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January 12, 1989 - Focus on Nature: Ice Challenges Winter WildlifeM Focus on Nature: Ice Challenges Winter Wildlife By Paul Stoutenburgh The cold snap we had last week surely let you know who's in charge of the outdoors and, as they always say, there's not too much you can do about it. At least today we're us- ually forewarned of what's coming. By watching the weather channel and the path of the jet stream, one could pretty well tell we were in for a real old -time cold snap. Seems to me, though, that the cold years ago lasted longer and froze things up more than today. My grandson has been hoping for ice to try out new skates his uncle gave him for Christmas, but just about the time it freezes hard enough to skate, it rains or thaws. When the temperature drops to five and 10 degrees and the northwest winds howl at 15- 20 mph, the best place to see this winter rampage is over on the North Shore, partic- ularly where there are rocks. We don't have the rocky outcroppings here on Long Island that they have along Connecticut and Rhode Island shorefronts where rugged bedrock comes right to the surface. Rather, the rocks we have along the North Shore are glacier boulders of all sizes and sorts left here when the great glaciers retreated sore 10- 15,000 years ago. Proof of their glacial journey is the roundness that comes from the grinding of the glacial till as it moved southward. It came out of that frozen vastness only to stop here and then retreat, forming Long Island. Through aeons of time, erosion has washed away the sand and debris, leaving the stones and rocks we associate with the North Shore. Cold Wind Paints Shoreline During the summer the ocean beach of the South Shore is fanned by the warm moist southwest winds of the ocean but during the winter the northwest winds tear at the North Shore causing dramatic erosion each year. When it's here you'll see winter's icy spray paint and plaster the rocks into shapes of roundness. The area becomes a fairyland of white even though not a flake of snow has fal- len. This winter ice makes it difficult for ducks so they depart for open water further out or a rip where the moving tide won't let the sea ice form. The faster the tide rip, the less likely you'll have ice, for they are turbulent and ever-changing, bringing up warm water to replace the chilled surface water. It's into the deep offshore churning areas and toward these tide rips that ducks head when ice is forming in the cold shallow ar- eas. Of course, there has to be a food supply on the bottom or the ducks will leave and seek out feeding grounds somewhere else. Winter Ducks Easily Identified Many of our winter ducks are quite hand- some and easily identified. The little black and white ones we see in our creeks and bays are the bufflcheads, or as the hunters might call them, butterballs. The male red - breasted merganser in his handsome black - and -white coat is easily recognized. Larger than the bufflehead, it has a long thin pencil- like bill that distinguishes it from most other ducks. The female is a drab bird with a red- dish head and brownish -grey sides. These divers are sometimes called shelldrakes by the locals. Our three scoters are less colorful but with a pair of binoculars easily recognized. The surf scoter has a white patch on the back of its head, giving it the local name skunk - head. It also has a very gaudy orangish bill. The white - winged scoter can easily be rec- ognized in flight by its white wing patch. The most difficult to identify is the black scoter that is entirely black. Scoters are big birds and continually diving for food along the bot- tom. There are others but if you can get to know these few, you'll be well on your way to identifying most of our winter ducks found Y5 �� �,,`'� r Y ✓/4 h .