- [Stephfond] Tonight on WPBS Weekly: Inside the Stories, Sandy Pines Wildlife Centre in Napanee, Ontario takes care of sick or injured wildlife.

Discover how this nonprofit functions, and why the work here is crucial.

And meet the youngest news team in the north country.

Copenhagen Central School offers a broadcast program for students.

Also, take time to visit the Fort Drum Museum.

Learn about the history of the 10th Mountain Division and more.

Your stories, your region.

Coming up right now on WPBS Weekly: Inside the Stories.

(peaceful music) [Announcer] WPBS Weekly: Inside the Stories is brought to you by the Watertown Oswego Small Business Development Center.

Carthage Savings.

The J.M.

McDonald Foundation.

And the Badenhausen Legacy Fund at the Northern New York Community Foundation.

- Good Tuesday evening everyone, and welcome to this edition of WPBS Weekly: Inside the Stories.

I'm Stephfond Brunson.

We kick off tonight with a story of goodness.

In Napanee, Ontario, volunteers at a wildlife nonprofit are making a big difference.

When injured or orphaned wildlife are hurt or sick, these courageous hearts give them the healing they need before they're released back into the wild.

Take a look.

- [Gail] 30 years ago, quite by accident, Sue Meech started wildlife rehabilitating when the Local Humane Society asked for her assistance.

That request that began Sandy Pines Wildlife Centre did not phase her in the least.

- I've always rescued cats and dogs wherever I've been.

I've always been involved in the local Humane Society and when I came here, I was helping out at the Humane Society and one day one of the ladies said to me, "Do you think you could foster some raccoons?"

A raccoon was killed on the road.

They found the babies.

And I said, "Sure.

Can't be any different from cats."

So, I started.

The first year I had seven.

The second year I had 15.

The third year I had 35.

I began to see that this was a trend and there was a need for it.

- [Gail] And that need only grew.

Sandy Pines is now admitting more than 6,000 animals a year from mice to moose and sparrows to bald eagles.

As the patients grew, so did the need for staff.

- I remember I was at St. Lawrence College, giving a talk to the veterinary students.

And I met Leah, she came up to me after class and said she really would love to work with wildlife.

So, I actually hired her.

Before that, I did it all - My husband and I did it all ourselves.

- [Gail] After graduating from the Registered Veterinary Technologist Program at St. Lawrence College, Leah Birmingham became Sandy Pine's Wildlife Centre's first full-time employee.

- I am technically the medical director as a registered vet technologist.

That's, my background is veterinary medicine.

So, I am overseeing for veterinarians the day-to-day healthcare of the patients.

People that really excel in this field are naturals at it.

I kind of feel that way myself.

Like I, you know, find myself teaching people things.

And I think, you know, nobody taught this to me.

Like I learned it because Sue put me in a position where I had to figure it out.

They didn't teach me in college, "this is how you're going to restrain and hold a raccoon."

They taught me how to do it with cats and dogs.

And I just took that knowledge and applied it to wildlife.

And I think, so I think it just was a natural thing for me.

It was a natural fit for me.

- [Gail] Their mandate is to help all injured and orphaned wildlife and release them back into the wild.

But they also give advice to people all over eastern Ontario with concerns about wildlife conflicts that they are experiencing.

- I am super proud of how much we've grown, how much the awareness has grown.

I think that people that we have educated along the way, be it interns, volunteers, you know, we've had an impact.

- People are now stopping when they see something hit on the road and they're calling us and they're somewhere to go now, before there was nowhere to go.

So what could people do but keep on driving?

But now people will call us and say, "I just witnessed a deer hit at the side of the road.

What can I do?"

- [Gail] Sandy Pines offers education programs from kindergarten to grade 12, helping build connections with wildlife and students.

These programs aim to raise awareness of our impact on wild animals and teach our community how to offer kindness and compassion toward them.

- The concept is to teach children to empathize and to love wildlife.

