Daybreak Wednesday 10/14/20

A TREAT TO SEE YOU, UPPER VALLEY!

Ah, sun. It'll be cloudy to start, but those should dissipate pretty quickly, and we'll see mostly blue skies, temps getting into the mid-60s, and some decent breezes from the west drying everything out. Down into the high 30s tonight.Okay, okay, there's a reason you're a national symbol! Ellen Buras was just south of Cavendish on Sunday when she noticed this bald eagle perched in a tree above the Black River. She's always got her camera nearby, so she grabbed this remarkable shot and a few others. She her husband arrived from Texas back in March to stay with family, and have liked it so much they're putting down roots. "I'm always so moved by the eagles' presence," she writes. Guess who just popped up on VT's restricted-travel map. Every Tuesday, the state's Agency of Commerce and Community Development updates the map of Northeast counties that have more than 400 active cases per million population, and so are in the yellow or red zones for travel restrictions. Yesterday, Grafton County, NH turned yellow. Essential travel (work, school, food, health) is still fine; non-essential travel requires quarantine. But maybe restrictions should be reversed: Note that if you hover over the map, Windsor County has 474 cases per million, more than Grafton's 442."A ragtag group of scientists..." That would be Tillman Gerngross and the team at Adimab in Lebanon, along with some academic labs around the country and the US Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The NYT's Apoorva Mandivilli looks at their joint effort, known as Prometheus, to come up with an antibody effective against the coronavirus and related pathogens. They're "months behind in the competition — and yet may ultimately deliver the most powerful antibody," she writes. A 200-year-old piece of Hanover history. "Hanover isn’t only Main Street," Susan Apel writes on her Artful blog. "It’s also an isolated woodsy patch where you’ll find the Tunis District Schoolhouse..." Built in 1822 (around the same time Francis Scott Key was composing "The Star-Spangled Banner," Susan points out), the schoolhouse is small, "with an even smaller chamber for wood storage and a vertigo-inducing ladder to the loft. Word has it that every student would arrive each morning with a raw potato to put in the woodstove to cook in time for lunch."SPONSORED: Join Willing Hands and help us GROW! Willing Hands feeds those in need around the Upper Valley by distributing fresh food that would otherwise go to waste. Right now, it's growing so that it can combat rising food insecurity. Your contribution to the capital campaign will allow it to expand its Norwich facility and distribute an additional 100,000 pounds of healthy food each year to those who need it most. Join the effort today: Donate to the Campaign for Willing Hands. Sponsored by Willing Hands."I'm not dead yet!" says Hanover Country Club. The Valley News's Greg Fennell reports that despite its declaration in July that it's closing the 18-hole golf course, the college is in negotiations with a group of country club stalwarts to reopen a portion as a nine-hole course. Neither side will go into details, but, "Any hope of bringing Hanover CC back would likely require a third party to operate it," Fennell writes.Arctic ice expedition done; now comes the data slog. Remember the icebreaker Polarstern and its hardy international crew of researchers—including Dartmouth engineers—lodged in the Arctic ice? The ship just returned to port. The yearlong venture produced about 100 terrabytes of data, which could take a decade or more to analyze. “The data is the legacy," says Thayer prof Don Perovich, an expedition leader. The goal is to understand "the causes and consequences of diminishing sea ice," writes Thayer's Julie Bonette.It's all about the vortex. Geese have been passing overhead for a few weeks now, and naturalist Mary Holland writes about why they fly in a V formation. As a goose flaps its wings, it creates tiny patterns of rotating air, which swirl off its wings as well as into the space behind it. The vortexes off the side of its wings spiral upward. So if a goose flies on the outer side of the goose in front of it, she explains, "air is pushing upward and the goose will get a slight lift, making flying easier." Speaking of flying... Naturalist and writer Ted Levin came across a Monarch butterfly in Thetford the other day, drifting toward Michoacan, Mexico. They tend to take two routes from around here, he notes: down the river and across Long Island Sound to join up with others hopping the islands, or along the CT coast, across the GW (okay, I made that part up), ultimately joining the others at the Jersey Shore, and then onward to Mexico. "That a butterfly, as fragile as a Vermont summer, ever gets there is a miracle," he writes. "Street shoes in this weather? I knew someone was in