Carving Demonstrations Both Days

Step in and look closely. Although appearing animated, perched, and ready for flight, their wings are wooden, their feathers painted.  Exquisitely carved songbirds, raptors, waterfowl, and other wildlife will be showcased at the 8th Annual Bird and Wildlife Carving Exposition hosted by the Audubon Society of Rhode Island on October 18 and 19, 2008, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Audubon Environmental Education Center, 1401 Hope Street (Route 114,) Bristol, Rhode Island.    

Twenty of New England's finest wildlife carvers will display their work at this annual exposition of bird and wildlife carving. A popular two-day event, acclaimed and award-winning artists from throughout the region, including Connecticut, Cape Cod and other regions of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, will exhibit their incredibly lifelike carvings of birds and other wildlife throughout the facility. Carving demonstrations and workshops will be held throughout the weekend. Many carvings, which range in value from the hundreds into the thousands of dollars, will be offered for sale.  Work by various artists will also be raffled off.   For many collectors, this exposition is one of the most admired in New England and a highlight of the year.

International Coastal Cleanup Gets The Drift

More than 2000 volunteers, wearing ospreys on their International Coastal Cleanup T-shirts, combed the state's shoreline for trash and tallied every piece of it.

Plastics and other trash in the aquatic environments may entangle or cause digestive disorders for wildlife.  Marine turtles mistake plastic bags as jellyfish, their predominant food.  Whales become entangled in derelict line and netting, and baleen whales often swallow floating plastics with food items strained through the baleen.  Birds eat cigarette filters and become entangled in various plastics.  Two young ospreys and several cormorants died this year as a result of entanglement with monofilament fishing line which left them dangling from their nests.
Several fish, birds, and a seal were found dead during the cleanup, but none showed evidence of entanglement.  A 3-foot shark found along the shore in Providence appeared to have been struck by a propeller.  

Oddities picked up were a mailbox still containing mail which the Boy Scouts in charge of the Bristol Narrows Beach returned to the nearby house to which the mail was addressed; a 5-gallon drum of guar gum on Common Fence Point; a used pregnancy-test kit in Warren.