With the elaborate dishes that inventive chefs create at hundreds of restaurants lining the N.C. shore these days, it’s hard to remember why simple, traditional seafood recipes like roasted oysters or mullet and sweet potato stew endure — until you sample their pure seafood flavor.
Our Coast
Wildlife Without the Mosquitoes
A new visitors’ center in Manteo offers a hands-on, learning experience about the federal wildlife refuges in North Carolina.
Hatteras Center, Ecology Park Set to Open
Sea turtles will get prominent display space at the Hatteras Island Ocean Center’s new education center that should open this spring. The center will also have trails through the wetlands and free kayak and paddleboard launches.
Remembering the Fight to Save Bird Island
Residents who fought for 10 years to stop development of the island near Sunset Beach will gather this week to dedicate a kiosk that describes the fight and why it was worth waging.
The Serengeti of North Carolina
Thousands of migrating waterfowl are attracted to Lake Mattamuskeet each winter where they join the native black bears, otters, bobcats, mink, snakes, sliders, herons, egrets and dozens of other species. It is Sam Bland’s kinda place.
Jockey’s Ridge: Saving the Giant
It was 40 years ago that Carolista Fletcher Baum stepped out in front of a bulldozer to spark a movement to save the highest sand dune on the East Coast.
Atlantic Sturgeon: Is the Giant Making a Comeback?
The endangered sturgeon has been showing up in the James River in Richmond and one even spawned in the Roanoke River in North Carolina.
The ‘Plastic Ocean’ and Bonnie Monteleone
Bonnie Monteleone set out to document the plastic debris that is killing marine life after a photo of a deformed turtle in a plastic six-pack ring turned her life around.
Bear Island in the Winter
Sam Bland, our naturalist, returned recently to the home of his heart, his spirit, his soul. Come walk with him on the winter beach as he rediscovers old friends — keyhole urchins and the murex, crystal skippers and fierce antlions.
Coastal Sketch: Bill Birkemeier
As head of the Army Corps of Engineers research center in Duck, this soft-spoken, jazz-loving engineer changed the way we think about the natural forces that shape our ocean beaches. He’s retired after 32 years.
Displaying History Rescued from the Deep
Museums are trying to encourage recreational divers to display a treasure trove of historic artifacts that they salvaged from U-boats sunk off the Outer Banks before it became illegal to do so.
Remembering the Christmas Blizzard of 1989
A series of meteorological quirks had by Christmas Eve that year brought historic snows to the N.C. coast that knocked out power and paralyzed towns.
A Holiday Tradition That’s for the Birds
The National Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count begins this weekend on the N.C. coast. For more than 100 years, “citizen scientists” all over the country have scanned the skies counting birds and compiling invaluable data on hundreds of species.
Mistletoe: A Native Plant Steeped in Lore
Our naturalist Sam Bland traces the stories that link this semi-parasitic plant with Christmas and smooching and tells how you can collect your own mistletoe.
Red Wolf Program Ends Its 25th Year
Twenty-five years after the first red wolves were released into the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, the success of the Red Wolf Recovery Program is intertwined in an uneasy relationship with the wolf’s close cousin, the coyote.
Venus Flytrap: History of the ‘Tippitywichit’
A Wilmington historian tells how the world learned of this gloriously peculiar plant that grew in the land of the lower Cape Fear.
