Environment

We tagged along with Diane DeLuca, a biologist with NH Audubon on her rounds of the Deering Wildlife Sanctuary. DeLuca has been working on their Phenological Monitoring Pilot Project, and defines phenology as "the study of 'phenophases', which are the different phases that plants and animals go through in their life cycle each year." 

Bullying, R-rated topics and shouting matches during presidential debates have left some Americans wondering whatever happened to civility in politics?  But in the British Parliament, being rude is a long-standing tradition. Today, a history of Parliament's bad manners.

Also, while we usher in spring with a last minute nor'easter, we’re looking back at the most devastating storm in New England history: the hurricane of 1938. 

Plus, a tech reviewer looks at a hot new item in the world of consumer drones.

Earlier this week, the city of Portsmouth approved 75 million dollars in bonds to upgrade the wastewater treatment plant on Peirce Island. The vote by the city council is a milestone in the years-long effort by federal and state regulators to clean up Great Bay.

As the snow starts to melt you might notice a stark contrast in the landscape.  Maybe you were driving down the highway and noticed one shoulder was covered with snow while the other side was bare with a faint tinge of spring green shoots.  The cause?  Slope and aspect.  

There’s no way around it. This week, Something Wild is a little thick. Like hundreds of pages thick but stay with us.

Chris Schadler is a wild canid biologist, and for about 25 years, her specialty has been the coyote. The first confirmed case of coyotes in New Hampshire was an individual found in a trap in Holderness in the mid 1940s. But they have likely been here longer, because as Schadler points out, they didn’t parachute into Holderness, they will have migrated south from Canada.

With a narrow five to four vote, New Hampshire's Fish and Game Commission has approved new rules that would let hunters and trappers to kill fifty bobcats a year. The season would begin with a month of trapping in December of this year, and continue into January of 2017 with a month of hunting with dogs and firearms. Sportsmen will be awarded permits based on a lottery.

Every moment of our lives add up to the people we are today but some of those moments have a bit more of an impact.  That turning point when you realize what you want to do with the rest of your life. It's something that's been coming up in conversation as we've been speaking to naturalists and wildlife biologists, including Sy Montgomery.  

One of those time honored New Year’s traditions is taking stock. Taking stock of the past year, or the past 13,000. When you consider New Hampshire was covered with a mile thick ice sheet 13,000 years ago, we’ve come a long way, baby! 12,000 years ago, we were still tundra. Trees don’t reappear in these parts until about 8,000 years ago: namely spruce, birch and poplars. And it wasn’t until about 4,000 years ago, that what we would now recognize as “New Hampshire forests” begin to reappear.

The Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, one of the state's oldest conservation groups, has asked the Coos County Superior Court to block the Northern Pass project, a power line which would connect New England to Canadian hydropower.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In times of mourning, we emphasize the cyclical nature of life and death - and yet, American burial practices are mostly designed to halt the natural process of decomposition. Today on Word of Mouth, a look at the historical forces that pushed America towards embalming and containment, and the growing "green burial" movement. Plus, how American judges are grappling with a difficult to interpret form of evidence that's starting to be introduced in the courtroom - the emoji.

You know how New Hampshire likes to be first in the nation when it comes to politics? Well, it turns out we’re stragglers in another category: sandhill cranes. They’ve been nesting in our neighboring states of Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts, but they never went granite until 2014.

Republican presidential candidate John Kasich was in Manchester Friday holding another town hall. This one was aimed at local business owners, with a plan for how he would balance the country’s budget. But the conversation veered into some unexpected territory.

In recent years, New Hampshire has seen rapid growth in solar power. With the approaching cap on a solar development incentive known as net metering, though, many in the industry say they can’t expand much more.  We’ll find out what’s going on, and how bright or dim the future might be for solar in the Granite State.

GUESTS:

For decades, environmentalists have fought to keep plastic, glass, paper and other recyclables out of landfills where they’d sit for thousands of years…so, is recycling truly making a difference in the health of the planet? Today, some data that challenges recycling’s sanctified status. Then, India’s government says it will clean up the horribly polluted Ganges, the river which supports ten percent of the world’s population. The first step: working with the Hindu belief that the Ganges is holy, self-purifying and the place to be buried. 

The U.S. Air Force has agreed to treat two more contaminated wells on the former Pease Air Force Base.

That’s in addition to the Haven well, which the Air Force agreed to treat back in August. That well tested above the EPA’s provisional health advisory level for perfluorochemicals, which had leached into the water from firefighting foam used on the base.

Now, after urging from the community and EPA, the Air Force will treat the Harrison and Smith wells, which test positive for the chemicals, but below the EPA’s threshold for the contaminants.

As hunters head out into the New Hampshire woods today for the first day of bear season, they may have a harder time finding their quarry. Not only is there a new ban on using chocolate as bait, but it’s been a good year for natural bear sustenance.

Last year, bear hunters took 784 bears, up 20 percent from the year before. This year, Fish and Game Bear Biologist Andy Timmins says the number will likely be lower, as there’s a bumper crop of acorns, beech nuts and berries out in the woods.

At the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center, visitors learn about New Hampshire’s environment up-close: observing otters, black bear and moose as the walk the center’s trails. Eric Kelsey and his daughter Sophie are regular visitors, and Sophie attended the center’s Blue Heron School, a nature-based early learning center.

We’re at an osprey nest in Tilton with Iain McLeod, director of Squam Lakes Natural Science Center. Our goal is recruiting another individual for Project OspreyTrack. He explains that Project OspreyTrack began in 2011, “to try to understand a little bit more about osprey migration and foraging.” 

In this year’s Democratic primary, several candidates have made action on climate change a major part of their campaign. This time around they think it could be a winning issue for them in the general election, and they’re also more comfortable using it to draw distinctions between each other.

The City of Manchester is halfway into replacing all of its streetlights with energy efficient LEDs.

The total price tag for replacing 9,000 street lights? $3.7 million dollars.  

But the savings, according to the city’s Deputy Public Works Director Tim Clougherty are “in the neighborhood of $550,000 dollars a year.”

The city says the upgrade will pay for itself in less than six years.

Bear-Paw Regional Greenways is a land trust that protects important wildlife habitat in southern New Hampshire. Its work in Hooksett has helped to double the amount of conserved land in that town, including ponds, trails, and rare species habitat.

This week on Something Wild we further demonstrate that nature is everywhere…by going inside. We’re at the Currier Museum of Art looking at an exhibit of prints by John James Audubon from about 175 years ago.