The Wrack

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.

The ninth annual Reserve Cup was October 24, a bright day with a brisk breeze and a temperature decidedly cooler than the 2012 event. Despite several golfers needing knit hats or winter coats, attendance remained strong for this good-natured competition among staff and volunteers. For most, it's their sole golf outing of the year and they don't like to miss it.

Last week I had the chance to rise 750 feet above the Wells Reserve at Laudholm in a 1933-vintage open-cockpit bi-plane piloted by Dave Trucksess of Seacoast Biplane Tours. Less than 5 minutes after our take-off from Sanford Airport, we were over the Webhannet River estuary and for the next 20 minutes I got an eyeful of glistening salt marsh, just-past-peak mixed-forest foliage, and Laudholm's many yellow farm buildings.

Ensconced in the front seat, windproof vest zipped up, aviator hat pulled down, a headset muffling the engine noise and carrying light commentary from my pilot, I gripped tight the camera and started to shoot.

Master bird bander June Ficker and her crew wrapped up the summer season at the end of August. June recently shared her summer wrap-up and we're happy to pass along these facts and highlights for 2013&

In my last post, I focused on the conversion part of our C-Change. Here I focus on our equally important conservation efforts.

Since we launched our ambitious energy initiative in early 2012, our yearly use of propane and heating oil has dropped 20 percent, from an average of 11,500 gallons before we started to 9,000 gallons today. At the same time, we have reduced electrical energy use from an annual average of 105,000 kilowatt-hours to 85,000 kilowatt-hours, a 22 percent reduction.

How did we achieve such dramatic cuts?

This past Saturday evening, over 20 community members participated in the "Bats: Friends of the Evening Sky" program offered in partnership with the Center for Wildlife. We all learned about the many myths surrounding bats and the real truths (they don't fly into human hair, there are only 3 species of vampire bats among the over 1,200 species of bats worldwide, and vampire bats do not live in the United Statesthey live in tropical climates and prey primarily on livestock).

We were amazed to learn, too, that Maine's insectivorous bats eat 1,000 mosquitoes in a single night! The next time a mosquito bites you, think of all the mosquito control bats provide us!

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 10/20/13:

Quick quiz: which of the following have the backing of scientific consensus? Violent video games make kids more violent. Sugar makes them more hyper. Carbs make us fat. Vaccines are linked to autism.

Answer: none of the above. Science says so; look them up.

The bigger question: do we trust science?

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 10/6/13:

School has started again, which means its group visit season at the Wells Reserve at Laudholm. Those schools fortunate enough to have bus rental money are sending classes our way, and our team of educators are taking the kids out on the trails, down to the beach, and through the science and history of this 360-year-old place.

For a long time, I didnt understand what environmental education was. Im a perennial skeptic, particularly when it comes to claims from my own liberal brethren, so, over the past ten years of my environmental career, Ive always taken my colleagues proscriptions with more than a grain of salt. What finally convinced me to start applying their lessons was, of course, that grand old motivator of cynic and sucker alike: money.