Contact Mr. McCarthy
I'm happy to answer your questions. Remember, if you have a question, other students probably have a similar question! Usually, I respond to your email within the day you send me a question or concern.
Email: mmccarthy@westwood.k12.ma.us
The TMS Pollinator Garden is now home to many native plants to provide and restore some habitat for our declining numbers of pollinators in the area. The Pollinator Garden will play a major role in our Ecosystems Unit because it will enhance our ability to see ecological relationships and plant reproduction in action!
Photos by Andrea Morrell, June 18, 2023.
Grade 7 Science Teachers, Michael McCarthy and Andrea Morrell, many parent and student volunteers, including garden coach, Daphne Minner (Growing Garden Habitats), have collaborated to lead this project, and it will provide increased hands-on learning experiences for students.
Students will practice observation skills, data collection, and data analysis, which are all skills connected to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks.
In addition, there is a citizen science component of the project, as well as opportunities to connect with nature, which will also enhance student social-emotional learning. Specifically, creating and managing this new habitat will give students a sense of control and agency in addressing environmental challenges, including biodiversity loss and climate change.
Above photos by Andrea Morrell, June 2023.
Planting the Plugs, June 18, 2023:
Brand New Garden Installed! June 18, 2023. Thank you Ms. Mo, Ms. Minner, and to those dedicated and driven students of the Class of 2028!
Blue Dasher dragonfly on TMS Pollinator Garden fence July 22, 2023
Senor Witt Captures Some TMS Pollinator Garden Activity Sep 2023.MOVVideo of Pollinating bumblebees on goldenrod flowers, by Señor Witt, September 15, 2023. Muchas Gracias Señor!
Native Plant Trust, over a two-year period, designed and installed twelve gardens throughout New England featuring native plants that are good food sources for native pollinators.
It also developed a free, online course to educate home owners on how to implement such gardens in their own yards.
Nancy Pau, wildlife biologist at Parker River National Wildlife Refuge for over 20 years, shows Mr. McCarthy and other science teachers how to use a surface elevation table, or SET, to measure marsh elevation. The leveled arm has nine pins. Staff measure the height of each pin above the arm to determine how much the marsh surface elevation has changed. (photo Wade Institute for Science Education, 2015.)
Mr. McCarthy hopes to continue as a volunteer for the Fish and Wildlife Service helping biologists figure out how to make the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge's coastal habitats more resilient to climate change and how to work collaboratively with partners such as MassWildlife, the Trustees of Reservations, and local Greenbelt Associations to restore and monitor critical wildlife habitat for the endangered salt marsh sparrow in Spring 2024.
Mr. McCarthy will be working to complete a biological inventory of a new acquisition of the 180 acre Millborn Farm in Sherborn, Mass. He will be conducting breeding bird census during the Spring season in 2024.
What we’ve lost since Mr. McCarthy wrote this article as a Penn State biologist in 1995:
Americans have transformed 95 percent of the natural landscapes in the country. Roughly half the land in the Lower 48 states has been developed, converted into streets and cities, infrastructure such as airports and shopping centers, or isolated habitat fragments, with farms covering much of the other half.
Only about 13 percent of the United States enjoys some form of protection.
That’s hardly enough to sustain wildlife. If nearly three-quarters of habitat is lost, ecologists say, then we’re likely to lose three-quarters of species as well. In just half a century, for example, a staggering 3 billion breeding adult birds, or nearly 30 percent of their populations, have disappeared.
Doug Tallamy is an entomologist at the University of Delaware who’s proposing a different approach. To save America’s biodiversity, Tallamy wants us to share the land. “I’m trying to reduce the area of lawn and do it in an attractive way so you’re not thrown out of your neighborhood.”
To do this, he’s enlisting private owners of more than 83 percent of the United States to create what he calls “homegrown national parks” from tiny city plots to corporate campuses. He envisions turning over half of the 40 million acres of lawns in the United States — an area roughly the size of New England — to imperiled native plants and trees, embracing what Aldo Leopold, widely regarded as a father of modern conservation, called the “land ethic.”
