"I am very honored to be among the company of EPA achievement award winners, both today's and from the past," Cadot said. "And I'm very fortunate to have climbed aboard the Harris Center ship just when it was embarking on its long and successful maiden voyage with remarkable and dedicated crew members and scores of supportive passengers all along the way."

 

Hunt Dowse, chair of the Harris Center's board of trustees, said the organization is proud of Cadot's awards. "In his 30-plus years of working with many like-minded land conservationists, Meade has set the standard for linking important pieces of land together to preserve wildlife habitat, watersheds, and some of the best open spaces in the Monadnock Region," Dowse said. "His expertise, combined with the talents of our teacher/naturalists and the strong leadership from Executive Director Laurie Bryan, has created an organization that is delivering some of the best environmental education, public programs and land conservation in the state."
 
In the early 1970s, Cadot was teaching for what is now Antioch University New England, when he moved to Hancock and became naturalist and caretaker of New Hampshire Audubon's Willard Pond Sanctuary. By 1975, a five-year-old organization called the Harris Center for Conservation Education hired Meade as its first paid director. He held that post until this January, when he took a "sideways slide," to become the Harris Center's senior naturalist and land program director. Bryan, who joined the Harris Center staff in 1999, brings an extensive background in education and organizational management, as well as a love of the Monadnock Region's human and wild communities.

 

"Meade's vast knowledge of wildlife, passion for land protection, and dedication to using the outdoors as a classroom is inspirational," Bryan said. "His work sets a solid foundation from which the Harris Center continues to thrive - providing outstanding environmental education and land protection in the Monadnock Region."

Spotted salamanders, wood frogs, spring peepers and many other amphibians have migrated to vernal pools to breed. Be sure to check out Tom Tyning's talk on this in Keene April 24, and Matt Tarr's talk at the Harris Center April 25. See below for details.

The male woodcock starts displaying, including its wild aerial dance and ground "peenting."

 

Male wild turkeys are also courting the affections of hens. Spring has sprung and love is in the air!

Enjoy Earth Day!
Get Outside

Small teams of high school students from throughout New Hampshire are hard at work right now, preparing for a big day next month in Hancock: the state Envirothon competition.

 

The New Hampshire Envirothon is an annual competition among high school teams who are tested on a range of natural resource issues. The four- or five-member teams are quizzed on aquatics, forestry, soils and wildlife, along with an environmental "current issue" problem that they're asked to solve. The winning New Hampshire team goes on to compete at the national level against other winning teams from throughout the U.S. and Canada.

 

The Harris Center recently hosted the annual Envirothon Training Day, where teams converge and are prepped on the various topics they'll face at the actual competition. That event will also be in Hancock, at Boston University's Sargent Center on May 26.

 

Representatives of several agencies and organizations helped the teams during the Training Day earlier this month at the Harris Center. ABOVE: Marty Curran of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers shows Keene High School students Carolyn Johnson and Caitlyn Andrews how to identify a tree species.

 

New Hampshire's Envirothon is organized by the N.H. Association of Conservation Districts.

Students in Ms. Kenney's fifth grade class at Great Brook Middle School in Antrim, Alex Lawrence and Noah Cass, bake cookies in their newly crafted solar oven. Harris Center teacher/naturalist Dori Drachman helped guide the students in engineering and using solar ovens. They were able to eat the results of their baking project, despite cold temperatures!

The Harris Center is offering a unique opportunity for high school students this summer.
 
Teens can spend a week in July learning about sustainable agriculture, working on local farms and discovering the challenges and opportunities of the growing local food movement.
 
"Students involved in this course will have a terrific opportunity to work directly on local farms and explore the connections between sustainable agriculture and conservation practices," said Laurie Bryan, executive director of the Harris Center. "The week's experience will provide students with an active understanding of resource conservation, sustainability, and community that they can apply to real-life situations."
 
"More and more people are becoming interested in food that's grown sustainably and locally, right here in the Monadnock Region," said Susie Spikol, outreach education coordinator for the Harris Center. "Because we've encountered many local youths who are interested in this movement, we wanted to offer a nice way for them to learn and be involved in local farming."
 
Each day of the program will be a blend of working at area farms and discussing the issues and challenges facing farmers today, from economics to land management and conservation. The work will include harvest and helping to prepare a community supper. "The community supper will be a great way for kids to give back to the Monadnock community and highlight to the public the value of local foods," Spikol said.
 
