Meanwhile on the North Fork...........

[Volkonski]

About half a mile from our cottage and only 1 block from Mrs. V's cousin who lives down by the Bay.

Dump truck driver attacks Riverhead ambulance rushing to medical emergency: police

https://riverheadnewsreview.timesreview ... cy-police/

A sleepy intersection on the edge of South Jamesport was the scene of a harrowing road rage incident on Thursday morning, in which a dump truck driver used a metal pipe to batter a Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance heading to an emergency call — following a verbal altercation over right of way, according to police.

Shortly after 9 a.m., Riverhead police received a 911 call about an elderly Jamesport man in need of medical assistance. Patrol officers responded while alerting the Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps, which responded as well.

With its lights flashing and its piercing siren wailing, the ambulance was headed south on West Street, a block from the waterfront, when it attempted to make a left turn onto East Second St.

A dump truck in its path was trying to make a right onto West Street going northbound, according to police.

“The driver of the ambulance motioned for the driver of the truck to back the vehicle up so that the ambulance could proceed,” a Riverhead Police report reads. “The driver of the truck refused to move the truck and instead became involved in a verbal dispute over which vehicle had the right of way at the intersection.”

Authorities say the dump truck driver “exited his vehicle and continued the verbal argument and then got back into the truck and began inching his truck towards the side of the ambulance.

“The driver of the ambulance took evasive measures and drove up onto a nearby property and around the truck. The verbal argument continued, and the driver of the truck exited his vehicle and ran towards the ambulance, holding a metal pipe. As he approached the driver’s side of the ambulance, the male began striking the rear portion of the ambulance causing damage to the body of the vehicle.”

The ambulance driver flagged down a uniformed officer and reported the incident.

Police arrested Hamlet O. Ramirez of the Bronx, New York. On Thursday evening he was being held pending an arraignment on charges of obstructing governmental administration, menacing, criminal possession of a weapon and criminal mischief.

Two officials from the Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps did not immediately respond to a request for comment — nor was it clear whether Mr. Ramirez has retained an attorney. A spokesperson for the East End bureau of the Legal Aid Society of Suffolk County, located in Riverhead, took a message but couldn’t say whether any attorneys from the group were involved in the case.

It was also unclear what happened to the elderly Jamesport man in need of medical assistance. A Riverhead Police spokesperson said she could not divulge any further information about the incident beyond what was included in the department’s press release.

Detectives are actively investigating the case, according to resident Joe Broyles, whose home sits on the corner of West St. and East Second St. Mr. Broyles said he was not at home and not an eyewitness to the incident, but agreed to share his Amazon Ring home security video surveillance camera footage with investigators.

“The detective just left,” Mr. Broyles said in an interview. “He spent 45 minutes pouring through my footage.”

At other nearby homes in clear sight line of the intersection with Ring video surveillance systems, police detectives’ business cards stuck out from behind the distinctive Ring doorbells of residents who did not appear to be home on Thursday evening.

Of course most of them are not home. Those are mostly summer cottages and it is late October.

What kind of nut case picks a fight with an ambulance responding to an emergency call?

[Maybenaut]

What kind of nut case picks a fight with an ambulance responding to an emergency call?

In what universe does anyone have the right-of-way over an emergency vehicle. What a dumbass.

[NewMexGirl]

About half a mile from our cottage and only 1 block from Mrs. V's cousin who lives down by the Bay.

Dump truck driver attacks Riverhead ambulance rushing to medical emergency: police

https://riverheadnewsreview.timesreview ... cy-police/

“The detective just left,” Mr. Broyles said in an interview. “He spent 45 minutes pouring through my footage.”

Of course most of them are not home. Those are mostly summer cottages and it is late October.

What kind of nut case picks a fight with an ambulance responding to an emergency call?

You will have to pour through the footage to determine that. A pitcher is worth a thousand words.

[Volkonski]

This article is about upstate NY but the North Fork was similarly affect this Autumn.

