From the category archives:
At the end of John’s Gospel Peter gets impatient waiting for the resurrected Messiah to show up with further instructions and goes fishing with the other Apostles. They catch nothing all night. In the morning they see Jesus on the beach grilling fish (where’d He get those?) He tells them to cast the net on [...]
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At Work in the Garden of Eat and Be Eaten
By Charles F. Tekula, Jr.
On dry land nothing’s moving yet,
still dark and cold.
But in the watery fields the feasting continues.
Bluefish dart like lightning in and out of the pods of bunkers
that themselves still strain the tiny swimming plankton,
even as their brethren are themselves devoured. Spider crabs [...]
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In the PBS Nature presentation chronicling the demise of the red knot population, which they said took place precipitously in the 1990’s, they blamed it on the supposedly coinciding drop of the population of spawning horseshoe crabs. It was said that commercial fishermen discovered in that decade that female horseshoe crabs with eggs [...]
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Just so you know, there are more fluke (aka summer flounder), more striped bass and more horseshoe crabs near our shores now than anyone alive has ever seen. But in New York the fluke season is closed for both sport and commercial fishermen, the horseshoe crab take is closely controlled and President Bush has moved [...]
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(click on the photo for an article and a video about LI baymen)
As to the “new data” on the percentages of fishing mortality the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is now embracing, and the controversy this is engendering, I’d like to make of few personal observations. My credentials are these – I have [...]
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2/28/07
At the end of January Newsday reported on the plight of a long successful multi-generational Long Island bayman. As soon as I read about how the Town of Islip and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) had finally run Frank Sloup out of town, I knew it was coming. I just [...]
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One sunny summer afternoon I was out in our yard tilling the little victory garden that I had enhanced with the carcasses of otherwise underutilized sea robins and summer dogfish. Our second child was pensively dangling from a swing on the swing set I had erected not twenty feet from me. I [...]
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