Kevin Hardy of Wilmar, near Vanceboro, fishes along Cape Lookout National Seashore as a commercial fishing trawler offshore heads southwest. Photo: Dylan Ray
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Icy conditions
An egret hunts along the shore of an icy marsh Thursday near Pelletier Creek in Morehead City. Don’t look for a quick thaw as much of coastal North Carolina is under a winter weather advisory from 4 p.m. Friday until 10 a.m. Saturday. The forecast calls for the potential for light accumulations of ice and snow, although little to none is expected from Hatteras Island to Ocracoke Island. Photo: Dylan Ray
Fine day for fishing
Visitors during a recent cloudy day carry fishing poles while strolling along the water’s edge at Cedar Street Park in downtown Beaufort, with the construction site of the 103-room Compass Hotel Beaufort by Margaritaville Resorts on Gallants Channel in the background. Photo: Dylan Ray
Tiny trains, bigger models, too, roll into Beaufort
A tiny Z-scale model train operated by Mike Basher of Basher and Sons Hobbies rounds the bend during an appearance earlier this month at the 30th annual John Costlow Train Show at the North Carolina Maritime Museum Harvey W. Smith Watercraft Center in Beaufort. The three-day show included model train layouts of various scales, including working antiques. Photo: Mark Hibbs
Flying colors over Radio Island
A rainbow reaches skyward from the Newport River as viewed from the marsh at Radio Island following Sunday showers. The island was formed by the placement of dredge spoils from an early channel-deepening project at the Morehead City port in the 1930s and takes its name from Carteret Broadcasting Co.’s WMBL, which began broadcasting in 1947 at 740 kHz. Photo: Mark Hibbs
Belted kingfisher surveys its kingdom
A belted kingfisher surveys its surroundings from a perch, Nov. 14 at North River Preserve in Carteret County. Photo: Nick Green
Beacon backdrop for the birds
The 1859 Cape Lookout Lighthouse reaches 163 feet skyward beyond shorebirds hunkered down recently on a jetty across the bay at the Cape Lookout National Seashore visitor center at Shell Point on Harkers Island. Photo: Dylan Ray
Sunrise skiff
A fishing skiff anchored at the North River Bridge in Otway, in Carteret County, is nearly silhouetted at dawn recently. Photo: Doug Waters
Sunset striations
Striations of clouds blanket the sky at sunset over North River in Carteret County recently. Photo: Dylan Ray
Spooky storefront apparition
Webs around a vent in the tiled storefront wall of the old, now vacant, M. Mann’s & Sons building in Newport create a ghostly appearance peering out slightly menacingly at passersby from the longtime home of the former C.M. Hill Hardware, where Chatham, East Chatham and Market streets all converge with the North Carolina Railroad Co. line and East and West Railroad boulevards. Photo: Mark Hibbs
Watch your step!
Fall colors, the reds, yellows, browns and copperheads. An eastern copperhead crosses a path recently at the New Bern Civil War Battlefield in Craven County. Watch your step! Photo: Doug Waters
‘Dirty snowball’ swings by Beaufort, Earth
The faint tail of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS pointing away from the setting sun is visible Sunday evening over Taylors Creek in Beaufort. NASA says the “dirty snowball’s” appearance is “a once-in-80,000-years sight.” The comet believed to be from the Oort Cloud at the edge of our Solar System was expected to swing close by at about 44 million miles from Earth — its closest pass — on Saturday. Discovered in 2023, it is named for both China’s Tsuchinshan, or Purple Mountain, Observatory and an Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS, telescope in South Africa. Photo: Mark Hibbs
Northern Lights appear down South
Aurora borealis, the result of an intense solar geomagnetic storm reaching Earth, lights up the skies over Jockey’s Ridge State Park in Nags Head late Thursday evening. Photo: Catherine Kozak
Tiny sunbather
An especially young green tree frog catches the morning sun from an agapanthus leaf in a Beaufort garden. Photo: Dylan Ray
Coastal flood advisory in effect
A vehicle creates a wake Tuesday while passing through floodwaters from the saltmarsh along Crow Hill Road near Otway in Down East Carteret County. Carteret County and coastal Onslow County were placed under a coastal flood advisory Tuesday effective until 5 p.m. Wednesday. Up to a foot of inundation above ground level is possible in low-lying areas near shorelines and tidal waterways. Officials urge people not to drive through waters of unknown depths. Photo: Dylan Ray
Albemarle sunset ‘impossibly calm’
The sun sets over Albemarle Sound in Edenton earlier this month near the N.C. Highway 32 bridge in this photo submitted by Tom Brennan of Edenton. “For the past couple of years I’ve been flying my drone over the Albemarle Sound capturing the dramatic cloud formations, sunsets and sunrises,” Brennan told Coastal Review. “This time of year the sound becomes impossibly calm with remarkable sunsets.”
