GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sunny, a bit warmer than yesterday. It’ll be a quiet day, with highs getting into the mid or upper 50s, and less windy than the past couple of days—though winds will still be from the north. With mostly clear skies overnight, we’ll see temps fall into the upper 20s—but with high pressure building in, the winds will shift and we’ll see southern air arriving tomorrow, driving highs into the lower 60s.
Another thing that may be arriving: what the weather folks call a “pattern change.” Starting Sunday, we may see a “continued period of precipitation chances” well into next week. Which’ll be good, because both NH and VT saw slight boosts this week in the portions of each state under extreme drought. Here are this week’s maps… (Note: if you get a “server error”, go into the URL and delete the equal sign the system’s adding at the end, then hit return).
It’s not just loons. Grafton Pond is justifiably known around here for its yearly loon population, but as Peter Bloch points out in his new video from the pond, other birds are pretty fond of it, too. He’s got a languid, drifting look at great blue herons, mergansers, Canada geese, bald eagles, greater yellowlegs, and a double-breasted cormorant.
Did you catch Dear Daybreak yesterday? If not, you missed Barbara Mason’s beautiful pastel of the Connecticut River based on a photo by Jay Davis; Rebecca Lafave on Thetford’s Woods Trail Run; Jay Campion’s poem on fall and the turn of the seasons; and Patricia Sherman’s story about watching a snoring-loon video late at night in a hotel room and its unexpected consequences. And Dear Daybreak always needs submissions. If you’ve got something to share, please send it in.
Claremont residents will see school tax hike. Interestingly, reports Patrick O’Grady in the Valley News, it has nothing to do with the district’s $5 million deficit—that pain probably won’t arrive until next year, once the district has to pay back a $4 million bank loan while also prepping teacher contracts. At a school board meeting Wednesday, SAU 6 interim business administrator Matt Angell told board members that taxpayers could face up to a 9 percent boost in the school tax rate, with his estimates suggesting that annual school taxes could rise as much as $370 on a $250,000 property.
SPONSORED: Reporting Without Borders: The Role of Journalism Today, with Geeta Anand. On Tuesday, Oct. 21 at 5 pm, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, now editor-in-chief of VTDigger, will explore the critical role of independent journalism in an era of misinformation, polarization, and rapid technological change. From breaking stories sparking congressional action to her book The Cure, Anand exemplifies journalism’s power to inform and expose. An accomplished and inspiring voice on why local journalism matters—perhaps now more than ever. In Dartmouth's Haldeman Hall and online. Sponsored by the Dickey Center for International Understanding.
Northern Stage adds performances for Come From Away and This Verse Business. The company’s production of the musical about Gander, Newfoundland and its open-hearted—but complicated—welcome to thousands of passengers stranded there by 9/11 has been selling out, so it’s added a noon performance on its last day, Sunday, Oct. 26—and as Susan Apel writes in Artful, “you will want to act quickly.” Meanwhile, veteran star Gordon Clapp is reprising his Robert Frost role for a limited run Oct. 30-Nov. 1, and the theater’s just added a second chance to see it on its final day.
Female dark fishing spiders can have leg spans of up to three inches. In other words, that’s one big, hairy spider, though as Northern Woodlands’ Jack Saul writes in “This Week in the Woods” for the third week of October, they’re not dangerous to humans—just to prey and to their mates. Also, they can sail on water. Also out there: leaf miners, a variety of insects that in their larval stage shelter in and feed between leaves’ top and bottom layers, leaving tunnels; a gray catbird and a yellow-rumped warbler; and oyster mushrooms, whose sprawling underground networks “far exceed [what we see above-ground] in mass and volume.”
How invasive plants thrive. For one thing, says Robert Nelson, who lives in Randolph Center and is a VT state forester, “Most of them leaf out 10 days to two weeks earlier in the spring than the native vegetation. And most of them hold their leaves 10 days to two weeks later in the fall than our native vegetation.” As it happens, he tells Maryellen Apelquist in The Herald, that makes this an especially good time to notice everything from chervil and poison parsnip to Asian honeysuckles and Asiatic bittersweet, which is why he’s giving an invasives workshop and walk on his property on Saturday (details in the story). He talks it all over with Apelquist.