Among the farms that the students will work with are Sunnyfield Farm in Peterborough and the Daloz Farm Community Supported Agriculture in Hancock.
 
College credit for this program may be available for high school juniors and seniors who meet the requirements of Keene State College's accelerated program for high school students. 
 
To register or learn more information about the Harris Center's Farms to Community program, contact Susie Spikol, 603-525-3394, or spikol@harriscenter.org.

The Harris Center's Environmental Studies Institute provides an array of opportunities for adults to learn about the Monadnock Region's natural history, connect to the outdoors, and engage in meaningful discussion about the environment.

 

 

If you haven't heard of phenology, you certainly know what it's all about, and spring is a great season to think about it, or better yet, participate.

I'm not talking about phrenology - the 19th century pseudoscience of analyzing personalities by examining the skull. It's phenology: how we study the timing of life-cycle events for plants and animals and how they're influenced by seasons and climate. It's about bird migration, breeding, plant flowering, and leaf emergence.

Examples of how we study phenology abound, in both low-tech, personal ways and modern, ultra-scientific ways. And both low-tech and high-tech approaches are taking on an urgent new importance as scientists look for evidence of climate change. A bit on that later.
The concept of phenology goes way back to the first cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia. Aside from keeping track of spring rains, the ancients recorded the blooming of plants, including all-important crops.

 

Thomas Jefferson kept systematic weather records for more than 50 years in Virginia, often noting when cherry trees and other plants were blossoming. Henry David Thoreau noted the appearance of hundreds of wildflowers, insects and birds around Walden Pond. And closer to home, Abner Sanger's 18th century diary mentions sap runs and other seasonal events in the Keene area.

 

As denizens of a place where seasons rule our lives, you and I are unwitting phenologists, whether we keep records or not. In any given March, I'll bet you've at least once stepped inside after a walk and said, "Hey, I just heard my first red-winged blackbird!" Or spring peepers.

 

And I'm sure that you've noticed those early crocuses, poking through the old leaves (or snow) and thought to yourself, "Ah, spring is near!" That's all low-tech phenology, and it's as natural as can be.

 

Neal Clark of Hancock has been a closet phenologist for decades. Clark has kept a journal on nature, personal activities and seasonal observations from 1978 to 2001 or so. He still jots down big events on the calendar, like hearing the first spring woodcock or a gobbling wild turkey. The journal helped him write Eastern Birds of Prey, a guide to hawks and other raptors.

 

Keeping bird records has also long been on the agenda of Meade Cadot, senior naturalist at the Harris Center for Conservation Education. Cadot was 11 when he first started keeping records of birds returning in the spring. In 1973, he got the Monadnock Region involved in the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count and later participated in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Breeding Bird Survey. Over time and with thousands of volunteers, the vast data gathered from these ambitious record-keeping activities lets biologists know which species are in trouble.

 

Bill Eva's phenology is based on his business, his Hancock maple sugaring operation. Eva needs records on when he tapped, how many trees he tapped and how much syrup he produced. His father also ran a sugaring business and kept records from the 1940s into the '60s. Bill Eva sent his dad's notes to the Proctor Maple Research Center in Vermont, where they analyzed scores of decades-old sugaring records. Researchers found that the maple sugaring season has progressively started earlier, with modern sugarers tapping in February, while their fathers tapped in March. And the season itself has shrunk in duration. The reason: "They figure it's due to global warming," Eva says bluntly.

 

Climate change is one of the top reasons for an ambitious new project called the USA National Phenology Network (www.usanpn.org). The project involves scores of organizations, agencies, and professional scientists. And by harnessing the power of the Internet, the project also involves thousands of ordinary folks who take notes on nearby plants, then submit the data online. They record when plants are flowering, leaf size, and whether they've borne fruit. The project will soon collect phenological information on wildlife, including birds, reptiles and amphibians.

 

By gathering such records from thousands of volunteers throughout the country the project is building robust, meaningful data to assess the impacts of climate change.

 

So, when you notice the first returning woodcock, the first spring peepers, or the first blooming maples, make a note of it. Fill out a form or jot it on the calendar. And let's hope that 40 years from now, your observations won't be much different.

 

- The Bobcat's Tail is a collaboration of the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript and the Harris Center. The column appears monthly in the Ledger-Transcript's Earth Friendly Living section.