Youth Exchange Incoming: Laure Archard deLelulliardiare (France)
YE Outgoing: Ann Soloman (Mexico), John Gustafson (Brazil)

March 4th - Pancake Breakfast at the Colgate Inn
June - Golf tournament
August - Bouckville antique show

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L to R: VP Rev. Casper Green, Susie Gustafson, PP David Craine, PE David Collier, Presenter Marlene Brown	January 2000 Meeting
Enjoying presentation on "Technology & Rotary"	PP Jake Graber at CanCon'99

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Ambassorial Scholar Report by Eric Jeremiah von Wettberg

Dear Marlene,
Greetings from Denmark.

It is a pleasure to receive the new bulletin every month, and then wander around the district webpage when in need of information. I am a current Rotary Ambassorial Scholar from your district (7150), studying organic agriculture and ecology in Denmark. Among my duties to Rotary are two reports on the progress of my studies. I've sent you a copy of my report, as it may be some interest to rotarians in the district. I am not sure what the best use of the report is, and leave it to your discretion. I think it is much too long for the new letter, anf not of sufficiently general interest (though as you seem to route all of your email into the news letter, my attachment method may put it in by default).

It may be appropriate for either the Hamilton club webpage (my wonderful sponser club) or for the exchange student page. Even then it is probably still too long. I leave it to you. I don't have any pictures to share at the moment, though if usueful I could maybe find one of myself at least. In general, though, I sort of prefer graphicless pages, having first used the web at a time when dealing with graphics slowed it down so much that they were best avoided. First Report for Eric von Wettberg Last updated, 14th of February, 2000 Table of Contents: Section 1: Addresses Section 2: Rotary Involvement Section 3: Program of Studies Section 4: Observations of Host country Section 5: Other Observations

Abstract: As I got a bit carried away in my writing, and have written too much, I've attached a short note at the front so that the most important sentiment does not get lost. I want to give a big thank you to my Rotary Hosts for having me, to my home District (7150) for sending me here, and to the people in Evanston for putting up with my silliness. The exchange has been wonderful for me, and I hope for my Rotary guests. Although the research has not always been successful, it has significantly expanded my perspective on what doing research is like. More importantly, I think, it has been a successful cultural exchange. It has deeply increased my understanding of other people and cultures, and given the people I have interacted with a broader conception of America and Americans. I think this is a small contribution to continuing peace, one that integrated over many Ambassorial scholars is quite important.

Section 1: Addresses
Current Scholar Home Address: Eric von Wettberg Egmont Kollegiet Nørre Alle 75, 2 vær 340 2100 København Ø Denmark Telephone: +45 82 32 03 40 Email: egvw@dsr.kvl.dk Current Scholar Work Address: Eric von Wettberg Botany Section Department of Ecology Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University Rolighedsvej 21 DK-1958 Frederiksberg, Denmark Fax: + 45 35 28 28 21
Current Advisor Address: Jacob Weiner Botany Section Department of Ecology Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University Rolighedsvej 21 DK-1958 Frederiksberg, Denmark Telephone +45 35 28 28 22 Fax: +45 35 28 28 21 Email: jw@kvl.dk Website: http://www.botge.kvl.dk/ (and links therein)

Section 2: Rotary Involvement
I had the good fortune to be involved with Rotary in Copenhagen this fall, as a Fulbright scholar, before my Rotary Scholarship officially began. I have been to several meetings of my host club, and have visited the four Rotaract clubs in Copenhagen. During the fall I had a language course during my host club's meetings, which limited how often I could come, but I have come more often this spring. I love the food, which is quite good, and enjoy the meetings. The Danish in the talks is still a bit above my comprehension level, but I can converse some with individual rotarians after the talks. It is great that there are so many Rotaract clubs in Copenhagen, but it has made it difficult for me to decide whether I should float from one to another, or simply join one at the expense of the others.

The club I have been assigned to is wonderful. My advisors (I think only one is official, but I have two, and am happy with the arrangement) are very friendly and helpful. I have not had much need for assistance as Fulbright has a rather extensive orientation and safety net for its Scholars; but I feel like I am in good hands with my Rotary advisors nonetheless. The meetings themselves are an experience. The club meets aboard a boat in one of the canals surrounding Copenhagen. The semi-permanently anchored ship now houses an opulent restaurant with several rooms spacious that I have enjoyed wandering through before and after meetings. The meals are a Danish culinary experience: it begins with sild, or herring, and is followed by a several part main course consisting of a wide variety of meat dishes with vegetable garnishes. There are several sweet desserts, cheeses, and tea or coffee to close the gustatory experience, assuming one can save enough appetite to enjoy them.

