Rhode Island Feeds

The butterfly count is coming up soon! At this event, amateurs and experts go into 15-mile diameter survey areas and count as many butterflies as they can in one day. Check out the new google map of the survey circles: http://tinyurl.com/ributterflycount. Teams claim survey sites within the larger survey circles. In each circle, there will be one site led and coached by an Audubon staff member that anyone can join.

Orientations are held before the count, so don't be shy if you are a beginner! You will learn to start IDing butterflies right away.

Butterfly Count Orientations
Environmental Education Center (Bristol): June 15, 6:30-8 p.m.
USFWS Kettle Pond Visitor Center: July 1, 7-8:30 p.m.
Powder Mill Ledges Wildlife Refuge: July 6, 6:30-8 p.m.
Fisherville Brook Wildlife Refuge: July 7, 7-8:30 p.m.

Butterfly Counts:
Saturday, June 19: Bristol and Newport County Circles (includes some "West Bay" areas as well--see map)
Saturday, July 10: Providence, Kent and Washington County Circles

The pricing structure is a little bit different this year. Audubon is charging $6 to participate in the count, but this includes both count dates! So if you count butterflies on June 19, you pay $6. If you count butterflies on June 19 and July 10, you still only pay $6. The orientation is included in this fee. If you just want to do the orientation/ID workshop and not the count, it is still $6. Simple, right? Hopefully! Let me know if you would like more information or to be added to the email list for the Count: 401-949-5454 x3044 or jlewis@asri.org. We always love new participants!

Scientists often study depression, anxiety and fear, but why not devote your work to the causes of positive human qualities like happiness and compassion? That's the question the Dalai Lama asked researcher Richard Davidson, writes Ryan J. Foley of the...

Dig this: The RI Department of Health and the RI Department of Transportation are working together to solicit “proposals from community-based, public or not-for-profit organizations to change the social, political, and physical environment to active living an easier choice for all residents.”

From Angela Ankoma, RI Dept of Health:

Hello everyone,

I’m attaching information about Active Transportation Projects RFP and a LOI for a Safe and Active Commuting Consultant. PDF’s of both are attached and you can also check out at the website below.

Website:
http://www.purchasing.ri.gov/RIVIP/PublicBidding.asp

Safe and Active Commuting Consultant
LOI# 7353674

Active Transportation Community Projects
RFP# 7353679

Angie

Angela Bannerman Ankoma MPH, MSW
Physical Activity Coordinator, Initiative for Healthy Weight
Rhode Island Department of Health
3 Capitol Hill
Providence, RI 02908

401-222-7630 (phone)
401-222-4415 (fax)

The two files mentioned can be downloaded here (RFP) and here (LOI).

Just a quick thank you to those who spoke at last Friday’s Bike-to-Work Day here in Providence including two opportunistic Providence Mayoral candidates who saw an open microphone and wasted no time getting to it.  Thanks to you all:

Mayor David Cicilline

John Robitaille – Candidate for Governor

Ken Block – Candidate for Governor

David Gifford – Head of RI Department of Health

Angel Tavares – Candidate for Mayor of Providence

John Lombardi – Candidate for Mayor of Providence

Mark Dieterich – Executive Director of RI Bicycle Coalition

Be well,

Richard Durishin

Bass as large as 20 pounds were feeding on spawning cinderworms near Shelter Harbor on Quonochontaug Pond this week, said Mike Wade of Watch Hill...

Last night's cold front ignited a bass bite on the Taunton River where Ai Phrachanhsiri and a group of friends caught fish up to 41...

It’s the unusual hiking guidebook that quotes rock and roll lyrics, a Walt Whitman poem, and The Great Gatsby. But then, it’s the unusual outdoors guide that takes New York City and environs as its focus. AMC’s Best Day Hikes near New York City, published this spring, makes the most of the metropolis’s vibrant history, while offering 50 hikes around the city and out to the lower Hudson, New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut. Author Daniel Case marks more than 40 of the hikes suitable for children. Here are 5 that bring city and country together in interesting and surprising ways:

1. Central Park. New York City. “People dancing, people laughing … a real celebration.” Robert Lamm of the band Chicago wrote these lines in “Saturday in the Park” after spending a summer day in Central Park. They still ring true today. We walk in the park on nearly every visit to New York, and we’re always discovering new corners. Ursula and Virgil’s finds on our last trip included “Strawberry Fields,” a tiny garden across from the Dakota apartment building memorializing John Lennon of The Beatles, and the small pine grove called The Pinetum. Signs and maps at reasonable intervals make it easy to navigate around the 843-acre park.

2. High Line. New York City. Neighborhood activism, a great idea, and a sturdy old rail viaduct came together to create New York’s newest trail, and surely one of its most remarkable. The “elevated park,” the second of its kind in the world, opened during the summer of 2009. A set of stairs above Gansevoort and Washington streets serves as the trailhead to the green walkway, which extends 0.8 miles north along the western edge of Greenwich Village, through the Chelsea Market arcade. Check the High Line website for such activities as last-Wednesday-of-the-month scavenger hunts for children 5 and up.

