The Lloyd Center is in need of your member support now.

Generous friends of the Lloyd Center help sustain us with their membership support. If you have been a member in the past, we are asking you to please give what you can today, and if you have already renewed your membership, we send our deepest gratitude!

Our hardworking staff, who have made the transition to working remotely remarkably well, and our educational animals will all benefit from your investment. Right now, we are retooling our field trips into online curriculum and advancing research projects until we can resume regular activities.

During this time of social distancing, we encourage you to reflect on what the outdoors means to you. If possible, we’d be grateful for your membership support for the Lloyd Center’s special coastal resources.

Plovers from a Distance: Shorebirds and the Coronavirus Pandemic

by Jamie Bogart, Lloyd Center Research Associate

As these days role on, we’ve become accustomed to adjusting our behaviors in a variety of ways, to accommodate the new social distancing strategy used to “flatten the curve” of COVID-19. If not reduced to solitary confinement, we’re steering clear of others around us. We’ve acquired a new threshold of disturbance and become outright territorial, some might say, just like a Piping Plover.  For a plover, getting six feet from much of anything is more than disturbing. The plovers, no strangers to “quarantine”, are those brownish white birds on the upper beach which receive protection with fenced refuges to prevent disturbance of their nesting activity, due to their protection under federal and state law as an endangered species.

Click here to read more about Jamie’s Piping Plover protection responsibilities in an article in Dartmouth Week.

Fun Family Activities from the Lloyd Center!

by Adeline Bellesheim, Lloyd Center Educator/Naturalist

It is safe to say that these are strange times we are living through. With Massachusetts schools and daycares officially being closed for the remainder of the school year, feelings of uncertainty and anxiety continue to rise. The pressure on parents to care for and educate their children is intense, but we at the Lloyd Center for the Environment are happy to say that we are here to help! We are invested in the well-being of all of our past, present, and future students, and we want to be a part of their wildlife and science education even during this period of separation.

Vernal Pools – A Road Less Traveled

by Lloyd Center Research Associate Jamie Bogart

We are perhaps never more thankful for, or more in need of, a connection to the nature that surrounds us than now. While we miss large group excursions to natural areas for guided educational tours, we are fortunate to still have access to the landscape. Provided we obey current social distancing measures, some nature properties, including the Lloyd Center, remain open. If you’re lucky, you may possess a backyard large enough and located such as to see wildlife activity out of your own window.