A soft buzz of 250,000 watts of energy echoed off of Watcha Path in Edgartown on Thursday afternoon.

“Listen to that hum,” Bill Bennett told a group of Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School students standing next to several transformers at Mr. Bennett’s new solar array.

Cong. William Keating appealed directly to the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard this week to expedite the transfer of ownership of the Gay Head Light, which must be moved soon due to rapid erosion at the Gay Head Cliffs.

In a letter to Adml. Robert J. Papp Jr. yesterday, Mr. Keating urged the Coast Guard to declare the lighthouse as excess property.

Plans are underway to relocate a large house on Wasque Point that is threatened by a rapidly eroding shoreline.

The bluff on Richard and Jennifer Schifter’s Chappaquiddick property has been eroding at a rate that coastal geologists call alarming and unprecedented. Despite emergency measures to stanch the damage, the ocean is coming ever closer to the Schifters’ 8,800-square-foot house.

“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.”

William Turner, the “Father of Botany,” knew this. In his book, Grete Herbal, he created a common name for Euronymus europaeus because he couldn’t find an English name for this plant.

Only 15 birding days left until the 53rd annual Martha’s Vineyard Christmas Bird Count! December 29 is Count Day, and we will have a lot of intrepid people divided into a dozen field teams, with each team scouring their assigned territory to count all the birds they can find. Our high counts are 134,963 individuals and 130 species, although in the past decade we have averaged around 50,000 birds and 120 different species.

For me, as the principal compiler for our count, this is the pinnacle of the birding year.

On Tuesday morning a thin crescent moon appears low in the southeastern sky before sunrise near the bright planet Saturn.

Saturn, the ringed planet, resides in the zodiacal constellation Virgo, where it has been for more than two years. It usually takes Saturn two years to move from one zodiacal constellation into the next. The moon takes two days to move through one constellation.

On Wednesday morning the moon will have advanced farther eastward and will appear in the zodiacal constellation Libra.