♪♪ -Welcome to Windows to the Wild.

I'm Willem Lange.

Today we take you to the beach, where you'll meet a family that prays for stormy weather, summer and winter.

[wave crashing] You’ll wade to the New Hampshire’s coastal waters with researchers and citizen scientists, on an important restoration mission.

But first, we want to share with you a story about some folks who saw a threat to one of our most beautiful waterfowl wood ducks, and decided to do some housecleaning to save them.

♪♪ It's a cold morning near the All Persons Trail in Manchester, New Hampshire.

♪♪ [snow crunching] -Bill, is this another way you went down or?

Or do you go down the regular way?

-Bill Blue and Mike Guillemette are already on the move.

They have some housecleaning to do.

♪♪ [snow crunching] -Yeah we’re heading down towards the Beaver Pond is what I call it.

It's not down too far, about 500ft.

So we're going to go down there, Mike's going to explain the program he's had with the duck boxes.

And then we'll go eventually go over to a duck box that needs to be maintained, inspect it, look at the eggs and replace the bedding material, for next year.

♪♪ I always refer to these as the winter desert.

♪♪ [quick breaths] ♪♪ [poles clacking] I have four nests out here, starting with one in the cove over there.

You can see probably one right there.

I don't know if you can pick that up.

And then there's two others further down this way.

♪♪ -The boxes are nests for wood ducks.

♪♪ Mike and Bill act as volunteer caretakers for them.

It's a job that came their way by chance.

♪♪ -I've lived here for about 20 years, and I used to go down before the All Persons Trail was there and I used to hike the mock trails they had down here, and I eventually got off and noticed this part of it.

And then about ten years ago, I moved to a new development up on the hill up there and so it was easy for me to come down here and that's where I met Bill.

-You look at a bud, and you see the three-- -Bill is Bill Foss.

We hiked with Bill a few years ago on the All Persons Trail close to where we are today.

Bill's an outdoor ambassador who recruits anyone willing to walk with him in the woods.

[indistinct dialogue] To those who can't get outdoors, he provides recordings of wildlife like wood ducks that make the Manchester Cedar Swamp their home.

♪♪ [water trickling] ♪♪ -This is one of our boxes.

What happened about 7 or 8 years ago, I was walking down here, we had Cub Scouts in Manchester make ten wood duck boxes.

So we came out here and as I was walking out here with them, Bill Foss was right off shore and yelled over, thought I was with Fish and Game or the Audubon Society.

I says no, we’re just looking to put some wood duck boxes out here, because the ones that are out here are falling apart, the roofs are all cracked, and that's how we became friends.

-Mike and Bill helped Bill Foss connect people with life in the cedar swamp.

They set up trail cameras to capture duck activities that they themselves rarely get to see.

[water ripples] [wood ducks squeak] -I download the the files and send them to Bill and he puts together his newsletter that he puts out to about 100 people about every 3 or 4 weeks, [wood duck calls] and he combines my new videos with some of his old, stock videos.

[wood creaks] You know they’ll-- They'll nest in the box laying anywhere from like 6, 8 to 12, a dozen eggs, whatever.

And, after I think 28 to 30 days, the eggs will hatch, and female will call up to the box and there's a little ladder inside or-- And we call it a little area-- A little-- I guess it is a little ladder.

They can be wire mesh, or it was curved by a saw and they'll with their little picks, they'll climb up and out and they'll jump.

[wood ducks calling] [ducklings chirp] -All in the same day?

-All in the same day, And they’re-- They’re only actually in the box for about 24 hours of life.

♪♪ [ducklings chirp] ♪♪ [birds singing] -There was a time not long ago that Mike didn't know what a wood duck was.

In fact, he'd never heard of one.

♪♪ [birds singing] -Probably, I think around 2015 I was hunting out in some-- A place, something similar to this, and I came across a box on a tree, an old wooden box on a tree, and I was like, I had no clue what it was.