Mr. McCarthy grew up in Reading, Massachusetts, in the late 1960s and '70s, when the town was a very different place, far from the sprawling, built-out suburb it is today. Then it was an oversized small town in which wild nature was never far away, thanks to the town's network of conservation lands--freshwater marshes and other wetlands, old fields, and forests of the Ipswich, Mystic, and Saugus River watersheds. One of those areas surrounded his childhood home, a long stretch of mostly coastal red maple swamp with vernal pools that had been relatively untouched since first logged for Atlantic white cedar in earlier times. "I would spend hours exploring the forested hummocky wetlands within the Timberneck Swamp," he remembers. "Then I would find myself at the edge of the vernal pool. The water still clear--but it was a place that flooded in spring and produced a wonderful variety of creatures that I would capture, learn about, and let go free again--spring peepers, fairy shrimp, wood frog eggs and polliwogs, spotted salamanders, snakes, even crayfish." Today, the water in this vernal pool is not as clear, overwhelmed by algae in areas, bordered by new housing and new yards, and receives storm runoff at the end of the street.
Such scenes, endlessly repeated in different seasons and varying habitats over the next few years, formed the basis of Mr. McCarthy's education as a naturalist. (Mr. McCarthy and his younger brother Brian, in backyard snow, Feb 1973.)
McCarthy has compared the process of learning about nature to the one children go through as they learn language. First there the simple act of naming things, then comes a rudimentary grammar: "As you progress, you learn to read whole paragraphs--brief wilderness essays. Their subject is invariably the relationship between things--what scientists refer to as ecology. A marsh stops being just a place to observe waterfowl or listen to frogs croaking. It becomes a place of complex interaction between plants and animals, prey and predator species, all existing in an elegant balance. The naturalist is fascinated by both individuality and interrelationship, and that's what ecology is all about." In those days, ecology, was a word just beginning to be more common in use.
This oak , huge in the 1970s, still stands in the Timberneck Swamp (July 2022).
With enthusiastic teaching and encouragement from his father and uncle, Mr. McCarthy's journey to becoming a naturalist, biologist, and science teacher began when he was very young. "I remember one day, sitting in a tree near my yard, with the enormous oak trees surrounding our house blossoming, waiting to see what birds would come to me." The day in question was a May morning in the early 1970s--when he was perhaps eleven or twelve--during the annual invasion of migrating wood warblers, a warbler "wave." He had gone into his backyard wilderness armed with binoculars, his father's copy of Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds, and his notebook to observe and record the show. "That day there was an unusual number and variety of warblers...I hid motionless in my retreat and watched the parade. I was surrounded by birds--darting, fidgeting, flashing, shimmering--a magnolia warbler, a black-throated green warbler, a black-throated blue, a myrtle! And I could now identify the birds, which brought me infinitely closer to them."
From an early age Mike McCarthy was hooked on nature the way some kids are hooked on computer games. It's not easy to explain why, except that nature was close at hand. His parents loved the shore, and the family spent weekends at Cape Ann beaches and summer vacations at a cottage in South Yarmouth, Cape Cod. But some of the best learning experiences occurred at Parker River National Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island. (Photo of Mr. McCarthy and his younger brother Brian, with his earliest copies of Chan Robbins's Guide to the Field Identification Birds of North America, 1971, at Plum Island, taken by Leonard McCarthy, Christmas 1974).
Mr. McCarthy's father's Field Guide to the Birds, 2nd Ed. 1947
Mr. McCarthy's earliest copies of Chan Robbins's Guide to the Field Identification Birds of North America, 1971
McCarthy the young birder soon became adept at identifying species and subspecies, often with only the sound of a bird's voice as a clue. But simultaneously he was developing a philosophical attitude toward the natural world--and by extension the human world as well. At some point in this educational process, McCarthy came to a conclusion that has become a central part of his credo. This new perception was about the infinite particularity and variety of nature. Every living thing, he came to understand, is a unique individual.
Mr. McCarthy's reverence for the natural world was firmly rooted. Inevitably this led to his first questioning of the values of the "civilized" world he had been born into. McCarthy remembers one turning point -- when he was in his early teens -- when if first dawned on him that what he loved so much was being threatened. "Here I was, a kid in the eighties living at the dead end of a neighborhood built in wetlands.
A friend of mine Doug Adams told me his father needed help taking care of the flowers growing in the greenhouses on his farm within walking distance of my neighborhood. I worked at Adams Farm after school and on weekends, and would watch the rolling pasture full of nesting grassland birds while helping Doug's dad and uncle prepare fresh flowers for transport and sale at Haymarket, Boston's oldest outdoor market.
Then we began finding bulldozers operating in our favorite spots, and we find the pastures being filled in and being paved over. And it got so that we had to go farther and farther." A few years later this farm with breeding eastern meadowlarks was a residential subdivision. He witnessed one of the last sheep farms in Reading disappear the same way a year after. Mr. McCarthy had come face to face with something called "progress."