3. West Pond Loop. Broad Channel, New York. Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, the only wildlife refuge in the National Park system, is a popular birding site in the middle of the New York Harbor. The West Pond Loop offers views of “big birds” — planes, that is — as well as some of the 325 “real” birds, such as osprey, swans, herons, and egrets, that can been seen in the salt marshes. The full loop around the pond is 1.8 miles. Accessible by public transportation.

4. New York Botanical Garden — Native Forest. Bronx, New York. This hike has an entrance fee, but once you’ve paid for your visit to the New York Botanical Garden, you’ll have the opportunity to spend time in 50 acres of forest that, as guidebook author Case says, “haven’t been cleared since before the Dutch traded beads with the American Indians.” And, as you might expect from the largest botanical garden in any city in the world, there’s much more to view, besides. Not open on Mondays.

5. Massapequa Preserve. Massapequa, New York. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously imagined in the closing paragraphs of The Great Gatsby that the lush forests of Long Island must have looked like “a fresh, green breast of the new world” to early settlers. That forested landscape had largely disappeared in the 19th century, when Walt Whitman walked “the long brown path before me leading wherever I choose” as a child growing up on Long Island. But there are still pockets of undeveloped green space amid the suburban sprawl. The Massapequa Preserve on the South Shore of Long Island is the southernmost section of the Nassau-Suffolk Greenbelt, a 20-mile trail that ends at Cold Spring Harbor State Park at its northern end. The 2-mile out-and-back trail through the Preserve crosses over streams and through woods, and travels along the shores of Massapequa Lake. Accessible from the Long Island Rail Road’s Babylon Branch.

Learn more
… about AMC’s Best Day Hikes near New York City
… about AMC’s New York – North New Jersey Chapter

Photo from Friends of the High Line.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

Fit2cook4Kids will offer nine, one-week camp sessions this summer, for children ages 11 to 15, at the URI Kingston Campus in South Kingstown. Developed by the Food and Truth organization, Fit2cook4Kids Camp has been designed as a solution to...

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Yesterday, during a meeting at RIDOT hq, Mike Lewis (RIDOT director) explained that state roads aren’t swept during the winter for two basic reasons: (1) the equipment involved includes a water sprayer; that component freezes up in the winter, so the department basically mothballs the street sweepers between fall and spring, and (2) budget constraints mean that the workers that operate the sweepers (and mowers, etc) in the summer are operating snow removal equipment (and other winter road maintenance stuff) during the winter, so there is no staff available.  Yes, it is all about the benjamins.

RIDOT does acknowledge that winter is the time of year that cyclists most need the streets swept, due to the purposeful application of sand to the roads. Taking a step toward our needs, Director Lewis asked that we assemble a list of state roads that should receive priority for sweeping once spring comes.

Please help us with this by providing your suggestions. I’ll start with one: Allens Ave. What would you add?

This special bike lane sweeper in Copenhagen is fitted with a plow in winter for snow removal. Ah, aspirations...

When Virgil was younger, he liked to play a game he called “combinding,” creating fantastical animals that had, say, the wings of an eagle, the legs of a cheetah, and a python’s constricting strength. AMC’s Best Day Hikes near Philadelphia, published this spring, contains a number of hikes that “combind” interesting history, fun activities, and nature exploration for children. Here are five that caught my eye:

1. Schuylkill River Trail. Philadelphia. A 10-mile stretch of a planned 130 miles of trail along the Schuylkill River offers art, gardens, an extensive urban park and trail system, bustling river life, even a water museum. Park at Lloyd Hall, near the entrance to the Philadelphia Art Museum, and walk north along the east side of the river. Not all the art is inside: 9,200-acre Fairmount Park is known for its sculpture gardens — and its flowering gardens (azaleas near the art museum, cherry trees by the river). Watch rowers come and go from ornate boathouses along Boathouse Row. The former Fairmount Water Works now houses a water museum, with exhibits attuned to children’s interests. The round trip from the parking area at Lloyd Hall (where there are public restrooms) to Girard Avenue Bridge is approximately 3 miles.

2. Valley Forge National Historic Park. King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Washington really did sleep here, along with the rest of the Continental Army over a bitter winter during the Revolutionary War that we now call the Encampment of 1777-1778. Valley Forge was considered an important historic area almost from the start. The area around Washington’s headquarters was established as Pennsylvania’s first state park in 1893; the site became a national park in 1976. The current network of trails provides a walking tour of the encampment’s historic buildings, starting with Washington’s Headquarters at the visitor’s center, and including reconstructed soldiers’ huts. You can also see ruins of the forges along Valley Creek that gave the historic area its name.