The Rotaract clubs of the Copenhagen area are all quite friendly with each other, visiting often and apparently sharing members to an extent. They meet on different nights of alternating weeks so that one can conceivably attend all the club meeting, although to do so would be quite tiring as there is usually a pubcrawl after the meetings. Despite being quite friendly with each other, the four Rotaract clubs in Copenhagen are all unique. The one with which I am most familiar is the Central Copenhagen club. It is quite small, to the point of barely surviving. Other clubs are quite large, and consequently have more group energy for arranging club visits and speakers. The tone of the meetings, and the manner of exchanging ideas about which directions the clubs should choose are subtly different. I am yet to determine what the significance of these differences are, but am looking forward learning more. I am also looking forward to the Europe wide Rotaract conference to be held here in early April.

Section 3: Program of Studies
The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, or KVL, outside of Copenhagen, Denmark, is in several respects about as far away from Swarthmore College, my alma mater, as is possible within Western academic culture. KVL is a state supported agricultural university that prides itself on healthy cattle and large harvests across Denmark. Swarthmore, on the other hand, prides itself on its distinct blend of quacker social activism and intellectualism.

Although the change in academic climate is akin to falling off the edge of the earth, going from Swarthmore to KVL has been quite possibly the most sensible thing I will ever do. I was prepared for at least some of the shock. I had made arrangements to work in the laboratory of Jacob Weiner, professor in the botanical ecology section of KVL. Jake, like myself, has not always been an agricultural scientist. In fact, he used to teach at Swarthmore and do research in less applied areas of ecology. He eventually decided that Swarthmore and the research he was doing there were not for him, and that there was more pressing research to be done. With that decision he took at job at KVL, and switched over to doing research to help develop farming techniques that reduce the need for herbicides. Jake left Swarthmore after my freshman year there, before I could take a class with him. Despite not knowing him, his decision to leave had a large effect on me. It would take some word massaging to convince most people that what I did at Swarthmore was important. I took classes in all sorts of things, like philosophy and the history of biology.

I thought the subjects were fascinating; but we dealt with topics that impinge upon normal lives, such as environmental quality or poverty, as theoretical issues rather matters of importance. Most of the undergraduate research I did there was on social behavior in bees. Although it was interesting, the kinds of bees I worked with do not make honey or pollinate plants, and are consequently useless economically and quite difficult to explain to those not versed in entomology. I wanted to do something more important after leaving, or at least something that I could explain more easily. I found this in Jake's research, as we stayed in intermittent touch over email for my last two years at Swarthmore. Jake had not completely left his old research into the dynamics of plant competition behind. He had instead twisted the questions he was posing around in such a way that they were applicable to issues in the development of more sustainable farming strategies.

For me this was great, a way to not leave the somewhat comfortable place I had found on the research biology track behind, but do research that is applicable to problems faced by people outside the relatively closed circle of academic biology. As it was, I also realized, though it is more clear now, that if I wanted to pursue some agricultural interests, but remain within the realm of academic biology, I would have to do it abroad. In the US, agricultural and academic biology are two separate worlds. Although agricultural scientists will look to academic biology for explanations of phenomena, they do not look at the world in the same way. While academic biologists are looking primarily for explanations, agricultural scientists generally take higher yields, however they can be achieved, as their primary goal. There are, moreover, some social barriers between the two communities, where academic biologists look down at agricultural scientists and agricultural scientists consider their more academic peers elitists. To bridge these two worlds, it is somewhat easier to go abroad, where cultural and linguistic differences mask the social tension. This was all fairly clear to me before I left for Denmark.

What was not clear is how different the academic climate here is. Jake is the first foreigner to come into this section of the University. His arrival has been a shock for many of his peers. The Botanical Ecology Section, which houses a significant portion of Denmark's plant taxonomists, is a reactionary center against the globalization of Denmark. Denmark is a small country, with fewer people than Manhattan, and easily influenced by European and American trends. As Danish culture begins to disappear against the onslaught of Anglo-American music, and the Danish welfare state is dismantled by the European Union, Danish plants, and their Danish names, become a symbol of Danish identity. Many of the course taught by the section remain like they were 30 years ago, so as to limit many of the internationalizing aspects of current ecology. The section is a Danish language only area, particularly in its use of Danish plant names. This is despite the fact that English writing and Latin plant names must be used for any publications for readers outside of Denmark, which is most of the publications produced in the section.

