GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Cooler, clouds then sun, chance of showers to the south. A cold front is coming through today, following hard on the heels of yesterday's, and it's bringing less humid, cooler air in its wake. Things should be dry in much of the region, with temps getting up to 70 or above and dew points making it feel like being outside is a fine idea. Winds from the northwest, upper 40s overnight.Birds of spring. Three ways, in fact...
In his latest blog post, photographer Jim Block collects an incredible variety of avian life in these parts—the section on ducks alone will keep you entertained for a while. As he notes at the beginning, he made a special effort over the last few months to capture birds in flight, and he succeeded: eagles, warblers, finches, ducks, herons, and, remarkably, a pair of sandhill cranes.
Meanwhile, at the Union Village Dam Monday morning, Lori Harriman caught this kettle of turkey vultures soaring above the Ompompanoosuc.
And on Sunday, Doreen Guillette spied a bald eagle posing majestically at Miller Pond in Thetford.
Coming soon to Hartford: "a baseball game-slash-carnival-slash-farmer’s market." That's how Upper Valley Nighthawks president Noah Crane likes to describe Nighthawks games. The team's home opener at the Maxfield Sports Complex is June 9. But before anyone actually steps onto the field, writes Matt Golec for Daybreak, ten months of prep work have gone into getting ready, from finding players to finding hosts for them to laundering last season's uniforms. Matt talks to Crane and to general manager Matt Wright about the unseen effort that goes into creating a baseball-driven "community hub."Man crashes into flagpole at Vermont Veterans Memorial in Randolph. On Memorial Day. It happened Monday evening, when Vermont State Police got a call about a single-vehicle crash there. On arriving, they found the driver, a Barre man, showing signs of impairment. He was arrested on suspicion of DUI and taken first to Gifford Medical Center and then DHMC for injuries; he was later reported in stable condition. The flagpole was "leaning heavily" and taken down by the Randolph Center Fire Department.Gird for a tax jump in the fall, Lebanon warns property owners. In all, residential property owners face a possible 9 percent increase in their fall tax bill, when they'll "see the full effects of the municipal budget adopted by the City Council and the 2024-25 school budget the voters approved in March," reports Patrick Adrian in the Valley News. The jump is being driven in part by a 6 percent increase in the municipal budget, and in part by a drop in the city's total assessed value as APD shifts from paying property taxes to making payments in lieu of taxes, Adrian writes. The cost of a new fire station is also looming.SPONSORED: Cindy Pierce is returning to the Briggs! Renowned comic storyteller Cindy Pierce will perform her solo show KEEPING IT INN at the Briggs Opera House in WRJ for just three shows June 7-9. Cindy takes on the challenge of playing her mother during the final six decades of her life, exploring love, family, and what holds in our memories over time. Tickets and information can be found at the burgundy link and here. Want to check it out first? Here's a trailer, and here's Cindy's interview on Vermont Public with Nina Keck. Sponsored by Pinzer Productions, LLC.From rocker, punk poet, and photographer Patti Smith, a daily meditation. The paperback version of Smith's 2022 book of days, A Book of Days, is now out, and in this week's Enthusiasms, the Yankee Bookshop's Kristian Preylowski writes that its collection of photos, tributes, poetry, and more remind him a lot of Smith's music, which was "effortlessly cool, of its time, and timeless." The book, he says, offers a chance to see the world in new ways: It "will keep you intrigued, informed, and inspired, to see and share the world as part of a bigger picture, one page, one day at a time."Federal judge strikes down NH's "divisive concepts" law. The 2021 law bars K-12 public school staff from teaching in ways that suggest a person might be inherently superior based on a range of characteristics, or that any individual is inherently racist or sexist. Its backers saw it as "an anti-discrimination statute meant to ensure that all students were treated equally," writes NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt. But yesterday, the US District Court sided with teachers' unions that had opposed it, ruling that the law is unconstitutionally vague and raises "the specter of arbitrary and discretionary enforcement."It's not even summer, and already three NH bodies of water are on the cyanobacteria warning list. None around here, but the earliest warning ever was issued May 15, for Arlington Mill Reservoir in Salem. “We’re very concerned this is going to be a bad year for cyanobacteria blooms. We had a mild winter with little ice cover, meaning with the relatively warmer water there was an earlier start to the growing season for everything in the lake, and especially cyanobacteria,” NH LAKES president Andrea LaMoreaux tells InDepthNH's Paula Tracy.
VT's Cyanobacteria Tracker won't start up until late June. It'll be here.
