A Vinyl County Almanac

During the last Ice Age, New England, like much of the northern hemisphere, was covered by a massive glacier up to a mile thick. When the Ice Age ended and temperatures started to rise again around 18,000 years ago, this glacier began to melt and the resulting flood waters slowly filled the Connecticut Valley, forming a massive, but skinny glacial lake (Meszaros 2019). This lake, named Glacial Lake Hitchcock by the geologists who first discovered evidence of it, stretched at its height from what is today St. Johnsbury in Vermont all the way down to Rocky Hill, Connecticut, where a large sediment dam blocked the water from flowing into Long Island Sound. Much like the glacial lakes that we still see today in the far north, Lake Hitchcock would have been a dynamic place, with large chunks of ice regularly breaking off from the glacier in the warmer months and floating away through cloudy, turquoise waters. Along with its stores of frozen water, the glacier would also have released tons o...

Last weekend, I went for a little walk at the Eugene B. Fargeorge Preserve in New Haven, Connecticut. At only 32 acres, this property of the New Haven Land Trust isn’t very big, but what it lacks in size, it more than makes up for in interesting habitat and excellent opportunities for viewing wildlife. Starting from a small, inconspicuous parking area on Quinnipiac Avenue and running about a quarter of a mile along the edge of the property, a gravel service road acts as the backbone of the preserve’s humble trail system, which consists of two small loops — the Meadow Walk and the River Walk. The former will take you through a mixture of open, grassy marshland and thickets of various shrubs, vines, and small trees, while the latter leads to an old, wooden bird blind with an excellent view of Quinnipiac River and its tidal marshes. Both trails are great for a nature walk in any season, but I especially like to visit in the winter, when there is often a lot more going on than you might e...