Santa Needs Your Help

Dear Children of Chesapeake Country:

I hope you have been very good this year. I am writing to you this year before Christmas to see if you might be able to help me with a challenge we have here at the North Pole. I am sure you have both heard the term Global Warming. It’s a big concern to us here in the north. The reindeer have been out on the tundra all summer, and they have been telling the elves and me all about the warm temperatures, beetle infestations and polar ice caps melting.

You can help us solve our problem. To make Christmas green and cheerful, would you make us some recycled Christmas paper to wrap gifts? You can use any old Christmas paper or make new paper with old brown and white packing paper. Get creative and colorful. Just leave the paper in a box on the porch and my elves will pick it up while you are sleeping.

Thank you for helping.

–Santa Claus, The North Pole

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Maryland’s Wide-Open Definition of Open Space

Dear Bay Weekly:

I read in the Way Downstream section of your Nov 21 issue [Vol. xv, No. 47] that $525,000 of Open Space funds is going to Kinder Farm Park for lighting and expansion of athletic fields, and Calvert County is getting $1,944,366 for an indoor swimming pool. I also read in the Nov. 28 issue of The Capital that Quiet Waters Park is getting $1,350,000 to fix (again) its ice skating rink. I do not view this as good news.

  Not only do these expenditures take money away from the original intent of protecting open space from development, they also make NON-open space and parking lots out of some of the land that was already acquired. The state has simply used the funds to support the parks and recreation budgets at the state and county levels. As a result, much less open space is being protected than we should be achieving. How many acres of real open space could have been purchased with the Open Space money that has instead been used to develop recreational facilities?

 –Steve Long, Annapolis

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Getting to Know Osprey and Snowbirds

Dear Bay Weekly:

Congratulations on Maureen Millers’ Going South article in your Nov. 21 edition [Vol. xv, No. 47]. As a Galesvillian myself, I thought I knew a bit about osprey, but I didn’t know that that unlike most human snowbirds, osprey parents go their separate ways each winter while their chicks go to entirely different destinations. Perhaps science will someday identify that DNA chip that allows them to navigate thousands of miles back from South America to the exact same nest while snowbirds will still be counting on GPS coordinates.

 –Neil Wilkie, Galesville

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The Sweet Music of Swan Song

Dear Bay Weekly:

Dottie Doherty’s “Swan Song” article [Vol. xv, No 45: Nov. 8] was exquisite. She is as good a writer as her husband John was a manager for [me and my two co-authors, Helen C. Rountree and Wayne Clark] writing John Smith’s Chesapeake Voyages 1607-’09.

–Kent Mountford, Lusby