3. Rancocas State Park. Mt. Holly, New Jersey. This 1,100-acre pinelands park in western New Jersey incorporates the Rankokus Indian Reservation, which is leased to the Powhatan Renape Nation. A museum and replica village are open to the public. (Limited hours; check the website for current schedule.) The New Jersey Audubon Society maintains a nature center, a natural history museum, and a network of trails, and a schedule of programs for children and families.

4. Monocacy Trail. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Follow industrial and immigrant history along a river trail. Depending on where you want to go along the 3-mile trail, you’ll see Illick’s Mill, a grain mill that operated in the latter half of the nineteenth century and is now a community environmental center; Burnside Plantation, a living history museum of the Moravian immigrants who founded Bethlehem; Historic Bethlehem’s Colonial Industrial Quarter, with its restored Water Works (begun in 1754 and considered America’s first pumped town water system), tannery, and other early manufacturing buildings. Cross over the Lehigh Canal and Towpath to the mouth of the Monocacy Creek at its confluence with the Lehigh River for iconic views of the once-mighty blast furnaces and rolling mills of Bethlehem Steel. Steel production ended there in 1995. The mills now house a casino.

5. Little Lehigh Parkway. Allentown, Pennsylvania. Virgil would love this combination: a trail with a scale model of the solar system; the Museum of Indian Culture, with exhibits about the culture of the Lenape and other woodland Indians of the Northeast; the Lil-Le-Hi Trout Nursery — and a fly shop that gives lessons in fly fishing and fly tying. The museum is open Friday through Sunday; fishing is encouraged every day.

Next up — great hikes with children in and around New York City.

Photo by Sue Beyer, from an article about the Illick's Mill opening in 2009.

Learn more
… about AMC’s Best Day Hikes near Philadelphia
… about AMC’s Delaware Valley Chapter


“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

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We are heading into the last week of our month long challenge.  If you haven’t been consistent in logging your miles, it’s not too late!

The random winners for this week of the Commuter Challenge are Deirdre B, Jef N, and Josh K.  They have all won a commuter kit including: Manhattan Portage messenger bag, bike basket, umbrella, and some cool reflectors.  Winners will be contacted personally to arrange for prize delivery.

Who doesn't like chocolate milk? As a kid growing up I practically lived on it, especially when eating at the school cafeteria where there wasn't much I enjoyed on the menu. I gave it up when I got older, thinking...

I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time letting go of my old hiking guides, especially when their dog-eared pages and broken spines bring back happy memories of a streamside campsite or an epic slog or the view from a granite outcrop. Part of the fun of planning a new hiking season, though, comes in looking through new guidebooks. A new hiking guide can throw open the doors to places we haven’t been before, maybe even introduce us to new ways to think about hiking.

I’ve looked at two guides lately that do both of these things. AMC’s Best Day Hikes Near New York City and AMC’s Best Day Hikes Near Philadelphia explore the hiking possibilities in and around two of our nation’s former capitals: New York City, where George Washington held his first inaugural, and Philadelphia, which served as the country’s capital several times in the 18th century. I know both of these cities, but not as places to hike.

The book titles themselves signal something important going on in the hiking world: These are hiking guides that include descriptions of trails through urban parks, across city greenways, and next to rivers, along with more expected hiking fare. Nearly half the hikes in the two guides can be reached by public transportation.

A generation ago, I don’t know that we would have considered these real “hikes.” But a couple of trends have come together to make hikes of this sort entirely appropriate for guidebooks: the development of green urban corridors and natural pathways that skirt the built environment on one hand, and on the other, an increased awareness about the benefits of getting outside, wherever you happen to live. These two guidebooks, and others like them, bode well for the vitality of hiking as an urban activity and for the health of families in and around cities.

Of course, people have always walked in cities. And for families who live in rural, suburban, or exurban America — where it often feels impossible to get anywhere with getting into a car — visiting cities often gives us our best opportunities for walking. I’d have to think hard to say whether my children have walked more city miles or more trail miles over the years.

I don’t want to give the impression that these two guidebooks concentrate only on in-city hikes. In fact, both stretch well beyond the borders of their respective cities, even into neighboring states. But in their willingness to appreciate cultural, industrial, and natural history at a walker’s pace, they make hiking accessible in new ways.

In my next two posts, I’ll preview some of the particularly interesting family-friendly hikes in each book. First up — combining history and nature on the trail near Philadelphia.

Learn more
• AMC's Best Day Hikes Near Philadelphia by Susan Charkes
• AMC's Best Day Hikes near New York City by Daniel Case


Photo: Along the Schuylkill River Trail in Philadelphia.

“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.

AP photo / Stew Milne Rhode Island Moderate Party gubernatorial candidate Ken Block, left, and Republican gubernatorial candidate John Robitaille talk during bike to work day festivities in Providence, Friday. Providence ranks 18th among the American College of Sports...

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