Daybreak Monday, 4/6/26

Partly sunny, cool. It’s an early-spring day out there today, with an unsettled upper atmosphere—which is what’s producing these wispy snow showers this morning—a mix of clouds and sun, highs reaching the low or mid 40s. Winds are from the west and may get gusty at times during the day. Tonight we’re going to get a shot of cold air descending from Canada, which will drop overnight lows into the mid 20s and bring a chance of snow showers by the time you wake up tomorrow.

Even so, spring’s on the march! Three sure signs:

“For maybe the first time in history, I’ve found teens who love health class.” That’s Trudy Silver, a student in Sophie Crane’s audio storytelling class at Dartmouth, who overcame her own seventh-grade sex-ed mortification to dip her toe back into the subject in the Upper Valley. She visits Sarah Lemieux’s class at Hartford High—”It seems that somehow [she] has made a torturous class fun. This woman seems like she was born for this work…”—and sits down with Hanover High health teacher Dan Bornstein and a Planned Parenthood staffer to talk about health/sex ed and why it matters. And she meets two Hartford students intrigued by what they’ve learned.

Man’s body found below WRJ bridge. A scrap hunter looking for pickings along the railroad tracks yesterday afternoon discovered the unidentified man underneath the Urban Bridge that spans the White River. “I went underneath the bridge and I seen the backpack just sitting there and then I seen him laying face down,” he tells Eric Francis for Daybreak. EMTs responded quickly and determined the man was dead, at which point Hartford police took over the investigation. They say there was little to indicate how long the man might have been there before he was found, Eric reports. The body’s been taken to the state medical examiner in Burlington.

Hearing on stalking petition against Hanover resident. As you probably remember, all five members of Hanover’s selectboard and the town manager have gone to court asking that David Vincelette be barred from approaching them, attending selectboard meetings, or “further acts of stalking or acts of abuse or threats of abuse.” On Friday, reports Alex Ebrahimi in the Valley News, selectboard member Joanna Whitcomb’s petition came up before Lebanon District Court Judge Michael Mace; it was the third of the six to be heard. In a sometimes heated 40-minute session, Vincelette represented himself, drawing at least one reprimand from Mace. Ebrahimi paints the scene.

In Tunbridge, Mary Lake is a sheep farmer, shearer, butcher, crafter—and sheep-health educator. In recent years, writes Maryellen Apelquist in The Herald, Lake has “earned wide regional acclaim as a shearer and butcher, articles and photographs showcasing the obvious strength and purposefulness of her form.” But in Apequist’s profile, Lake emerges as much more: not only a master shearer—she’s competing to go to the world championships in 2029—and accomplished butcher, but also a keen observer, using her shearing time to gauge the health of the sheep she’s working with. “What can we take from this day and learn from the wool?” she asks.

SPONSORED: Herbal medicines Q&A. Join Betzy Bancroft—a founder of the VT Center for Integrative Herbalism and author of the new book Herbal Pharmacy: The Science and Magic of Preparing and Administering Plant Medicine—for a mini-workshop and Q&A tomorrow on preparing plant remedies, hosted by The Norwich Bookstore. Herbal Pharmacy is a go-to book for herb enthusiasts and provides detailed step-by-step instructions, how-to information, and "why-to" explanations so readers can confidently move from following recipes to designing and preparing their own herbal remedies. Event details at the link. Sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing.

What snowmelt reveals, this first week of April. For starters, writes Northern Woodlands’ Jack Saul, there’s the clubmoss known as southern ground-cedar, which “has remained evergreen beneath the snow and can take immediate advantage of the lengthening, snow-free days, especially before the canopy closes.” Lichens and mosses in general collect dust and nutrients and, over the years, build layers of organic matter: “Snowmelt – like a little glacial retreat in miniature – reveals them doing what they’ve done on bare rock in New England since the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated 20,000 years ago.” Plus: ruffed grouse scat and pine siskins trilling.

And speaking of birdsong… In Sidenote, Li Shen offers up a mini-essay on the nature of what we’re starting to hear out there. Though “there's growing evidence that female birdsong is more widespread than previously thought,” it’s still thought of primarily as a male behavior, in particular for establishing territory: “the further the song can carry the larger the territory,” which gives a decided square-footage advantage to rural birds, since songs have a tough time competing with the din of cities. The loudest bird is the white bellbird, a rainforest dweller in South America, which at 125 decibels is louder than a chainsaw; Carolina wrens, at 100 decibels, aren’t far behind.

The Monday Jigsaw: the grandstand at Riverdale Park in Lebanon in 1877. It was once a horse and harness racing venue. Starting in the late 1940s, the Riverdale neighborhood hosted a stock car track for a number of years. As Cam Cross shows in an overlay photo on his Curioustorian blog, it sprawled where Hypertherm stands and a stretch of I-89 now runs. With links to lots of photos from the stock car days.

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

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HEADS UP
At Colby-Sawyer College, “Two Birds, One Cudgel: How Fascism Reformed Italy’s Film Industry and the Italian Language”. UNH Italian studies prof Piero Garofalo will explore “how the technological, artistic and cultural shifts from 1926 to 1946 established the foundations for modern filmmaking in Italy and how these film practices impacted the formation of the Italian language.” With Italian sweets on hand. 1 pm in the Ware Room of the Cleveland Library.

And for today...

What better intro to the week than Henry Mancini’s intro to The Pink Panther, thanks to the Vienna Philharmonic’s quartet of double bass players: Christoph Wimmer, Filip Waldmann, Alexander Matschinegg, and Valerie Schatz.

See you tomorrow.

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