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What's new on my Estabrook Woods site (other than Middlesex School's awful project)?

* (To see news of that awful project and the School's bulldozers 1200 feet in the Woods, [and their turning down a $5 million offer to create with Harvard a premier, joint environmental sciences program there], click here. Folly has been compounded.)

* Updated April 12, 2002. A new bibliography has been compiled about the biodiversity and natural history of the Estabrook Woods and the Sudbury River-Concord River valley area. It contains many pages of references to the 400 studies on wild animals and plants in this 14-mile stretch of valley. Of these, sixty-five studies are about plants and animals in Estabrook Woods. The area is a fine educational resource. It also has an annotated cover showing the 70 fragments of conservation land in the valley from Wayland to Bedford, totally more than 12,000 acres. It is a triumph but lacks protected corridors and has few unfragmented blocks. Click either for 90K gerrymander map with Middlesex School annotation.

* March 26, 2002. A Harvard biology course has an Estabrook Woods web site. This last year, BS 55 "Population Biology: Ecology" used the woods for one-day projects as part of an introduction to the ecology of the woods and practice in species recognition. They prepared a web site to help the undergraduates hit the ground running: <http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/bs55/Web/Main_Page/Frames/EstabrookWoods_Frameset.htm> . Recently, however, the MCZ and CFS have not utilized the Woods as Ernst Mayr had intended. See, preservation history.

* On February 5, 2002, the first  annotated checklist of Estabrook's birds ever compiled was submitted to Mass. Audubon: 159 species have been seen in Estabrook Woods over the last 35 years. This is a large, varied, and interesting list for a forest. It contains birds of great visual beauty: for example, 32 species of warblers--the jewels of springtime. And of great aural beauty: the Winter Wren, the Veery, and the Wood and Hermit Thrushes. And of predatory drama: four species of owl and ten of hawks, including breeding Great Horned Owls and Goshawks. It also contains a list of 104 species seen by Middlesex students in 1904. (In March 2002, two additional species were found.)

* Posted Dec. 28, 2001. Massachusetts declares that the entire Estabrook Woods is CORE HABITAT which should be preserved to save the state's biodiversity. To see a BioMap of Estabrook and environs, with the Middlesex project annotated, click here.

* Posted Nov. 9, 2001: a letter opposing the Middlesex School project from a Middlesex parent who is also an environmental engineer and Concord neighbor.

* Oct. 21, 2001. Walter Brain's wonderful historical-poetical article about the old cellars of Estabrook Woods is now posted only here. Its 6500 words and 8 photos first ran in The Concord Journal.

* Oct. 10-12, 2001. New photos are posed here showing how BIG the proposed Middlesex School bridge into Estabrook Woods will be. And here is a useful map of the project.

* Aug. 10, 2001. Here is new support for the lore that on April 19, 1775 some women, children, and infirm took shelter in Estabrook Woods while the British regulars occupied the town and the minute men and militia gathered at Estabrook's Punkatasset Hill.

* Aug. 8, 2001: Brad Dean suggested I post this note on an eccentric character in the book Walden: the crazy uncle and his hole to China. This hole was located in Estabrook Woods, and some think they know where it is.

* Lucille Daniel, the editor of Appalachia, writes endearingly about being lost in Estabrook Woods in "Lost and Found: The Pleasure of Finding Your Way."

* July 20, 2001: updated "one-page summary" of Middlesex School controversy. And an architect who is Middlesex graduate & parent calls building in Estabrook, Middlesex's Bridge to Nowhere: "a spectacularly bad idea."

* June 20, 2001: Thoreau scrawled in the corner of a penciled draft survey of the Hunt land in Estabrook, "Upernavik, the most northerly inhabited spot upon the globe." Why?

* June 20, 2001.  At last, the correct location of the Yellow Birch Swamp, incorrectly shown on other maps. And stepping stones there, across Thoreau's "wine colored brook."

* June 3, 2001. Links to Snapshots of places in Estabrook Country. New page of Alan Cole's photos of Estabrook ice in winter.

* May 28, 2001. Information on the Thoreau Museum of Natural History. It was built at the entrance to Estabrook Woods on the Middlesex campus. The Museum was abandoned in 1948 and its collections dispersed. An old photo has been found and people now realize the Museum building still exists: it's the left wing of Eliot Hall.

* May 25, 2001. Middlesex School students dress as at-risk salamanders and parade, to protest their school's plans to develop up to 70 acres of upland in Estabrook Woods. Pictures here and here. Student magazine article "Convenient Amnesia" comments on the forgetfulness of school trustees. Other letters of protest at school's Centennial In June, 2001.

* April 7, 2001: Rare, breeding Blue Spotted Salamanders were found at the site of Middlesex's proposed 300' by 32' bridge into Estabrook Woods. Nevertheless, Middlesex School argues in its motion to dismiss the wetlands appeal that its construction over wetlands and on adjacent uplands will have no effect on the five state-listed rare species in project area. Click here, please.

*April 4, 2001. Estabrook Woods is named a Biodiversity Site in the "SuAsCo Biodiversity Protection and Conservation Plan" (2000), which was just published on the website of the Sudbury Valley Trustees <http://www.sudburyvalleytrustees.org>. The Middlesex project, however, makes the Biodiversity Site skinny; see annotated map.

*March 29, 2001. Just discovered-- Middlesex headmaster Monk Terry's long-lost commitment to a 1400-acre woodland wildlife preserve on all of the School's land in Estabrook Woods: click here.

*Jan. 1, 2001: Steve's article, Estabrook Woods, A Rediscovered Great Wild Tract is published in Appalachia, the conservation and mountaineering journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club (text here). Also, click here for new aerials of Easterbrooks Country from Thoreau's house in the village. And click for a clearer topo map. Also, new pictures in old Estabrook Road album.

 * Explore on your own. Go to Estabrook start page.