Robert Finch
A nature writer living in Wellfleet, Robert Finch has written about Cape Cod for more than forty years. He is the author of nine books of essays. A Cape Cod Notebook airs weekly on WCAI, the NPR station for Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and the South Coast. In both 2006 and 2013, the series won the New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.
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Stories in the natural world have no true beginnings or endings. In writing about them, we choose a place to start and a place to end, knowing that nature continues to write the story long after we have abandoned it. -
My chum, who these days walks the Outer Beach more often than I do, commented that “high tides are reaching further up the beach than they used to.” -
I spent my teenage years in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a small city on the banks of the Ohio River. There’s not much about the town that would strike a visitor – or a resident, for that matter – as noteworthy. -
About six o’clock one evening, as we were about to sit down to dinner, there came from the other end of the house a loud thunk, as though something had hit a window. I stepped outside to see what the noise was. -
During the third week of May, when the oak leaves are still just pink flickers in the forest canopy, and the pitch pines had not yet begun painting the landscape with their dry yellow swaths of pollen, then the lowly huckleberry spreads its emerald scarves far and wide throughout the forest floor. -
This is about crows. Or rather, this is about a crow. I stress the singular, because if there’s any lesson in the incident I’m about to relate, it’s to caution us against generalizing about other animal species. We’re all too quick to talk or write about “owls” or “woodcocks” or “whales,” as though each one we encounter is totally representative of all owls, woodcocks and whales, and that individuality is purely a human trait. -
Over the past few weeks our local snowbirds have been returning from their annual winter sojourns in the south. -
People come to live on Cape Cod for a variety of reasons. I came because its landscape and history spoke to me in such a compelling manner as a subject for writing. -
Whenever a discussion on climate change turns to the issue of rising sea levels, I usually say that since our house is situated about sixty-five feet above sea level, I don’t worry that much about flooding. -
This week Bob concludes his account of the stranding of a large fishing boat on the Outer Beach last month.
