The Wrack

This course, launched in 2013, provides guidance in collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing qualitative data and using the results to improve the quality of meetings, foster effective project management, and facilitate collaborative research projects.

Thirteen Head Start preschools from across York County visited the Reserve on numerous occasions this past year to experience the great outdoors and make exciting wildlife discoveries. They came in the fall, winter, and spring seasons to hear a nature-based story, meet a variety of animal puppets, create a related craft to take home, and walk the trails while engaged in scavenger hunts and sensory adventures.

Last week, we wrapped up one of the busiest school program seasons to date. Beginning the last week of April, school kids and teachers from Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont (!) explored the trails here at the Wells Reserve. Some came for self-guided discovery, but many more learned from our team of volunteer docents a wealth of information about estuaries, wildlife, habitats, water quality, and much more. Today we celebrated their hard work leading these students in temperatures that ranged from 45F to 85F, in drizzle and shining sun, and learned just how big their impact was with a candy guessing game during our end-of-season potluck!

Last week the Salmon Falls Watershed Collaborative hosted 65 attendees at its 5 year anniversary workshop Protecting the Source at Springhill. The collaborative, facilitated by our Coastal Training Program,?coordinates long-term source water protection efforts among planning commissions, land trusts, watershed associations, water systems, and town, state, and federal agencies in New Hampshire and Maine.The collaboratives goal is to protect and sustain high quality drinking water in the Salmon Falls River watershed.The workshop was designed to highlight achievements made in the past five years for protecting water quality in the watershed and to generate and prioritize ideas for future work by the Collaborative. Pictures and workshop materials below, read about the workshop on Fosters.com.

Stellar interns in spring 2015 helped with camps, events, digitizing records, fish research, and program promotion.

The reserve has a no-pets policy. It may be our least popular restriction.

It's another winged Wednesday, but while bird banders await more birds, other wonders abound at this "place to discover."

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 5/24/2015.

The small bird my boys found in the backyard last weekend was olive green with an orange crown like a dirty hunters hat. It showed no signs of violence, but it was definitely dead. No rigor mortis, so it wasnt a winter casualty emerged from the snow. &thats as far as our CSI: South Portland investigation went before I got a shovel and buried the bird six inches under. My seven-year-old placed a cantaloupe-sized rock over the grave and we went on with our day.

It was only after going back inside that evening that I began to wonder what species of bird it had been.

The young people are dressed in distinctive khaki pants and NCCC-labeled tee shirts are members of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps. I recently sat with four of them at one of their newly constructed picnic tables.

I watch a lot of nature films. My favorite bit of animal cinema involves day-old ducklings emerging from a hole in a tree trunk and plummeting 50 feet down to the leaf-strewn ground below. Their mother guides them to a nearby lake. Their real lives begin.