Daybreak Friday, 4/10/26

Partly sunny, warm. We get a one-day taste of what’s to come, thanks to continued air flow from the south, with highs today reaching the mid or upper 60s. Things get cloudier this afternoon as a cold front and ride-along system approach, bringing a chance of rain into the early-morning hours. Lows will drop into the upper 30s, and tomorrow and Sunday will be cooler before we get even more of a warm-up next week.

Woodcocks doing what woodcocks do. “My favorite bird is the American Woodcock because of how goofy they are,” Rebecca Kelecy writes from Leb about the video at the link. “As luck would have it, there are Woodcocks doing their springtime mating displays right across the road from my house! Male Woodcocks have a specific ritual they do to try to find a mate. They will first make loud, funny ‘peent!’ calls on the ground to gain attention. After they've done that for a minute or two, they will take off into a sky dance where they fly around, then descend with a magical sounding 5-note song-like sound.” Sadly for the male in this case, the female in wasn’t interested.

FedEx driver killed in crash on I-89 in Quechee. The accident happened last night around 8:15, when a tandem FedEx tractor trailer and a BMW collided just above the Quechee exit on I-89 south, reports Eric Francis for Daybreak. The impact left the truck on its side facing the wrong direction, with its smashed cab dangling over a steep embankment next to an underpass. The driver was thrown down the embankment, and was pronounced dead at the scene. The BMW’s driver was taken to the hospital. The highway was closed for hours; at 4 this morning, the VT State Police said it had reopened, but asked drivers to proceed carefully. Eric’s story at the link.

Dartmouth students revive push to rename Black Family Visual Arts Center. In a joint email to undergrads on Wednesday, the Dartmouth Student Government and the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault pressed college officials to remove alumnus Leon Black’s name from the building; Black had longstanding and close ties to financier Jeffrey Epstein. The issue first came up in 2021, when a group of alums called for renaming the center. In response to the renewed push, spokesperson Jana Barnello told The Dartmouth’s Iris WeaverBell the college has “no current financial relationship” with Black. His lawyer wrote, “There is absolutely no truth to any of the allegations against Mr. Black.” Lots more at the link.

VT state policy debate lands in local back yards. The heated discussion over whether to reshape Act 181, the land-use law aimed at updating Act 250, is not just on legislators’ minds, Tunbridge state Rep. John O’Brien tells The Herald’s Darren Marcy. “Constituents are paying attention for sure,” he says. In the first of a series on the law, Marcy talks to O’Brien—who backed the law in 2024 but now believes it “forgets the farmers and loggers” and would turn VT into “a forest and some nice homes”—and to Rep. Larry Satcowitz of Randolph, who believes the law needs amending but is fundamentally sound. Marcy explains issues like the “road rule” and Tier 3.

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QBar Upper Valley: “I come to this to find community.” That’s Grafton’s Aja Howes, talking to Valley News reporter Marion Umpleby about a recent QBar gathering at Still North. The group was started in 2023 as a way to offer “opportunities to socialize with other queer people off of the dance floor,” Umpleby writes. It meets at a different location each month—including venues like Daddy’s Pizza in Claremont, the Filling Station in WRJ, and the Ottauquechee Yacht Club in Woodstock. Locations are announced day-of. “I’m glad there’s options,” organizer Aaron Almanza says. “We need to have places where people can actually have a conversation.” 

Strolling Kinda Close to Home: Riverwalk, Stowe, VT. With mud season still on us, the Upper Valley Trails allows urges skipping mountain trails and enjoying this short, easy paved walk along the Little River in Stowe's Lower Village. The 0.2-mile Riverwalk is accessible, flat, and perfect for all ages—a quick break from winter with beautiful river views and plenty of benches. It's a bit of a drive from the Upper Valley, but ideal for an afternoon outing when muddy trails are off-limits. In general, mud season lasts through May, and you can protect trails by staying on dry, lower-elevation routes.

