Gay Truax, Tom Dumont, and Dolly Dame preparing the Spring Fling meal.

Salisbury’s Community Events Committee ran another superb event last weekend.  The Spring Fling Dinner was their third annual Green Up Day event, and has apparently become a tradition along with their summer Town Picnic and winter Holiday Tree Lighting events.   

The incredible dessert buffet at the Spring Fling. Wow.

Old Bones keeps the audience entertained from the stage.

Pat Stevenson and the three reptile and amphibian posters she won in the conservation commission raffle.

John Beatty shows off the 18 trolling flies tied by Wally Bailey. John outbid four other bidders to win this item for $21.50. The wooden cigar box was an elegant extra touch by Wally.

Our auctions came to an end last Thursday, and we were very pleased with the results.  We were unsure about how many people would participate in our first online fundraiser, but there was lots of interest in the local items up for bid.  It looked like everyone was having fun bidding, and we appreciate your interest and support.  The final bids on the 17 items total $1071, and we thank everyone for the lively bidding.  Of course the event was only possible because our neighbors around Salisbury generously donated all of the auction items.  It’s wonderful to have such support in the community, and humbling to learn of all the talented folks who created many of the items.

Jim Eagan and the bright landscape painting by Peter Langrock he won at the online auction.

For those of you curious about how the event progressed, here are some stats.  During the 12 days the auctions were active, more than 30 people placed 220 bids on the 17 items.  A total of 43 people registered at the auction site, but I can’t determine exactly how many of them placed bids (if your bids were always lower than the high bidder’s hidden maximum, your name was not revealed).  During the days the auctions were active, 136 different people made 456 visits to the auction Web site and viewed the 19 pages 3998 times.

A daily record of how many times the auction and main conservation commission (SCC) Web sites were viewed during the online auction in April.

I have included a graph of the number of visitors (unique computers which accessed the auction Web site) and the number of visits (including the same computer returning to the site multiple times).  The graph includes several days before the auction started, and two days after it ended.  It also shows when I sent emails to our list of interested people and when an article about the auction appeared in the Addison Independent.  I was surprised to see this evidence that some people actually read my emails.

The graph also includes the visitorship to the conservation commission’s main Web site.  It looks like a few people were clicking over from the auction site while the auctions were happening.  I hope some of you continue to check this site for news of our activities (I guess you have!).

Click on the images to enlarge.

Salisbury history buffs examine old photos on display, April 25, 2010.

Barry Whitney found some old slides that had been prepared around 1987 by James Petersen, Jr.  for a lecture on Salisbury history.  Accompanying the slides of old black and white photos were typed index cards with the text of his talk and a description of each slide.  Barry presented this talk in the old Town Hall, complete with projected slides and his reading of the cards.  Some of the photos have been featured in the Salisbury history books by Max and James E. Petersen, but some I had never seen before.

Barry is compiling a digital collection of these and other old photos, so it will be more efficient to find a photo relevant to your interest.  It might be a great project for students at Salisbury Community School to find the locations from which some of the old photos were taken and retake them.  The digital collection will be an important resource for people studying many subjects, or for people who just like old photos.  It was great to meet some of those people at this event.

Overlooking Salisbury from the Town Forest. April 24, 2010.

There is almost no sugar maple anywhere in the town forest, so the most valuable trees are red oaks and white oaks. The forest near Upper Plains Road includes some good quality oaks, and stands near the town shed and recycling barn will be attractive to loggers because road access is very good. As we travelled east, away from the road, there was more beech and red maple, and the oaks were smaller and not as straight. A couple hundred yards from the road we reached the base of a steep bedrock slope which would stop a logging skidder, the heavy equipment which drags logs to a landing. At the top of the ridge, the thin soil supported a stunted forest with lots of chestnut and white oaks (Dry Oak Forest), so there was not much for a skidder to retrieve there. There is one place along this ridge where one can get a view to the west over Salisbury.

East of this ridge, deeper, wetter soils nourish some oaks, hemlock, beech, red maple, and yellow birch in a small valley surrounding a vernal pool. Although the quality of the timber is less than that near Upper Plains Road, there is probably enough of it to support a timber sale. However, a skidder would have to cover a lot of territory to gather enough logs, and the logs would have to be taken out to the south across land owned by the Keewaydin Foundation and the US Forest Service along some roads that would have to be newly built or restored. The expense of this might reduce the profit margin substantially.

Shadbush blooming on the southern slope of Bryant Mountain, April 29, 2009.

Farther east, the town forest’s largest area of Dry Oak Forest covers the south slope of Bryant Mountain. This is an unproductive forest of stunted chestnut, white, and red oak, and red maple with little commercial value.  I was expecting an impressive display of shadbush on the slope, but only a few scattered trees were blooming. The photo here was taken last year on April 29, so maybe the display will be better in a few days.

We ran out of time and had to turn back before we got into the hemlock forest at the eastern margin of the town forest. Maybe next time there will be less talking and more walking.

Several bids had already been placed by 9:30 Sunday morning.  Although these first bids were less than a dollar more than the starting bids, the bidders might have bid more than that.  When you place a bid, the system automatically bids just enough to outbid others.  To find out how high the actual bid entered was, you have to place another bid.  The system will tell you when your bid is high enough to become the current high bid.  When the auction ends, you might win the item for less than the last bid you entered. For more information, see the Instruction page.

All of the auctions will run for 12 days and end on Thursday evening, April 29, between 7:00 and 8:04 PM.  The auctions will end sequentially in the order they are displayed on the auction home page.  Each auction will end four minutes after the previous auction, at the time noted on each auction page.  Save the date, and be prepared to bid again if someone tries to top your bid by a few dollars at the last minute!

All proceeds from this auction will support the education, research, and conservation programs of the Salisbury Conservation Commission. Enjoy, and thanks for bidding.

The northern end of the uppermost vernal pool in the town forest. April 13, 2010

Galen and I made a nice loop in the town forest yesterday (April 13), checking out the sites east of Upper Plains Road.  We found two more clusters of wood frog egg masses in the high vernal pool, one with seven masses and one with three. These had been deposited since my visit on April 7. There were no egg masses in the lower pools, including the one south of the quartzite canyon.  These pools are shallower and probably won’t last as long as the uppermost pool.

One of the 300 year old hemlocks in the town forest. April 13, 2010

To the west of the canyon we found a charred stump, evidence of an old forest fire.  There is another charred stump on the other side of the canyon, but they are the only ones I have found.  Maybe the fire did not spread far, or maybe other evidence of the fire has been lost.  The stumps were well rotted, so they probably record a fire from the mid-twentieth century.

In the hemlock grove at the eastern boundary of the town forest, we found a couple of large, old hemlocks that I had not noticed before.  That makes a total of five hemlocks that are about 300 years old.  There are lots of trees in that stand that are about 200 years old, so it is probably the oldest forest in Salisbury.  The stand also includes cut stumps dating from the last 60 years, so it is not an undisturbed forest.

The weather has been so good I expected to see lots of plants blooming.  We found some trailing arbutus in bloom, but no other wildflowers.  The next week will doubtless see more flowers.

We greatly appreciate the support of AVCC, and their recognition of this project’s potential  to increase awareness of the importance of maintaining connections among increasingly fragmented habitats in Salisbury.