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 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.

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.

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.