It seems that winter has finally found us. For a while, it only flirted with us from the outside; a little frost here, a bit of nasty wind there, some flash black ice for some extra fun and a thin coating of snow that lasted about 10 minutes. All through these little wintry games, the temperatures hovered around or above freezing, which has been downright tolerable, for winter. Even the birds got a little lazy wi...

Amy Hinesley wants to leave Monomoy Regional High School in better shape than she found it. The senior from Chatham has made a concentrated effort to make a positive impact on her school and she’s fully immersed herself in the high school experience — excelling not only in academics, but musical theater, band and athletics, too. And then there’s the laundry list of extracurricular activities Hinesley has be...

When you find something you like, you stick with it. That may be part of the rationale behind “The Ivan Variations,” a new full-length album by the Chandler Travis Philharmonic which consists of not one, not two, not nine, but 12 distinct versions of the same song. Now I know what you're thinking. Who wants to listen to the same song over and over 12 times? You do. Because this is not your average everyday album...

HARWICH – Adopting a dog is high on the list of things people are doing in the pandemic. So high, in fact, that nationwide shelters are reporting that the supply of dogs has often not been able to keep up with the demand. A Harwich family recently found a creative solution to this problem and adopted a rescue dog from the Caribbean island of Antigua. When Cheryl Eldredge and her husband Matthew decided the tim...

It was Christmas Day and Andrea Spence was starting to prepare dinner when she received a call about 20 stranded dolphins. She quickly left her home in South Orleans and headed for Brewster, where she weathered heavy rain with other members of the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s Marine Mammal Rescue and Research Team. Spence and her colleagues were met with a dire situation: 11 live dolphins were stran...

 The sometimes weird and sometimes spectacular adornments of wild creatures inspired author Jenna Grodzicki of Chatham to write “Wild Style: Amazing Animal Adornments” (Millbrook Press, 2021). “Hats. Jewelry. Makeup. Perfume. People wear accessories every day. But humans aren’t the only ones with a flair for fashion,” Grodzicki writes. For wild creatures, “The right look, though, can make all the difference.” ...

As anyone who has attempted to recover their lost sunglasses after they fell off a boat can attest, even clean ocean water is impenetrable beyond a few inches. Over the past decades, dramatic improvements in our ability to explore the ocean depths have taken place and yet there is still so much to be learned about the ocean, whose well-being is critical to our global ecosystem. More than 80 people were online ...

Sunsets do not utter sentences. Waves do not speak in rhymes. Trees don’t spout half truths and flowers tell no lies. Birds sing but not with lyrics. Coyotes howl and yip but with no paragraphs or grammar. Rabbits and deer are mostly silent, yet they get their points across. Underwater there are clicks and whines, melodies and harmonies but no whales or fish use words to tell their tales. Only we ...

One morning in that blurry week between Christmas and New Years I went for an early morning walk on the beach. There’d been a full moon and the high tide that accompanied that and the sand was filled with shells, twists of seaweed and a multitude of beaten up and well worn feathers. The sky was that silvery shade of blue we get when the sun feels pale and watery and the sea was nearly white from glare and spark...

January Is Human Trafficking Awareness Month January begins the year with Human Trafficking Awareness Month. Cape Cod PATH (People Against Trafficking Humans), a non-profit under the umbrella of the Cape Cod Foundation, is a task force on the frontline in addressing this pervasive human rights issue. The reality is that there are more people enslaved today than at any time in history. Across the globe, an e...

In the charming 1987 rom-com movie “Roxanne,” a tongue-tied young firefighter is unable express his romantic feelings for a beautiful woman. Step in Steve Martin, who ghostwrites love letters of such eloquence that the woman falls in love with the firefighter. Jill Meyer of Chatham, who founded the wedding service company “Write Weddings,” has performed that same magic. A Washington, D.C. man contacted her and...

In the days before the ongoing pandemic reached Cape Cod's shores, if you swung by the Hot Chocolate Sparrow on a sunny afternoon when the weather was warm, you'd likely find Roger Boucher working in one of his sketchbooks. A closer look, however, reveals impressively detailed drawings that could easily find their way into a local gallery. Boucher, an Orleans native, has been drawing since he was a little boy,...