And so I asked another friend of mine who was a duck hunter, and he had told me, you know, it's a wood duck box and I just, like a wood duck?

I'd never even heard of that.

And then so I looked it up online and got just fascinated at the, you know, knowing these ducks are very shy, they’re, most-- I think the most beautiful duck in North America.

[birds singing] -They are beautiful.

In the early 1900s, wood ducks were nearly extinct.

Market hunting and habitat loss took a heavy toll on the population.

♪♪ [birds singing] -Yeah, without the wood boxes, they would make their nests in a large hollowed out tree or an old pileated woodpecker nest.

But obviously we've lost a lot of the old growth.

You know, it's a lot smaller diameter, so there's a lot less natural habitat for them to build a nest.

That's why people have been putting wood duck boxes up for, I don’t know 40, 50 years at least?

I remember them as a kid I used to see them, but I never realized they had to maintain them the way you do every year.

I’d just-- They’d put them up and kind of leave them there.

[wood ducks chirping] -That effort paid off.

During the past century, the population has rebounded and it continues to grow.

It's estimated that there are now more than a million of these birds along the Atlantic Flyway.

[wood duck calling] -I’m always out in the woods, whether it's hunting or just hiking, I just find that I this is my element.

This is what I love to do and this just contributing to conservation, helping these ducks because we're losing habitat in these areas around-- One of the places that I maintain for boxes, they're putting in commercial development all around the wetland piece, there's hardly any trees at all.

So the boxes in there are badly needed.

[wood ducks calling] But I just enjoy doing this.

I enjoy building them.

In fact, we have many hunters now, duck hunters across the state since we started this.

There's Pembroke Academy and another elementary school up in that general area are building with duck boxes.

I think they have 40 they're building this, this winter to put out and they go, they're all free and they won't last.

All, you know, everybody on the social pages that I belong to, will grab these boxes and put them in areas like this and maintain them.

The key is maintaining them.

-Mike and Bill visit the nest boxes every winter.

They inspect them, make repairs and clean them out for the next occupants.

-So I open up, if it's not frozen.

♪♪ Yup and good.

♪♪ And if you want to, we'll get it, Mike, and see what you what you think?

-Well I can see right here, ♪♪ unhatched, ♪♪ wood duck eggs.

So wood duck eggs are tan in color like this.

♪♪ -Even though it's common that eggs are left behind, Mike says he's pleased with what his cameras witness.

♪♪ [wood duck squeaks] -And I'm seeing it, and you have Bill, whereas 7 or 8 years ago I’d have 1 or 2 wood ducks going swimming by, now I'm having 5 or 6, males you know, and that's pretty cool to see in the same area.

So it is-- It’s definitely making a big difference.

[ducklings squeak] ♪♪ [ducklings squeak] I want to keep this going as long as I can.

And throughout the state there's so many other hunters and conservation people doing this.

It's just wonderful to see.

♪♪ [wood ducks squeaking] -When winter rolls into New England, many surfers trade in their boards for something more suited to the season.

The family you're about to meet has other thoughts about how to enjoy the cold weather, together.

♪♪ -I don’t really care, do you?

Does it matter to you?

Which board I ride?

♪♪ -It's one of those days.

-Here we go.

♪♪ Higgins beach, Scarborough, Maine beautiful Saturday.

[waves crashing] In winter, surfers look forward to.

-Beautiful waves today, about shoulder high, offshore winds.

Can’t complain.

[waves crashing] -It's cold and blustery at Higgins Beach and with the storm brewing off shore, parking spots are hard to come by.

-Yeah, it's really nice that he let me use that parking spot during the winter because, it saves a lot of time, especially when you're trying to sneak out in the middle of the day.

[waves crashing] -So how does it feel when you're walking up and you see the surf?

-Oh it feels amazing.

It's the best feeling in the world.

[bird chirping] When I usually-- When I come up I-- Oh that guy just got a good one right there.

