GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Daybreak is brought to you this week with help from Bookstock. Join us today through Sunday for our beloved Used Book Sale, talks by bestselling authors, poetry readings, and activities for all ages on and around Woodstock’s historic Green. Details on the Bookstock website.
Clarification: Several people read yesterday’s note about Dear Daybreak to mean that Daybreak itself will be off for the summer. Nope (though wouldn’t that be a sweet schedule?). Dear Daybreak is the Thursday feature with contributions from readers. It’ll be off until fall. Daybreak (the thing you’re reading right now) will continue publishing as always, though I’ll be taking off a handful of weeks during the summer. More on that when the time comes. You can catch yesterday’s Dear Daybreak here.
Showers coming to an end. Yesterday’s system is heading eastward and skies will gradually clear. Still, there could be the occasional shower into the early afternoon. Highs today reaching toward 60, lows overnight in the mid 40s, and arriving sun and high pressure should get things warmed up pretty quickly over the weekend, with highs getting well into the 70s both days.
A riled chickadee. Attacks Erin Donahue’s trail cam. Ted Levin writes, “The black-capped chickadee is a familiar, confiding presence, so common it seems almost inevitable. But don’t mistake familiarity for simplicity. Its calls choreograph the dramas of social life and are rich with meaning: one loud, chicka-dee-dee-dee; the other a soft, high, almost whispered seet. Both are sophisticated alarms signaling not only the kind of predator nearby but the danger it poses. The more dees, the sharper the peril. A predator at rest gets a stronger response than one in flight; a small predator—a saw-whet owl—more alarm than a larger one. A weasel draws more concern than a bobcat. Why this particular chickadee is so distressed by Erin’s cam, I have no idea.”
Grafton County sheriff’s office seems to have dropped ICE agreement. Sheriff Jillian Myers isn’t talking, reports the Globe’s Steven Porter (no paywall), but “her office no longer appears on ICE’s list of participating agencies.” Myers, who’s up for re-election this fall, originally signed a cooperation and training agreement with the federal agency in March of last year. County Commissioner Katie Wood Hedberg tells Porter that the decision “came after ‘significant and persistent’ pushback from locals opposed to the cooperation agreement.” NH “is the only state in New England where any local police force has such an agreement in place,” Porter writes.
At Barnard’s Silver Lake, pinwheel spinners and a plan for daily cyanobacteria checks. The lake was closed for several days last summer because of the blue-green algae—whose blooms can be toxic—and now, reports Maryellen Apelquist in The Herald, state park staff are ramping up their vigilance. The pinwheels (and fencing) are aimed at keeping geese off the beach and lake, and earlier this week staff got trained in testing for and identifying “problem cyanobacteria,” Apelquist writes. “We will be doing those visual checks every day, so that when something happens, then we would take steps to alert the public of the changing category,” says a state parks manager.
It’s early, but just so you have it: Here’s NH’s Healthy Swimming Mapper. There are no current alerts, though a pond in Salem has already had a report this spring.
And here’s VT’s Cyanobacteria Tracker, which relies heavily on volunteer testers around the state and isn’t active yet. It’s a good bet both the NH and VT maps will get more active once things warm up.
SPONSORED: Get ready for Samantha Fish live at Lebanon Opera House! Join us on Friday, May 29 at 7:30 PM for an electric performance with the Grammy-nominated blues rocker, joined by special guest Solomon Hicks. Tickets are selling fast, so don’t miss the chance to see this formidable talent in her element on the LOH stage. Sponsored by Lebanon Opera House.
“I’ll never forget putting my hand into those holes made by those bullets all those years ago. It was like I felt something pull me in.” That’s historian Howard Coffin, talking to the VT Standard’s Emma Stanton about a visit he made when he was 25 to a Civil War battlefield and discovering bullet holes in the bricks of an old church. “I knew I’d be hooked on this subject for the rest of my life,” he adds. Coffin, who dropped out of UVM, got drafted, and then taught himself history, grew up in Woodstock, and was just given a lifetime achievement award by… UVM. He talks to Stanton about the Civil War, exploring battlefields, becoming a history author, and more.
New England School of the Arts launches ballet program with news of Leb Ballet School’s closing. The ballet school announced Tuesday that after 42 years, it will close June 6. Almost immediately, NESA announced it’s starting up NESA Ballet, noting that LBS’s announcement follows the 2022 closure of Dancers Corner and the 2024 shuttering of White River Ballet Academy. “These changes have created an urgent need for accessible, high-quality ballet and movement education for children, teens, and adults,” NESA says in its press release. Its program will be led by dancer and Dartmouth ballet instructor Kassady Small, who grew up in Enfield.
SPONSORED: Public Talk by Brandon Terry on "A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement". Brandon Terry, a scholar of African American political thought at Harvard University, will give a public talk as part of the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College's New Books in Ethics, Politics, and Society Series on his reinterpretation of the civil rights movement, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope. The talk is in the Rockefeller Center, Room 003, on Thursday, May 21 at 5pm. Sponsored by the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College.
A Morphy tour. In this short Valley News video, Dartmouth biology prof Eric Schaller explains what’s going on with the college’s famous corpse flower. “There’s probably more examples in greenhouses and botanical gardens now than there are in Sumatra, in the wild,” he says.