trouble." Pam Bales was at 5,500 feet on Mt. Washington in an October snowstorm when she saw those footprints in the snow. A volunteer with the Pemigewasset Search and Rescue Team, she was just out for a hike, but prepared. The guy she found under a layer of snow and helped survive, though, seemed oddly uninterested. Back at his car, he drove off without a word. Until a letter arrived... She recounts her tale in Backpacker.Judge rejects effort to pry Covid relief control from Sununu. In a ruling Monday on a lawsuit filed by legislative Democrats, Hillsborough County Superior Court Judge David Anderson ruled that Gov. Chris Sununu has a free hand in making decisions on how to spend $1.25 billion in federal CARES Act relief funds, and is not subject to oversight from the Legislative Fiscal Committee. About $200 million of the money remains unallocated.NH school districts have an idea about where $70 million of that funding could go. Which doesn't even take into account special ed expenses during the pandemic. Testifying to a legislative advisory committee yesterday, Carl Ladd, who runs the NH school administrators association, said schools are facing technology purchases, the need for safe water stations, skyrocketing transportation costs, and HVAC revamps. Without relief, schools will either "cut programs or go into a deficit situation," he said.Police officer who shot former girlfriend, self, had been trying to rekindle relationship. VTDigger's Alan Keays follows up on the police investigation into Monday's shootings in Barre by an on-duty Berlin officer. According to a preliminary timeline, Jeffrey Strock carried out four traffic stops while on patrol, then headed to Barre to talk to Julie Fandino. Eleven minutes later, he shot her and then himself. The two had lived together in Brookfield before Fandino left last December.The hockey cluster: a dozen VT cases linked to adult, youth hockey leagues. What they all have in common, VT health commissioner Mark Levine told a press conference yesterday, was using Montpelier's Memorial Civic Center. Officials are uncertain whether the cases are connected to the rink itself or to carpooling, team gatherings, or other collective activities, writes VTDigger's Erin Petenko. "The health department is assembling team rosters and scheduling to create a timeline," she adds.Vermonters voting absentee at record clip. With three weeks to go, more ballots have been returned to town clerks than were cast absentee in all of the 2016 elections, reports Seven Days' Colin Flanders. And with absentee ballots going out to all registered, active voters, state officials hope turnout will surpass the record 326,822 votes cast in 2008. Secy of State Jim Condos says despite this, he's confident results will come in on Election Night. "During the primary, we had 98 percent of the poll locations reporting by midnight," he told reporters last week. "Never say never, but ... we expect that it will happen again." VT now allows visitors into nursing homes. The rule change went into effect Monday, with limits: only two visitors will be permitted indoors at a time, staff will have to collect contact information in case tracing is needed, masks and social distancing will be mandatory, and staff will need to be tested regularly—and more frequently if a surrounding county's test positivity rate increases. "The beans are like jewels, and the corn is so vibrant." It's harvest time for the Abenaki Land Link Project, in which a dozen farmers around VT have been growing corn, beans, and squash from seeds provided by the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk-Abenaki Nation. The crops will go to feed Abenaki citizens. "My goal, as chief, is to give our citizens access to that healthy food and help with our health disparities," Don Stevens, chief of the Nulhegan Band, tells Seven Days' Jordan Barry. The project also aims to link growers to land once stewarded by Indigenous people, and to the people themselves.Oh, yeah, sure, give me a sec and I'll figure out how to do that. Quokkas, which mostly live on a single island off Australia, are closely related to kangaroos, though smaller. They're also cute and appear to smile when tourists take photos with them (seriously: google it), which has sent them soaring to social-media fame. Now along comes this guy doing some three-rock juggling for a couple of them, and the quokkas are...bewildered? intrigued? dead set on landing a gig with Circus Oz?

So, let's see...

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Dougie MacLean, the great Scottish singer-songwriter, was on a beach in Brittany

He returned to the youth hostel where he was staying and played it, 2 in the morning, for his mates there. "That was the final straw," he remembered years later. "We all got on the train home the next day." You get why.

See you tomorrow.

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