In Woodstock, an unlikely mountain-bike pairing yields a “marquee trail system.” On the mountain-biking site Singletracks, Greg Heil writes about the partnership between the Woodstock Inn—”a place where I don’t belong”—and the Woodstock Area Mountain Bike Association, which since 2017 has been carving a wide array of beginner-friendly, flow, and technical trails in its Mount Peg system on land owned by the Inn. Heil raves: “It’s all killer, no filler riding,” he writes. “When we weren’t descending, we were climbing back up a still-entertaining trail to reach the next downhill.” He rides and describes them—as well as Woodstock’s new Ranch Camp restaurant and bike shop, there because the trails are there.
Hiking Sorta Close to Home: the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail, Ripton, VT. It’s worth the drive, says the Upper Valley Trails Alliance: a 1.2-mile easy walk through the woods where Frost's most beloved poems are mounted throughout the walk. Wander past a scenic beaver pond and through open meadows along the Middlebury River. “It's a unique chance to experience how one of America's greatest poets found meaning in the natural world,” they write, “and maybe discover what the woods have to say to you.” The trail is fully accessible with boardwalks and benches for reflection.
Were you paying attention this week? Here are the Friday news quizzes. At the link, you’ll find this week’s Daybreak quiz on the Upper Valley, NHPR’s New Hampshire quiz, and Seven Days’ Vermont quiz.
Real estate developer in Laconia State School mess sentenced to 2 1/2 years in federal prison. Back in 2021, then-Gov. Chris Sununu re-jiggered state law to give himself the authority to sell the 220 acres of state-owned property overlooking Lake Winnisquam in Laconia to a developer. Officials eventually settled on Robynne Alexander and her proposal for a huge housing and business complex—only to see Alexander fail to come up with the money. Now, reports NHPR’s Annmarie Timmins—who’s followed the story since the beginning—Alexander’s been sentenced after pleading guilty to defrauding nearly two dozen investors in a variety of schemes.
After last year’s flooding, VT contracted out help for victims navigating FEMA. It hasn’t worked out as planned. In fact, reports Tik Root in Grist (here via VTDigger), “poor state oversight, vague contract terms, and high-priced consultants” have cost the state a big chunk of a $2.9 million FEMA grant that was supposed to last two years, but probably won’t. It’s a complicated story, but Root writes that the contractor, the multinational consulting company Guidehouse, in turn subcontracted with another agency that didn’t hire the full complement of frontline workers the state and FEMA had envisioned. Root details where things went wrong.
The hunters and the prey: winners of this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year. South African photographer Wim van den Heever won top prize in the competition hosted by London’s Natural History Museum for his photo of a reclusive brown hyena sneaking through an abandoned diamond mining town in Namibia. There were more than 60,000 entries, including Shane Gross’s glistening moray eel on the hunt in the Seychelles; Amit Eshel’s family of Pallas’s cats in Mongolia; and Gabriella Comi’s heart-stopping standoff between lion and cobra in Tanzania. A common thread across this diverse field: a shared commitment to conservation.
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak. And if you find yourself missing Wordbreak over the weekend, you just have to hit this link and you'll find brand new words tomorrow and Sunday—though not necessarily from Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
These days, you’ll find what used to be the Friday Heads Up section in your inbox on Thursday afternoons. But if you missed it yesterday, here it is! With additional information about Sunday’s CHaD Hero that wasn’t in the email.
And for today...
Hey, the weekend’s coming right up. And the Birmingham, AL-based Southern soul band St. Paul and the Broken Bones has a new album out. That’s frontman Paul Janeway, who grew up in rural Alabama training to be a preacher, hot-dogging it in the suit.
See you Monday for CoffeeBreak.
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