The Wrack

This year's Laudholm Nature Crafts Festival was the kind of community we should all want to live in. More than 160 volunteers worked together as a tireless, friendly, and welcoming team to make 3,500 visitors and 122 participating artisans feel like there was no better place to be.

The Reserve held its sixth annual Monarch Rescue yesterday! Two education staff and seventeen wonderfully enthusiastic volunteers of all ages set out in search of monarch butterfly eggs and caterpillars in fields that will be mowed within the next couple of weeks. Select Reserve fields are mowed each year in an effort to maintain this vital habitat, rather than allow it to eventually grow into forest. The mowing also serves to keep invasive plant species in check.

Each year since 2010 (with the exception of 2011, when no rescue was conducted), the Monarch Rescue teams were tasked with combing the fields while inspecting individual milkweed plants to look for signs of monarchs. Any found eggs and caterpillars were then brought to a field not slated for mowing that year. Milkweed leaves with eggs on the underside were stapled to secure milkweed leaf undersides. Caterpillars were moved to secure milkweed plants. The graph below shows the number of eggs and caterpillars found during each of the six rescues.

The Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge 50th anniversary prompts a remembrance.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 8/21/2016, and?Making It At Home's 8/24/2016 issue.

August 21^st is my 38^th birthday. The odometer keeping track of my trips around the Sun just rolled over 22.2 billion miles. Theres still plenty of tread on the tires. I am beginning to notice a few twinges of maturity, though. Joint pains, hair loss, reflexive stubbornness, the irrepressible need to give advice  the signs of creeping codgerdom.

We have 19 native goldenrod species in Maine, but they're not to blame for itchy eyes and runny noses. The real culprit is ragweed, which blooms at the same time and is pollinated by wind.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 8/7/2016, and?Making It At Home's 8/11/2016 issue.

The orange ruffles hadnt been there last week, but now they were impossible to miss. Overnight, it seemed, a chicken-of-the-woods had returned to roost on the old oak stump in our yard.

On July 7, we hosted our annual Volunteer Reception. Normally an August event, we celebrated early this year to honor Nancy Viehmann, who just retired after 16+ years as our volunteer and visitor services coordinator. It was also a good opportunity to introduce her successor, Lynne Benoit-Vachon, to many of our most faithful volunteers.

What a pleasant evening! It's not often that crafts festival volunteers, trail rangers, education docents, receptionists, landscapers, beach monitors, trustees, RMA members, and the staff get to mingle. Everyone looked happy to be visiting.

Capturing personalities at the event was Lucie Lachance, who kindly shared her collection of images. We've selected a few to share. Thanks, Lucie, and to everyone who came out for the social.

Pollinator heaven: The purples and pinks of bee balm and liatris.

Dr. Jason Goldstein will oversee the Wells Reserves fish studies, salt marsh restoration activities, and long-term environmental monitoring program. He will expand the reserves shellfish program, currently focused on green crab research, into lobster and Jonah crab ecology.