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The Wrack

The Wrack is the Wells Reserve blog.

Why "The Wrack"? In its cycles of ebb and flow, the sea transports a melange of weed, shell, bone, feather, wood, rope, and trash from place to place, then deposits it at the furthest reach of spent surf. This former flotsam is full of interesting stuff for anybody who cares to kneel and take a look. Now and then, the line of wrack reveals a treasure.

  • Corning Incorporated Foundation helps education programs at Wells Reserve

    | January 28, 2011 | Filed under: News

    WELLS, MAINE  School field trip programs and public education offerings at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve are getting a boost from a donation made recently by the Corning Incorporated Foundation to Laudholm Trust, the Wells Reserves nonprofit partner.

  • Marking an individual milestone

    | January 26, 2011

    We all got together in the farmhouse kitchen at noon today for our almost-annual potluck lunch and yankee swap. It's a rare opportunity for everyone to visit. Even though we're a fairly small staff, we're in separate buildings and many of us are out and about as often as we're at our desks. Deep winter offers our best chance to assemble and we had near perfect attendance, with 22 of us packed into the small second-floor room.

  • Original exhibits off to new home

    | January 14, 2011

    After standing for almost twenty years, and educating and entertaining untold thousands of visitors, the original Visitor Center exhibits are moving out to make way for new "Changing Landscapes" exhibits that arrive this spring. Today, several key displays from the room-by-room tour of habitats traveled down the hill and up Route 1 to Arundel, where they will become tools for learning at the K5 Mildred L. Day School. Dr. Crowley and Mr. Cressey did the hauling.

  • Winged Wednesday XXI: "Common birds" not always common

    | January 12, 2011

    2010 was not a good year for piping plovers on Laudholm Beach, though the overall Maine population held steady. Maine Audubon reports that 30 breeding pairs fledged 49 young along the state's sandy shorelines, with beaches from Kennebunk to Fortunes Rocks in Biddeford being the strongholds this year, but Laudholm put up zeros for nests and young.

  • Gazebo gets stronger

    | January 5, 2011 | Filed under: Culture

    The gazebo beside the farmhouse, as iconic as any building on the Laudholm campus, was suffering from aged wood. The very structure was weakened to the point where something had to be done.

  • Kennebunk River Road-Stream Crossing Survey

    | January 4, 2011

    About the Project

    The Maine Road-Stream Crossing Survey determines where poor design or degraded condition of road culverts hampers the ability of fish to access upstream or downstream habitat. This information helps project partners to set priorities for restoring critical fish habitat sites.

    For this project, Wells Reserve workers visited all road-stream culverts along the Kennebunk River, from its mouth on the border of Kennebunk and Kennebunkport to its far reaches in Lyman.

  • Conservation Focus Areas of Maine's Piscataqua region

    | January 3, 2011

    The Land Conservation Plan for Maines Piscataqua Region Watersheds aims to identify and describe areas that represent the best opportunities to conserve the critical ecological, biological, and water resources of southern Maine's coastal watersheds. These Conservation Focus Areas (CFA) are presented in the plan as a series of double-sided pages that include a map of each specific area plus detailed information about its significant resources. Each CFA fact sheet is available individually here:

  • Winged Wednesday XX: New List

    | November 17, 2010

    An update of the Wells Reserve bird list has been overdue for some time. Now it's done.

    Download the latest Wells Reserve bird list

  • FairPoint Communications supports Laudholm Trust

    | November 16, 2010 | Filed under: News

    FairPoint Communications Release dated November 16, 2010

    FairPoint's Leslie Roberts shares a donation with Laudholm president Diana JoynerThe Laudholm Trust in Wells recently received a $750 contribution from FairPoint Communications on behalf of employee Leslie Robertss volunteer work for the organization. Roberts, who lives in Kennebunk, is senior manager of internal communications at FairPoint and has been on the board of trustees of the Laudholm Trust since 2008. She is chair of the Trusts nominating committee and also serves on the public relations/marketing committee and strategic planning committees.

  • Boardwalk Completed over Muskie Bog

    Charles Lord
    | November 9, 2010 | Filed under: Culture

    A new boardwalk protects a fragile bog habitat while keeping feet quite a bit drier. This has been a long-desired improvement.