Dick Jennings has a reason to be blue. His beloved red cedar trees on Cape Pogue are bare of blue berries. Naked, scaly branches offer no lunch for wildlife wanting a terrific treat to tide them over. Evergreen red cedar trees nutritionally nurture nature. No less than 70 animal species rely on red cedar trees for food. Birds top this list of cedar berry consumers. Red cedar’s avian namesake, cedar waxwings, is known to consume copious amounts of this fruit, with one study showing that they gobble approximately 683 berries per day!

Wow, call it an invasion, an irruption or a superflight, the Vineyard has had it! The definition of a bird invasion is a periodic southward influx into the United States from Canada and Alaska from those who normally live there year-round. This movement tends to happen when there has been an increase in these bird populations. From Chappaquiddick to Aquinnah, huge flocks of pine siskins have been seen. It is fascinating to watch the pine siskins feed and to check out the amount of yellow in their plumage.

A brilliant moon will dominate our evening skies in the week ahead. The month ends with a full moon. For the next week the gibbous moon moves through the zodiacal constellations Capricornus, where it is tonight. It moves onto Pisces, Aries and then finishes the month full in Taurus.

As the night sky shifts from summer to autumn and later winter, it is a good time to take note of the constellations overhead.

Officials worked to salvage a fishing vessel Thursday morning after it broke mooring and washed ashore on Lobsterville Beach.

Even while he was growing up, Chris Melrose, a scientist for the National Marine Fisheries Service, knew that the currents on the Vineyard were pushing him towards marine science. A 1993 graduate of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, Mr. Melrose is today one of the leading scientists working on a global study of plankton. He works out of the fisheries science center in Narragansett Laboratory in Rhode Island.

A trail-widening project by the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank on its properties has sparked strong reaction from a small group of bikers and horseback riders, who took their concerns to the land bank this week.

Laura Bryan, an off-road biker who lives on Chappaquiddick, said she and her friend Michael Berwind were biking through Pennywise Preserve last week when they came upon a land bank crew working with a brush cutter and a freshly-cleared trail.