Somes Meynell Wildlife Sanctuary
The Somes-Meynell Wildlife Sanctuary is dedicated to conservation, research, and education in the Somes Pond-Long Pond watershed and beyond
We were able to sneak in our last Frozen Classroom field day of the rapidly warming season on Monday with Bar Harbor's 5th grade students, teachers, and volunteers. This was the 24th year since teacher Brian Cote and I started doing these winter multi-activity days for students. We only missed one year in 24 due to lack of ice. It's great to have high school students who participated in middle school helping us with various stations now.
Former students, long since graduated college, have seen Mr. Cote in the grocery store checkout line buying lots of hot dogs and hot chocolate have looked over and said: "hey Mr. Cote, Frozen Classroom time!?" They remember it well.
This year was tough to schedule groups due to some days being too cold, school schedules, and our recent rapid warmup with ice starting to melt back from the edges. We were able to have four schools and 105 students out on Somes Pond and in the surrounding woods to participate in ice fishing, animal tracking, campfire skills, winter ecology explorations, and story telling.
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Wow, what a beautiful morning! The 5-6 inches of heavy, clinging snow last night won't last long on the trees with the strong sun and temps rising from 28° to the mid-upper 40s today. Thankful that there's no wind to knock the snow off the branches, for the moment.
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One more night of very cold temperatures - cold enough to freeze sea water. All of Somes Harbor is frozen over, but that will be changing with a big warmup later this week and next. Hard to believe we'll be near 50° after three months of steady cold.
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