Living in Chatham, MA

A swim alone off Surfside on the Tuesday after Labor Day becomes the starting point for a meditation on scale: how a tiny island and an endless ocean can hold the same feeling as a highway through the desert. The season is turning, and this essay sits in that turn a while before letting it go.

Twice a week, the Family Table Collaborative's donated food truck pulls into Cape Cod parking lots, offering meals to anyone who shows up, no questions asked. What began as a pandemic stopgap has grown into a weekly lifeline serving up to 700 people, built almost entirely on volunteer labor and local generosity.

New fishing restrictions on Nantucket extend protections for great white sharks that began on Cape Cod Bay and the Outer Cape. Tom Moroney connects those rules to the lasting damage Jaws did to the species' reputation, and to his own past coverage of a now-defunct shark tournament on the Vineyard.

A tiny, weathered gravestone in Sandwich's Old Burial Ground may be the oldest on Cape Cod, but its inscription was deliberately chiseled away centuries ago. Gravestone historian Steve Broker explains the competing theories, from anti-Quaker sentiment to Puritan objections over sacred imagery.

On Nantucket, the height of summer means being outnumbered by tourists two to one. A meditation on Augustitus, the exhaustion and thrill of a place at its busiest, borrowed from a phrase coined nearly a century ago.

A pizza order gone slightly sideways sends Tom Moroney down a rabbit hole of restaurant surcharges, tip-shaming, and the economics behind why your cheeseburger costs what it costs.

Painting a boathouse turns out to have a lot in common with yoga: stretching, balance, and the patience of proper prep work. A meditation on ladders, primer, and the quiet satisfaction of a job done right.

Turns out empty nest syndrome doesn't require actual children. Susan Moeller follows a gray catbird family that set up shop in the viburnum by the kitchen window, from sloppy first nest to turquoise eggs to a six hour screaming fit from an anxious dad. Then, silence. And a lot of feelings about it.

Nantucket wakes most summer mornings wrapped in fog, yet the island is deep in drought. With a sole-source aquifer and no neighboring town to lean on, water restrictions have divided the island between lawns left to go golden and lawns kept impossibly green by private wells. A meditation on scarcity, privilege, and the strange beauty of a place learning to live with less water.

From "Happy as a Clam" to "Squeezed Inn," a Cape Cod cottage-naming saga full of bad puns, a 92-year-old sign-maker's wisdom, and the realization that some things resist a name.

After a long winter on Cape Cod, Mary Bergman laces up her boots and heads to Portugal's rugged Atlantic coast to hike the Fisherman's Trail. She travels through the last stretch of undeveloped coastline in Europe, where ancient cliffs, turquoise water, and fearless local fishermen offer a world apart from home.

A dog's unblinking vigil at a Cape Cod window becomes a quiet reflection on attention, perception, and all the things just outside the frame of human awareness.

The Crested Caracara pulled its usual disappearing act in Wellfleet, and a Swallow tailed Kite in Mashpee just set a state record for the latest sighting ever. It's peak shorebird migration season, and it's time these underrated travelers got some airtime, with a beginner's guide to the sandpipers and plovers gathering on Cape Cod's flats before their long flights south.

A Crested Caracara turns up at Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, marking the second Cape sighting of this warm-climate raptor this summer. This report covers the species' puzzling northward push since 2020, plus other notable birds including a Buff-breasted Sandpiper, Tricolored Heron, and a performative Clapper Rail in West Harwich.

After literally years of trolling us, the weirdest presumed breeding bird on Cape Cod has finally given up the goods. The huge, unmistakable birds in question, known to nest prominently in the tallest tree around, have somehow hidden definitive evidence of actual nests with chicks in them since at least 2022.

That famous Bridled Tern is back in the news again, this time at Seagull Beach in Yarmouth. But there's bigger birding happening on the Vineyard, where a marathon dawn watch at Aquinnah produced 91 species and some early signs of fall songbird migration.

Late-summer Cape Cod brings rare Swallow-tailed Kites and spectacular waves of migrating shorebirds. Find out where to see both before the season flies by.

Shorebird migration is picking up, but the world's friendliest rare bird stole the show. This week, the famous bridled tern toured Cape Cod and the Islands before returning to Scituate.

A rare tropical seabird has spent weeks charming its way around Scituate Harbor, perching on cars, deck railings, and even the heads of beachgoers and their dogs. Bridled Terns almost never show up in Massachusetts outside of hurricanes, let alone linger all summer acting like a friendly parrot. This week we dig into the sighting history, compare it to a more standoffish bird that's been working the coast of Maine and New Hampshire since 2024, and consider a few Cape reports from earlier this summer that may be connected. Plus a theory involving a marooned sailor and a rottweiler named Flotsam.

A Crested Caracara, a tropical bird of prey rarely seen north of Florida and Texas, turned up at Race Point in Provincetown this week, one of several surprising sightings across the Northeast this summer. A look at the species' odd habits, its wandering history in Massachusetts, and a running debate about whether it really belongs with the falcons.

It's all about water. One refilled bird bath brought a flood of orioles, a Wellfleet Bay stream draws in warblers and bluebirds, and a volunteer's photos of daytime owls bathing have to be seen to be believed.

As Whip-poor-wills grow scarce in the region's pine woods, a larger and considerably ruder cousin has taken up residence: the Chuck-will's-widow. Once found no farther north than Virginia, this bird-eating nightjar is now breeding across the Cape and Islands in ever-increasing numbers.

Despite its reputation as a quiet month for birding, June delivers a string of surprises on the Cape and Islands this week, led by multiple rare Gull-billed Tern sightings along the coast. From an unexpected Red Crossbill heard from a driveway to a Mississippi Kite studied from a standstill on the Sagamore Bridge, the birds are overachieving.

A short stop at a Mass Audubon nature playground becomes an insect safari full of parasites, predators, mimics, and a tiny fly with a very big name.

Looking for fungi with Alex Emmons.

This week on the Local Food Report: it’s a duel of appetites in a new documentary about delicious but destructive green crabs.

There must be some good way to eat them, I started thinking, because historically people have always tended to use what’s available, and for centuries, wild black cherries have been both abundant and incredibly important here ecologically.

I have a friend in Barnstable who’s always telling me about unusual edible plants, particularly perennials. Recently, he told me he’s planting something new called a Cornelian Cherry.

I have a friend in Barnstable who’s always telling me about unusual edible plants, particularly perennials. Recently, he told me he’s planting something new called a Cornelian Cherry.

Helen loved kvass. The flavor, the fizz, everything about this drink made from fermenting stale bread with water and sugar. But when she got home, she forgot about it for almost 40 years.

This week on the Local Food Report, we learn about Wellfleet’s historic herring run.

This week on the Local Food Report, Cape Cod jail inmates find connection and hope in a program baking for those in need.

The small, black relatives of the blueberry grow all over the Cape and Islands.

Amateur cooks get by with a little “kelp” from their friends and the results are pretty tasty.

Garlic scapes are in season at the Truro Farmers Market, and there are so many good ways to cook them.

A centuries-old Portuguese ritual rich with history, pageantry, and, most definitely, food.