They're fearful of them and they're unaware of them.

And they don't realize that these animals have family members.

They have parents that care about them, they have community, they have feelings, they feel fear, they feel injuries, they feel trauma, right?

Like they feel all that.

So, to teach kids to understand that means there's the hope that as they mature and age, that that spreads.

Right?

So you're hoping that multiplies and that for future generations are gonna do better than we do.

- [Gail] As they are often contacted for support, the center felt basic training was needed for professionals to triage situations and act quickly to get an animal out of distress.

Recently they received a grant to allow the creation of an online course in Kingston and the surrounding region.

- There are a lot of people out there, especially that work in different fields that are on the roads a lot, come across wildlife, don't know necessarily how to help them.

Every wild animal that comes in here comes in because some kindhearted, caring individual has found them and whether they wanted to or not, has usually been talked through how to capture the animal.

And then we try to get it here, whether it's them bringing it or somebody else.

So, the concept we had was, we need to teach this to people.

We need to make them more aware of when an animal's suffering and when it needs help.

Because there's also situations where people think an animal's suffering and it's not, and they interfere and then they cause problems.

So, this concept was that we could create a program that we market essentially to businesses that can then have their staff certified, pass the test, get wildlife aware, get their certificates, and that also shows the community that this organization has got a conscientiousness about wildlife and want to contribute to helping them in our areas.

I know all over Ontario great work's being done, but I am very proud of the the level of care we give here.

I'm proud of our ability to make the tough decisions when we have to and not let animals suffer for our own ego.

- [Gail] For WPBS Weekly, I'm Gail Paquette.

- In other good news, students interested in broadcast journalism often have to wait until college to learn the ropes.

Unless you're a student at Copenhagen Central.

Thanks to a grant awarded to the district, junior journalists are hitting the airwaves at their school.

Producer Ryan Proven has more.

- Three, two, one.

- [Ryan] Something big is happening in the small town of Copenhagen.

Fifth graders at Copenhagen Central School are using their maker's space to design, engineer, and create a variety of products for school projects.

- The maker's space is amazing.

It's this really great interactive space where kids can come in and create.

They come up with their own ideas, they make their own projects.

So, that's a lot of fun.

- [Ryan] Within this space, students can develop their technical, critical thinking and communication skills by engaging in projects they feel passionate about.

In a space with so many ways to create, students always find something to keep busy.

- 'Cause I like using all the technology and building stuff.

- Makes it more like, school more entertaining.

- We do breakout EDU.

We have a Glow forge, which is a laser engraver that the kids make projects on, Christmas projects and family projects that they want to work on.

We also have Cricut.

The Cricut allows us to do some really cool vinyl cutting and some heat press, so we can make t-shirts, we can make all sorts of different projects with that.

And then we have just a ton of stuff that is hands-on activities that kids can come in and explore.

They just grab it, start building, create what they want.

The idea is how can you use these materials to solve a problem or a solution for something that you are curious about?

It's really all about students coming up with projects that they're interested in and being self-starters.

What do you wanna learn about?

And then it's the research process first, what do you want to make?

How are you going to create it?

What resources are you going to need?

How can we support you and facilitate that opportunity so that you can get started on something that interests you?

- [Ryan] Students also have the opportunity to produce a weekly newscast that broadcasts every Monday to the entire school.

These broadcasts highlight important news and events taking place at Copenhagen Central School and in the local community.

And thanks to a grant called the Future Knights Grant, all of this and more is possible.

- There's jobs for all of the kids, whether they want to be on camera, if they wanna be behind the camera.

We have a teleprompter, which I think works really well, because we don't have to, you know, focus so much on memorization.

The students that write the news, we typically write on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

And then if we have time, we film on Wednesday and then typically Thursday and Friday are both filming days as well.

(intense music) - Good morning Copenhagen Knights.

This is this nightly news for the week of October 24th through the 28th.

For news, we do the weather, the special feature.

We interview teachers.