Dartmouth researchers confirm that much rainfall is happening in shorter, more intense bursts. Geography prof Justin Mankin and former postdoc Corey Lesk, who now teaches at the Univ. of Quebec in Montreal, looked at 40 years of precipitation data from around the world for their study in Nature, reports VT Public’s Abagael Giles. They found that when and how frequently rain falls affects drought and flooding more than how much precipitation a place sees overall. Locally, Mankin says, “As we concentrate rainfall, we're asking the land surface of Vermont to drink from a fire hose, and it just cannot do that.”
Hiking Close to Home: Cole Pond Trail, Enfield, NH. This easy trail, managed by NH Fish and Game, provides walk-in access to the 17-acre coldwater Cole Pond, which is inhabited by eastern brook trout, says the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. Only fly fishing is allowed in the pond. Trailhead and parking are on Bog Road, which is off 4A.
Daybreak’s Upper Valley News Quiz. Were you paying attention this week? Because we’ve got questions! Like, what’s going on with Blake Hill Preserves? And which town offices just got added to NH’s Register of Historic Places? You’ll find those and more at the link. Meanwhile, you’ll find NHPR’s New Hampshire quiz here, and Seven Days’ Vermont quiz here.
JetBlue pulls out of Manchester Airport. Manchester-Boston Regional Airport officials announced yesterday that the carrier will end service there on July 8 as it struggles with the kinds of financial challenges that took down Spirit Airlines at the start of this month. Former Massport CEO Tom Kinton tells WMUR’s Jackson Stoever that he blames rising fuel costs—adding that the Spirit/JetBlue merger blocked by a federal judge in 2024 might have helped avoid the route cuts. "JetBlue has been having financial problems," he says. "There's no secret there."
NH Senate Republicans “gut” House’s Charlie Kirk act in committee, replace it with effort to revive “divisive concepts.” The House version, writes NH Bulletin’s Ethan DeWitt, passed in February and would have kept NH teachers from advocating for “critical race theory” and other conservative targets. But the bill scheduled for the Senate yesterday was different: It makes no reference to Kirk and returns to barring educators from teaching the four “divisive” ideas laid out in 2021 legislation that was struck down by a federal court in 2024—though it contains fewer enforcement mechanisms. More at the link.
VT towns, school districts, and state agencies struggle with legislature’s mandates. It’s something of a pattern, write Hannah Bassett and Alison Novak in Seven Days: “Legislators draft laws that signal urgency and intent while shifting the burden of execution onto schools, communities, agencies and public servants.” And often, that burden comes without the money to make it happen. They cite many instances, and focus on three: the 2021 mandate that schools test for PCBs (agonizingly familiar to Hartford families); conflicts with state agency staff over funding; and a pile of work for a state ethics commission with inadequate staff and money.
On that USGS lithium-deposit story: “Nobody’s going to start ripping up the ground anytime soon.” Especially in VT. That quote comes from UVM geologist Keith Klepeis, who points out to VTDigger’s Emma Green that, among other things, VT lacks the “evolved granitoids” that are likeliest to host the lithium deposits that USGS researchers estimate are especially probable in NH and ME. Their findings, says UVM’s Laura Webb, point to “a potentially significant resource, for what we know right now is an important need.” But, she adds: “Will there be mining in the northeast? I’d say probably. A lot? Unclear. Probably not.”
Now here’s a signal honor: First in your state to receive Wilderness SAR Air Scent Certification. And it goes to VT Fish & Wildlife wardens David Lockerby and Bella Kline and their K9s, Rezi and Spike. “For 8-10 hours each day over the course of four weeks, the Wardens and K9s trained in the rain, across diverse landscapes, and at night to show the dogs as many environmental conditions as possible. And the result? The K9s are now trained to follow their noses and scan the air for human scent to find lost or vulnerable humans,” the agency writes. With, of course, photos.
Life always finds a way. There’s a reason Death Valley is called, well, Death Valley: Summertime temps regularly hit 120°F and it’s the driest spot in North America. But as My Modern Met’s Sara Barnes writes, between last November and this January it got 2.5 inches of rain, far more than normal, and the result was the first superbloom in a decade, which has just finished its run. Photographers flocked to the park, and Barnes rounds up the results (just keep scrolling past the ads, which are frequent).
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
From Bookstock in Woodstock and this year’s Experiment Balloon and Airship gathering in Post Mills, both starting today, to music choices for a Sunday afternoon, plus lots in between, there’s a pile of stuff happening this weekend. It’s all in the Weekend Heads Up. Three additions: The First Congregational Church in Thetford will be serving breakfast at the Post Mills Airport starting at 6:30 tomorrow morning; on Sunday at 4:30 pm, the Barbershop Harmony Society presents a concert at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Hanover with the North Country Chordsmen, VoxStars, Treble in the Valley, 91 North, and guest quartet Frozen Assets; and Jason Cann and Wherehouse will play Plainfield Town Hall tomorrow in a benefit for the town hall and the Maxfield Parrish mural, 7 pm.
And for today...
Sometimes you want to get hyped up ahead of the weekend, sometimes you want to take things down a few notches. Berlin-based composer and pianist Olaf Taranczewski definitely helps out with the latter, with “Coco,” which, interestingly, he set to footage from the 1952 animated version of Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline.
See you Monday for CoffeeBreak.
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editors: Jonea Gurwitt, Sam Gurwitt
