SO GREAT TO SEE YOU, UPPER VALLEY!
Getting warmer. Things will start out quiet and pleasant this morning, but it will cloud over fairly quickly and as a low-pressure system traipses past the border this afternoon there's a chance we'll see both rain and snow in the late afternoon. Winds today from the southwest. Temps may cross the 40-degree line before dropping back into the high 20s tonight. Here's what daybreak looks like...
Over Janet and Doug Hardy's igloo in Norwich, waking up after what Doug calls a "cozy one-dog night" in it to find a visitor outside;
And as the sun rises over a frozen, snow-covered Lake Sunapee, from Julian Devlin.
New $18 million fund aims to conserve forest land in Upper Valley, elsewhere in twin states. The money comes from the NYC-based Open Space Institute, and will go to local conservation projects in the Upper Valley, the Monadnock region, and other parts of NH, VT, and ME. The group's hope, reports NHPR's Daniela Allee, is to conserve 50,000 acres along the northern Appalachians. In particular, the institute believes that "uninterrupted forest in the Upper Valley...is a key connecting link for wildlife that are moving north, as the climate changes," Allee says.Dartmouth remote workers to return to campus around Sept. 1. That announcement came in an email to students, faculty, and staff yesterday from Provost Joe Helble and Executive VP Rick Mills. Only a quarter of the college's staff are on-site at the moment, says Dartmouth's communications office. Returns will be staggered over a transition period, Helble and Mills noted, and final details won't be put in place until late spring or summer."The tufted titmouse is a landlubber." Also an adventurer. They started out farther south, didn't reach Massachusetts until the late 1940s, New Hampshire until 1973, and Vermont until 1976, writes Thetford naturalist Ted Levin. "During my lifetime, they expanded their range more than three hundred miles north." How did they manage this? They "benefit from a warming climate, maturing suburban trees, the regrowth of abandoned farmland, and the exponential increase of bird-feeding stations," he writes.One of the best things about doing Daybreak: There's usually someone out there who knows more about a subject than the rest of us. It turns out that the village where those Mongolian schoolkids disembarked in yesterday's video is called Cogoog, and it's the ancestral village of reader Patrick Francis's wife, Bulbul. "It certainly is unsafe by Western standards for all of these kids to be stuffed together like that," he writes, "but it is truly miraculous that they attend school, in a place where kids are often kept home to help care for livestock instead." Also, that video's at least a couple of years old. More at the link.Separate entrances for Ds and Rs as NH House reconvenes today. And they'll be pretty far apart when they get inside the NH Sportsplex in Bedford, reports InDepthNH's Nancy West. That's in part because there will be a section for the 97 Republican legislators who won't be wearing masks, after the attorney general's office ruled that Gov. Chris Sununu's mask mandate doesn't apply to co-equal branches of government that set their own rules. In fact, there will be two separate non-mask sections: for those who bare their faces by choice, and those who do so for health or disability reasons.Vermont opens vaccine registration to those 65 and older next week. The news came at a press conference by state officials yesterday: Registration opens at 8:15 am on Monday. As with previous cohorts, Vermonters can make appointments on the state health department's website, or Kinney Drugs or Walgreen's. Seven Days' Anne Wallace Allen (just moved over from VTDigger) also reports that state guidance has been relaxed to allow Vermonters who've had both shots to gather with members of other households. “I didn’t ask for this war to start, but I’m going to see it through." That is Daniel Banyai, the owner of the now-infamous Slate Ridge tactical weapons training facility in W. Pawlet, VT, talking to NYT reporter Ellen Barry. Barry pulls together and updates the story of Banyai's hostile relations with his neighbors, including an interview with Banyai and his take on the confrontations; a look at the facility itself—it includes a suburban house to practice dealing with home invasions and shipboard structures, for high-seas piracy; and new details on the threats Pawlet residents have received. (Thanks, MT!)"Do not skimp out and not get snow tires." Also: Wave to your neighbors. Don't dress up, for any occasion. Do get some micro-spikes. Oh, and don't ever use fake maple syrup around a Vermonter. All of this—and a lot more—is advice collected by Angela Evancie for VPR's Brave Little State to answer a question from a Floridian, "What do I need to know about moving to Vermont?" In general, the people Evancie talked to say, take time to settle in and pay attention to the people around you. Warning: some shade thrown at NH.Just drive down a dirt road: "Eventually, you'll pop out in some of the most amazing places you've seen in your life." Brenda Greika is on the board of the 251 Club, now 4,200 people strong (including Peter Welch and Phil Scott), who aim to visit all 251 towns and cities in Vermont (plus a few gores and a grant, if they've got the time). It's gotten new members during the pandemic, writes Seven Days' Alison Novak, including a high-schooler who hit all 251 in a few months and a SoRo couple who couldn't make it to Maine for their honeymoon, so explored Rutland and Bennington counties instead. "They’re not just scrutinizing the crows and the squirrels. They’re also watching us. Bird-watching, in other words, goes both ways." They, in this case, are Los Angeles's raptors: cooper's hawks, red-tails, great horned owls, the occasional peregrine. In Alta, a Hearst magazine about California and the west, science writer Jason Goldman spends time with ornithologist Dan Cooper, who studies urban raptors. Says Cooper, "Their survival is based on their ability to predict normalcy and routine.” Interestingly, they've taken to nesting in introduced ornamental species.From high up to down deep. Earlier this month, Underwater Photographer of the Year, a UK-based group, announced its awards for 2021. There are a lot of spectacular images in there (which, despite the name, include some above-water photos, too): looking up at sharks in French Polynesia at sunset; a frog in a mire in Glasgow one night in early spring; tunnels in Mexico's Cenote Monkey Dust; jellyfish, sea lions, fish, whales, divers.... Link takes you to a .pdf that includes each photo's description and back story.