At first this nationalism kept me from noticing that many of the same distinctions between agricultural students and academic scientists that exist in the US exist here. Over six months it has become clear the distinctions exist here too, but in some subtlety different ways. As is true of many large agricultural schools in the US, there are many programs associated with the agricultural programs that are only marginally agricultural in nature. The landscape architects and food scientists are not akin to the agronomy students, despite attending the same university. Even within the more agricultural sections, there are some tensions. For example, the pure agronomists have some resentment towards the foresters and the ecologists. Yet, it is different here. The educational system prior to university appears to be much more level, with all of the students having much more comparable backgrounds than in the US. Furthermore, the taxation system is such that salaries after university will not differ as much as they do between fields in the US, so that the cause for resentment is not nearly as large.

This has made for an interesting background for the research Jake and I have been doing. As foreigners we are in some ways shielded from the class tensions. We also do most of our field research away from the main campus, at an experimental farm outside of the Copenhagen metropolitan area, so that we are often not around most of our colleagues who do research at the main campus near central Copenhagen. On the other hand, we are both academic biologists with limited agronomic backgrounds from the "evil empire" across the Atlantic. This makes us the butts of occasional jokes, but in the long run I think the presence of both of us sets everyone more at ease. As far as our research itself it concerned, the ideas are quite straightforward. Jake's main research project, which was underway before I arrived, is to attempt to reduce weed growth by reducing the row spacing and increasing density of crops. This is an idea that is probably nearly as old as agriculture itself, and has been examined by agronomists before.

But no one has ever looked at the technique from the perspective of academic ecology. What we want to know is why it works better, and under what conditions it will work best. It is here that our approach as academic scientists is useful to agricultural science. Agricultural scientists have always just looked at total yield. This is important, but it may not be the whole story. Jake had found before, in his work at Swarthmore, that at higher population densities, the skew in sizes and seed set of individual plants changed. At lower densities or wider spacings plants were more uniform in size and seed production. But as density increases and spacing is reduced, the skew increases, so that there are a few very large plants with many seeds, and many smaller plants with few to no seeds. In these situations it is usually the plants that have a head start that become the biggest.

The dynamics of this skew can have a big effect on crops grown at high densities or narrow spacings. If things can be arranged so that it is the crop that is large and the weeds small, this is great. But, if only some of the crop is large, and the rest small, neither an improvement in total yield nor a decrease in weed growth may be achieved. This summer I will be doing most of the field work and data collection for this ongoing project. Our second project, which has occupied most of my time this fall and winter, is to write a review paper about row spacing and density experiments. This has been a surprisingly interesting project, because the literature was much larger, and more fragmented than we expected. At first, and this is a source of embarrassment for him still, Jake thought his ideas about row spacing were largely original.

As I uncovered more and more papers, it became clear that the idea is not new, and that someone had already written a paper quite similar to the one I am working one. The discovery of this paper has been a source of considerable frustration, and has lead to some changes in our proposed paper. Despite the overlap of our ideas with those of another researcher's, many agricultural scientists remain unaware of large parts of this literature. In their own work, people working on this topic will cite the work of only a few other people, ignoring work done in other countries or many years ago. We have three hopes for this literature review. For one, we would like to try to raise interest in narrowing row spacing and increasing planting density, in hopes that if more agricultural scientists are aware of it they will tell extension agents, who will in turn tell farmers, ultimately leading to reduced herbicide use. Secondly, by putting together research done in many lands in one paper, we hope to bring disparate parts of the international body of agricultural literature together.

Finally, we also hope that by taking our perspective in academic ecology to a problem in agricultural science, we can bring academic ecology closer to agricultural science. This increased closeness may lead to more applicable work being done in academic ecology, and more scientifically grounded work coming from agricultural science. Another project that we have underway is a more purely academic one. Jake is famous among academic ecologists for a quite simple experiment he did 15 years ago to separate the effects of root and shoot competition. In this experiment he grew morningglory, a climbing plant, in pots in such a way that individuals grew alone, sharing a pot with another plant, sharing a stake upon which to grow up with another plant, or both sharing a pot and stake. With the data he collected he could statistically judge competitive effects by difference in growth rates among the four treatments.

