Daybreak Tuesday 1/26/21

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Snow tonight. We're not talking a major storm or anything, but there's a low pressure system headed our way from the west and a warm front along with it, and we'll probably see snow falling by the end of the day. Mostly sunny skies this morning, then clouding over quickly in the early afternoon, highs somewhere around 30, down only into the lower 20s tonight. What started as a trickle... Well, it's not exactly a flood, but when birders sighted two Hoary Redpolls in Norwich last fall, people flocked from all over the state to see them. Because they breed higher in the Arctic than the more common Common Redpoll, they're exceedingly rare in these parts. Now, though, more have been sighted around the state, including a relative bunch amid an immense flock of redpolls feeding on dead weeds at the confluence of the Waits and CT rivers in Bradford. The VT Center for Ecostudies' Nathaniel Sharp and Nick Tepper of VT Family Forests caught the action last week. Alicia Barrow steps down from Hartford selectboard, citing "blatant bigotry." Barrow, who is Black, unseated longtime member Dick Grassi last year. She tells the Valley News's Anna Merriman that since then she’s been the victim of racial slurs and death threats. “My life has been threatened and my children have been adversely affected by it,” Barrow says, blaming both racial issues and her questioning of police funding last year. In an emergency meeting yesterday, board members opted to leave the seat vacant until town meeting in March."Given what we know at the moment," Dartmouth to leave Black Family Visual Arts Center name intact. That's college spokesperson Diana Lawrence responding to yesterday's news that financier Leon Black, the heavy-hitting donor who gave $48 million for the center, paid convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein over $150 million from 2012 to 2017. The NYT reports that Black will step down as CEO of his private equity firm. “To date," Lawrence tells The Dartmouth's Emily Lu, "we are aware of no allegations...that Leon Black engaged in any of Epstein’s reprehensible behavior.”Here's thinking the marketers made the right choice. People pay for chaga, a fungus they consume as tea and in other forms. Its other name, though, is clinker polypore—it's a parasitic fungus that attacks birch trees. And in this fourth week of January, writes Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast, you can find it out there in the woods. Also, signs that it's been a warmer-than-normal January: Beavers have been peeling trees "like a carrot," since open water lets them get up on land rather than rely on their stores. Also, staghorn sumac and the fun you can have with goldenrod gall balls. You. Not me.SPONSORED: You know you should have a Will, but you keep putting off creating one, right? Then register for a free webinar Thursday, Jan. 28th at noon to learn why you need one and how to create it. Hosted by Everything in Order, an Upper Valley company that helps people create essential legal documents—and not just in VT and NH. We've made the process to create your Will simple, understandable, and affordable. Register now at the maroon link. Space is limited. Sponsored by Everything in Order."Early signs of spring tilting in the depths of winter." Writer and naturalist Ted Levin notes the chickadee he's heard singing recently and the hairy and pileated woodpeckers he saw yesterday "declaring" territory. As daylight lengthens, little by little, "I imagine in the jungles of the western Amazon, scarlet tanagers must be molting, stirring, overeating." With a brief foray into pileateds, which "like beavers (or alligators in the Everglades), are keystone species that provide sheltering and nesting cavities to other animals.""We have numbers but are not sure what those numbers mean." Jacqueline Hubbard co-leads DHMC's wastewater surveillance pilot project. That's the effort to see whether testing sewage and other wastewater for the Covid virus can alert towns and cities to upcoming surges. The answer so far, she tells the Monitor's David Brooks: It's too soon to say. Although communities elsewhere—like Boston and Burlington—seem confident the testing is useful, Hubbard says, “Until we have a large enough dataset to establish a threshold … and we understand the correlation … we really can’t say."[Sound of screeching tires] On Sunday, NH officials were defending a policy allowing non-resident property owners to get a Covid vaccination. Yesterday, the state health department sent out an email saying it's modifying the policy and limiting vaccinations to residents. "It gave no reason for the change," NHPR's Todd Bookman reports, deadpan. The shift puts the state in line with policies in both VT and ME. Sununu bypasses NH House, issues order to allow towns to postpone 2021 town meetings. You may remember that the state Senate acted right out of the gate this month to give towns scheduling leeway, but the bill got bogged down in the House. With town moderators arguing the House was moving too slowly, Gov. Chris Sununu yesterday issued an executive order overriding the legislature, making it possible for towns to push back both deliberative and voting sessions and to begin processing absentee ballots ahead of voting day.Vaccinations get underway in NH, VT. 

"To: The Vermont Press Corps..." So begins an open letter yesterday to the state's journalists by over 50 signatories, including three former governors and a host of business and community leaders, calling out the press for sexism in their reporting. They point out that the press corps is almost all male and all white, that men are quoted more frequently than women, that political coverage focuses too often on women's appearances or demeanor, and other cases of bias. "We write this letter in the hope of starting a dialogue about this important issue," they say, and ask newsrooms to tackle it.  VT lands $580K to study UV light to sanitize public transit, working with Dartmouth researchers. The grant comes from the Federal Transit Administration, and will go toward testing light-based air filters on public buses. The state's Agency of Transportation "wanted the opportunity to try out this technology and see if it also helped to improve the air quality, not just the surface cleanliness," transit coordinator Dan Currier tells the Times Argus's Keith Whitcomb Jr.Impact of climate change on VT fauna "appallingly considerable." On his Vermont Political Observer blog, John Walters covers Friday's legislative testimony from herpetologist Jim Andrews, who coordinates the VT Reptile and Amphibian Atlas, and Kent McFarland, of the VT Center for Ecostudies. Climate change and habitat loss are ramping up the stress on reptiles and amphibians, Andrews said. Meanwhile, McFarland testified, “Seven out of 10 mountain species we monitor have declined. Our state bird, the hermit thrush, has suffered the worst decline.”AT Conservancy asks thru-hikers to wait until 2022. “Our advice, as long as the pandemic is raging and vaccines aren't widely available, and the CDC hasn't given us the all-clear signal, we're recommending that long distance hikes not be taken on the AT,” Morgan Sommerville, the conservancy's regional director in North Carolina, tells the Asheville Citizen Times. Some 2,000 thru-hikers have already registered for this season, but the conservancy says no thru-hiker recognitions will be awarded this year.Las Vegas might not be the first place you'll head when the pandemic's done.... But if you do find yourself there, Claudia Bueno's new Pulse installation at Meow Wolf there is pretty head-expanding. It started when she was at Yellowstone and Grand Teton five years ago, riveted by the microbes in geysers and the feeling of both insignificance and connection in the Tetons. That all made its way into her new, 60-glass-panel work that melds painting, lights, and tech to turn 2D into 3D...at least if you're standing in front of it. Even on a 2D video, though, it's pretty mesmerizing.Yo! Pal! Let's just keep the bird theme going for a moment. Or, to be precise, 26 seconds. Down in the Falklands, two groups of rockhopper penguins stopped for a chat recently as one group was headed out for a dip and the other was headed back to the rookery. Only, when they parted, one confused rockhopper headed off with the wrong cohort... Thank goodness for friends, eh?

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A poet should praise the world.Good luck with that!I’ve stopped following the news.Perhaps when we are goneThe mythological animals—dragons and griffins, the beautiful lonely phoenix—will come out of hidingand loll on the empty benchesin the park that shimmers feverishlybelow my window.

— From

"Plague Poem,"

by Katha Pollitt

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