Top Stories from NCPR

Wendy Hall walked up to an open-air enclosure housing two ravens, a female and a male. The female squawked. The male sat on a wooden board - motionless - with its beak poking through the cage.

"Hello, baby, are you all right? Are you all right, sweetheart?" Hall said to Ricky, the male. She rubbed Ricky's beak. "Oh, my big boy. What’s the matter, baby?"

After weeks of public voting, New Yorkers have selected a design for the stat’s new license plates. But the contest was overshadowed by a controversy over who would pay for the new plates.

Thirty-two years ago, Keith Zimmerman was a rookie in county government. It was then that he learned a lesson that he would carry with him forever. His office had failed at a project they were working on, but his boss bought cake for the staff to celebrate that failure. Why?

A dozen farms across St. Lawrence County will open their barns, fields, gardens and orchards to the public this Saturday for a Harvest Tour. The event is sponsored by Cornell Cooperative Extension of St. Lawrence County to celebrate the local food system - including livestock, vegetables, fruit, mushrooms, dairy, hemp, and honey.

A Saranac Lake high school student got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity this summer to study ballet at the renowned Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow. Dellice Chase, 16, was the only New York State resident in a group of 14 high school students chosen for the six-week cultural immersion program in Russia.

Expect seasonably cool but mostly pleasant weather, although there is a chance for passing showers through the weekend. Cold mountain valleys dipped into the 30s last night, but night-time lows should be mostly in the 40s this weekend.

A coral reef is kind of like Manhattan, a huge number of mouths to feed in a packed parcel of real estate. A reef doesn't have upstate farms to keep them all fed. So how do they get by?