In this work he found that shoot competition lead to the size hierarchies I mentioned above, with a few large plants and many small ones, while root competition did not. He suspected that this was because light is a thing that one plant can take from all others by being taller than them, while nutrients and water can not be hoarded by an individual because they are mostly evenly distributed in the soil. This may be true, but no one has proved it yet. We hope to prove this by growing plants in pots where the nutrients actually are distributed in such a way that one plant can take them all. If the hierarchies typical of plants competing for light develop when nutrients and water are not evenly distributed, we have some sound evidence to explain why below ground competition generally does not lead to skewed size hierarchies.

Section 4: Observations of Host Country
After several attempts at writing this section, I came to the conclusion that this section is impossible to write in an organized fashion. There are so many observations, none of which necessarily go together coherently. There is not one story I can tell to put all my observations together, and no easy way to say everything. I will say first that I think Copenhagen and Denmark are beautiful.

Although Denmark has lost every major foreign war it has fought since the Vikings became Christian, most of Copenhagen stands unaltered by major wars. As a consequence Copenhagen has an old center which is a mix of medieval and enlightenment charm that the German cities to the south lack. The extensive bike lanes that accompany every street, and no-motor vehicle restrictions through much of the center of the city enhance this beauty. The countryside is also beautiful, with a mix of farms and forests and villages in a plain as flat as the American midwest. The country side has a feeling of having been lived on for much longer than any place in the US, but retains a feel of coziness and ruralness that the "old" parts of the American east coast lack.

There are innumerable small farm houses, some with the old half timbered construction typical of Scandinavia back in the days when America was largely devoid of Europeans. Danish Christmas is a good illustration of my second impression: Denmark is not that different, but it is different from the US. Danes take Christmas to extremes that I have not seen before. The Christmas season starts earlier in Denmark, around the middle of November, as there is no Thanksgiving holiday to take up display space in shops. The Christmas season is highly commercialized, as it is in the US. Decorations are much the same, although located in slightly different places.

Although individuals do some decorating, there are none of the completely lighted personal homes that I am used to seeing and chuckling at near my home in upstate New York. Instead, the christmas spirit is exaggerated in public squares and the Tivoli amusement park in the center of Copenhagen, where several trees had every single branch lighted. Christmas music is also quite popular. As with general popular music, much of what is listened to in Denmark is American music. But, oddly, it is a different American music (or Anglo-American music, to be sensitive to the British, as I can often not tell if a popular song is British or American) than I am used to hearing in the US. During the Christmas season Danes will play the Wham song "Last Christmas" several million times. I had never heard this song before coming to Denmark; I have also never heard many of the popular songs from the US they play at parties. Hearing that the American music they listen to is so foreign to me continually shocks Danes, to the point where they think I must be lying.

The actual Danish Christmas is a special event. I had the good fortune to spend it on the family farm of one of my friends from KVL. Danish Christmas celebrations are like those in the states in that eating enormous quantities of food is quite common. The dishes are slightly different. The Christmas Eve meal is quite commonly duck, and the meals in the preceding days are usually a mixture of flaksteak, traditional Danish herring, liverpates, and other unique Danish culinary delights. There is also a considerable amount of drinking involved. Danes in general drink more than Americans, although this is by no means universally true. Gammel Dansk, or old Danish, a bitter herb liquor, is usually consumed with breakfast. Schnapps and beer, and sometimes wine, accompany lunch.

For the novice at drinking, the schnapps can be quite dangerous and lead to unplanned afternoon naps. Scotch whiskey and cognac, among other things, usually follow. On the vacation days before and after Christmas there may be a pubcrawl afterwards for the younger adults in the family, lasting well into the morning. After the gluttony of the Christmas dinner, the family dances around the Christmas tree and then opens presents. This is, as far as I can tell, the most distinct part of Danish Christmas. Several Danes asked me about there being presents on the 24th, and were quite surprised to hear that some Americans open them on the 24th too. As in the US, there were many presents, especially for the young children. I am told by one of my friends from school in the US that in the Czech Republic, where he is now working, it is still common to give just one small gift. He takes this as a sign of a lesser degree of commercialization of the society. If he is correct, Denmark is really quite commercialized.

