Daybreak Wednesday 4/7/21

WELL HEY, UPPER VALLEY!

Still sunny, warmer. It's not just that high pressure's building in, but the weather folks are expecting temps 10-15 degrees warmer than normal through the weekend. Today, there will be some clouds around but mostly we'll see sun, highs getting toward the mid-60s, moderate breezes out of the northeast. Down into the low 40s or high 30s overnight. Waiting for ice out. Late Monday afternoon, Midge Eliassen was on the eastern shore of Lake Sunapee, where the ice had piled up, when she noticed a bald eagle standing regally on one block that jutted above the rest. "I had under a minute between walking to where I could see him to when he took off," she writes. "And I had to get the camera out of its carry bag.... Such an extraordinary gift!" The ice was gone there yesterday, she notes.That was fast. On Saturday, the Valley News's John Lippman reported that the Woodstock Inn had filed a request for approval to lease Suicide Six to a Ford Bronco off-road driving school. Yesterday, the Inn dropped the idea like a hot potato, Lippman reports, after a Pomfret planning board meeting where outraged residents raised concerns that Pomfret and surrounding communities might become "a magnet for intensive off-road vehicle activity."Carbon monoxide deaths in Vershire. In a death investigation report released yesterday, VT State Police say that Cody Coburn, 28, of Vershire, and Joelle Ryder, 36, of Sharon, were found inside an SUV parked in a Vershire driveway on Saturday. Police had responded to a call from a family member. Monday afternoon, the state medical examiner issued a preliminary finding that "accidental carbon monoxide poisoning appeared to play a role in the victims’ deaths." Police are still investigating, and awaiting toxicology reports.Dartmouth easing restrictions for students, staff who've been vaccinated. In an email to the campus and family of undergrads yesterday, the college's Covid task force chairs, Lisa Adams and Josh Keniston, said that fully vaccinated students can gather in groups of up to nine in private, off-campus spaces without face coverings or distancing; everyone present, they wrote, must have been fully vaccinated. In addition, faculty, staff, and students who've been fully vaccinated will get tested less frequently starting April 12. In all, about 600 students and staff have been vaccinated so far."Like a canary-in-a-coal-mine in reverse." That's how Bruce Wood, who covers all things Dartmouth football from his home in W. Newbury on his BGA Daily blog, describes coach Buddy Teevens' tentative plan to go ahead this summer with the Buddy Teevens Football Camp. "We will only do this if we feel we can do it safely for everyone involved," the camp notes, adding that since all camps on the Dartmouth campus "will be non-residential this summer," it's still looking for a site somewhere in the Upper Valley. So, how was this sugaring year? The season's done, and in Thetford, writes Li Shen in Sidenote, it varied from slightly below average for Jessica Eaton and her family, who have maples with large crowns (which thus get plenty of sun), to far below average for Donn Downey, who was hampered by persistent snowpack. Across the river, Lyme's Rich Menge, who runs Maple Leaf Farm, writes in an email that he fell 80 gallons short of the 750 gallons he strives for every year, "but we feel lucky to have made this amount of syrup in just one month, which included 10 days of sub-freezing weather."Fire danger in VT, NH. Remember Tuesday's brush fire in Cornish? Conditions are dry out there, rainfall's already abnormally low for early spring, and the last few days have been windy. No wonder burn permits aren't being issued right now in Vermont and fire wardens in both states are on edge. To check daily fire danger for each state, you can go here for VT and to this Twitter page for NH (use the pinned post to figure out which Fire Danger Rating Area you're in). Early Geisel research laid groundwork for "game-changer" vaccine just entering trials. The NYT's Carl Zimmer writes about NDV-HXP-S, which uses a novel design for a coronavirus spike protein and, unlike current vaccines, can be produced cheaply and quickly enough to put it within reach for much of the developing world. The vaccine grows out of work done by structural biologist Jason McLellan and colleagues at Geisel and two other labs as they sought a vaccine against MERS. Their findings (McLellan is now at UT-Austin) were mostly ignored at the time. No longer, Zimmer writes. (Thanks, NM!) NH schools: Reopening logistics are daunting. As you may remember, Gov. Chris Sununu has mandated that all schools fully reopen, five days a week, by April 19. In an interview with NHPR's Sarah Gibson yesterday, Keene schools superintendent Robert Malay points to some