  

    Last week, charter captains and private boaters sailing out of Montauk were finding striped bass, bass, bass. Nice plump ones. This week, the bass flurry slowed, but the slack was taken up by some doormat-size fluke and vast schools of bluefish. Then, there’s the news from California about radioactive bluefin tuna. Read on.

    The Lazy Bones party boat has been hot with left-handed flounder with fish up to nine pounds. If you stand them on edge, summer flounder, or fluke, have both eyes on the left side; the upward-gazing eyes of winter flounder are on the right side.

    It’s coming, it’s coming. This is the year of the Big One. Batten down the hatches and prepare to go without electricity for a week or so, or buy a generator ahead of time and have an electrician who knows what he or she is doing install it. Rising sea level and increased ferocity of storms is no longer a topic for idle discussion.

   A week ago Thursday, Stephanie Baloghy, who lives in East Hampton, called to tell me that she had just found a baby box turtle slowly making its way over some leaf-strewn ground in her yard. She examined it as she has examined others in past years. This one had already used up the yolk sack (like our umbilical cord) that is found on the bottom shell of just-hatched turtles. No bigger than a quarter, it most likely hatched last fall but didn’t emerge until a few weeks ago.

    Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett can always be counted on for a fish tale or two. On Monday he related the adventures of one blowfish, a k a bottlefish or blowtoad.

    Bennett said he was checking the waters just outside Fresh Pond in Amagansett for signs of fish when he observed a seagull pick a blowfish from the surface. Blowfish are swarming local waters this season, always good for a laugh and a very tasty dinner.

    The bartering has begun. A plumber installing sinks and toilets at a Montauk motel in the throes of gentrification showed up late, sunburned, and begging his employer’s indulgence. 

   Orioles, towhees, great-crested flycatchers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, catbirds, and a ton of warblers have all come back to roost. The most spectacular avian visitor in a while was the white-faced ibis that was seen and photographed at Scoy Pond in the Grace Estate nature preserve over the weekend by and Pat Lindsey and Angus Wilson.

   We birders are always looking for the odd bird, not the familiar one. Yet it’s the familiar ones that provide us with the most information, the ones that quiet us down when things go awry, and at this point in civilization, they often do. On Friday, it was the sweet song of the Baltimore oriole heralding his return that set my mind at ease; on Sunday it was the wheezy nonsensical notes of the catbird, gone from my brain since August 2011, that did the same.

    The Montauk SurfMasters spring shoot-out tournament will begin at one minute after midnight tonight, or tomorrow morning, however you want to think of it. And, according to the few surfcasters who have already ventured to their favorite haunts, striped bass are schooling and ready to be caught.

    Bill Gardiner took his surf rod to a secret spot somewhere in Montauk in the dark over the weekend where he found lively action with a few nice fish in the teens.

    Reading this week’s press release from the State Department of Environmental Conservation was like waking from a wonderful, liberating dream and realizing it was all true.

    “These regulation changes reflect improvements to populations of scup, black sea bass, and summer flounder,” reported Kathy Moser, the D.E.C.’s assistant commissioner for natural resources. “The scup population is particularly robust at this time, and we encourage anglers to get out on the water and enjoy the increased opportunity for anglers to bring home freshly caught fish.”

   We are in the midst of a deep drought. Yes, we had almost three inches of rain locally two Sundays ago, but a drive by Chatfield’s Hole on Two Holes of Water Road showed that it hardly made a difference. The pond level was so low, that there were two ponds, a largish one to the north, a small one to the south. The small one had a tiny island in its center covered with the northern shrub of the heath family, leatherleaf.

    On April 10 I went with some friends to the meeting of the Long Island Botanical Society held at Stony Brook University. When we were approaching the campus from the north end of Nichols Road, a red fox streamed across the road from east to west with outstretched tail. When we arrived back at Warren’s Nursery in Southampton (our starting point), a red fox ran across Majors Path into the nursery, its tail in the same position. That made sense, there is an active den with fox kits at that site.

    Alfonso Marino stopped casting into the Georgica Pond gut as the water flowed into the sea. He stopped casting flies and watched in awe as Mother Nature did her spring thing shortly after the pond was opened to the sea on April 2 by order of the East Hampton Town Trustees.

    Trustees open it each spring and fall — when storm-driven ocean waves do not — in order to accommodate the fish that leave as fry and return to spawn as they have for millenniums.

   We are in the midst of a drought and there is nothing worse for those early leavers and early bloomers who bet on a premature spring, but not on the dry weather. In 1986 during an extended dry period a wildfire caught hold of Hither Woods in Montauk and burned more than half of it. In 1995 the Westhampton Pine Barrens exploded from too little precipitation and now in 2012 a warm, dry winter and drier, warmer spring has sparked another major forest fire, north and east of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton.

    Jean Dodds, secretary of the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt, anxiously hoped the moon would cooperate as two dozen hikers gathered in the parking lot of the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton Friday for the monthly full moon hike she led.

   The last “Nature Notes” column talked about Montauk’s ancient hardwood forest, the Point Woods. In East Hampton Town there are two other forests dominated by broad-leaved deciduous trees that have hardly been cut over and have been equally impressive during settler, colonial, and modern times.

   Are the striped bass here or not? The rumor mill is generating excitment and perhaps a few stretched truths.

    Surfcasting rods are appearing on roof racks. People who would normally drive Montauk Highway when traveling to and fro from Montauk are taking the Old Highway instead to keep eyes peeled for birds working.

    Yes, it’s an early spring, and yes, striped bass have been caught up west, but, as of Monday, the beach has been quiet so far in Montauk. East Hampton is another story.

   Some of you may remember when Camp Hero was still in possession of the federal government and when President Ronald Reagan tried to sell it to the highest bidder. The Concerned Citizens of Montauk showed up in force at the bidding site in New York City and put the kibosh on the sale. Simultaneously, Tony Bullock was working with Senator Moynahan’s office to have it become public land. And it did!