We do lunch and like, we say happy birthday and all that kind of stuff.

- We started it as an enrichment program last year with fifth graders as an opportunity for some of our students who needed a little more push, something that was engaging and interesting to do outside of their classrooms.

Something that would really spark their interest and let them take off with it.

- I like that we get to like, share like all the news and what's going on here at CCS.

- It's not, it's like a funner class.

You don't like have to sit there and do work.

- [Ryan] You still have to work a little though, right?

- A little, yeah.

- [Ryan] It doesn't feel like work.

- Yes.

It feels like playtime.

- [Ryan] Playtime, where they can learn valuable skills.

- There's obvious technical skills that they're learning through the computer programming and writing the information for it.

But there's so much more about just journalism skills, learning how to be a listener.

So many of our kids have learned how to take a step back and ask probing questions, so they can get more information from the news.

Communication is really important.

Understanding how to ask questions and how to be polite and be kind and give an open and general guideline, so that people can express themselves really openly.

They love it.

And what's great is they're proud of their work.

They're really proud of what they're doing.

They feel a lot of pride in what they've researched and what they've learned and sharing it with others.

They love the opportunity to be broadcast and for others to say, "I saw you on the news."

- I think Mrs. Greene and I enjoy it just as much as the students do.

You know, I think they look forward to it.

I know there's days when they've got other things going on in their own classrooms and they can't come down to video productions and they're, the kids are usually bummed out about that.

So, I think they really look forward to it and certainly we look forward to working with the students as well.

- Failing forward is something that we talk about all the time, especially in the maker's space.

Our kids have the opportunity to try something and if it doesn't work, we're not failing.

We're failing forward.

What have we learned from that and how do we make it better?

Learning how to adjust, learning how to just get started, being a self-starter.

A lot of kids are used to having very specific instructions.

"Do this, do this, do this."

In here, come on in and start exploring.

You'll figure out what you need to do.

You just have to keep tinkering with it.

So those types of skills are really important and collaboration.

These kids work as a team and they work as a team because they've built that relationship together.

They respect each other's roles, they listen to each other.

Those are things that are really promoted in this space.

- [Ryan] At Copenhagen Central School, for WPBS Weekly, I'm Ryan Proven.

- Last June, Fort Drum opened their museum in its new location, just off Route 3 in Great Bend.

Open to the public, we take you inside to take a look at artifacts that date back further than you may think.

- [Luke] Since its relocation, The 10th Mountain Division and Fort Drum Museum has given the community a chance to learn about the military history in the North Country.

- Our goal here at the museum is to preserve the legacy and the heritage of both Fort Drum and the 10th Mountain Division and then communicate that history, both to the soldiers who work here, as well as the civilians that occupy the surrounding area.

- [Luke] It was a concept that began in an unusual place.

- The 10th Mountain Division Museum originally started in a bus depot back after 1985, when the division was reactivated.

And it's grown over the years and to where it is today.

In an attempt to preserve the legacy of both the post and the division.

- [Luke] Not only can people visit the museum, private researchers can schedule time to do their own digging and discover unknown stories hidden away in its humble beginnings.

- Well, the story of Fort Drum starts really back at the battle of Sackets Harbor and has grown all the way way to the Pine Plains region that we occupy today, which is now commonly referred to as Fort Drum, but has seen several names.

Pine Camp, Camp Drum, now Fort Drum.

And the other story is the 10th Mountain Division, which got its start during World War II, in the mountains of Colorado.

Saw action in Italy, and then finally was deactivated after World War II and then was reactivated in 1985, here in the North Country.

- [Luke] Some notable artifacts displayed include the M1904 machine gun, the M29 Weasel used in World War II, the coveted Rock of Somalia Award and other artifacts.

- This is the M1904 machine gun.

This is the cult copy of the Maximum machine gun, the first ever machine gun used in the world.

The unique thing about this machine gun is that it was properly used by the 10th Calvary, more commonly referred to as the Buffalo Soldiers, when they visited here in 1910.

