Accabonac Harbor in Springs and Northwest Creek in East Hampton will receive a new degree of scrutiny after an expansion of a water testing program run by Concerned Citizens of Montauk.

The major question having to do with climate change before the East Hampton Town Board today is how do we save Montauk from global warming.

If you looked at The New York Times on Monday, you may have come across an article about saltwater crocodiles in the Philippine Islands and how they attack humans every so often and recently killed a fisherman.

Birds continue to return north. Jane Bimson sent me a nice shot of an osprey perched in a tree at the edge of Fort Pond. Karen Rubinstein, who has overseen the Montauk Christmas Count for the past two years, and lives with her sister on Accabonac Harbor, reported that a pair of fish crows arrived and she observed an oystercatcher at Louse Point. She still has a pine siskin at her feeder that has yet to go north.

When I was a boy growing up in Mattituck across the bay, there were no Little League baseball teams or summer camps to occupy our time and keep us from getting into trouble.

Victoria Bustamante and her college-age son Chris visited one of the Atlantic white cedar swamps on Friday. There are four in North Sea, three on the north side of Little Fresh Pond and one on the south side. Conifers that do well with roots in standing water are rare across the globe and white cedars are our only native conifer with such a habit. In fact you almost never find one doing well on dry land.

Brrrr. We knew that the mild weather wouldn’t last. So here we are shivering our timbers and wondering what comes next. Then, however, March is only a month away. Let’s hope it’s a pleasant one.

The dredge spoil deposited on Havens Beach in Sag Harbor in the spring of 2018 was full of a bunch of curiosities including pieces of concrete, crockery, rusted hunks of metal, and other junk.

The nation is shut down. It’s not for me to open it up. What’s worse to my locally oriented mind, however, is the stuff against nature that has been going down right under our noses here on the South Fork for the past several years.

Last Monday morning, while lying flat on my back on a cold, narrow, operating room table in a Manhattan hospital, an inordinate number of thoughts raced through my mind. It’s not an everyday situation to find yourself in, and your brain tends to go into overdrive.