The Wrack

It's a 20-year tradition: In each season of every year since 1989, birders from the York County Audubon Society have scoured the forests and fields, marshes and beach of the Wells Reserve, intent on counting all the birds they can see or hear in 3 hours. Teams spread out to cover four routes, never knowing what they'll encounter.

At yesterday's post-survey compilation, it was clear that the Muskie and Pilger trails were the hot spot. That's where most of the 127 warblers of 15 species were found.

Survey coordinator Joanne Stevens and data handler Nancy McReel have shared the full results from one of the birdiest quarterly surveys the Audubon team has done75 species.&

Here are a few faces from the reception we held in the Laudholm barn before our screening of A Chemical Reaction on May 6, 2010.

Wood Frog Friend

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Frog Pond Reflections

With the impressive amounts of rain in the last month or so, and some unusually warm temperatures in March and early April, I thought I would share some of the more interesting weather trends we recorded through our System Wide Monitoring Program here at the reserve. March was the wettest and warmest on record for the state of Maine!

The Laudholm Nature Crafts Festival is a premier event on the festival circuit for both exhibitors and buyers. Each year, we receive more applications than we can accept. How can you increase the likelihood of being selected?

Protecting the Headwaters of Five Southern Maine Watersheds

Sanford, the town with York County's largest population, contains the headwaters of these five rivers:

It is the first warm spring day and just as the sun starts to set, the air comes alive with?high pitched peeping and what sounds like ducks quacking in the woods. That is when you know spring has officially arrived. The sounds are coming from two types of small frogs:?spring peepers and wood frogs.

"You never know what the day will bring!" That is especially true of my job as Natural Resource Specialist here at the Wells Reserve. For instance, last week my task was to walk down the length of Laudholm Beach with Nancy Viehmann in search of beached birds. This is part of a monthly survey for a nationwide program called SEANET.

The Seabird Ecological Assessment Network (SEANET), based at the Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, is an ongoing project assessing seabird mortality along the eastern seaboard of the United States. Over 100 citizen scientists volunteer to walk an assigned stretch of beach once or twice a month, record environmental data and report both dead and live birds seen on the beach.

Hello again, Well another strong storm system battered the Maine coast again this past weekend. Here is a brief synopsis of that storm data courtesy of the System Wide Monitoring Program. All data from 3/13 at 11pm to 3/15 at 3pm was collected on the SWMP Meteorological Station located behind the Coastal Ecology Center. We had 6.7 inches of rain fall between late Saturday night (13th) into mid…