Buffalo soldiers are unique throughout American history and most people don't realize they served here in the Northeast.

The 10th Calvary came here from Vermont and the 24th US Infantry came here from Madison Barracks.

At the time, the 24th and the 25th, the ninth and the 10th Calvary were commonly referred to as the Buffalo Soldiers.

This is the M29 Weasel developed by the 10th Mountain Division during World War II.

It's basically a snow Jeep, designed to float over snow.

This will go places that a person can't go while walking.

Think of a Jeep, but wearing snowshoes.

This piece is unique in that it was Italian manufactured.

It's a mortar sight, Italian manufactured, used by the Germans.

It was captured by a 10th Mountain Division soldier, Martin Weinberg, who then used it to shoot back at the Germans.

After the World War II in Italy, the 10th Mountain Division had orders to return to the United States and then train to go to Japan.

He kept it with him on his person and planned to using it to then shoot at the Japanese.

This here is the original Pine Camp military reservation.

This is the property that the army started to buy in 1909, because they had outgrown Madison Barracks with things like Maxim 1904 machine gun, bolt action rifles, rifled artillery.

So they came here to train.

The next evolution was tanks and the army needed a much larger space to train for tanks.

So, they bought using intimate domain all of this property, which is now the current outline of Fort Drum.

In December of 1992, the 10th Mountain Division was sent to Somalia on a humanitarian mission.

Somalia was a failed nation and people were starving.

Initially met as saviors, the mission then soon turned to a violent streak.

Soldiers initially started to notice the things that were being thrown at them while they're on convoy.

The Rock Reeds, the coveted Rock of Somalia Award, presented to the windshield of Specialist Hank Othmar, during an informal ceremony route 7, north of Mogadishu, 14 July, 1993.

A bit of dark humor from that timeframe.

Next to it is a piece of Super 61.

It might not mean much to most people, but it is the radio call sign for the first helicopter shot down during the The Battle of Mogadishu.

Battle of Mogadishu, most people are commonly referred to it as Black Hawk Down.

One of the oldest artifacts we have in the installation is a Clovis Point dating back 13,500 years ago, and it was dated by our cultural resources archeologist, Dr. Laurie Rush.

And you can hear working with cultural resources, we tell the story of the first people that lived here.

- The Fort Drum cultural resources program has the mission of managing all historic preservation on Fort Drum.

We manage over 108,000 acres and our acreage is extremely highly sensitive for prehistoric archeological sites.

So we've had indigenous occupation here on Fort Drum land spanning over 13,000 years.

- Visiting the museum is really traveling through history, starting 10,500 years ago, and then working your way through Battle of Sackets Harbor on to the story of the Lost Villages and the expansion in 1940, through what the 10th Mountain Division did during World War II, where you see the weapons used during the time and some of the tools of the trade, on into the modern day history that most of us are more familiar with.

Meeting soldiers out in the community.

- [Luke] Curious about what the museum has to offer?

Visit their website for more history on Fort Drum and the 10th Mountain Division, as well as visiting hours.

- One of the great things about this museum is that we're now located outside the fence of Fort Drum.

We're still located on Fort Drum property, but we're located where the community can come visit us.

It's a huge bonus over us moving to this location, as well as the fact we doubled in size.

We can now tell double the story that we used to, when we were located on post.

- [Luke] In Fort Drum for WPBS Weekly, I'm Luke Smith.

- We wrap up things tonight with a local music duo that puts the grit in bluegrass.

Here are Coyote and Crow with their original tune, "My Favorite Color."

- Hey, what's up?

We're Coyote and Crow.

And here we are with "My Favorite Color."

