Guest Speaker Clay Sutton
on
“The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – What’s All the Fuss About?”
NOTE CHANGE IN MONTHLY DATE & BUILDING
Meeting Wednesday, July 18, 2001
Wheaton Village Administration Building, Millville 7:30 p.m.
(Parking on the circle at the main entrance to Wheaton Village)
Clay Sutton’s Presentation
The Arctic NWR, in northeast Alaska, has been in the news a lot lately, the center of a controversy concerning the Bush Administration’s plans to drill for oil in one of our last true wilderness areas.
Join Clay Sutton as he shares the 11 day float trip that he and his wife Pat took on the Canning River, in the Arctic NWR, with Wilderness Birding Adventures. Their trip resulted in the landmark discovery of the first nest of the Gray-headed Chickadee ever found in the United States.
More importantly, learn what the Canning River, some 4,000 miles away, tells us about the Maurice River in our own backyard. What are the connections here? What does the Arctic NWR mean to you?
Down Jersey Celebrating Our Sense of Place- Teachers’ Curriculum
The web pages for our teachers’ guide are nearly ready to be posted to the existing website. This will enable teachers not only to access existing lesson plans that interpret the Bayshore Region but also to share their own lesson plans and submit field trips! Teachers have been enriching their classroom experiences by using local elements to instruct necessary learning skills. Some examples: rather than use a map of Anytown, USA, teachers are using mapping skills that relate to local topography. They take students to local streams to learn water characteristics: quality, flora and fauna. Some schools have devoted whole theme weeks to the Curriculum with fantastic results. We salute our Down Jersey teachers for their imagination and dedication to the region and learning.
Folklife Center Tours
The new Director of the Wheaton Village Folklife Center has taken on the challenge of studying the folklife of the Maurice River. Iveta Todorava-Pirgova was given a tour of the River on May 17. Local eagles did their part to add to the River’s charm.
Ornithologists Do It Again
Clay Sutton and assistant James Dowdell completed and submitted their fourteenth annual survey report on Wintering Raptors and Waterfowl on the Maurice River.
Website Happenings
Fish and Chicks
The Story of the Maurice River Osprey colony is now in slide form on our website; if you haven’t seen it we invite you to visit us at cumauriceriver.org.
Officers Vote to Continue Satellite Transmissions
The University of Minnesota has been keeping us abreast of osprey movements for a number of years. The time had come to remove the transmitter from our Maurice River osprey. Jane Morton Galetto asked if it couldn’t be left on the bird since our internet-savvy membership enjoys tracking the local ospreys’ winter movements. Mark Martell of the Raptor Center at U of M said it was primarily a matter of funding the satellite transmissions. Each transmission has a fee associated with it. The trustees and officers were polled by e-mail and voted unanimously to pay the $1,500 annual fee to continue to receive updates. At some point the transmitter will fail or our bird will expire, but the Raptor Center’s work is in line with our own mission of learning more about these majestic creatures and certainly worth supporting.
If you would like to be an Osprey Trecky, ante-up with CU – send your space medallions in the form of a check to CU, PO Box 474, Millville, NJ 08332. We may even send you a space certificate.
It just struck our President that if she had sent this correspondence about satellite transmissions from osprey about 10 years ago it wouldn’t have been taken seriously. It would have been about as real as Flash Gordon was to our grandparents. Maybe 10 years from now we will all be travelling around in solar powered hovercraft. Nah – well, could be!