Field Notes Team In the early 1980s, Laurie arrived in the Pioneer Valley as a Smith College student. Already keenly interested in New England flora, her interests have expanded over the years to include many other taxanomic groups and other aspects of landscape ecology. In the 1990s, she produced more than thirty segments for public television on the natural history of our area and in 1999, began producing Field Notes on WFCR. She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, Fred Morrison, and their young daughter, Lydia. Fred Morrison is a former science teacher in the Northampton school system, and is currently involved in a long-term study of rare dragonflies on the Connecticut River. For the last 20 years, he and Laurie have spent many field seasons searching for rare species in MA, and in the mid-1990s, he and another colleague discovered a population of federally endangered dwarf wedgemussels, previously believed to be extirpated from the state. He has also worked on the monarch butterfly overwintering colonies in Mexico, and since the early 1980s, has been involved with conservation and research activities in the Monteverde Cloud Forest area in Costa Rica. Jill Kaufman, WFCR News Director |
Host/Producer
Laurie Sanders' interest in the natural world began
as a child growing up next to several hundred acres of wild land
in Connecticut. As a teenager, she spent most afternoons exploring
the traprock ridge and talus slopes, visiting streams, and crisscrossing
the woods near her parents' house. Of all of these habitats, most
important was what her family called "the swamp." Consisting of
a red maple swamp and an open tussock marsh, Laurie spent hundreds
of hours there, poling down through the marsh on a homemade raft
(2 truck tire inner tubes and a piece of plywood), watching wildlife
and identifying plants. "What surprised me was that basically I
was the only one who ever went there, and here was a place that
was full of interesting plants and animals. I think that Field Notes
is an outgrowth of that experience. It's a way for me to share my
appreciation for the richness and diversity of the natural world."