Sept. 21 marks the 75th anniversary of the Great New England Hurricane of 1938. Although in many respects the hurricane of 1944 was much worse (it killed more people around the Vineyard than any storm in the 20th century), the 1938 hurricane is the one that stands in the record books.

In the middle 1970s, trap fishing enjoyed a brief revival on the Vineyard on the site of an old Campbell and Flanders trap near Menemsha Bight. Chris Murphy of Chilmark set up exactly the same type of trap that the old-world Island fishermen were using in the 1930s, only he rigged his netting from floating 55-gallon barrels anchored to the bottom rather than using heavy wooden stakes.

Fall officially arrives on Sunday at 4:44 p.m. Daylight is becoming a precious commodity.

Hummingbirds are surprisingly abundant for mid September. A request for information sent out yesterday generated 19 responses, 14 of which still had either females or immatures at their feeders on Sept. 16. Wow! I did not expect that many responses. Charlie Kernick was the only one to report that a male was still present, so the males have apparently left already. The other five responses had observed hummers either last week or over the weekend. Thanks to all the respondents; there are too many names to list them all.

Abundance is a difficult thing to judge. Changes to the abundance of a particular species are relative to our perception of its abundance when we first observe the species. Our first observations become our baseline against which we measure changes in our natural world. Is this appropriate? Consider horseshoe crabs.

Katama Bay oyster farms in Edgartown were closed this week after two people who ate oysters from the bay contracted Vibrio parahaemolyticus (Vp).

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the Department of Fish and Game, Division of Marine Fisheries announced the closure Monday.