The Apple-Picking Apocalypse of Upstate New York
Eight straight weekends of rain have pushed the pick-your-own orchards toward financial disaster.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/nyre ... -rain.html

According to Mr. Barton, this has been, without question, the most miserable fall tourism season since he converted the family apple orchard to a pick-your-own outfit in the 1990s. Over the decades, Mr. Barton said, he has spent “millions upon millions” building the venture up, adding a corn maze, an enormous playground, a petting zoo, and a tap room that sells hard cider and local microbrews. In recent years, he said, the property has drawn more than 10,000 visitors on peak weekends.

For Barton Orchards, which like many apple-picking farms makes most of its annual income from tourists filling bags with Galas, McIntoshes and Granny Smiths during two months in the autumn, the recent spate of wet weather has been nothing short of disastrous.

Nearly 11 inches of rain have fallen on the region in September and October, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 33 percent above normal. But those numbers don’t capture the true extent of the bad luck: The wettest days have disproportionately fallen on weekends, when pick-your-own farms receive most of their visitors. Commercial orchard crews work rain or shine, and this year’s downpours haven’t kept them from getting the apples off the trees. The general public, though, prefers to pick apples in nice weather.

It all started the weekend after Labor Day — the agritourism equivalent of Black Friday — when almost an inch of rain fell across the Hudson Valley between Friday and Sunday. Wet weather has struck on at least one day of each weekend since, leaving orchards sodden and turning parking lots into mud pits. Mr. Barton maintains that he’s lost at least 30 percent of his business this season to the incessant rainfall. Other u-pick orchard owners estimated that their fall revenue has decreased by a quarter to as much as a half.

According to Cynthia Haskins, the president and chief executive of the New York State Apple Growers Association, the self-pick orchard grew in popularity in the late 1990s, after deteriorating wholesale prices caused many small farms in New York State — the nation’s second-largest apple producer, behind Washington — to either leave the apple business entirely or find other avenues for marketing their produce. For those located within an easy drive of New York City, on-farm retail seemed like a natural fit.

“I’ve been farming since 1972, and this is the roughest fall I’ve ever seen,” said Bob Stuart, who converted his 35-acre apple farm in Granite Springs, N.Y., to pick-your-own in 1999, and now relies entirely on fall crowds for the farm’s annual income. This year, hay rides have been stymied by tractor wheels sticking in the mud, and he didn’t even bother to cut his corn maze; it would have been a soggy mess. “People aren’t coming out,” Mr. Stuart said. “You’ve got seven weekends to make it in, and if you lost half of your days, you’re out of luck.”

It’s the same story at Apple Dave’s Orchards, in Warwick, N.Y., where the owner, Peter Hull, said the bad weather has cut autumn visits to the farm by half. Mr. Hull’s father, Dave, switched from selling apples wholesale to a pick-your-own model in 1974, when the farm’s storehouse burned to the ground with the year’s entire crop inside. “The next year he couldn’t pay pickers or packers or truckers,” Mr. Hull recalled, “so he sat out there with paper bags from Shop Rite and said, ‘Come pick your own.’”

To help diversify the farm and move away from its reliance on the u-pick business, Mr. Hull built a distillery on the site, but it hasn’t served as much of a buffer this fall. On a nice weekend day, Apple Dave’s might see 3,000 visitors. The distillery can accommodate only 50 to 70 people.

As of the last week of October, many of his trees were still loaded with apples, destined to drop to the ground and rot. Should climate change lead to more rain-drenched autumns like this one, Mr. Hull doesn’t see any obvious ways for a retail apple orchard like his to adapt. “I’m wondering if we should all be getting more religious,” he said.

In the wake of this year’s weather woes, some orchards have been getting creative to try to recover lost sales. At Pennings Farm, in Warwick, N.Y., they’ve hauled in giant spotlights and opened the orchards to apple picking and hayrides on weeknights.

Normally the apple picking season closes at the end of October, but with so much fruit left on the trees this year, some farms are planning to extend into November, hoping the weather will stay warm enough to preserve the picking for another week or two. Most, however, have resigned themselves to the idea that there’s no chance of making up for all the income they’ve lost. For some, that will mean taking on new debt, or delaying repairs, or putting off equipment purchases for another year.

North Fork apple growers are even more dependent on agritourism since their orchards are not large enough to interest commercial apple packers.

