I took a friend out birding today along the rail trail and through the Nevins Sanctuary. Among the birds we saw today were 3 Green Herons, 9 Great Blue herons, 1 Red Tail Hawk and believe it or not 1 Immature Bald Eagle. Unfortunately I didn’t have a long enough lens to get the eagle, but two of the Green Herons were cooperative.

Spicket River Rookery, Methuen (the rookery is along the rail trail just past the MSPCA)

Mallard 8
Great Blue Heron 9
Bald Eagle 1 imm
Red-tailed Hawk 1
Mourning Dove 2

Remember
Next Meeting: 7:00pm July 13, 2010 @ the Nevins Library

Nevins Memorial Library
305 Broadway

Please attend if you, bring a friend if you like.
We are having a Membership drive

Download or View the Final Report in PDF format(882 kb) September 2008.

Download the Complete Printable PDF in Zip format(2,194 kb)

The Massachusetts Bicycle Transportation Plan prepared by the Executive Office of Transportation, continues to advance bicycle transportation by:

• Providing a comprehensive inventory of existing on-road and off-road facilities (shared use paths), projects in the pipeline, and long-term facility proposals
• Recommending a 740-mile, seven-corridor Bay State Greenway (BSG) network consisting of on-road and off-road facilities bound by a single identity and including on-road routes that parallel shared use paths
• Providing an implementation strategy aimed at launching the BSG initially as mostly an on-road system, geared to both utilitarian and recreational travel, and complemented by a long-term investment strategy
• Recommending other programmatic enhancements and interagency initiatives

Sponsored by Federal Highway Administration
Prepared for Executive Office of Transportation

New England Biking (2005) by Melissa Kim is your general travel guide. It lists some bike rides in all the states that incorporate road biking and trail biking, but obviously doesn’t focus on rail trails. It does index all these trails by scenery, difficulty, distance etc…if you are interested in expanding your biking opportunities all over New England this is a damn fine book with good general maps and explicit directions (something you don’t often see. (author’s site)

Rail-Trails New England (2007) from the Official Rails-to-Trails Conservancy is the official guidebook to same. It covers trails in various states of development including some that are more appropriate for mountain biking. Lovely book it also includes the contact info for the caretaker organization. Hopefully this book will do nothing but get bigger in future but it is a great overview of the state of multi-use trails in New England. (publisher’s site)


New Hampshire Rail Trails by Charles F Martin is one of my favorite books thus far. Trying to be all inclusive Martin has included proposed but likely trails such as Salem’s Bike-Ped corridor. It has good maps and directions, but the books appeal is the integration of the history of railroad right of way with the present use of the property and dense with images of the roads, buildings, bridges and waterways that surround the trails. I seriously wish there was a similar book for the Massachusetts side of the line. (author’s website)

lack of bike racks, originally uploaded by jgodsey.

that downtown is sorely lacking in bike racks.

KU research adds to evidence that exercise can help damaged brains.

The researchers at the University of Kansas School of Medicine found that Exercising and staying physically fit may slow the relentless, mind-robbing progress of Alzheimer’s disease. About 5.2 million Americans now live with Alzheimer’s. By 2050, that number could swell to 11 million to 16 million. If ways can be found to postpone Alzheimer’s by as little as two years, nearly 2 million cases of the disease could be avoided. (read Kansas City Star article)