Just before midday Sunday, NH Fish & Game was notified of an SOS signal from the ridgeline between Mts. Jefferson and Adams, along with a dropped 911 call that had relayed news of a serious injury. Unsure of what was involved, they put in a call for a National Guard chopper, while two hut caretakers (one of them a member of Pemigewasset Search & Rescue) hiked up. They found a 27-year-old CT man—an experienced hiker—with a badly broken leg. The helicopter was able to land and airlift him out, saving volunteers from a carry-out through "difficult and dangerous terrain," Fish & Game writes.
Don't laugh: NH is under-lawyered. It's got 3,495 lawyers serving a population of 1,377,529, according to a new national study by a Pennsylvania law firm; that gives it 2.54 lawyers for every 1,000 residents, the lowest level in New England. Not surprisingly, MA (6.08 per thousand) and CT (5.83) are among the top ten in the country, followed in New England by RI (3.71), VT (3.42) and ME (2.93). As Maureen Milliken notes in Manchester Ink Link, rural legal deserts are a big issue here and elsewhere. Last year, 684 civil legal aid cases in the Granite State were rejected for lack of resources.After months of tension, VT Gov. Phil Scott and Democratic legislators blame each other for Montpelier's "toxic" atmosphere. To be sure, writes Sarah Mearhoff in a VTDigger analysis of the legislative session that just finished, there were plenty of reasons to be tense, from last year's flooding to this year's school-funding debates and the Senate faceoff over Scott's choice for education secretary. But the tone took on "a new sharpness," she writes, as Scott took to issuing weekly digs at legislators for overreaching and legislators countered he preferred scoring points to working with them.A handful of women lead top craft breweries in the US. Lawson's Finest's Adeline Druart is one of them. And that's after spending two decades at Vermont Creamery, where she rose from an internship in cheesemaking to become president. In Seven Days, Jordan Barry profiles Druart, who last fall became Lawson's first CEO hired from outside the company. It's been a steep learning curve, Barry writes, though there are similarities between cheese and beer: both "are essential to Vermont's food identity and center on the science of fermentation." Plus: they both rely on stainless steel equipment.VT turtle researcher inadvertently finds plant not seen in the state since 1916. The state Fish & Wildlife employee was surveying habitat in Addison County earlier this month and photographed a rare species of wild garlic—and, alongside it, the plant known as false mermaid weed. Seeing the photo, botanist Grace Glynn tells WCAX, "I sort of did a double take and rubbed my eyes and couldn’t believe that I was seeing this plant, which may have never been photographed ever in the state of Vermont until now." Glynn has since found hundreds of the spring ephemerals growing nearby.Ten marathons in ten days, or 114 hours and 16 minutes of running. You may remember the early-May item about Chip Piper, who's been running ultramarathons in part to deal with grief over the death of his stepson from a fentanyl overdoes, and in part to raise money for recovery nonprofits. Well, over the weekend, he completed the last of 10 marathons—one a day—at the Infinitus deca-marathon in Ripton, VT. He raised $13K and lost 10 pounds. "I was exhausted; I was worn down," he tells Seven Days' Hannah Feuer. "I can't believe I did it." Feuer's original profile is here.What happens when a big crowd of people chase a big wheel of cheese down a very steep hill? Mayhem, of course. Seems like the blink of an eye, but it's time to check in again on the Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling & Wake in Gloucester, England, which took place Monday. The idea, as you may remember, is that a crowd of men or women (or, this year, kids) charge pell-mell down a steep, 200-yard incline after a well-wrapped wheel of Double Gloucester. Unlike last year's women's winner, this year's—North Carolina's Abby Lampe—was not knocked unconscious. The BBC's got the footage.
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The Hanover Conservation Commission's got 300 of them that need to go into the ground in three plots that will be studied in coming years by UVM researchers looking into how trees from various regions adapt to changing climate conditions. The planting effort kicks off this morning from 9 am to noon: Meet at the Trescott Road trailhead in Hanover, near the big bend by the chain-link fence. If you can't make it today, they'll be doing it again Saturday, also 9 am to noon. Email John Donovan with questions or to volunteer:
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And to welcome us to the day:
Senegalese singer and kora player Ablaye Cissoko, who's become renowned for weaving West African Mandinka traditions into contemporary forms, and French accordionist-composer Cyrille Brotto—in a match that neither kora-makers nor accordion-crafters probably ever dreamed of, but that makes perfect sense once you hear it.
See you tomorrow.
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editor: Jonea Gurwitt About Rob About Michael
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