- �ee. Our ocean beaches along the South Shore miss the chilling northwest winds of winter. Not so for the North Shore where single -digit temperatures blown from across the Sound create a frozen spray that covers all it can reach in a mantle of white. —Paul Stoutenburgh Photo in our bays here on the East End. One never tires of watching our waterfowl whether on the ocean, bay or inland pond Already some ducks are showing off in ex otic mating rituals. We just watched a red - breasted merganser the other day bobbing its head up and down with its bill raised high to the sky in some mysterious courtship dis- play. To us it was most comical. A friend called last week telling me he had seen six Harlequin ducks off the rocks at Plum Island. This is what all birders look for in the winter. It's the highlight of the season to see these visitors from the far, far north. Many a season goes by when we never see one. Most agree that the Harlequin along with the wood duck are the most spectacu- lar of waterfowl in color. It is a small duck that is usually associated with swift waters and rocky shores, even in its nesting grounds in far north Labrador and Greenland, where the parents choose the rush of turbulent streams to bring up their young. Around here the place to see them is at Montauk, Orient and other rocky rough wa- ter spots. It's a duck I remember from my youth when I used to thumb through that wonderous volume called Birds of America. I can still see Plate 19 with its wintry paint- ing of Harlequins and Eiders by Fuertes. It's just such remembrances that have kindled my interest and I hope yours too in the world around us. FREE Checking Accounts For South Fork Businesses At Bridgehampton National BRIDULF -1 PT�K NATIONAL BA STATEMENT Business Checking Account • .. N/C Per Deposit Deposit Item N/C Per Check Monthly Service Charge Total N /C* FREE. Why Pay For Checking Account Services You Can Get FREE at BNB? IWWEEWMEMEN. *Free checking accounts with no monthly service charges for South Fork Businesses when you maintain an average monthly available balance of $5,000 or more. Five dollors monthly service charge when average monthly available balance is below $5,000. 6 6 Bridgehampton National Bank The South Fork's oldest independent commercial bank. Founded 1910. Main Street, Bridgehampton • 537 -1000 • Plaza East, Bridgehampton • 537 -1200 26 Park Place, East Hampton • 324 -8480 • 425 County Rd. 39, Southampton • 283 -1286 Member FDIC THE SOUTHAMPTON PRESS / JANUARY 12, 1989 What Happens' Collection of Robert Long Poetry Explores Role of the Individual By Allen Planz This marvelous poem ends quietly when he In What Happens, Robert Long's new col- buys a velveteen jacket from a courteous lection of poetry (Galileo Press, $9.95), the street vendor and tries it on. "People walked poet engages the major themes of his work: by. I had my gloves between my teeth/ trauma, loss, the inexhaustible mystery of "Whaddya think," I said. "Looks good," he life and language, various rites of passage, said. and the meaning of the individual in society. But, you say, come on! "Windexed "? The second stanza of "First Day of Spring" 'Slat" "Big Deal" indeed (to say nothing of begins: "Whaddya Say "). In another poem Mr. Long Everything goes by so quickly! The first says "Kerpow and schlock are our favorite stanza's words." Is this another instance of imitation Already as ancient as any high school folk or pop art? How about punk poetry? history, (The Long Island School of Punk poetry 1977 - And sudden absences like those leave sud- 1981 never flourished much east of Speonk af- den holes. ter its founder, Gaynor Ngronsky, was shot When I got cracked in the nose with a base- in the Yaphank minimall in a mob - related ball bat corporate takeover). Yuppie quop? Dogge- Playing grammar school softball, rel? Who talks like that? Well, speaking strictly from this end of our seasonal service I saw angels, Lyndon B. Johnson, and doe- economy, I do, but not in print. Only in post - tors capitalist, post- modernist America can a na- For the next three years, until my nose tive son like Bob Long, former chef, former Stopped bleeding and started breathing adolescent, have the audacity of genius to again. talk like that, in poetry. You could say my nose went on strike. And deliver it in a stand -up, conversational Now it veers toward Portugal tone that is his claim on his generation, that extends, as William Carolos Williams put it, No matter when I'm headed. I'm talking the domain of the sayable, and thus fulfills About my generation, or re- generation. the oldest of modernist tenets: make it new. I saw my best hand- patched jeans The use of conversational devices amounts Hit the heap, then reappear, miraculously, not to experiment but to augmentation of On angels walking down Main Street. form, like rhyme, stanza, meter —a kind of That last stanza, with its play on the op- eloquence, rather than rhetoric, achieved by ening of Ginsberg's Howl, emphasizes that an insistence on common elocution and spon- something mysterious passes from genera - taneous improvisation. Mr. Long is quite tion to generation, endures and survives