[AndyinPA]

It was a lousy season for the fall festivals here, too. It rained every weekend of them. The one we go to, though, is a more diversified operation so also does blueberry, strawberry, etc., picking during the season. But their biggest moneymaker has to be fall, and I'm sure they took a big hit.

They gave the winter forecast for the area last night. Not as cold as normal and not as much snow as normal, about 25 percent less snow predicted. That would still be a foot + more than last year, when we only had slightly less than 18 inches. We never shoveled the driveway last winter.

With my husband gone, though, I'm going to hire a snow-shoveling plowing service. We did that one winter, and it was wonderful.

[Volkonski]

Potato farming on the North Fork is fading fast.

Potato farming hangs on: Legacy North Fork potato farmers dwindle as the East End changes

https://northforker.com/2023/10/potato- ... d-changes/

So much about Martin Sidor’s history in Mattituck can be seen in front of his family farmhouse at the west end of Oregon Road. Parked in a long row, as if placed there for a museum exhibit dedicated to a disappearing tradition, are a dozen potato trucks.

They are old; some are rusting away. All have seen better days. They are relics of a bygone era, when the North Fork was a different kind of place, when they were all put to good use harvesting acres of potatoes, which would be piled into the trucks’ V-shaped beds and transported to barns where they were washed, bagged and shipped to market.

“Those days are over,” Sidor said one summer morning, part of which he spent atop his tractor, digging potatoes out of a field south of the farmhouse.

He is seated at the farmhouse’s kitchen table. The room is filled with soft light. Dark clouds in the western sky threaten a late afternoon storm. His wife, Carol, ducks in to say hello to a visitor.

The kitchen has the warm feel of a family gathering place. Here is where conversations that matter take place, where important decisions are made. It is home to family mementos. Land records dating to the early 20th century fill a cabinet; family photographs decorate a wall.

Looking through old records, he finds a fading piece of legal paper that shows his grandfather, a Polish immigrant who came to America in search of a better life, bought the family’s first acreage in Mattituck in 1910. That was the beginning of the Sidor family’s journey on the North Fork.

“It lasted down to me, but so much is nearly gone now,” he said.

What is nearly gone is the acreage on the East End once dedicated to potatoes. In the 1950s, an estimated 75,000 acres of potatoes were grown on Long Island, about 15,000 of them in Nassau County. With the post-war development of Levittown, that farmland was swallowed up by miles of subdivisions that slowly spread east.

The North and South forks were home to hundreds of acres of potatoes well into the mid-1980s, when market prices fell so low many farmers called it quits. Old-timers talk about the sad spectacle of regularly occurring farm auctions, comparing them to funerals where a family said goodbye to a loved one.

Rapid transformation of the landscape turned the South Fork into a wealthy, Page Six playground. Farmhouses where generations were raised were remodeled into lavish summer homes; old potato barns were repurposed or torn down. Super-sized mansions sprawled across old farmland.

While the South Fork transformed, the North Fork’s potato industry held on for dear life. But in recent years, that has all changed. The Long Island Farm Bureau’s Rob Carpenter said no group keeps an up-to-date running total of who is still harvesting potatoes on the North Fork. What information he has is entirely anecdotal.

Carpenter and Sandra Menasha, a vegetable and potato specialist at Cornell Cooperative Extension in Riverhead, tick off the names of longtime and legacy North Fork farmers, often with Polish surnames, who have given up on potatoes.

This one is out; that one is no longer doing potatoes and is growing sod. They cite two or three others who gave up on acreage and now grow only small amounts to sell at farm stands. Both agree the number might — might — be six legacy potato growers still planting in Riverhead and Southold, with one more in Eastport and one in Bridgehampton. If they are undercounting, it is only by one or two.

“I would guess the total acreage still in potatoes on the North Fork is about 1,000,” Carpenter said, adding that Sidor is likely the last in all of Southold Town. “Marty might be doing 70 to 80 acres. It’s amazing there are any left.

“There are some bright and upcoming people in agriculture who are taking over existing farms and doing good things,” he added. “But the legacy potato farmers are really gone. We’ve done a good job saving 20,000 acres of farmland, but it does no good if we don’t have farmers to use it. We want to continue farming. That’s the battle we face.”