(bluegrass music) (bluegrass music continues) (bluegrass music continues) (bluegrass music continues) ♪ They don't know ♪ ♪ From the street light up the road ♪ ♪ Outside the candy store that closed ♪ ♪ When I was 12 years old ♪ ♪ I can hear that whistle blow ♪ ♪ Deep in the valley down below ♪ ♪ Used to watch the trains roll by ♪ ♪ And I would wonder where they go ♪ ♪ Take me away ♪ ♪ Take me back to the good old days ♪ ♪ Why wind up worrying about things that I can't change?

♪ ♪ Take me away ♪ ♪ Take me back to the good old days ♪ ♪ Why wind up worrying about things that I can't change?

♪ (bluegrass music) ♪ That midnight glow ♪ ♪ When the moon is hanging low ♪ ♪ Sitting right outside ♪ ♪ Where the Mohawk River flows ♪ ♪ We'd set up on the banks ♪ ♪ And we'd be dipping in our toes ♪ ♪ We'd watch the folks go by ♪ ♪ And we would wonder where they go ♪ ♪ Take me away ♪ ♪ Take me back to the good old days ♪ ♪ Why wind up worrying about things that I can't change?

♪ ♪ Take me away ♪ ♪ Take me back to the good old days ♪ ♪ Why wind up worrying about things that I can't change?

♪ (bluegrass music) (bluegrass music continues) ♪ There's one right to the bridge across I-95 ♪ ♪ Just staring at the stars ♪ ♪ And counting cars as they drive by ♪ ♪ That midnight moonlight that's riding in the sky ♪ ♪ That streetlight you don't know ♪ ♪ Shines like the color of your eyes ♪ ♪ Take me away ♪ ♪ Take me back to the good old days ♪ ♪ Why wind up worrying about things that I can't change?

♪ ♪ Take me away ♪ ♪ Take me back to the good old days ♪ ♪ Why wind up worrying about things that I can't change?

♪ (bluegrass music) (bluegrass music continues) ♪ That old glow from the streetlight up the road ♪ ♪ Outside the candy store that closed ♪ ♪ When I was 12 years old ♪ ♪ I can hear that whistle blow ♪ ♪ Deep in the valley down below ♪ ♪ Used to watch the trains roll by ♪ ♪ And I would wonder where they go ♪ ♪ Take me away ♪ ♪ Take me back to the good old days ♪ ♪ Why wind up worrying about things that I can't change?

♪ ♪ Take me away ♪ ♪ Take me back to the good old days ♪ ♪ Why wind up worrying about things that I can't change?

♪ (bluegrass music) (bluegrass music continues) (bluegrass music continues) - That does it for us this Tuesday evening.

Join us next week for a fresh look inside the stories.

Take a hike to protect hemlocks from invasive pests.

Discover the insect that's killing Eastern and Carolina hemlock trees, a key species in the Tug Hill region.

And we're back in the kitchen with Johnny Spezzano.

Delta Kini of Windswept Metals Farm shares grass-fed beef to fire grill these scrumptious quesadillas.

Also, join us as we showcase an Ottawa favorite, Twin Flames.

These multi-award winning indigenous artists aren't to be missed.

Meantime, we wanna tell your story.

If you or someone in your community has something meaningful, historic, educational, or inspirational to share, please email us at wpbsweekly@wpbstv.org and let's share it with the region.

That's it for now, everyone.

We'll see you again next week.

Good night.

- [Announcer] WPBS Weekly: Inside the Stories is brought to you by the Watertown Oswego Small Business Development Center, a free resource offering confidential business advice for those interested in starting or expanding their small business.

Serving Jefferson, Lewis, and Oswego counties since 1986.

Online at watertown.nysbdc.org.

Carthage Savings has been here for generations.

Donating time and resources to this community.

They're proud to support WPBS TV, online at carthagesavings.com.

Carthage Savings, mortgage solutions since 1888.

The J.M.

McDonald Foundation.

And the Badenhausen Legacy Fund at the Northern New York Community Foundation.

♪ Take me back to the good old days ♪ ♪ Why wind up worrying about things that I can't change?

♪ (bluegrass music) (soft music)