Stories
Rob Martin has been fishing from the Sandwich Marina for 29 years off his boat, Resolve. “It’s only 40 feet. It was big when I first got it and now it seems small,” he said, while warming up inside his boat’s cabin on a cold January morning. Over the last few decades, Martin, 56, has…
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Standing on a cold, wet beach, Bruce Silverbrand rummages through a metal basket of oysters. He picks out a huge one — almost as big as a mitten, with a knobbed and lumpy shell. It’s what people in the shellfish industry call a “big ugly,” though Silverbrand abhors the term. “I would never call an…
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Wearing tall rubber boots, a scientist walked along an overgrown path to the Little Bay salt marsh in Fairhaven. “I’m going to kind of weave us up through this back zone,” said Alice Besterman, the post-doctoral researcher with the Buzzards Bay Coalition. Besterman pushed past tall, pale grasses that hid crabs underfoot, and when she…
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The great shearwater is a seabird commonly seen off the New England coast. It’s not particularly striking — to the untrained eye, it looks like a brown seagull with long wings. It eats by diving underwater, grabbing prey and then returning to the surface to swallow it down. The birds aren’t rare or endangered, but…
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Biologist Karen Malkus’s laboratory in the Barnstable Town Offices features a marble vanity with a mirror framed by light bulbs. “It used to be … the ladies’ room, which is now converted into the lab,” she said recently. Pipettes and amber bottles crowd Malkus’s lab bench. Mostly, she works with her microscope, and device called…
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In early August, carpenter Michael Forgione told his mother that he was heading out to go crabbing in the brackish waters of Chilmark Pond on Martha’s Vineyard. Carol Forgione, a 72-year-old nurse practitioner, wished him a good catch. “This is the pond,” she said on a recent visit. “This is the entrance that he went…
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Last month the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wrapped up a public comment period on its controversial plan to remove toxic PCBs from the Housatonic River. The agency said it hopes to issue its final plan by the end of the year. That would be before any possible change at the White House. It can take…
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Despite some recent rain, New Hampshire’s drought is growing, causing wells to run dry across the state. And the hotter temperatures of a changing climate could make future droughts more likely. As part of NHPR’s By Degrees project, Annie Ropeik reports on how the dry conditions are affecting people who rely on well water, and…
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