Bill Sanok, a longtime employee at CCE who retired in 2003, said he watched as potato acreage fell year after year. “There was once a hundred duck farms on the East End, now there is one,” he said. “Change comes. For potatoes, it’s down to a handful and I don’t know how they hang on.”

Menasha replaced Sanok at Cornell. “In my time here, we used to provide services to the growers and walk their fields to determine what diseases or insects might be present,” she said. “That was once my entire schedule. Now I might go to three growers each week as part of my job here.”

David Steele began working on John Tuthill’s Mattituck potato farm when he was 12 years old. “I moved [irrigation] pipe, did a little tractor work,” he remembered. “It was all potatoes, a little cauliflower, from the North Road [County Road 48] to Main Road.”

He sits in the workshop on old Tuthill land along Elijah’s Lane in Mattituck. Tools and various pieces of equipment fill the space. Outside, the heat of early August has begun to fade.

In the big barn adjacent to the workshop, hay bales are stacked nearly to the ceiling. The dusty air in the barn smells sweetly of freshly cut hay. Swallows dart in and out through the big open doors. A truck backs up and a woman climbs atop the mountain of bales and throws some down to her truck. The hay is destined for horse farms.

Steele gave up potatoes in 2019 when COVID-19 laid him out, sending him to the hospital for weeks when his survival was in question. He recalls days when he received his last rites. He pushed back.

Today, he grows hay and, with his son, Kyle, has planted some of the land once used for potatoes with sod. “You do what you have to do to keep going,” Steele said. “But everything has changed — nothing is the same.”

The evolution away from potatoes is best seen on Sidor’s farm. The potato trucks parked along the road, and the old equipment in the field on the east side of the house, represent a time capsule of what once was. He reels off the names of growers who worked nearby when he was a young man. He is now 72, and looking toward his and his family’s future on this land. All are now gone. There’s a vineyard west of the farm. To the south another vineyard is planted on what had been for generations the Ruland farm.

[Volkonski]

As the Peconic Bay scallop season is about to open the early reports on social media are not encouraging.

Season opens Monday. Heard from someone who went all around Robins Island to Reeves with a test dredge. All bugs with a few keepers.

It does not look good my Boss has looked a lot and only had like 6 keeper size in his dredge. Same with all the other guys I know. I fear they went the way of the dinosaur.

A "bug" is a young scallop too small to harvest.

Most experts blame rising water temperatures for the decline in the scallop population. Lobsters also affected by warm water. They have all but disappeared from LI and southern New England coastal waters.

[Volkonski]

Good news for Foggy-

Cock-a-doodle doo! Riverhead drops bid to ban roosters and regulate backyard chicken keepers

https://riverheadlocal.com/2023/11/03/c ... kf6tNBS-DE

Here’s something backyard poultry-keepers can crow about. The community has spoken and Riverhead officials heard them. Town officials have decided to drop the rooster ban idea. The town also will not pursue regulations on backyard coops, henhouses and pens.

“There was overwhelming support from the community for the roosters,” Council Member Tim Hubbard said today.

Town officials have heard from a lot of people speaking out against the rooster ban and backyard poultry regulations discussed last week by the Town Board — and they heard a lot of opposition to what was discussed, Hubbard said.

“It just seems it just overwhelming support for the roosters, that we’re a rural community. And I get that, you know, that’s why we brought it up to work session, so we could talk about it,” Hubbard said.

“We had complaints coming in, of people saying that they had roosters 10 feet outside their bedroom window because they live on a small lot and the house next to them was right on top of them. So we looked around, we looked at other towns to see what they had in their codes and we decided to put something together and talk about it and discuss it,” Hubbard said.

“I believe we’re going to just drop the topic and move on to something else,” he said.

“A lot of people love fresh chicken eggs. And it’s just another source for people to get them, so it’s not something big brother and government should get involved in,” Hubbard said.

[Volkonski]

Turtle Rescue of the Hamptons is not located in the Hamptons (South Fork) but rather about 1/2 mile from our North Fork cottage.

Rescue 'Overwhelmed' By Rising Number Of Wounded Turtles On LI

https://patch.com/new-york/northfork/s/ ... 27b23925a1

A rescue organization in Jamesport is "overwhelmed" by the number of injured turtles arriving at its doors.

