Save the Sound Dispatch

At the end of a cul-de-sac, wrapped in a gallery of trees, the only sound you could hear on winter weekends was the scratching of skate blades carving into the surface of the frozen lake. It was here, gliding along this stretch of ice beside her aunt’s house in Ridgefield, CT, that Denise Stranko’s connection to nature was set. “You can’t imagine a more picturesque setting,” she said. It seems fitting that Denise’s journey, like most that…

On a corner storefront in the Village of Mamaroneck, NY, about a block from where the Sheldrake River turns away from I-95, the exterior wall is wrapped with three horizontal blue stripes in paint and painter’s tape. The lowest, several feet above street level, is marked by red print on a white sign: Nor’easter, 4/16/2007. It’s the height the floodwaters reached during a rare spring storm that broke rainfall records throughout the region and required hundreds of…

  Over the 12 weeks of its 2023 bacteria monitoring season, Save the Sound collected roughly 780 water samples from 60+ sites along the western Long Island Sound. Every sample was analyzed in the John and Daria Barry Foundation Water Quality Lab in the organization’s Larchmon, NY office. Results were published weekly at savethesound.org. As with many journeys, this one ends with a dot on a map. Not a destination, in this case, but a designation. A…

  The only thing more challenging than the water temperature – a biting mid-50s on a late May morning – was the turbidity. Already unable to see much beyond her outstretched fingertips, Emma DeLoughry resisted the temptation to feel her way along the sea floor; stirring up the sediment would have made it even harder to find what she was searching for in the muddy, murky waters of New York’s Smithtown Bay. Emma spotted two horseshoe crabs…

By Melissa Pappas, ecological communications specialist     People from around the world come together to clean up their beaches on International Coastal Cleanup Day (ICCD), first put on the calendar by Ocean Conservancy over 35 years ago. Since then, the effort has seen 17 million people pick up 350 million pounds of plastic and debris across 150 countries. Save the Sound, the official host for Connecticut’s cleanups for over 20 years, has taken that day and…

By David Seigerman, clean water communications specialist Picture standing at Signal Rock, the postcard-worthy spot along Milford’s fourteen miles of Connecticut coastline. You’re looking back at the city’s seaside neighborhood of Woodmont, its famous flagpole and Long Island Sound behind you. To your left is what the locals call Crescent Beach. As far as official water quality data collection goes, it’s called Anchor Beach 1. To your right is Anchor Beach 2. In terms of physical proximity,…

By Melissa Pappas, Ecological Communications Specialist Diadromous fish, those that migrate from rivers to open ocean and vice versa to complete their life cycle, need passable waterways for a successful journey. Alewife, a type of river herring native to our region, is an anadromous fish, the kind of diadromous fish that swims upstream from the open ocean into river habitats to reproduce. Dams present barriers to their migration, and without functioning fish ladders to allow passage, these…

By Melissa Pappas and Katie Friedman     What are living shorelines? How can they save our coastal communities? Save the Sound’s New York ecological restoration program manager, Katie Friedman, shares her knowledge of this nature-based solution. Q: Can you explain the concept of a living shoreline and its purpose? Katie: In an urban area where we want to stabilize the coast or protect infrastructure from high wave energy or erosion, people typically build hard structures out…

By David Seigerman, clean water communications specialist Off the beaten paths, patches of Opuntia humifusa are preparing to bloom. Bright bursts of yellow will pop this summer from spiked green pads that look like a beaver’s tail crossed with a stegosaurus’. Yes, cacti grow around Long Island Sound’s shores, particularly in two sections of West Rock Ridge State Park, a 1,691-acre open parenthesis of green space spanning New Haven and Hamden, CT.   And Annalisa Paltauf isn’t…

By David Seigerman, clean water communications specialist The vast majority of freshwater fish in the U.S. are contaminated with toxins called PFAS, and eating just one of those fish may be equivalent to drinking PFAS-tainted water for a month.   © savethesound.org They are called “forever chemicals” for a reason. A couple of reasons, actually. The first is marketing. Acronyms tend to be ineffective when it comes to messaging; just ask any parent struggling to decipher a text…