--HELEN KELLER

I am writing you with early notice so that you can be sure and get into your appointment book the auspicious date for the very special resumption of New England Chapter events.

I very much hope you can make it to our upcoming New England Chapter Meeting, which will be held on Wednesday (a different day of the week than usual), September 19th, in the usual place--the Doubletree Guest Suites Hotel - Boston (Soldiers Field Road).

This meeting will feature a presentation by a gentleman and explorer that gave us an absolutely smashing slideshow and talk a number of years ago, who has recently returned from subsequent years of explorations and investigations to give us what will undoubtedly be another "not-to-be-missed" show. Here's a little something from our speaker, James "Skip" Lazell, concerning his work and presentation written in his own words:

"It all began in Richmond, Virginia, in 1951. There, for the first time in eastern North America, a tiny, aphid-like insect was noticed parasitic on ornamental hemlock trees. At first there was little concern, but over the years the insect, called "hemlock woolly adelgid" (HWA) spread and became abundant. Forty years later, in the early 1990s, the HWA was wiping out whole groves of hemlock from the Carolinas to New England. A major conservation crisis had developed.

The HWA originally came from Asia. In keeping with their Grayian distribution, hemlocks are more speciose in Asia than they are here (we have only two eastern species vs. China's eight). In 2005 the U. S. Forest Service and The Conservation Agency sponsored efforts to find HWA killers - mostly predatory beetles - in the hemlock forests of China and Tibet. Led by Dr. Wenhua Lu, my wife, we first had to find living hemlocks harboring HWA in the Himalayas and then do the studies necessary to determine who were the most single-minded and efficient killers of their HWA. For most of three years we travelled, searched, collected, and lab-reared candidate species. We found quite a few, but did we succeed in finding ones that will do the job and kill the American invasive HWA?

We travelled mostly by 4x4 SUV and on foot and we were plagued by landslides, ice, snow, and floods. Half our team fled Tibet on the new Qinghai Railroad: they could not face the return trip via "roads." We found stumps where once there had been forests, but we also located some excellent hemlock stands previously undocumented. We had numerous wildlife encounters, and even got some pictures."

James "Skip" Lazell is a Harvard alumnus with a doctorate in biological science from the University of Rhode Island. He is the founder and president of The Conservation Agency, a research non-profit (www.theconservationagency.org). He has specialized on islands ecosystems, especially in the tropics, so the HWA project was a significant departure from his norm. He is the author of more than 270 publications, including four books, most recently "Island: Fact and Theory in Nature" University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005. This book is readily available online and loaded with stories and humorous asides.

Yours in exploration,

Greg