[waves crashing] ♪♪ [waves crashing] I come up and just kind of see what's going on, seeing where it's the busiest, I tend to try to find a spot kind of by myself.

I don't like being crowded too much.

♪♪ -Mom!

♪♪ -Travis Hayes and his wife Holly make their way onto the beach.

[waves crashing in distance] They're here with their three daughters, and for them, this place feels like home.

-You want to come out?

-You look chilly.

-I’m not!

-My parents met on this beach, in the late 60s, so kind of my whole journey started here.

[Travis chuckles] And I grew up in Falmouth, which is a town on the other side of Portland.

We're in Scarborough right now.

It's probably like a 20 minute drive, ♪♪ [waves crashing] It's almost time for it all to happen.

[chuckling] -Travis didn't pick up a surfboard until his late teens.

Playing outdoors, however, felt like a birthright.

[waves churning] -And honestly, I would say, you know, being a little rugrat growing up, you know, in the 80s, you know, you would-- Went outside and played all day, like, even if you were by yourself, you'd be outside playing with sticks, climbing trees, you know, making, making games up, so, and Maines honestly like to me the best place in the world to grow up.

♪♪ ♪♪ -It's important for me to spend time doing things that I really love and that my kids love to do, and that we can do that stuff together.

Before you would even start riding that around.

-Yup.

[giggling] -I grew up on the beach.

My mom had us at the beach, all summer, every single day of the summer so it's nice to share that with my kids too and watch them, find a love for the ocean and being outside.

[water churning] -The family outings began as an extension of Holly's and Travis's own outdoor fun.

[waves crashing] Why stop doing what they love to do?

♪♪ [waves crashing] ♪♪ -So as soon as my 18 year old was born, I bought a Kelty backpack that you can put your little, little one in and, and I started taking her cross-country skiing, like right off the bat.

Ready?

Go ahead!

[skis scraping on snow] So she would come out with me basically every time I would go cross country skiing.

And then as she got, you know, basically old enough to stand, I got her her own little cross-country skiis.

And then she would start coming with me, skiing right next to me, behind me.

She got really good to the point where she was, she was only six years old, and she did the six mile trek into Little Lyford lodges in, up there in Moosehead area.

-I'm Lila, I'm a senior in high school at Cape Elizabeth.

[waves crashing] [waves crashing] [child screaming] -Lila's early introduction to the outdoors was a spark that still burns.

♪♪ -Her head is a little small though.

-Even on the coldest winter days.

-I really liked hiking I remember, like I always, my dad brought me hiking when I was like really little and he would just take me in a backpack.

And I just always remember really, really liking that.

I really liked camping.

We would camp on like Richmond Island.

That was like one of my favorite things that we did.

♪♪ ♪♪ [waves crashing] -Waverly and Blake, they don't surf yet, at least not on their own.

♪♪ [water churning] But this is how they get a taste of what's to come.

♪♪ [water churning] ♪♪ [waves crashing] The family finds ways to have fun outdoors all year long, [waves crashing] even with the family dog.

♪♪ [wave crashing] They're in the water during the warm months, and play on it when it's cold.

-Can I do skid outs?

[skates scraping on ice] ♪♪ [skates scraping on ice] -And then, they move to higher ground.

♪♪ -Yeah mother.

Isn't this nice?

My wife is probably more of an avid skier than I am.

She didn't ski when we met.

I got her into skiing too, for the same reason I got my kids into this stuff so that we could go spend time together doing all the things I like to do, and now she's probably a better skier than I am, and she goes way more than I do and, so I'm really proud of her for for doing that.

And then she also is really into cycling as well.

So she rides her bike to Maine Med every single day.

Winter, snow, rain, doesn't matter.

She has a fat tire with studs for the wintertime.

♪♪ -I do, I, I-- have found that getting outside every day is so important to me that I've kind of worked it into my everyday routine, so when I go to work, I get outside no matter the temperature and ride my bike.

