Outdoors

   Think of the cold air that blew into town this week as a crystal clear lens provided for viewing the night sky, especially on Monday in Montauk, where there is virtually no ground light to interfere.

    The crescent moon was bright enough to make you squint, and Venus just below and to the right nearly so. Jupiter hung directly below Venus and if one were fortunate to have a telescope or even powerful binoculars, its moons would have been visible. On Tuesday night Venus was at its farthest point from the sun.

   Just when you thought you had nature by the handle, here comes one of the most bizarre creatures yet, one you had no idea of and one that is found in less than a third of the field guides and other books dealing with insects and lepidopterans, in particular, moths.

    It was two weeks ago when I was walking along the Long Beach parking lot road in Noyac when Vicki Bustamante pointed to something in the dune area between Long Beach Road and the parking lot. Not good, she said.

    Spring, the vernal equinox, the season of rebirth, sprang in the early morning hours on Tuesday with its promise that all living things, including fish, will return for another go-round.

    Every culture has celebrated the equinox — when the center of the sun is on the same plane as the earth’s equator — in one way or another, even in Amagansett. One such annual fete took place in the home of Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett. According to Bennett, the sol­emn ceremony went like this:

   On Monday evening after a record high temperature for March 12 I went out at night to listen for spring peepers. Between 8:30 and 10, I visited 11 known peeper breeding sites and heard not a single peep. The sites were watery, but apparently not watery enough. Peepers and other frogs and toads that breed in water, as do all of ours on Long Island and all but one of our salamander species, generally don’t move from the ground until there’s a rain, and it hasn’t rained sufficiently for at least two weeks now.

   Where has all the smoked whiting gone? There was a time when it seemed smoked whiting was everywhere. Bars in Montauk put it out for snacks. Not putting out a smoked whiting appetizer at Christmastime was considered a grave social faux pas. In barter transactions, smoked whiting was stable currency.

   Pete Spagnoli, a Sag Harbor physical therapist and adventure racer who often traverses in his wide-flung travels some forbidding terrain and has faced some of nature’s more daunting conditions, returned, as he had vowed, to Alaska’s Mount McKinley last June for a second attempt.

    Montauk’s fishing community was saddened by the death of Bobby Huser on Monday. Most will picture him at the wheel of his classic Nova Scotia-style lobster boat, Teddy Boy. The Muskrat, as he was known, was a popular presence on the Montauk docks for decades. He will be sorely missed.

   The first column I wrote for The East Hampton Star was in March of 1981. It was about Alosa pseudogarengus, the alewife, of the now-threatened river herrings. As far as Long Island post-Columbian history is concerned, the alewife ranks right up there with the quahog, steamer clam, bay scallop, oyster, and right whale. It was, perhaps, the only catadromous fish — one that leaves salt water to breed in fresh ­water — the first settlers could count on, as our streams and ponds were too small for the likes of the Atlantic salmon, which bred in New England rivers.

   It’s just conjecture, but an early recreational fishing season seems possible given a number of signs, including the recent discovery by commercial draggers of a sizable number of porgies in 26 fathoms of water, relatively close to shore. The question is, will the fish arrive early, or did they never leave?

   The weather was springlike on Friday and I had the good fortune of accompanying Howard Reisman and Vicki Bustamante to a Southampton Town preserve that I hadn’t visited since the spring of 1979. At that time the 50 acres or so of wooded bottomland on each side of a meandering stream was in private hands. It was up before the Southampton Town Planning Board as a proposed subdivision with umpteen parcels.

   An authority on rope suggested to me that vines that climb up trees go up clockwise just as the first course of rope is laid in its manufacture. Do all vines go “right-handed,” like rope? Of course, a right-handed vine is only right-handed when looking up from the ground. Looking down from its top it is left-handed or counterclockwise.

   It’s the middle of winter. Except for the greens of the conifers and some evergreen hardwoods, the trees are bare and the leaves that still cling to the lower branches are a drab brown.

