The Wrack

The fall 2010 issue of our Watermark newsletter is now available as a PDF. You can download it here (3.5 MB).

The Woods Hole Research Center, with support from the Wells Reserve, has just put up a series of web pages focused on the loss of open space in southern Maine. Their intent is to slow the pace of development and sprawl that has been rapid in our region over recent decades. The site includes sections on farms and forests, housing density, and impervious surfaces. By showing maps and graphs of both past and projected change, the real and potential landscape changes become easier to grasp.

We are happy to report that the old exhibit pieces that left the Visitor Center a couple of weeks ago are now displayed at the Mildred L. Day School.

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.