Tom Wessels Speaks at Audobon Center

Saturday morning, the Audubon Center hosted acclaimed author and ecologist Tom Wessels for a lecture and guided hike around the center, with the focus on appreciating a forest's history while walking through it.

Wessel — who is director of the Master's Degree program in Conservation Biology at Antioch University New England — was promoting his new book, "Reading the Forested Landscape, A Natural History of New England."

Wessels lectured to the full house of roughtly 40 attendees on the ecological histories of parts of New England.

He talked about the forest, and how a person can tell what the forest used to be, when it reached different phases, and what grew there just by looking at certain features of the land, such as the kinds of rocks around the area, the shapes of trees, the scars on their trunks, the way surrounding stone walls were built, and many other clues.

Wessel's speech was peppered with interesting trivia about the area.  For example, that a person can stand in any forest around the area, and be 75 percent sure that whatever forest he or she is in was once a pasture.

Wessels grew up in coastal Connecticut, across the street from a 70-year-old woodland.   He said spending time in that forest is what inspired his fascination with nature.

After the lecture, Wessels hosted a hike, stopping every few minutes to push home points he had made during his lecture.