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A Cape Cod Notebook

A Cape Cod Notebook

Kathy Shorr



A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.

It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.

A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:

Robert Finch, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing. He has lived on and written about Cape Cod for forty years. He is the author of six collections of essays, including "The Iambics of Newfoundland" (Counterpoint Press), and co-editor of "The Norton Book of Nature Writing." His new book, "The Outer Beach: A Thousand-Mile Walk Along Cape Cod’s Atlantic Shore."

Mary Bergman, originally from Provincetown, now lives on Nantucket.  She is a writer and historian, working in historic preservation and writing a novel. 

Nelson Sigelman is an award winning former reporter, outdoor writer and author. He has been honored by the Outdoor Writers Association of America, the New England Outdoor Writers Association and the New England Press Association. His most recent book is Martha’s Vineyard Outdoors, Fishing, Hunting and Avoiding Divorce on a Small Island. He currently works part time for the Tisbury Shellfish Department and lives with his wife Norma in Vineyard Haven.

Susan Moeller - Susan Moeller is a freelance writer and editor who was a reporter and editor with the Boston Herald and Cape Cod Times. She’s lived on the Cape for 45 years and when not working, swims, plays handbells, pretends to garden and walks her dog, Dug. She lives in Cummaquid. 

Dennis Minsky's career as a field biologist began in 1974, at Cape Cod National Seashore, protecting nesting terns and plovers.  A Provincetown resident since 1968, he returned full time in 2005.  He is involved in many local conservation projects, works as a naturalist on the Dolphin Fleet Whale Watch, and tries to write.





 A Cape Cod Notebook is made possible in part with support from Titcomb’s Bookshop on Route 6A in East Sandwich.

Ways to Connect
  • 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.
  • This week Robert Finch tells us why there is nothing more soothing than the sound of rain.
  • A surprising etymology of "tourist," from ancient pilgrims to the invention of the "tourist trap," and a case for seeing visitors as individuals rather than a crowd.
  • 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.