According to Karen Testa, executive director of the Turtle Rescue of the Hamptons, scores of turtles are wounded in all kinds of ways.

"Our turtles are being hit by cars and boats. They’re suffering ear abscesses because of pesticide use on our lawns. Dogs are attacking them. Landscapers and bulldozers are digging them up from their hibernation," Testa said. "And they’re getting trapped in window wells and outside basement doors."

Testa said that the organization has seen increasing numbers of turtles dying because of exterior basement doors accessed by concrete steps. "What happens is that turtles and also rabbits and snakes find themselves trapped on the steps, where they often starve to death," Testa said.

She encouraged homeowners to install Bilco doors at the top of the stairs to save wildlife from deadly consequences.

Window wells, she noted, are also fatal for turtles and other wildlife, but there is a simple and inexpensive fix that homeowners can take to help protect wildlife.

"If you have a window well, putting a plastic cover over it will save a lot of turtles, rabbits and other wildlife from falling into the well and dying," she said.



Currently at the rescue, Testa and her team are caring for more than 200 turtles, many of whom have debilitating injuries preventing them from ever being released into the wild again, she said.

[Volkonski]

Good time not to be on the North Fork.

Not labelled in the article but this is just 700 feet from our cottage.



Storm Pummels Long Island, Flooding Roads And Eroding Beaches

https://patch.com/new-york/northfork/st ... 754e7b7a62

LONG ISLAND, NY — Mother Nature pummeled Long Island Tuesday with heavy rain, wind, and coastal flooding and the area was still struggling to dry out Wednesday, with many roads still flooded and beaches closed.

According to Nelson Vaz, meteorologist with the National Weather Service office at Upton, areas across Long Island with poor drainage were impacted, with coastal flooding an issue on the shorelines of ocean beaches. Beachfront areas were "hard hit," he said, with high wave action and water levels, impacts to dunes, and overwash, he said. "We're still getting a sense of how hard hit the dunes were," he said.

Vaz added that the South Shore of Long Island, from the southern parts of Nassau, heading east to Mastic and areas along the Great South Bay, exceeded the major flood threshold. Those areas saw between 2 to 2.5 feet of water above ground, with 3 feet reported locally in some areas.

Overall, Long Island saw about 2.5 to 3.5 inches of rain, he said. Wednesday's high tide is slowly receding but there are still elevated flooding areas, he said.

Beachfront areas on the East End were hard hit with major road flooding and beach erosion.

[Maybenaut]

Hope everything is OK at your place and those of your neighbors, some of whom are Mrs. V’s relatives, no?

Anywho…

[bill_g]

Pretty much the same on the Left Coast at least in Tillamook County yesterday.

[Volkonski]

Hope everything is OK at your place and those of your neighbors, some of whom are Mrs. V’s relatives, no?

Anywho…

Most of our neighbors there are Mrs. V’s relatives.

[Volkonski]

[Annrc]

Nice!

[Volkonski]

Farming, with the possible exception of wine grapes, may soon disappear from the North Fork.

What the present means for the future of farming

https://riverheadnewsreview.timesreview ... Lf3KhR_BNI

In our October Northforker magazine story about the last remaining potato farmers on the North Fork, we told the story of Eric Wells. He grew up on farmland in Aquebogue that his family had been cultivating since the 17th century.

Last year, Mr. Wells uprooted his wife and five kids and moved his farming operation to Aroostook County in northern Maine, a roughly 11-hour drive from the North Fork. He deeply respected his family’s history here, but he knew his days of successfully farming in the area had come and gone.

“We’d been in Aquebogue for so long. But we could no longer be viable with potatoes on our family land,” he said in an interview for our October article. “It wasn’t working, and it had not been working for a long time. We had our last potato crop last fall and this year we bought 1,000 acres in Maine to start over. We can be potato farmers here.”

Consider the financial backdrop to the Wells’ family move: The purchase price for 1,000 acres in Maine was less than the cost of 100 acres on the North Fork — if the development rights had been sold, that is. If the development rights were available, the same amount paid for the Maine parcel would buy just 10 acres on the North Fork.



