We're pleased to host these speakers for our Field Day on Saturday, August 20, 2022 in Thetford Vermont.
Learn more about our speakers below and click here to register!
Jack E. Davis
Jack E. Davis is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Gulf: The Making of the American Sea and The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird. A recipient of an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2019, Davis is a professor of history and the Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities at the University of Florida.
Keynote Plenary Session: “Telling the Bald Eagle’s Story: A Narrative of Nature, History, and More”
Writing Workshop: “Don’t Call It Majestic”
Scott Ellis
Scott Ellis is an outdoor educator at Thetford Academy with the Thetford Outdoor Program. Scott teaches an interdisciplinary Environmental Studies and Outdoor Education course with a mission to ignite academic curiosity and foster environmental stewardship through outdoor exploration, recreation, and project-based, experiential learning.
Woods Walk: Come on a Quest
Peter Faletra
Peter Faletra is from Boston. He received a PhD for his work on bone marrow stem cells from Boston University where he was a teaching fellow in the accelerated medical school program. During his PhD years, he co-founded a successful biotech company and invented a novel method of producing large amounts of antisera for medical and scientific use. He spent two years in our nation’s capital, as an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow, and then 8 years as the Director of Workforce Development in the Office of Science at the Department of Energy. Dr. Faletra has received numerous national and regional educational awards, including being named an AAAS fellow for his many years as a teacher and mentor to students from middle school through medical school. In 2016, he was one of a dozen people honored by the Leadership Upper Valley program of Vital Communities for his role as a mentor - an award that recognizes community leaders who have made significant positive impacts in the region. He has over 30 years of experience mentoring some of the most successful secondary school and college students in the USA.
Workshop: Saving the Endangered Lady’s Slippers of Northern New England
Josef Görres
Josef Görres is a physicist who is working in soil ecology. He is a Professor at the University of Vermont teaching soil science classes. His research focuses on invasive earthworms, soil ecology, and physical properties of the soil environment.
Workshop: The Latest on Jumping Worms with Dr. Josef Görres: Why Do We Care and What Can We Do?
Ben Kilham
Ben Kilham, Ph.D. is a wildlife biologist based in Lyme, New Hampshire. His love of and devotion to black bears has enabled him to study their habits and interact with them for more than three decades. He, his wife Debra, sister Phoebe (retired), and now his nephew, Ethan rescue and rehabilitate orphaned bear cubs enabling them to successfully return to the wild. Ben has been the focus of several news articles and documentaries, including National Geographic’s “Bear Man,” Animal Planet’s “Papa Bear,” and IMAX’s “Pandas.” He is also author of the books Among the Bears: Raising Orphaned Cubs in the Wild and Out on a Limb: What Black Bears Have Taught me about Intelligence and Intuition.
Talk: The Social Black Bear
Kateri Kosek
Kateri Kosek is a poet and essayist whose writing appears in such places as Orion, Terrain, Catamaran, Northern Woodlands, and Creative Nonfiction, where she has been awarded for best essay. She lives in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where she teaches college English, writes for Berkshire Magazine, and, as a birder, has worked seasonally surveying bird populations in the Taconic range (for Green Berkshires) and in northwest Connecticut’s Aton Forest. Frequently writing about landscape and place, Kateri has been a resident at Kimmel Harding in Nebraska, and the Tallgrass Artist Residency in Kansas.
Writing Workshop: Writing the Outdoors: It’s Not Just About Nature
Alexandra Kosiba
Dr. Alexandra (Ali) Kosiba is a forest ecophysiologist and the State Climate Forester for the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. In her position, she works with landowners, foresters, policymakers, and the public to better understand and manage forests under climate change. Ali received her MS and PhD degrees from the University of Vermont in forest science. Ali is a Vermont licensed forester and the current chair of the Green Mountain Division of the Society of American Foresters. She lives in Bolton, Vermont.
Workshop: Climate Resilience and Adaptation for Vermont’s Forests
Clare Walker Leslie
Clare Walker Leslie is an internationally known author, wildlife artist, and educator. For many years, she has been connecting people of all ages to their local nature using drawing, writing, and direct observation outdoors. Her many books include: Nature Drawing: A Tool for Learning, Keeping a Nature Journal, Drawn to Nature, and The Curious Nature Guide. Clare lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Granville, Vermont.
Workshop: Setting Up Your Own Seasonal Nature Journal
Meg Madden
On most days fungi educator, author, and professional photographer, Meg Madden, can be found in the forests of her childhood practicing what she calls “mushroom yoga,” Laying on the ground, standing on her head, balancing precariously on a log, or in any number of awkward positions to capture the perfect snail's-eye view of her favorite photo subject - fungi! Her colorful, highly detailed mushroom portraits offer an intimate look into the often-overlooked world of these extraordinary organisms. Inspired by the belief that people are more likely to take care of something they love, she finds great joy in facilitating fun and meaningful connections between humans and nature. Meg shares her knowledge and contagious passion for the fantastic world of fungi through visually engaging presentations, mushroom walks, and via her Instagram gallery @megmaddendesign. An advocate for fungal diversity and community science, Meg teaches iNaturalist workshops, organizes Bioblitzes, and is deeply involved in compiling an Atlas of Fungi for the state of Vermont.