Even if it's zero degrees I'm still out there.

♪♪ I need to get fresh air.

I need to smell the fire that someone has started or, [waves crashing in distance] you know, all these, all these sensory experiences that you don't have if you're not outside so, it's fulfilling.

♪♪ -Getting a family together and then out the door can sometimes be a challenge.

Travis says it's all part of the game, one they're all willing to play.

-It definitely challenges sometimes takes a little bit longer to get get to the beach than I'd hope.

[Travis chuckles] And you know, theres also you know, motions, every-- Sometimes everybody is on a different emotional wavelength that day, some people are more stoked to go, some people-- Times people are dragging their feet.

♪♪ [water churning] But all that investment you make in when they're little, it just pays back in just like four-fold.

♪♪ -I want them to feel connected to being outside and connected to nature and be able to always enjoy that like as they get older and are adults, it's really important for me to instill like a love of the outdoors in them now so that they can continue to, you know, love the outdoors lifelong.

♪♪ [waves crashing] -Honestly I hoped it would give them an appreciation for protecting the environment and caring about it and sort of, you know, also teaching them to be humble.

You're not-- You're not ever as smart or as strong as Mother Nature is so it's good to kind of know your limits and, and, and kinda curb your expectations sometimes what you're going to get into, but also it teaches them to be tough and resilient.

♪♪ [waves crashing] That was great.

Perfect conditions.

I mean, honestly, to me that's like the best legacy you can leave for your family is getting them outdoors, getting them involved in a lot of different activities.

For the most part this is, this is what life is all about being out here, enjoying each other's company, enjoying the outdoors, meeting great people.

So, as you can see.

[Travis chuckles] They got their-- They got their shoes and socks off right now, because they think it's summer all the time, so.

[Travis chuckles] ♪♪ [giggling] [dog barks] -How do your feet feel in the winter?

-Pretty cold.

[Holly chuckles] ♪♪ [water churning] -Eelgrass has been described as an underwater meadow where fish and shellfish graze.

The problem is the marine plant is in rapid decline along New Hampshire's coastline.

We take you to the sea coast, where scientists and volunteers work together to save it.

♪♪ Along the shores of New Hampshire's rocky sea coast, teams of volunteers and scientists from the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership quietly worked to restore an essential aquatic species.

♪♪ [water bubbling] -I'm a New Hampshire seacoast native, so I grew up as somebody who watched the scientists out in the water and always wondered what they were doing and wanted to get involved.

♪♪ -This project specifically I've been working with eelgrass for about 3 to 4 years.

This is absolutely my, probably my favorite field work that I do around here, the just going out and being able to swim among these, like flowing underwater meadows.

-Eelgrass is a really important species for estuarine and marine ecosystems.

It's an underwater meadow.

Also, it acts as a nursery for many different fish and shellfish.

So it's a place where we have lots of different species reproducing and seeking shelter from predators.

-The trends in this species have been a little bit disappointing over the last few decades.

Globally, we're losing quite a bit of our eelgrass populations.

That really is mirrored here in New Hampshire where we are seeing slow declines.

We've been seeing some significant declines over the last couple of years, and that's really been spurring us into action in trying to scale up our restoration in a very meaningful way.

-The loss of eelgrass has been attributed to surface runoff and warming waters brought on by climate change.

According to PREP's own statistics, the biomass of eelgrass in Great Bay has decreased by over 50% since its peak in 1996.

♪♪ -First, we go out with a team to harvest.

♪♪ We are looking for reproductive shoots like this.

-So the shoots look different than the regular just vegetatvie shoots.

We look for a stockier stem, so the stem is circular rather than like a blade of grass.

And you will see also a brighter color.

So they're more bright yellow than the vegetative shoots.

And also you can normally see the pockets where the seeds are.

Sometimes they'll have pistols sticking up like that.

Sometimes you can see the seeds inside.

Pretty easily identifiable from the rest.