I live in a Kollegium, a student housing arrangement that does not exist in the US. Kollegiums are like dormitories in some ways, having private rooms and often private showers and toilets. They are unlike dormitories in having communal kitchens and students from several different universities. The most striking thing I have found in the Kollegium is how well the kitchen functions socially. There are four refrigerators for 20 people. One is filled with beer and soda. Each bottle has a sticker which the consumer will place next to their name so that the "beer orderer" can calculate how much to charge each person at the end of the month. I can not imagine a kitchen of college students in the US not abusing such a system. The communal plates and flatware are respected, and the kitchen remains generally clean.

Furthermore, people generally get along quite well. Part of the reason they get along so well is that every other week they have hall meetings. I find the meetings interminably long, but the length allows everyone to say their share, and feel happy with the living arrangement. In contrast to having been very impressed with the collectivist spirit, I am disgusted by the amount of food that gets thrown away in my kitchen. I see food get thrown away quite often in the US, where it also disturbs me. But I think it is worse in Denmark. It is coupled with a tendency to leave lights on, throw out recyclable things, and to be generally environmentally unfriendly. This is in spite of the fact that Denmark has a reputation for being an environmentally friendly country. To an extent this reputation is true.

People ride bikes everywhere, windmills are a significant source of electrical energy, bottles get recycled, and there is readily available organically grown produce. Yet, Denmark is by no means perfect. People ride bikes in part because the public transportation is not great and the roads are too small for all the cars, not because they want to. There may be wind power, but there is not nearly as much as there could be and the program is largely known among environmentalists to be more hype than reality. Bottles and cardboard get recycled in Denmark; but the county I'm from in the US also recycles paper, boxboard, and several plastics, none of which are recycled in Denmark.

Although there is organic produce, Danes in my experience buy it no more often than Americans do. When I have gently ask young Danes about these things, I have received fairly apathetical responses. As a consequence apathy is the only reason I can find to explain the excess trash and other environmental contradictions. I have also found the Danish response to foreigners to be quite interesting. Denmark is a land that is in many ways quite open to foreigners, but in others extremely closed. The best example of the openness to foreigners has been my experience with KVL's First Contact Program.

The First Contact Program, or FC, is a program which greets international students studying at KVL and aims to make them feel comfortable and welcome in Denmark. Last semester I was one of about 20 international students who participated in the program. Each of us had a Danish buddy who met us at the airport, guided us through the intricacies of the Danish bureaucracy so that we could open bank accounts and receive national health insurance, and introduced us to other Danish students at the university. FC also threw a party for the international students so that we could meet each other, and organized several sight-seeing tours in and around Copenhagen. Moreover, they took us on a weekend trip over fall break to give us a fell of the Danish countryside, Danish cuisine, and to get to know each other much better.

Yet, despite all this friendliness, whenever there was a party, the Danish students would clump together, and speak primarily with each other in Danish. In addition, there are many students, mostly from Africa, who have been at the university for many years. These students can speak Danish, along with several other languages, and in many ways are treated just like native Danes. As a consequence, they slip through the cracks of the safety net for foreigners. It wasn't even until this semester that I met most of them, they are so inconspicuous.

Yet, many of them, especially the African students, have more difficulties in Denmark, and more need for a welcoming program than the Western exchange students, because their own culture is so radically different. The fate of the African students has been one of the few points of frustration in my continued involvement in the First Contact program this semester. The way that the semester long exchange students from Western countries are greeted is wonderful, and it has been a pleasure to give something back by helping the Danes run the program this semester. I hope that my awkward position, someplace in between being a counselor and a counselee, will be jarring enough that the program can be expanded to include the more permanent foreign-born students.

This situation is indicative of circumstances that faces foreigners in other parts of Danish culture. Danes are ambivalent about the waves of immigrants who have moved to Denmark in recent years. These immigrants, from very different places such as Turkey, Somalia, and Bosnia, have had significant trouble adapting to, and being accepted by, Danish culture. The Danes are in many ways friendly at first, and never outright hostile. But they are not always welcoming either, and many would like to see the foreigners return now that there are not as many jobs as there were 20 years ago.

It is, in some ways, much easier for me to fit into Danish society, as I at least look Danish. It is also easier for me in that Danes know I will be leaving Denmark fairly soon, and that, although the culture of my native land is difficult to escape, they can at least escape from me. On the other hand, I should make it clear that the Danish response to foreigners is in many ways more constructive than that of Americans or other Europeans. America has a history of violence against non-caucasians for which it is, and should be, ashamed. Americans will simply move to another neighborhood when a new ethnicity moves in, an act of silent hostility that Danes do not generally practice.

