The Wrack

A glitch gets fixed and our home page "current conditions" bar returns to delivering weather and water data.

Make more of your visits to the reserve by sharing what you see and hear through citizen science projects. Here are half a dozen ways you can contribute.

Summing up the year for Maine's part in the Marine Invader Monitoring and Information Collaborative.

At a 4-day technician training in South Carolina, I gained a new appreciation for all the effort needed to collect consistent water quality and meteorological data across the country.

Recording in three distinct habitats at different times of the day and the year is creating a soundscape for long-term studies.

If I just tallied the birds at the feeder outside my kitchen window, I might come to believe that the only bird in Maine is a rather fat and feisty cardinal. But that's not science.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 8/7/2016, and Making It At Home's 8/11/2016 issue.

The orange ruffles hadn’t been there last week, but now they were impossible to miss. Overnight, it seemed, a chicken-of-the-woods had returned to roost on the old oak stump in our yard.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 3/20/2016, and Making It At Home's 3/23/2016 issue.

My wife and I and our two boys moved up to Maine full-time in July 2012. We felt like we’d arrived in the Garden of Eden. Lobsters were four bucks, the ocean was 73 degrees, and the outdoor season stretched well into November. It wasn’t the Maine I knew from my childhood (swimmable water!?), but who cared? It was awesome.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition of 1/24/16 and Making It At Home Thursday edition, 1/28/2016.

Always eager to start some new long-term monitoring project, I’m now keeping track of the number of conversations I have about the weather. I’m planning to henceforth keep tabs on with whom, when, and for how long we chatted. I’m already certain one thing will be constant: the changing weather will be discussed in only the most general, equivocal, unchanging terms. You and I will talk about the weather, my friends, but we will say nothing new.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 10/18/2015.

Welcome to Southern Maine and “peak foliage.” Those blazing reds and oranges along the Turnpike and our back roads are a sight to behold. Of course, I’m talking about brake lights.