So...
Dartmouth reports 3 cases among students (up 2) and none among faculty/staff. There are 16 students and 3 faculty/staff in quarantine because of travel or exposure, while 3 students and 9 faculty/staff are in isolation awaiting results or because they tested positive.
NH reported 259 new cases yesterday for a cumulative total of 73,923. There was 1 new death, bringing the total to 1,155. Meanwhile, 112 people are hospitalized (up 3). The current active caseload stands at 2,728 (down 155). The state reports 262 active cases in Grafton County (up 9), 56 in Sullivan (down 6), and 222 in Merrimack (down 10). In town-by-town numbers, the state says Claremont has 35 active cases (down 5), Enfield has 11 (down 1), Hanover has 7 (up at least 3), Lebanon has 7 (down 2), Newport has 7 (up 1), Charlestown has 5 (down 1), New London has 5 (down 1), and Canaan has 5 (down 1). Haverhill, Piermont, Warren, Orford, Lyme, Grantham, Springfield, Sunapee, and Wilmot have 1-4 each.
VT reported 82 new cases yesterday, bringing it to a total case count of 14,691. There was 1 new death, which now stand at 199 all told. Meanwhile, 36 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized (down 1). Windsor County gained 1 case to stand at 1,018 for the pandemic, with 75 over the past 14 days. Orange County had 2 additional cases and stands at 496 cumulatively, with 32 cases over the past 14 days.
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It's not too soon to be thinking about warm, wet nights, which are when salamanders and frogs like to migrate, often across roads and into the way of car tires. The Hartford Salamander Team, which member Ben Lay describes as "a rough group of headlamp and reflective-vest wearing volunteers that go out in the rain on early spring nights, to help migrating frogs and salamanders not get squashed while they’re crossing the road," is looking for volunteers both as crossing guards and to help collect data on where they need to be focusing their efforts.
The Freedom & Unity Young Filmmaker Contest invites young VT and NH residents to create films exploring the life and culture of the Green Mountain and Granite States. It's been run for the past few years by White River Indie Films, and it's the featured item in this week's CATV show highlights—including a link to a film made for the contest by a couple of young CATV staffers about the community reaction to the NewVistas project (remember that?).
This afternoon at 5, Dartmouth's Rockefeller Center presents a talk and conversation on "public options" in civic life. Those words, of course, are most closely associated with health care reform, but Anne Alstott, who teaches law at Yale, argues that some of the "most useful and beloved institutions" in American life are public options: the library, the local elementary school, the post office. Reasonably priced, government-provided services, she says, are all around us, "ready to increase opportunity, expand freedom, and reawaken civic engagement if we will only let them." Moderated by Dartmouth government prof Herschel Nachlis.
Also at 5, Meetinghouse, the new national literary journal launched by a group of Dartmouth undergrads, hosts its first poetry reading, with three poets featured in its inaugural issue. Hala Alyan, Andrea Cohen, and Eileen Townsend, all working poets and writers, will read from their work, then follow up with a discussion on writing during the pandemic, finding writing community... and the future of literary journals.
And also at 5, Historic New England hosts Middlebury history prof Bill Hart talking about Alexander Twilight—born in Corinth of a mixed-race father and white mother, known as the first person of African descent to graduate from an American college (Middlebury), serve in a legislature, run a grammar school in Vermont...and now, to have an officially commissioned portrait for the VT Statehouse. Hart is currently working on a biography of Twilight.
At 7 pm, Phoenix Books and the Heritage Winooski Mill Museum present "An Evening with David Macaulay." Back in the '80s, the celebrated Norwich writer and illustrator spent a year researching New England mills and their buildings and inner works for his book, Mill, and for the last few months the mill museum has had an exhibit up of his drawings, sketches, research notes, and manuscript for that book. He'll be talking about it all—plus, no doubt, other things. Free, but you'll need to register.
Christine Salem's voice "feels old, but it's got power that's young and vibrant," NPR's Bob Boilen once wrote about the singer from Réunion, the French island in the Indian Ocean. She made her name on the world-music circuit singing maloya, often trance-y percussion-driven music rooted in the work songs of slaves and indentured servants on the island. But she ranges widely.
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See you tomorrow.
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