The Wrack

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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 Release dated November 16, 2010

The 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.

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