of the hurdles: Many staff won't get their second vaccine doses until April 17, and schools don't know how they'll find staff both for full, in-person schooling and for students whose families opted for fully remote schooling for the entire school year. "Where are they going to magically appear from?" he asks.Mixed news for NH on civic health. A new report for UNH's Carsey School of Public Policy finds that, on the one hand, NH ranked high among the states in charitable giving, connecting with friends and family, attending public gatherings, and volunteering. But it ranked near the bottom when it came to connecting regularly with neighbors, doing favors for neighbors, helping friends or extended family with food or money, and connecting with Granite Staters of other racial or ethnic backgrounds. The data is pre-pandemic; NHPR's Rick Ganley talks it over with report author Quixada Moore-Vissing.April 5. That's when ice-out on Lake Winnipesaukee was officially declared—three weeks earlier than the average for the 1970s, David Brooks notes on his Granite Geek blog. There's one big caveat, Brooks writes: Ice-out these days is "when one guy thinks the MS Mount Washington can safely get to its five ports of call." That hasn't always been the standard, so comparisons are tricky, but even so, the average dates by decade back to the 1890s were all later in April.Third Covid variant pops up in NH, VT. State officials in New Hampshire say they've identified two cases of the highly contagious P.1 variant first seen in Brazil, reports WMUR's Tim Callery. And in VT, health commissioner Mark Levine announced at a press conference yesterday that it's been identified in one specimen from the state, writes James Finn in VTDigger. It's "not unexpected," Levine said, "but it’s a concern. The variants we have found in Vermont spread more quickly... faster than we can vaccinate people."A pileated woodpecker in Warner's Grant. That bird, thwacking a tree in an unincorporated gore in Vermont in March, was the final notch in birder Bob Heitzman's decade-long quest to bird in each of Vermont's 255 towns, cities and gores—from the boreal forest in Canaan to the headwaters of the Mad and White rivers to Pownal's fields and hardwood forests. It's "a monumental achievement," write Richard Littauer and Nathaniel Sharp on the VT Center for Ecostudies blog—and a pointer to the pleasure of exploring a state through "town birding." Here's Heitzman's blog about his exploits.July 4. That's the day VT Gov. Phil Scott plans to lift the state's mask mandate and restrictions on gatherings, he announced at a press conference yesterday. The easing of restrictions over the next 90 days will occur in four steps, reports Seven Days' Derek Brouwer: Starting Friday, unvaccinated visitors or Vermonters returning home won't need to quarantine, as long as they get a negative Covid test within 72 hours; close-contact businesses will get new guidance as of May 1; all travel restrictions will go away as of June 1, and gatherings will be allowed to get much bigger. Dates may be adjusted.A look at VT ski industry recovery grants raises questions. All in all, the state's alpine ski areas have received $5.3 million in aid from the state so far. In a very close look at what's happened, VPR's Abagael Giles reports that areas owned by national industry titans received the maximum $300K grants, with no public oversight of how the money was spent (though the state auditor is looking into it). And overall, big corporations and wealthy private clubs, she reports, did as well as or better than small, locally owned ski hills. Giles looks at the history of the enabling legislation and where the money went.“This is not something ordinary burglars try to accomplish.” But then, this was no ordinary burglary: up the face of a London warehouse, along a pitched metal roof on a wet night, through a hole cut in a skylight, down 50 feet through the air without tripping alarms or getting picked up on camera... The burglars spent five hours inside sorting through a trove of rare books to choose $3.4 million-worth, then hauled them back the way they came in and disappeared. In Vanity Fair, Marc Wortman details the heist, the mobsters behind it, and the pair of Romanian detectives who cracked the case.

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For the last couple of years, four superstars of roots and folk music—Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell, and Leyla McCalla—have come together from time to time to perform as Our Native Daughters. Last fall, Carnegie Hall enlisted them for its virtual gala,

her tribute to an enslaved West African ancestor. (That's Russell on banjo and singing lead, Giddens on fiddle, Kiah on guitar, and McCalla on cello.)

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