David Griffin Photography

Wow, with the holidays and a bunch of road trips it’s hard to believe that we’re already over a week into January, but here we are.

I’ve been spending so much time indoors working on history projects and a video that I’ve missed some really nice days outside here. January has been a month of extremes here in Massachusetts. Within a span of a week we went from 3 degrees (F) to over 65 degrees — and it stayed there for more than a day. It’s colloquially known as the “January Thaw”, and considering the amount of snow we’ve received in December it was rather welcome by the more urban areas (less so by the ski slopes).

I’m embarking on a new project for 2008, focusing on the Concord River. The Assabet River will remain a frequent subject, and not just because it is in my backyard - but that doesn’t hurt… I’m currently in the process of scoping out all the land-lubber sites until it warms up enough (and long enough) to put a kayak in the water and do some proper photography. There are advantages to having solid ground beneath you though, as the photo above shows…

[A young “scientist for the day” inspects a water bug specimen.
Water Wise Workshops - Fort Meadow Reservoir, Marlborough, MA]

“Water Wisdom - A Drop At A Time…”

The brainchild of OAR Director Paul Goldman, the Water Wise Workshops bring the lessons of watershed ecology to young children ages 6-12. Designed by Paul along with educators such as Pat Koscinski from Marlborough High School, the 45 minute workshops are taught by high school and college students - who I think learn as much as they teach. This year high school juniors Amelia and Amanda were the instructors for the four workshops given along the shore of the Fort Meadow Reservoir in Marlborough, MA. Fort Meadow Reservoir is part of the Assabet River Watershed.

The workshops are fun, engaging, and educationally sound. They don’t talk down to the kids - many of which come to the workshops with a pleasantly surprising familiarity of the water cycle, ecology, and biology. (Hurray for the public schools’ science curriculum!)

There were four programs this year:
•The Water Cycle and Watersheds
•Water Plants and Animals
•Water Testing and Conservation
•Water Bugs Mystery

The Water Wise Workshops are sponsored by the Organization for the Assabet River (OAR), The City of Marlborough and the Fort Meadow Association, with grants from Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials, of Marlborough, and P&G’s “Live, Learn and Thrive” Program.

I’ll be working with Paul this fall to produce a short promotional video for the workshops, with the hope of drumming up additional corporate and institutional support for the workshops.

Photos from the 2007 workshops can be viewed at: http://www.assabetriver.org/riverpics/waterwise2007/

The Annual Meeting for the Friends of the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge held their annual meeting tonight. Betsy and I are supporters of the organization and hope to increase our involvement in the coming years, so we often attend their meetings. However, when we received the flyer for the meeting we were especially excited.

The speaker for the evening was Stephen Brown. Stephen is the director of the Shorebird Research Conservation Program at the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences. He’s also Betsy’s cousin. We have not had the opportunity to see Stephen in quite a number of years, so it was pretty cool to have him “come to us” so to speak.

In the “it’s a small world” department, the refuge directory, Libby Herland, also knew Stephen as a doctoral student at Cornell (she helped fund one of his early projects).

Stephen’s talk was rather sobering. Through our family we’ve heard bits and pieces of his adventures in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. With the fate of the refuge currently hanging in the balance of politics in Washington, it was scary to see what was at stake. Stephen was pretty dispassionate about the oil situation — we need it as a society — but the cost to this critical piece of slice of Alaska seems to to simply not worth the incredibly small bump in oil reserves that drilling in the refuge would provide. There’s a lot of “heat” in the debate around the refuge, but very little light. So Stephen (and a team of talented researchers, writers, and photographers) put together a book that helps illuminate what is at cost.

Arctic Wings tells the stories of the birds that migrate each year to this remote part of Alaska to nest and breed. While the book covers a number of bird families, Stephen’s talk naturally centered more around shorebirds. It truly was amazing to hear the journeys that sandpipers, golden plovers, and hundreds of other species take each year — linking together various ecosystems spanning the globe and spanning the seasons. The other connection is to us — we each have an impact on the fate of these birds, either through the politics of oil or the impact of global warming. I’ve only read a few stories in the book so far, but all of them tell how they were profoundly changed by visiting the refuge and seeing what was at stake. They’ve told their story. Now it is time for us to listen, learn, and act.

For more information about the book and the project visit arcticwings.org