Section 5: Other Comments
One comment that I think needs to be made, but which doesn't quite fit with any of the other sections, is that I did not realize how important the exchange program is until I got here. Danes in general know a lot about American culture. They watch our tv, our movies, and listen to our music. Our politics to a great extent shape those of the rest of the world, and our business trends reverberate everywhere. The US, though not the most populous or large country, does have the largest economy and one of the most thriving culture industries on the planet. The US is just huge. Despite familiarity with many things American, Danes, and most of the other foreigners I have met here, know few Americans personally. Many people have specific questions about American history or culture that they have never had answered, with which I can help them. These answers sometimes ameliorate their frustration with Americanization of their own culture, or with global politics.

They are also often just happy to find out what an American is really like, or, more often, to find out that we are not all alike, and that I dislike things many Americans do, and that other Americans feel the same way about me. There are a great many American stereotypes, and seeing some of them broken is a pleasant experience for many people. I have also had some of my latent preconceptions challenged. For example, with the recent scandals concerning Chinese spying in the US, I had come to question how peaceful the interests of the Chinese in global politics, and in scientific exchanges were. There are several Chinese students here, all of whom, besides being quite friendly, seem to be just honestly interested in learning how things work in the West. Simply meeting them has put me at ease. It is not just Chinese nationals with whom I have had such experiences, but a wide range of people from many places.

I have had the good fortune to have a social circle that includes a nice mix of both Danes and foreign nationals, and have had the opportunity to travel some in Europe over the Christmas holidays. Through friends in Copenhagen and a trips I took over the winter break to Prague and Vienna, I had the good fortune to met three Bulgarians, and have learned more about Bulgaria than I ever expected to. It is in many ways a black dot in European education, hidden behind first the Ottoman, then the Iron, curtains. Even most Western Europeans can do little more than name the capital. They are in an interesting position in regards to the West. History has made them an outpost of two empires, and drives some latent desire for freedom. They can look to Western culture and the EU for prosperity, but fear becoming a powerless outpost of Brussels in the same way they were once part of the Ottoman or Soviet empires.

I have also had the interesting experience of meeting some of my European relatives for the first time. I did not know I had these relatives before a German man with nearly the same last name as myself (they had lost the von during one of the upheavals in Germany in the 19th century) found me in an internet search. We met up in Copenhagen during a layover in a trip their family was making. It has been wonderful to meet them. I am going to visit them soon in Hanover, Germany, during a professional trip I will be making to another city in Germany.

Eric von Wettberg
Botany Section
Department of Ecology
Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University
Rolighedsvej 21 DK-1958
Frederiksberg, Denmark

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A Letter from Ambassadorial Scholar to Dr. John Bowen

John, I wanted to drop you a quick note, just to let you and the Hamilton rotary know how things are going here. I hope this finds you well, enjoying the end of fall. I've heard that the first snow has already come. Everything is going quite well here.

Thank you very much for sending me here. It is really wonderful. I am slowly learning Danish. It is difficult, both because the spelling does not correspond to the pronounciation, and everyone speaks excellent english, and is happy to practice on a native speaker.

My studies are also coming well. We work with winter hardy crops that we can plant in the fall and leave to grow through the next summer. We have planted, and done some manipulations to our winter crop already. It should give us a good data set. I also have plenty of library work to do. My advisor and I are intending to write a review paper.

I live with Danish students about my age who are very friendly, and alot of fun. I have also gotten to know many of the other foreign students at the Agricultural university here. There are people from all over the world here. My rotary counselors are also quite friendly. They have been waiting to introduce me to many rotary events until my Danish improves. Thank you and best wishes, Eric Jeremiah von Wettberg.

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Hamilton Club & Woodsman Pond

Hamilton Club has taken over the old, no longer used, Village of Hamilton water supply lake known as Woodmans Pond and is converting it into a bird and wildlife sanctuary with nature trails, picnic areas, etc. Future plan envisions a three mile walking - jogging - bike path from the pond to the center of Hamilton. Natural history, biology and geology students from Colgate and Syracuse Univ. are engaged in studies of the site. The dedication was May 2nd, 1999.

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