New Canaan Nature Center

USA-Germany Match: Community Viewing at Nature Center

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This Thursday when the USA plays Germany for a Chance to make it to the Group of 16 The New Canaan Nature Center will be hosting a Community Viewing Event starting at 12pm. It will be held in the Sturgess Room of the Visitors Center. All are welcome! However NO parking is allowed at the Nature Center but St Marks and the New Canaan Presbyterian Church have offered their parking lots for residents who are coming to watch the Game!!

Around Town

Noon Thursday: Get Your ‘Kicks’ at the Nature Center [VIDEO]

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New Canaan Music-Phil & Jim ‘I Get a Kick out of You’ 6 25 14
[On the video above: NewCanaanite.com asked Phil Williams and Jim O’Neil of New Canaan Music for a tune to mark Thursday’s huge 12 p.m. U.S.A. vs. Germany match. The guys also had a soccer ball ready for a cutaway on the word ‘kick.’ Good thinking, thanks guys!]

Here’s something New Canaan learned last weekend about our town: People here are down for gathering as a community to watch the World Cup together. An estimated 500-plus people came to the volunteer-run Pop Up Park at Elm Street and South Avenue Sunday to watch the U.S. soccer team take on Portugal.

News

Open Space Advocates Eye Dream Greenway in New Canaan

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Open space advocates are eagerly anticipating the sale of a Weed Street property that could lead, if all goes well, to the creation of a pedestrian path connecting Irwin Park to the New Canaan Nature Center. If things pan out as they hope, New Canaan could see a “greenway” from the woods out back of the Nature Center, through New Canaan Land Trust property and all the way to Weed Street and Irwin Park (which itself may eventually connect via sidewalk to the top of Elm)—in other words, a walk-able loop encompassing the heart of downtown New Canaan and all those town treasures along the way. All that’s needed is the transfer to the town of a strategically placed 425-foot strip of land that’s about 15 to 30 feet wide (see map detail at right), according to New Canaan Land Trust Board of Trustees President Chris Schipper. Right now, that strip is part of a property at Weed Street near the intersection of Wahackme that has been on the market for a little over one year. Asked about the status of the property, listing agent Susan Blabey of William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty confirmed that there’s an accepted offer and declined to say more, citing the owner’s privacy and the fact that the deal is not yet done.

Government

Town Weighs Future of ‘Audubon House’ at New Canaan Nature Center

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New Canaan is taking steps to help figure out what to do with a largely disused building on Nature Center property that had been operated by what officials call a dissolved nonprofit group. The town had granted a license (not a lease, officials say) to the New Canaan Audubon Society to use Audubon House, which for years has sat in a wooded area near the Visitors Center at the New Canaan Nature Center. New Canaan’s legal advisors say New Canaan now controls that license, since the Audubon Society here dissolved itself, and that it’s a good time to decide whether and how to use Audubon House, since private groups likely are interested in using it, the Board of Selectmen said this week. “Before that happens, let’s get an idea of what that building’s expenses could be, what’s the liability involved in someone else using that building,” First Selectman Rob Mallozzi said Tuesday during the board’s meeting, held in the training room at the New Canaan Police Department. The selectmen voted unanimously to move toward terminating the formal license with the New Canaan Audubon Society—a change that requires Town Council support.

Around Town

New Canaan Nature Center, Town, Businesses and Organizations Mark Earth Day 2014 [VIDEOS]

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“Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone

That science may have staked the future on?”

—from Robert Frost’s “Pod of the Milkweed”

 

The migration of monarch butterflies through New Canaan—and everywhere else along the East Coast—is happening less frequently in recent years, to the point where some are calling the insects’ once widely anticipated journey between the Northeast/Canada and Mexico “endangered.”

The major reason, experts say, is a lack of milkweed, which monarch caterpillars feed on. “The butterflies can go to all kinds of flowers for nectar, but the caterpillars can only eat milkweed plants. They’re having a hard time with loss of bio-habitat, so we are encouraging people in town to plant these free milkweed seeds,” Susan Bergen, a volunteer for the New Canaan Garden Club, said Tuesday morning from a table inside New Canaan Library. There, she and Jen Rayher (nee Sillo, a 1994 New Canaan High School graduate), director of membership and volunteers at the New Canaan Nature Center, handed out the seeds (“Got Milkweed?” on the packet) to mark Earth Day here in town. It’s one of several initiatives and events planned by the Nature Center for the next week, which New Canaan’s highest elected official today declared “Environmental Awareness Week 2014Week” (see video below).