The Wrack

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The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 12/15/13 ?(and may also appear, with other goodies, in members' mailboxes shortly...):

Normally, I do not talk to dead opossums. But since Id watched this one keel over right in front of me, I felt I had to say something.

Last week, nearly 60 community members filled Mather Auditorium to learn from visiting speaker Dr. Drew Barton, professor of biology at the University of Maine at Farmington. He used his new award-winning book, The Changing Nature of the Maine Woods, as a platform to speak about how Maine's forests have changed over time and how they are predicted to change into the future with global warming. Below are some highlights from my notes!

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Fire fascinates, so it's hard to resist a catching up with this "old" news in December.

Worn down after many years, the farmhouse north face gets new siding and a fresh set of steps.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 11/24/13:

Many of the staff of the Wells Reserve at Laudholm were in West Virginia this past week for the annual conference of the 28 national estuarine research reserves. Researchers, educators, conservationists, land managers and even evangelists like me pulled ourselves away from our coastal homes to share ideas, hammer out new projects for 2014, and do some good old-fashioned colleague schmoozing.

I flew out of Portland on a sparkling, "unlimited visibility" Monday afternoon. My Southwest flight passed three miles above the Wells Reserve, giving me the rare opportunity to get a live bird's eye view of our little corner of the Maine coast. Looking down, I smiled quietly over how beautiful and tranquil the place looked.

In early November, we wrapped up the last of our fall school programs here at the Reserve. The season was packed with field trips, with students from all over visiting to learn about our estuaries, plankton, water quality, forest ecology, and much more. We couldn't provide these programs without the dedication of our enthusiastic crew of volunteer docents who lead them, so thank you, thank you to all of them! Cong…

Yesterday I went to the North Dam Mill in Biddeford for Making Sustainability Work, an interactive event organized by Sustain Southern Maine. Those old mill hallways are long, long, long!

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 11/3/13:

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Jake Aman, a researcher at the Wells Reserve at Laudholm known fondly as our river guy, is building a ladder this month. At a cost of $40,000, provided by funders including the Nature Conservancy, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, the Maine Coastal Program, the local water district and the Reserve, its not some ordinary stepladder. Its fancy.

None of us will be climbing Jakes ladder anytime soon, though. Its a ladder for fish. With it, theyll be able to climb up and over a small but insurmountable dam on the Branch Brook, a tributary of the Little River here on the Kennebunk/Wells border. With this ladder, the Wells Reserve will reestablish an essential connection between the ocean downstream and vital nursery pools upstream. A small piece, missing for twenty years from a mosaic that stretches from New Hampshire to Newfoundland, will be replaced.

For the last 6 years, myself and a group of trained citizen scientist have been monitoring marine invasive species on docks, rocky shores, and tide pools as part of the Marine Invader Monitoring and Information Collaborative, or MIMIC.