Dans Hamptons

One thing that a newspaper is supposed to do every week is to write about trends. Things are trending toward the Republicans. People are trending away from Long Island. There’s a trend toward the iPod. Things like that.

Well, this winter, it seems, everything in the Hamptons is trending toward animals. We sat down at our round table in the conference room on January 10 to decide what we ought to put into the issue of January 17, and it all came up animals. I assigned an article on the attempted dolphin rescue in Northwest Harbor. There was a report that beavers, not native to Long Island, were building lodges up in the woods in East Hampton. The State of New York was pulling the funding from the Quogue Wildlife Reserve and that could leave the deer and possum stranded. And someone had stolen some shark’s teeth right out of a giant shark jaw mounted over the entrance to the restaurant inside the Montauk Lighthouse State Park Concession Center.

I assigned these stories, and several others that also included animals, and came away from that meeting thinking that when this paper comes out, we are going to look like National Geographic or something. And we did.

If you flipped through the front of our paper, looking at the pictures, you came upon a giant shark with its mouth open wide enough to eat you up, a big picture of an eagle at the Quogue Wildlife Refuge, a photo of a glossy red fox that was out there and a beaver that might have been from the new family of them in East Hampton. In the feature section of the paper, which Robin edits, there were pictures of lots and lots of dogs from the upcoming Westminster Kennel Club contest in Madison Square Garden. In the Kids section, there was an educational article about bottle-nosed dolphins with a picture of a couple of them nuzzling with one another, and in the North Fork section, which David runs, there was a picture of a groundhog. “When the Groundhog Wakes Up, He’ll Find North Forkers Snuggled In” was the headline.

Seeing all this, and considering all the other things that are going on in the area, involving crime, the arts, politics, society, fundraising, finance and real estate, I took stock of the situation. Was I becoming unbalanced? Had I been unduly influenced by a recent trip to Botswana? Was I becoming a tree-hugger? I decided to look at the pictures in some of the other newspapers in the area.

Well, it’s a trend. The photographs I found in some of the other local weeklies this past week included a striped bass, a bunny, a pigeon, a dolphin and somebody looking through a magnifying glass at a pretty ladybug. That was in one paper. In another, there was a photograph of two horses, another photograph of a whale and another photograph of shark’s teeth — and all of those were right on the front page. Inside, there was a picture of a herring, a bunny and a sculpture of an eagle atop a flagpole.

Well, I have to finish writing this article. It is 10 a.m. Saturday morning on January 27 and at 12:30 I have to be in Hampton Bays at the canal to cover the big story. The Riverhead Sea Mammal Service is releasing a harbor seal they saved and nursed. Can’t miss that. I think her name is “Luna.”