Greetings,
Thank you to everyone who contributed to our annual appeal. As you remember we had a challenge grant offer to match up to $15,000 in donations to help establish an endowment fund for the conservancy. We made it! Thanks to your generosity, we now have an endowment seeded by $30,000 from the grant and your donations.
Our goal in establishing the endowment fund is to help insure that the Friends of Lac Lawrann will always be in a position to continue our mission to “connect people with nature”. That means the efforts to conserve, maintain and restore Lac Lawrann, along with offering programs to our whole community will remain, as the Maurins would have wanted. Our naturalist, Courtney, has worked hard to expand those efforts as seen last Saturday evening at Lac Lawrann when we hosted our annual Winter Luminary Walk in conjunction with the City of West Bend Winter Warm Up. The weather must have agreed with a lot of you out there because we had about 1000 people out on the Lake Loop trail to enjoy a nice winter hike after dark. I’ve posted a link below to a short video from the WB Community TV, filmed and put together by John Elke. It has some great scenes from the luminary walk and the other city-wide activities.
January is really here. The temperature at the LLC weather station on January 26th read -12 degrees at sunrise, but there was little wind. The activity at my bird feeders was rather frenetic, as our feathered residents hurried to consume as many calories as quickly as they could. Snow cover has finally reached a good level of protection from this cold spell for those frogs, toads, beneficial insects and others riding out winter underneath the cold, white insulation. While it may look like a fair amount of snow, we are still almost a foot behind in our seasonal average. We went into this winter already in near drought conditions and could really use more moisture in the whole system to help in the spring when we start thinking about planting and our annual wildflower sale.
Hopefully things will warm just a bit so more of you can get out to hike, snowshoe or cross country ski our trails. Stay safe out there and hopefully we’ll see you on the trails soon.
Paul De Chant
President
Friends of Lac Lawrann Conservancy
