High above the crowds in Oak Bluffs Friday night, there will be rockets with red, blue and yellow glare. It will be a royal display.

Unlike their smaller relatives, snapping turtles don’t bask in the sun or float in rows on logs. They are both predators and scavengers.

It was on the Vineyard that Paul Greenberg first encountered the beauty of a functioning ecosystem, where fishing was not merely a symbolic act.

The 2014 inventory found there were 119 active osprey nests on the Island. If I did my math correctly, we had 63 successful nests.

Being dramatic is warranted in the case of monarch butterflies whose numbers have plummeted over the last few years.

This month there are two pairs of planets moving through our skies.