but aware of this. The poem "Saying One Thing" cannot be anticipated. is composed entirely of cliches. Cliches en- Expect the unexpected. That's the first compass a stock emotion in memorable thing about What Happens. The "sudden ab- rhythm; that's why we use them. Roll out a sences" in these well ordered poems are the list of cliches and you have a recipe for in- occasion for a confrontation with reality, surrection, or a force against ritual suicide, from which is won a new meaning to exper- as if saying one thing and meaning another ience, however provisional. is next to glossolia in hip elegance. For the most part, these poems investigate Another ambitious poem, "Time and its those pauses in the quotidian in which we find Double," succeeds where Antonin Artaud our bearing and take stock and, in this poet's failed in Theatre and its Double, by refusing case, start talking. "Anything can happen," to distinguish between catharsis and con - he says in the title poem. At such a pause, sumption, eschewing both for decorum. Dy- the poet's fluency can cause him to "hear the Ian Thomas said we must find a substitute slap of water on fiberglass, wood," or see for time and followed Coleridge who said he "two egrets fold into march grass," or ob- found it in delirium. In an age when so many serve "If Long Island is the lobster claw Ad- poets, like John Ashberry and others of the junct to the malformed body/ of the Mid early New York School of poetry, struggled Atlantic States, I'm sitting on the periphery to defeat meaning, it's refreshing to see a / of a minuscule barnacle about to close on poet assume their posture and pursue it. Gardiner's Island," which causes him to cat - There are poems in this volume that defy alogue the effects of hurricanes thereabout. classification and even quotation by sheer These pauses occur throughout the poems, force of meaningfulness finely felt through - too, as asides, divigations, catalogues, etc. out the poem. Among these are "Elegy for that move the themes along obliqueley, to- Grandfather," "Montauk Point," "It's Not gether with puns, witticisms, non sequiturs, the Heat, It's the Stupidity," "Somewhere on jokey quips (but no jokes), and especially the Coast of Maine," and "Chelsea." Mr. misquotations, mis- hearings, qualifying ap- Long writes equally well of Manhattan and positives applied to a sentence, say, that the East End, the landscape he calls "exur- meanders through several lines from one bia," of which he is the fond pastoralist de- stanza to another, followed by another, syn- spite its dangers. His talent is strengthened tactically abrupt but cadenced flawlessly. A by the union of his love of language and his poem may begin calmly: love of life. Last night, in a dream, a woman American poetry promised, beginning with Called on the phone to ask if I'd like to Whitman's installation of the muse in the order kitchen, to unite people and objects, objects A case of instance rice pilaf. Today and land, the sacred made real, and Mr: I'm "taking in" the September sun Long's contribution to that reality is the land - On an afternoon so mirror -like and bluish gape of exurbia as home and heartland. And It seems Windexed, his vision is to bring to this perception the —from "Littoral Landscape" enactment of perception. Here things are "so Or less sedately shifty The Hell's Angels live one block up from here They acquire a permanence. And the blat of their hogs fills the morning An enthusiastic Malemute comes bounding As I stand here on your front steps out of a bush. Still wearing the dinner jacket I wore last And I have a minor heart attack. night, Earlier, I had washed my car with a hose, At the big-deal opening where we drank Then sat staring, thinking of you. champagne The mailman's coming down the road now And bumped into a lot of other people in in his red white and blue jeep. Here he is." tuxedoes, Sequins, furs, and so on... Allen Plans is a poet who lives in Sag Har- -From East Ninth Street bor. He is the author of seven books of poetry. 11 �. ► I IT 11 • 1 Ar IS NOW CLOSED WE LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING YOU IN THE SPRING RE- OPENING MARCH 16, 1989 95 MAIN STREET SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. 11968 283 -31' Wholesale Retail i1 Includes FREE Cup of Soup Fresh Seafood Salads Fresh Baked Baguettes THIS WEEK'S ME t � LOBSTER BISQU TWO -ALARM SCALLO SHRIMP & CRAB E- Clamman Seafood 235 N. Sea Rd. Clamman Seafood Wholesale Clar, 283. 6669 283.6431