This is my 23rd and final year teaching Science at Thurston. I've always had an interest in nature since I was a little kid. I started birding as a fifth grader, and learned trees and shrubs in tenth grade biology. Then I expanded my interest in insects and reptiles and amphibians, and vernal pools in a senior field biology class at Reading Memorial High School, taught by Leo Kenney (who also taught Matt Burne, and many other now well-known biologists, ecologists, and other scientists.)
Nearly every April Vacation week during his high school years, and for several.years thereafter, McCarthy was able to travel with a group of highly knowledgeable ecologists to the 54,000-acre Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in Georgia. We paddled for miles for the week, through the wet prairies and camped overnight on the hammocks within the great bald cypress swamps." The group was lead by his biology teacher Leo Kenney, director of the Live Animal Center at the Museum of Science Boston, and other biologists with the Zoomobile of the Franklin Park Zoo. (American alligator, Chesser Prairie, Okefenokee Swamp, April 1982).
Then in his undergraduate work at UMass, Mr. McCarthy began pursuing his love of nature and ecology in more formal settings in the Wildlife Ecology & Conservation program which provided him with the essential conservation science education to study, conserve and protect wildlife populations, and the land and water environments on which they and we depend.
When I got my first film camera with interchangeable lenses in college, I began to study and record wildflowers and pollinators even more closely, and have been leading natural history tours for Mass Audubon since 1989, including working on diamondback terrepin and eastern box turtle recovery at Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary in 1990. "
As you may be able to tell, I am interested in working with others to conserve, protect, and enhance plants, fish, wildlife, and their habitats, for the continuing benefit of all of us. Prior to becoming a science teacher, I served as endangered species biologist for Mass Wildlife and the National Park Service on Outer Cape Cod working on the Recovery Plan for the Atlantic Piping Plovers. Photo May 1991, Cape Cod National Seashore.
and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service based out of the Pennsylvania Field Office in State College. One of the species I worked to protect, and helped to recover, was the bog turtle, whose habitat in Pennsylvania was severely threatened.
This enforcement action and the resulting settlement helped The Nature Conservancy to purchase important habitat for the bog turtle in northeastern Pennsylvania. The 501st National Wildlife Refuge was established in December 2008 to benefit the threatened turtle as a result of this enforcement action.
Mr. McCarthy with U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, June 5, 1996, and Michael McCabe, EPA Region 3 Administrator, at City Island, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to sign a Memorandum of Agreement with the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program that forms a commitment to restore the biological, chemical, and physical quality of the Susquehanna River to help revive the Bay.
Volunteers Needed to Identify and Restore Sites
By Karl Blankenship for the Bay Journal on July 1, 1996U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt visited Harrisburg June 5 for a brief paddle down part of the Susquehanna River before signing a habitat restoration agreement for the river's watershed.The agreement, between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Pennsylvania Field Office, the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay and the EPA, will help pick up the pace of habitat restoration activities which benefit Bay-related species throughout the Susquehanna basin.Through the agreement, the Alliance will work with other organizations to build a "pool" of volunteers available for restoration work and to identify potential restoration sites. The USF&WS would provide technical expertise for the restoration projects.The agreement also makes the USF&WS's Pennsylvania Field Office a member of the Chesapeake Bay Program, a cooperative effort between federal agencies, the states of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia; the District of Columbia and local governments to restore the Chesapeake.Babbitt's visit to Harrisburg was part of his "National Heritage Tour" aimed at highlighting the importance of environmental protection throughout the nation. In Harrisburg, he praised improvements made to the Susquehanna since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972."Twenty years ago, this was a sewer," Babbitt said. "Today, it has been cleaned up. The cities, the people are coming back to the river. That's a tremendous accomplishment."But, he cautioned, the gains could be temporary. "Congress, ironically, just as we are having such success is now threatening to gut the Clean Water Act," Babbitt said, referring to a controversial rewrite of the law that cleared the House last year but has been stalled in the Senate.
Mr. McCarthy in the Junior Honor Society, 8th Grade (back row, right).
Mr. McCarthy's yard-species list 2023 (725 species identified as of September, 2023: 352 insect, 208 plant, 87 bird, 33 arachnid, 21 fungi, 14 mammal, 5 protist, 3 lichens, and 3 crustacean
yard-species list 2023.xlsx
Mr. McCarthy's father Leonard and his uncle Tommy were some of the youngest birders of their generation. (Leonard and Tommy McCarthy, Hampton Beach, NH, 1956)