.......we spoke with Paulette Satur and Eberhard Muller, the Cutchogue couple who own one of the region’s — and the state’s — best known agricultural brands, Satur Farms.

Ms. Satur and Mr. Muller started their vegetable-growing business on 18 acres in Cutchogue more than 25 years ago. They sold their crop directly to restaurants, making them pioneers in what became the farm-to-table movement. Their salad mixes are available in Whole Foods, King Kullen, FreshDirect and other local and regional outlets.

But the economic forces that in recent years have swept over the South Fork are now fully present on the North Fork. Development pressure has increased, the cost of land and houses has skyrocketed and the tidal wave of incoming money has brought change that threatens Satur Farms’ future.

In fact, it threatens all future farming operations across the region because what a grower can make on their land doesn’t correlate — in any way — with the sky-high value of the land itself and the tens of millions that could be made building houses on it.

For a number of years, Satur Farms has leased a large warehouse in Calverton that was used for washing, processing, packaging and distributing their crops. That lease ended Jan. 31 because, as both Ms. Satur and Mr. Muller explained, the rent on the building nearly tripled and they could no longer afford it.

On top of this, a 140-acre tract of rich farmland in Cutchogue that the couple has also leased to grow their leafy greens may soon no longer be available to them. The couple explains they need that large tract to raise enough product to sell to the larger markets.

Their lease on that land expires in April. The land is owned by the Soloviev Group. As of this writing, the couple do not know if the Solovievs will allow them to renew the lease for another year and thus keep farming that land.

Without it, the couple explained, they won’t have what they call a “critical mass” of acreage to sustain Satur Farms.

Granted, nostalgia for a very different past on the North Fork is not a viable government policy. But neither is shooting yourself in the foot. Multi-million-dollar houses now seem to be the norm on the North Fork. Smaller tracts of farmland have been made available through the actions of the Peconic Land Trust, but this limited acreage will not support a business on the scale of Satur Farms.

Satur Farms does not sell directly to the public but I have been able to tour their operation twice over the years. There was a time when their business model of ultra high end produce sold directly to 5 star restaurants and gourmet markets was the future. Seems now it is the past.

[Volkonski]

The Wells family was one of the original settler families on the North Fork in 1640. So sad to see them go.

[RTH10260]

Cause I was interested in the origin of some name above:

Note: one long webpage with many pictures, loads slow

The origin of Long Island community names

By Michael Cusanelli, Rachel Weiss, Heather Doyle and Ian J. Stark
January 26, 2019

Have you ever wondered where Long Island towns got their names?

From Copiague to Quogue and everything in between, we've uncovered the origins of your hometown using municipal websites, information from historical societies and Newsday archives.


https://www.newsday.com/long-island/ori ... mes-i81735

[Volkonski]

Suffolk DA: 31 alleged gang members, including six from Riverhead, indicted on slew of violent felony charges after long-term investigation

https://riverheadlocal.com/2024/02/15/s ... stigation/

Six Riverhead residents are among 31 alleged members of a subset of the Bloods street gang facing felony charges under a 103-count indictment announced today by Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney.

The long-term investigation that led to the indictments covered 34 separate incidents, including 18 shootings, three armed robberies, three long-term conspiracies, including a conspiracy to commit murder, and the recovery of 12 loaded handguns used in 13 shootings and armed robberies.

A 44-year-old school teacher was shot and killed by gang members on April 1, 2023 in Hempstead, according to the press release.

According to the indictment, the defendants are alleged members of the Bloodhound Brims street gang, which Tierney described as “an established and organized subset of the nationwide Bloods gang.”

The investigation into a series of violent acts allegedly committed by members of the Bloodhound Brims got underway in early 2022, and was conducted by multiple law enforcement agencies, Tierney said in a press release today.

[Volkonski]

Deer With Container On Its Head Saved By Rescuers: 'We Never Gave Up'

https://patch.com/new-york/northfork/s/ ... 754e7b7a62

A deer who has been trapped with a plastic container on its head for 10 days was saved Friday night by a dedicated animal rescue advocate and a caring community who rallied behind his efforts to save her.

