How do you get kids to care about a bird that no longer flies to the treetops, nor whistles to greet the day? Appeal to their senses and their incomparable imaginative faculties, says Todd McGrain, artist, arts educator and activist.

Mr. McGrain did just that last week, during his visit to Sense of Wonder Creations summer camp, when he asked children to touch a reproduction heath hen, listen to its call and imagine what it must have looked like.

After 10 and 17 years of living on the Island, respectively, Tanya Augoustinos and Maria Westby were thinking of moving off-Island. They needed a change. The arts scene in the wintertime was unsatisfying, and their day jobs were getting a little dull.

“We were ready to get out of here,” Ms. Westby said. “We were wondering, how do we change our lives? It was either move on or bring something here.”

Kristen Kusama-Hinte arrived on-Island in early June. A couple of weeks later, her son had a fever. She tended to him, sleeping on the floor by his side. She checked her own and discovered a 100-degree temperature and didn’t pay much attention. She got a stiff neck and again didn’t pay much heed. When a terrible headache hit, she knew something was wrong.

The Dukes County commission voted Wednesday to name their executive administrative assistant as the new county manager.

Martina Thornton, who has held the number two staff position at the county for the past four years, will now negotiate a contract with members of the commission next week.

The vote to offer the job to Mrs. Thornton was unanimous. Two weeks ago the county commission voted to offer the job to New Hampshire attorney Katherine Rogers, but last week Ms. Rogers declined, citing personal health reasons.

Many overlook Martha’s Vineyard in the off-season, when beaches no longer accommodate bikinis, business owners stow away their cash registers, and the Flying Horses cease to fly. But Phyllis Meras, author of In Every Season, recently released by Schiffer Publishing, has a great appreciation for this time of relative hibernation, for humans at least. For her, the off-season is when the familiar becomes mysterious, and the unrelenting cadence of nature’s course penetrates the human psyche.

At the end of the dock in Menemsha Harbor sits a stately white yacht. At 75 feet, it can’t fit anywhere closer in the harbor. Inside the yacht, a woman often sits cross-legged in a bright sitting room, imagining far-off worlds full of romance and historical intrigue. She’s Kitty Pilgrim, CNN correspondent-turned-novelist, and she’s been hard at work writing her third book, while promoting, by boat, her latest release, The Stolen Chalice.