Browsing Category "land trust"
BioBlitz:  Counting All Creatures Great and Small

BioBlitz: Counting All Creatures Great and Small

Picture this: you’ve been dropped into the middle of 1000 acres of woodlands, fields, and water. Your job is to count everything. Not just the birds flying by. Not just the types of trees in the forest. Nope. Your task is to count every plant, insect, fungus, bat, snake, fish, clam, flower, in fact to count every species of every living thing that calls that region home. And you have […]

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Fly like an Eagle: The Surge of an American Icon

Fly like an Eagle: The Surge of an American Icon

Note one: Unlike my other stories, none of the photos here were taken by me. I have noted sources of each. Note two: This story originally appeared in the Winter 2015 edition of the Audubon Society of Rhode Island’s Report. Along the Seekonk River, the wind sweeps bitterly cold air into the cloudy day. If it was chilly and breezy inland, it’s downright windy and freezing here. This is an […]

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REMOVING DAMS TO RESTORE NATURE

REMOVING DAMS TO RESTORE NATURE

It seemed like the right move at the time. Big factories like textile mills in the 18th and 19th centuries needed power, and when there was no such thing as electricity, there was one major source: water. Use the power at hand to make a factory generate products. Build a factory by a river. Dam the river, turn it, shape it, bend it to the needs and turn that enormous […]

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Hatching a New Group: Ocean State Bird Club

Hatching a New Group: Ocean State Bird Club

It’s dusk. A dirt parking lot (well, more like a clearing of dirt) retains a few cars, and further back there is a small circle of people sporting binoculars. They wear the full palette of the bird watcher’s color wheel: khaki, tattered khaki, dirty khaki, spanking new khaki, and new khaki stressed to look old. (We are nothing if not consistent.) A bearded young man in the circle speaks to […]

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Turtles from the Dust:  Endangered Terrapins in Rhode Island

Turtles from the Dust: Endangered Terrapins in Rhode Island

The sand is fine grained and the sun is hot. Hundred Acre Cove in Barrington is just a few hundred yards away, but at the moment, there isn’t a shred of the cool breezes usually associated with being by the water. There are only scrub pines, weedy grasses, and dust. Lots of dust. Charlotte Sornborger carries a basket containing an empty green and white striped Newport Creamery plastic tub. She […]

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