Woods Walk: Fungi & Community Science: A Woodland Mushroom Walk
John Morton
John Morton is Founder of Morton Trails, a trail planning and design firm having been involved in over 150 trail projects across the US and internationally since 1990. John has participated in eight Winter Olympic Games as an athlete (1972 in Sapporo and 1976 in Innsbruck), a coach, U.S. Biathlon Team Leader, and most recently at the Salt Lake City Olympics (2002), as Chief of Course for the Biathlon events. He grew up in Walpole, New Hampshire, skied four events for Tilton School in Tilton, New Hampshire, then skied four years at Middlebury College where he was Eastern Intercollegiate Champion in 1966 and 1968, then runner up in the 1968 NCAA Championships. He served a four-year assignment at the US Biathlon Training Center in Fort Richardson, Alaska which was interrupted by a tour of duty in South Vietnam as a mobile advisory team leader for the Army. After teaching high school English in Alaska, John was named head coach of men’s skiing at Dartmouth College, retiring after 11 years in 1990. John lives with his wife, Kay, in Thetford, Vermont.
Talk / Woods Walk: Design, Construction and Maintenance of Non-Motorized, Recreational Trails
Janet Pesaturo & Robert Zak
Janet Pesaturo has pursued her interest in life sciences and behavior in a variety of ways. A former psychiatrist, she completed a master’s degree in conservation biology late in life and now focuses on her wildlife tracking and camera trapping obsessions. In 2018 she published Camera Trapping Guide: Tracks, Sign and Behavior of Eastern Wildlife.
Robert Zak is a congenital engineer, with wide ranging interests in how things work, and how to make them better. After a career working with and leading large teams designing supercomputers, Bob “retired” to spend time in the outdoors, and on “small engineering” projects and camera trapping technology.
Workshop: Beyond Trail Cameras
Susie Spikol
Ever since she can remember, naturalist and writer Susie Spikol, has always been thrilled by the sight of any wild animal. Whether it was the lightening bugs that lit up her childhood home in Brooklyn or holding a woolly bear caterpillar with her youngest child, Susie’s life work has been helping people of all ages find ways to notice and connect with the wild creatures of our everyday world.
Over the course of her 30-year career as a naturalist she has taught thousands of children, parents, and teachers and given hundreds of public talks at nature centers, schools, colleges, universities, libraries, and conferences. She is the recipient of New Hampshire’s Environmental Educator Award. Whether she’s talking about star-nosed moles or how to help children engage with the natural world, her passion and commitment to connecting people with the natural world is clearly communicated.
When not catching frogs with preschoolers, tracking bobcats with middle-schoolers, or hawk-watching with her own three children, Susie tucks away time to write. Her writing has appeared consistently in Northern Woodlands magazine and several of her essays have been featured in environmental educator and author David Sobel’s books. Look for her essays in Taproot Magazine and the Center for Humans and Nature magazine, Minding Nature. She is a regular contributor to the column “Backyard Nature” in her local paper, The Monadnock Ledger Transcript in Peterborough, NH. For over 25 years, Susie has been a contributor to the Harris Center for Conservation Education’s newsletter, The Hearsay.
Workshop: Everyday Wild: How Common Wildlife Connects Us to Place
Woods Walk: Forest Bathing
Ethan Tapper
As the Chittenden County Forester for the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, Ethan Tapper advises private landowners, municipalities, conservation organizations, foresters and loggers on the responsible stewardship of forestland, administers Vermont’s Use Value Appraisal (or “Current Use”) program in the County, and manages over 4,000 acres of Community Forests. He writes a monthly column for 11 community newspapers and a quarterly column in Northern Woodlands magazine, maintains a YouTube channel, leads public events attended by thousands of people each year and manages his own 175-acre forest -- “Bear Island” – in Bolton, Vermont. Ethan is the 2020 recipient of Vermont Coverts’ James B. Engle Award and a 2022 recipient of a Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Program’s Vermont Tree Steward Award, and is the Northeast-Midwest State Foresters Alliance’s 2021 CFM Forester of the Year.
Learn more about Ethan’s work, read article’s he’s written, sign up for his email list or subscribe to his YouTube Channel here.
Woods Walk with Ethan Tapper, the Chittenden County Forester
Liz Wahid
Liz Wahid is a Certified Science Illustrator who focuses primarily on ornithological illustrations and topics surrounding wildlife conservation. She is currently an Artist in Residence at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, working for the Birds of the World project under the Bartels Science Illustration Program. Liz graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. in Animal Science and received a Certification in Science Illustration from California State University, Monterey Bay. She sees birds as a gateway to connecting with and conserving nature and it is her hope that her work sparks a curiosity with viewers. Her illustrations are inspired and informed by her hands-on experience with the care of captive bird species and the banding of wild birds, as well as her adventures birdwatching. In addition to Northern Woodlands, Liz has also worked with Scientific American, the National Audubon Society, and Bird Collective.
Workshop: Introduction to Ornithological Illustration
Marilyn Wyzga
Marilyn credits her parents’ bold experiment in family camping with her lifelong love of the outdoors. Those early roots grew into a career connecting people with nature, as a wildlife educator, environmental theater director, garden teacher, landscape designer and yoga instructor. Marilyn co-founded and served on the leadership team of the NH Children in Nature Coalition. Her work has been recognized by New England Wild Flower Society, The Wildlife Society, and New England Environmental Educators. Marilyn makes her home in Hancock, New Hampshire with her musician husband, surrounded by fields and forests and their wild inhabitants.
Woods Walk: Forest Bathing