    The lawns, whether covered with leaves or raked clean, are of an ecru hue at this time, with a few exceptions. There are some brilliantly green lawns, even in winter, and the greens come in a variety of tones, from very light to a brilliant lustrous green to a dark green that reflects little light.

   The South Fork of Long Island and, in particular, East Hampton Town have a quasi-natural feature that few other areas in the United States can claim, the “lop tree.” Lop trees, or boundary marker trees, are scarce in Southampton Town but abundant in East Hampton, especially so in the Northwest, Springs, and Amagansett areas.

   In October, while Three Mile Harbor was being dredged by a Suffolk County contractor, Steve Brennan and Chris Martin were using side-scanning radar to follow the course of the dredging work. Side-scanning radar allows one to look sideways along the bottom of a water body and see objects that rise off the bottom such as old wrecks, sunken 55-gallon drums, and other debris. What Brennan and Martin found among other things was a very large boulder in the channel, mostly submerged but sticking up out of the bottom.

   Saturday set a record for warmth in January. Sunday was a little colder but well above freezing. My wife, Julie, and I decided to drive down Noyac Road a mile and visit the most popular United States Fish and Wildlife Refuge on Long Island, the Elizabeth A. Morton Wildlife Refuge on Jessup’s Neck.

   Another year has passed. The Christmas bird counts are in the bag. It’s time to sit back and enjoy the cold weather.

If the crew aboard the Viking Star on Tuesday has anything to say about it — and you can bet they will — the day they were attacked by an army of black sea bass will not be forgotten.

­    As the Northern Hemisphere continues to warm up, natural selection will reverse a long-term trend in warm-blooded animal evolution known as Allen’s Rule. Mammals that stay active in the winter tend to have thicker fur than those that hibernate, just as the plumage of seabirds is thicker than that of land birds in general.

    An extraordinary event took place on Saturday — the annual Montauk Christmas bird count, now more than 100 years old and among the very oldest in the country.

    Birders go out and rake over a 15-mile-diameter circle to record the number of different species and the number of each seen or heard from before dawn until well after dusk. The circle covers Montauk, Amagansett, including Napeague, Springs, and Gardiner’s Island, as well as part of the ocean, Block Island Sound, Napeague Bay, Gardiner’s Bay, and Accabonac Harbor.

    It is impossible interpreting the present, but you can come close interpreting history. In my mind the history of East Hampton, and for that matter all of Long Island, is much more interesting than what is happening now. We’ve passed way beyond the age of discovery; we might better describe contemporary life as the age of packaging, marketing, distribution, and bad political theater. There are no Jeffersons, Washingtons, Lincolns, and Franklins to lead and enlighten us, only their poor likenesses recycled over and over to lull us into acquiescing submission.

Local discoveries and rediscoveries are still to be made.

    Sunday was a perfect day to take a walk in the woods. Adelaide de Menil and I went to the South Fork-Shelter Island Nature Conservancy’s Sagg Swamp Preserve. Adelaide had never been there, I had not been since 1995 when I led a walk for the Conservancy.

At 10 this morning, the Montauk SurfMasters surfcasting tournament ended with a collective whimper.

We cannot sustain ourselves without oxygen, and we can’t exist without nitrogen either, but too much nitrogen, and the balance of nature is seriously out of whack: Think red tide, brown tide, and other algae blooms.

    Thanksgiving is perhaps the one holiday that has not yet had its meaning sucked from it by commercial vampires, at least not here on the East End. Maybe because of the wild turkeys grazing along the side of the road.

    Certainly nature’s bounty in the form of striped bass, scallops, ducks, herring, deer, deer, and more deer, cauliflower, squash, brussels sprouts, and cranberries — if you know where the bogs lie — helps.

On Sunday, just when it seemed the surfcasting season was over, boaters began finding striped bass feeding on schools of herring

Leaves. We can’t live without them; some of us can’t live with them, particularly so after they’ve all fallen and coated every inch of landscape