-Plants take in carbon as part of their photosynthesis process, and adult happy plants like these out here on the coast really want to be perennial plants, so they really want to just grow up nice and big and strong and stay there every year so the adult plants will just hang around in the system, and they put a lot of that energy into this, what we call below ground biomass.

So they just create a lot of root and rhizome and underground stem and they just take all of that-- And this is carbon that they're pulling out of on, on land then they're out of the air but in this case it's out of the water and essentially burying it they’re-- They're using this under the sediment.

So all of this is under your sediment like this.

And so it's taking carbon out of these areas like the air or the water and putting it underground.

And then because of that, as it spreads out and as those plants die, all of that carbon remains buried.

So that really is causing your carbon sink, it’s that cycle And we'll go out, we'll harvest these seeds and bring them back to the lab and put them in flow through tanks.

♪♪ [water rippling] So those are going to keep plumping up a little bit more, and they start turning really dark, brown to black, as they mature.

And then once they do, I don’t know if I'll be able to find a good example of them, but they really start just sort of pushing out actually, like just like this one here.

These aren't the most mature, but you can see the space starting to just push them out like that, and they just go, doo doo doo!

They'll sit for a couple of months before we'll actually drain those off, take the seeds out and then be able to process them down and replant them.

-We started today at Newcastle Beach in New Hampshire, collecting reproductive shoots from donor beds that we will bring back here to Jackson Lab and then plant out in Great Bay.

The Jackson Estuarine Lab has a really significant location.

It's on a place called Adams Point, and it's right in the center of Little Bay and Great Bay proper.

So here we have boat access to go out into the bay, do lots of field work via boats, snorkel, scuba diving.

So the eelgrass within Great Bay is seeing-- I saw a decline last year, whereas the coast saw an increase last year.

The bay is a bit more shallow and a bit more turbid, so the water is hotter and murkier.

-Eelgrass itself offers quite a few benefits for us, being both a nursery for a lot of those critters out in the estuary, as well as a way of knocking down a lot of sediments, clearing the water and that kind of thing.

What we see are these feedback loops that go into play.

So if there is a lot of eelgrass, the eelgrass clears the water for more eelgrass, which makes a lot more light and lets a lot of that light produce more eelgrass.

So it's this reinvigorating cycle, this positive feedback loop.

Unfortunately, we see positive feedback loops working the other way as well.

So if you start losing eelgrass, then there's not as much capacity to clear that water and you start getting cloudier water which produces less eelgrass.

So you can quickly start getting in a cycle that way as well.

So that's really based on the resilience of a system.

So what we're really trying to do is help bolster that resilience of that system, make sure there is enough eelgrass as well enough other functional habitats out in the estuary, like oyster reefs.

Being able to filter that water, knock down that sediment, clear that water up so there's enough light for not only eelgrass, but the other habitats that really rely on it.

-I love this area that I'm from.

I want to protect it, so getting involved in helping to keep it healthy is what I love to do.

-It's absolutely magical out here.

Honestly, we were just out here for a couple of hours picking, and you just find yourself completely entranced by this and you realize this is really something that you really want to try to protect.

So I'm out there, you know, not only just enjoying myself and enjoying the visual of everything you're around, but knowing that this is something worth fighting for.

♪♪ -Well, it is time once again to say goodbye.

I regret it, but it's true.

So I shall.

Bye bye.

I'm Willem Lange, and I hope to see you again, On Windows to the Wild.

♪♪ -Support for the production of Windows to the Wild is provided by, the Alice J. Reen Charitable Trust.

The John D. McGonagle Foundation, The Bailey Charitable Foundation, Road Scholar, and viewers like you.

Thank you!

-Make a gift to the wild and support the Willem Lange Endowment Fund, established by a friend of New Hampshire PBS.

to learn how you can keep environmental, nature and outdoor programing possible for years to come, call our development team at (603) 868-4467.

Thank you.

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