Frankie Floridia of Strong Island Animal Rescue worked tirelessly for the entire 10 days to save the deer, who was first spotted on Sound Breeze Trail/ Great Rock Drive in Wading River.

Her rescue was definitely the result of a team determined to save her, he said.

"This was a tremendous group effort between Strong Island and the residents," Floridia said. Residents, he said, opened their yards to him for the search and set up group texts to let him know when and where the deer was spotted. "It was amazing," he said.

He also emphasized that the frightened deer's plight was absolutely avoidable. "This is human error," he said. "This is because someone didn't recycle properly." There is a proper way to recycle, he added, by crushing jars, and putting lids back on large containers such as the one that was wedged tightly on the deer's head. Also, he said, locking garbage cans is critical.

[Volkonski]

In NY's 1st Congressional District which includes the North Fork.

John Avlon, CNN Commentator, Enters Race for Long Island Swing Seat

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/nyre ... alota.html

John Avlon, a Democrat and former CNN political analyst, announced on Wednesday that he would enter a crowded congressional primary to try to flip a Republican-held swing seat on Long Island.

A moderate who once worked for Rudolph W. Giuliani and helped found the centrist political group No Labels, Mr. Avlon emerged in recent years as a piercing critic of former President Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party he has refashioned in his image.

In an interview, Mr. Avlon, 51, said he felt compelled to step from journalism into the political fray to help “break this fever” and oust “MAGA minions who are not even trying to solve problems in the national interest.”

“The seriousness of the times really sunk into me,” he said.

Winning the Suffolk County district will be no easy task for a Democrat. It is currently held by Representative Nick LaLota, a first-term Republican. Though President Biden won the district by 0.2 percentage points in 2020, Mr. LaLota sailed to an 11-point victory two years later.

Democrats in Washington do not currently consider the district a top-tier target on par with more favorable suburban swing seats elsewhere in New York. But that could still change, as Democrats in Albany weigh whether to use a rare mid-decade court-ordered redistricting process to draw a more favorable congressional map.

[bill_g]

Ugh. Political redistricting aka Gerrymandering. I hate it no matter which party applies it.

[Volkonski]

Near the North Fork.

New Body Parts, Including Woman's Head, Found In Babylon: Reports
The woman's head, leg and arm were recovered, as well as two male arms, report indicated.

https://patch.com/new-york/northfork/s/ ... 754e7b7a62

Suffolk County Police Homicide Squad detectives said a left arm was found on the west side of the road on Siegal Boulevard, between Park Avenue and Mason Avenue, in Babylon at 8:41 a.m. on Thursday.

The arm was found by a female walking to school who called her father; he then called 911, police said. During a subsequent search by police, a cadaver dog found a located a leg sticking out of a mound of leaves in a wooded area on the western side of the park near Graham Place between Beverly Road and Martin Place, police said.

The same dog continued searching the east side of the park and found a right arm, approximately 20 feet away from the original discovery of the left arm, police said.

The remains found on the eastern edge of the park appear to be male, police said. The crime scene search of the western edge of the park has been suspended until daylight, police said.

[bill_g]

Don't you hate it when people leave their body parts all over?

[Volkonski]

Climate change.

Years-long iceboating drought grips North Fork

https://suffolktimes.timesreview.com/20 ... EPakiNnzpw

It’s been eight long winters since North Fork waters froze thick enough for iceboats to sail across, and barring an unexpected March deep freeze, the count will soon hit nine. The dearth of freezing weather has gone on so long, the motley crew of area iceboating enthusiasts recently resorted to an age-old — if slightly goofy — Nordic ritual.

On New Year’s Day, a group of diehards, dressed as Norse gods and swarthy Vikings and touting a two-foot-tall Santa Claus statue clad in a Hawaiian shirt, gathered on the shore of Hallocks Bay in Orient. They wielded hockey sticks and swept piles of machine-made ice into the bay, hoping to induce Mother Nature into a deep freeze. In a previous year’s ceremony, they built a little boat, set it on fire and sent it out into the bay.



The current eight-year drought “is as bad as it’s been” in decades, Mr. Acebo said, citing global warming. “It’s being felt all the way to Maine.”