As I’m sure you’ve noticed, bird song in your neighborhood has been steadily picking up over the last several weeks. Bird hormones are surging in response to the lengthening days, producing a variety of behavioral and physiological changes to prepare them for breeding season, including ever lustier singing. So I want to take this opportunity to offer an early spring tune-up for your birding ears, because once the long distance songbird migrants come flooding back next month, the degree of difficulty will be much higher.

Most brain scientists will never know what it feels like to live with the mental illnesses they study. Barbara Lipska is the exception; brain tumors caused her to lose track of her left hand, forget where she lived, go running with hair dye dripping from her head, and accuse a familiar pest exterminator of trying to kill her family. 

Birds here on the Cape and Islands are very busy: courtship and nesting, and more spring migrants arriving.  On this month's Bird News on The Point, we hear the latest reports on sightings, and all about nests and nest boxes. Also a conversation about the use of chemical pesticides in our yards.  Mark Faherty, ornithologist and wildlife biologist at the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, joins host Mindy Todd in the studio.

I was walking in the backwoods with a friend the other day.  He was waxing philosophical about trees, drawing lessons from life about them. “Look at the circle of life here,” he said. “Here you have healthy trees standing tall, others dying and dead all around them. But look, on the ground, are new shoots, just beginning to grow, and actually nurtured by the old dead trunks.” 

Cape Cod’s first medical marijuana dispensary is scheduled to open in Mashpee in the next few days, five years after voters legalized medical marijuana in Massachusetts. The company behind the dispensary is “Triple M,” which operates an existing dispensary and cultivation center in Plymouth. WCAI’s Sarah Tan visited the Plymouth site to get an idea of what’s to come.

The severe coastal flooding brought by storms in January and March has drawn renewed attention to the issue of sea level rise, and how prepared or unprepared we are for it.  

Last April, tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of scientists and science enthusiasts took to the streets in the first March for Science. This year, there will again be marches. But the March for Science has changed – from a volunteer-led protest to a global network of science advocacy groups. 

With the approach of Patriot’s Day, seven Provincetown men will be honored nearly 240 years after they had served in the Revolutionary War. The seven men are interred at the Winthrop Street cemetery – the oldest in town - and their service was discovered almost by accident, as part of an effort to identify notable people buried there.

Mary Ellen Redmond reads her poem, "Mistaken Identity."   

WCAI News Director Steve Junker hosts a roundup of some of the top local and regional news of the week. His guests include: Gwenn Friss of the Cape Cod Times, Jim Kinsella of the Enterprise, Sara Brown of the Vineyard Gazette, Tim Wood of the Cape Cod Chronicle, Josh Balling of the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, K.C. Myers of the Provincetown Banner, Brittany Bowker of the Martha's Vineyard Times, and Andy Tomolonis of South Coast Today.