DUMMERSTON — “The Nature of Windham County: Past, Present, and Future,” co-sponsored by the Dummerston Conservation Commission and Bonnyvale Environmental Education Center, is a four-week lecture series that seeks to educate people of the region about their environment and their rich store of natural resources so they can make good decisions about the future protection of these resources.
The talks will take place on Feb. 1, 8, 15, and 22, from 10 a.m. to noon at the Learning Collaborative, 471 US Route 5. The cost is $50 for the series or $15 a session, but the talks will be open to all, regardless of ability to pay.
The schedule is as follows:
• Feb. 1, geology enthusiast Roger Haydock will present a slide show entitled “450 Million Years in Windham County.” The program will explain how the landscape of our county came to be what we see today, from an origin in the southern hemisphere to mass land collision, volcanoes, dinosaurs, and glaciers. At the end of the presentation, there will be a speculative look into the future.
• Feb. 8, ecologist Tom Wessells will discuss the history of the forest of the New England landscape, our forests as they exist today, and what we might expect our forests to be like as we move into the future. Wessells is well-known for his entertaining and thought-provoking presentations and for his books Reading the Forested Landscape, The Granite Landscape, and Forest Forensics.
• Feb. 15, Patti Smith, a wildlife rehabilitator, naturalist at the Bonnyvale Environmental Education Center, and author of The Beavers of Poppel Pond, will describe the wildlife that inhabited this area after the retreat of the glaciers, how that has changed over time and the factors responsible for that change, our current wildlife, and the possibilities for local and regional wildlife in the future.
• Feb. 22, Bob Engel, former professor of biology at Marlboro College, will talk about the plants and pollinators that were here, are here now, those that we hope will be here in the future and what might affect them going forward. Over the years, Engel has taught courses ranging from general biology to tropical, marine, and desert ecology, and from ornithology to comparative physiology and plant taxonomy.