Walter “Sandy” Sanstrom

Sandy Sanstrom helps a team of teenagers put the final touches on an Osprey platform.

Essex resident
Winner of the 2016 Dave Engelman Volunteer Benchmark Award

I met Andy Griswold [our EcoTravel director] and worked with him when he was involved with the Eagle Fest in Essex, almost 20 years ago. We collide every year at the Swallow tornadoes on the Connecticut River in Old Lyme and about three years ago started working together in Old Lyme and in the Borough of Fenwick on Osprey platform installation. I helped him install a bunch of Purple Martin houses and wren, falcon, owl, bat and bluebird houses in Fenwick.

When I was in elementary school in the early ‘60’s, my school bus crossed a salt marsh in Westbrook where there was an abandoned Osprey nest in a massive oak tree. One day a classmate offered that her father (well known local commercial fisherman) had told her that the “fish hawks were all gone and done for.” This news affected me because I had never seen one and figured I never would. It would be years before I would get to see Osprey locally, and years again before I would see a Bald Eagle. I grew up at Grove Beach near Duck Island and am still amazed to see eagles, Osprey, Wild Turkey, Canada Geese, ibis, loons, vultures, Brant etc. I was raised by a woodcraft savvy father who always pointed out wildlife to me, and yet I had never seen these birds in our neighborhood. Now they are a common sight, but I am always a little surprised when I see them near my childhood home.

The work is important because we seem to be both gaining ground but losing it at the same time. I’m trying to read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, but every time I finish a chapter I have to put the book away because I am both depressed and angry. We have not learned from our past and the big dollar seed, pesticide, fertilizer companies continue to tell us what is good for us and not to worry … “trust us.” This attitude and the problems the world is having with water, both quantity and quality, must be solved for mankind to continue to live on our planet.

I don’t consider myself a “tree hugger,” but a logical, practical person who knows we can’t just use it all up. Mankind continues to figure out a way to modify our environment to make up for our problems instead of finding ways to coexist with what we should conserve. Some day it will bite us hard, and we might not have time or method to recover and survive. I’d like to avoid that.

I enjoy seeing “my” Osprey return every year, their annual gains in maturity, ability to rear young, and quality of nest build. Every summer I see new behavior, species interaction, and learn a little more about them. When you’re involved and pay attention you see more and more.