Daybreak’s Upper Valley News Quiz. Were you paying attention this week? Because we’ve got questions! Like, would wake boats be allowed on Lake Fairlee under the new rules regulators are considering? And which well-known Upper Valley restaurant is exiting bankruptcy? Meanwhile, you’ll find NHPR’s New Hampshire quiz here, and Seven Days’ Vermont quiz here.

NH is losing one of its two experimental forests. The Bartlett Experimental Forest in the White Mountains is among the dozens of US Forest Service research stations being closed as a result of a massive USFS restructuring, reports NHPR’s Kate Dario. Hubbard Brook, the state’s other experimental forest, “is not currently slated to close,” Dario notes. Former Bartlett wildlife biologist Mariko Yamasaki tells Dario, "We have a 90-year record of how vegetation has changed at Bartlett. We can speak to things in ways that nobody else can do because nobody else does long-term ecological research and management research the way Forest Service research does.”

NH House votes to review GOP legislator’s inflammatory social media posts. It was a rare move yesterday, reports NHPR’s Josh Rogers, involving a series of posts by Rep. Travis Corcoran of Weare in which, among other things, he called for a “final solution” in response to a karaoke night invitation from a Jewish lawmaker, and another in which he talked of deporting a fellow lawmaker who was born in the Philippines: “She has to go back,” he wrote. Earlier this week, Speaker Sherman Packard sent Corcoran a “letter of caution”: “Your verified public writings are negative, targeted and purposely written to leave a hate-filled interpretation,” Packard wrote.

VT state employees “in limbo” as state Supreme Court refuses to intervene yet in work-from-home faceoff. As you probably remember, the state’s labor relations board last week ordered the administration of Gov. Phil Scott to rescind its policy requiring employees to return to their office. The state appealed to the VT Supreme Court, which ruled Wednesday that it “must first seek a stay” from the labor board, reports VTDigger’s Ethan Weinstein. “For now,” Weinstein writes, “life for state employees is mostly status quo. Howard said the union is telling members to follow their supervisors’ directives on where to work from.”

Unpaid property taxes are punching holes in VT town budgets. As the cost of living increases along with the cost of funding schools, towns are struggling to fill the gaps left when residents can’t afford their taxes, report Seven Days’ Hannah Bassett and Kevin McCallum. The problem is especially acute in smaller, low-income towns, where budgets depend on taxes from just a handful of properties and towns have few options without that revenue. They can work with property owners to create a payment plan, or try to recuperate lost revenue through tax sales, but a few unpaid tax bills can force towns to put off investments. Legislators are working on ed reforms and tax measures that would provide relief—but only in the next decade.

A guy with a cassette recorder taped 10,000 concerts, and now you can hear them, too. We’re talking about early gigs by R.E.M., The Cure, The Pixies, Depeche Mode, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Björk ... As the AP’s Christopher Weber tells it,  Aadam Jacobs slipped a tiny recorder in, then bigger, better ones, for more than 40 years. Now, volunteers in the US and overseas are cataloging, digitizing, and uploading them for all of us to stream and download, free. Jacobs says he’s not obsessive, not an archivist, just a music fan who—lucky for us—figured if he was going to so many shows anyway, “why not document them?” Here’s the archive.

Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.

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HEADS UP

You’ll find a remarkable array of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday events in Daybreak’s Weekend Heads Up. One event you won’t find there: On Saturday from 3-5 pm, the Tunbridge General Store is holding an opening for its exhibition of art by Joan Waltermire, the Vershire artist and naturalist who specializes in detailed drawings of nature.

And for today...

Lucía Gutierrez Rebolloso—better known simply as Lucía— will be at LOH this evening. She began her musical career at the age of two when she sang and danced in her parents’ band, “Son de Madera” and went on to study voice formally at the age of 13 at Mexico’s University of Veracruz. She’s best known for her jazz and Mexican repertoire, but she’s a fearless fan of pop as well. Here’s her cover of Taylor Swift’s “Willow”.

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