Fire Island National Seashore

Reaching Cape Hatteras National Seashore by vehicle in the near future will be hard, if not impossible, due to breaching of Highway 12 by storm waters from Hurricane Irene.

As Hurricane Irene continues plodding towards the Eastern Seaboard, units of the National Park System up and down the coast are preparing for the storm.

As Hurricane Earl assails the Outer Banks parks, producing damaging winds, rough surf, overwash, and beach erosion, Cape Cod National Seashore and other coastal parks in the Middle Atlantic and New England regions get ready for the powerful storm's arrival.

The Kemp's ridley may be little as sea turtles go, but it's got big problems. It was already the world's most endangered marine turtle before the mammoth Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico threatened to wreak havoc on its vital habitat.

A diminutive shorebird and a string of villages both dependent on the same necklace of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina are being pinched in a precarious setting that demonstrates the folly of trying to control nature.

Twenty-one units of the National Park System, including five national seashores and four national lakeshores, have been nominated for status as "Marine Protected Areas."

Each spring, certain areas in Acadia National Park in Maine are closed to visitors as peregrine falcons return to their ancestral nesting sites on seaside cliffs. With great anticipation, park visitors gather below the cliffs with binoculars, spotting scopes, and zoom lenses to watch the peregrines — — a species that in the mid-1960s was on the brink of extinction.

National Lighthouse Day is being observed around the country on August 7, and there are some excellent examples of those beacons in NPS areas. Some parks will host special events this weekend; one of them is more often associated with a famous battle than a lighthouse.

In honor of International Migratory Bird Day, Fire Island National Seashore in New York is offering a special three-hour ranger-guided tour at 9:00 a.m on Saturday, May 9, followed on Sunday, May 17 by a "Peak of Spring Migration" Bird Walk.

For years, summer trips to Cape Cod were an annual ritual for my family. My parents had retired to the Cape, and our boys loved romping in the surf and building castles in the sand. Lobster feasts, game-fishing, and whale watching were added benefits, as were exploring the seashore’s lighthouses, roaming its dunes, and looking for sea creatures in its mudflats.