♪♪ -Welcome to Windows to the Wild, I’m Willem Lange.

Today we’re sharing stories about some incredible people who protect the world around us.

You'll see what happens to all of those vehicles that end up somehow on the bottom of our lakes and rivers.

You'll go on board with a crew, who are helping nature’s crew.

But first, you have a remarkable 15 year old from Manchester, who is being recognized worldwide for his conservation work.

♪♪ Jack Dalton is on his way to the British Parliament.

[brakes screech faintly] -I'm here in London at the Parliament for the Global Child Prodigy Awards.

I’m so excited to be here and right here, right in front of Big Ben, my friend.

So I'm super excited for tonight to meet some of the other award recipients.

♪♪ [Willem narrates] -He's here to receive an award.

-This year I was named a Global Child Prodigy Award winner, and it's at the the Royal Parliament and getting to meet the other very impressive youth who, who are also making a difference in different fields in music, conservation, social justice.

♪♪ -Jack arrived to London from Manchester, New Hampshire.

♪♪ At 15 years old, he's too young to drive, so his mother's here with him.

-I am a proud mom.

He, well it’s funny people will say that when it comes to you know, oh, he won this award or that award, and the awards really are ways to to empower him and to amplify his platform really is to get his word out in different areas and with different people.

But in reality, the thing that makes us proud about Jack is who he is on the daily.

[water stirs] -My dog loves kayaking.

Kayaking is a great way of transportation.

[Jack narrates] -Ever since I was little, I've always had a dog in my house.

I, and I think that really contributed to my love for animals.

-But it was one animal that caught Jack's eye and that's when something remarkable began.

-I mean the definitive moment where I really remember falling in love with orangutans was when I was eight years old.

My family, we traveled the country at the time for my father's work as a nurse, and one of the places that we lived was Memphis, Tennessee, and we would always visit the Memphis Zoo and in particular, the orangutans caught my eye.

♪♪ And I think that was because of their red hair and my red hair I always went back to that.

But, as I observed the more I realized how alike orangutans really were to us humans, you know?

Their mannerisms, they have a very close relationship with their mothers.

♪♪ -It's very funny because the visit to the zoo ♪♪ was really the biggest ripple of our entire lives.

♪♪ My husband and my son included, because our lives have completely shifted.

-Jack whatchu doing?

-Watch this home video and you'll get a sense of how Jack, at an early age, took on challenges.

[Jack speaks indistinctly] [water stirs] -You're doing a great job!

Do you like being on a boat?

[birds sing faintly] [indistinct babble] -Okay, you too.

-When we would travel nurse, for my husband's job, we would travel around the country and wherever we would stay, Jack, if parents or family friends would come visit, Jack would create, slideshows.

He's eight years old, and, you know, welcome to Tennessee.

♪♪ -The day at the Memphis Zoo ignited something in Jack and set him on a course to learn more about the great ape.

♪♪ He asked to meet with the zookeeper.

♪♪ -Then I found out that they were critically endangered.

That's a problem.

What's the solution?

How am I gonna help them?

What can I, a little, you know, eight year old kid living in Idaho at the time, what can I do to help orangutans living all the way across the world in Indonesia?

And I think really, I as I, you know, I spoke with the zookeeper, Lexi Yang, she took care of the orangutans, she was the one who actually taught me about palm oil and deforestation.

And she, she said, okay, write letters to companies telling them about how their palm oil usage was harming orangutans.

And I did.

-Dad’s coming to join the party.

[chuckling] -Dad is coming to join the-- -That's where Lexi put together this entire Doctor Seuss themed birthday party, and taught Jack and myself, because I had never known about palm oil and what it was doing, and Jack basically said, I have to do something about this, mom [indistinct chatter] -When he, they put peanut butter on the pages of the book.

-So the first thing I did was I wrote letters to companies telling them about how palm oil and deforestation were causing orangutans to become critically endangered.

-Hi!

My name is Jack.

I'm the kid conservationist!

-And from there I also started a YouTube channel called Kid Conservationist.

-I'm here today at the Memphis Zoo-- -And I talked about orangutans-- -So I just got to go in and spread the enrichment toys and the foods for the orangutan.

-And I said, okay, I'm going to start spreading awareness of people in this fun, educational way, to hopefully get people to fall in love with our world.

[exotic birds sing] I'm Jack, I wrote this book, isn’t that cool?

Every copy plants a tree.

[faint chatter] It's a fun story about orangutans and the animals that surround them.

-We caught up with Jack and his parents in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

This is Market Square day.

[overlapping chatter] Jack rented this space to raise awareness about conservation and sell his book.

So this is my book Kawan the Orangutan: Lost in the Rainforest.

I love seeing the kids and giving them books you know?

It's, it's all about getting kids to fall in love with the orangutans, getting them to love reading and to love our world.

♪♪ -He wrote the story when he was ten years old.

-And for every copy sold, a tree is planted directly in the rainforest so the goal is not only to spread education literacy locally, to students and to kids, but also to directly help orangutans in the rainforest.

So the books are $12, but today I'm selling them with the stuffie for 20.

-Jack's efforts are paying off.

-One book sold means one more tree is planted.

♪♪ -It was one year ago when I first learned about orangutans and palm oil.

-Another story shared might mean another changed mind.

♪♪ -There's the big changes like, you know I've helped to raise over $40,000 for orangutan conservation, animal rehabilitation and rainforest restoration.

♪♪ Over 10,000 trees have been planted in the Indonesian rainforest and, ♪♪ the numbers are there.

Over a million views on YouTube.

But even on small day to day changes, you know I see friends, family members, instead of using plastic toothbrushes, they'll switch to bamboo toothbrushes and palm oil free toothpaste or palm oil free alternatives to their food and seeing those everyday actions, even the ones that seem little, those are the ones that are gonna add up and really make a huge difference over time.

-A T-Rex?-- -Dad's in Portsmouth today, ready and willing to help with the cause.

-This is my role.

This is part of being the supportive, the supportive dad.

Making, making a bit of a fool of yourself, but it's fun.

The kids like it.

♪♪ -Did you grow up like this?

-I-- no who grows up like this?

[Timothy laughs] Some people do, but we just try to be ultra supportive of him.

We kind of said, if this is something you want to do, let's treat it almost like a sport.

What do you do with sports?

You practice.

You, you have your game days like today, so, [crowd chatters] we've just really dedicated a lot of time and effort into it, like you would any other hobby we would in life and, it's really awesome to be on something beyond what we thought was going to happen.

♪♪ -Which takes us back to London, where the story began.

♪♪ This award is one of many that sit in Jack's home.

He says they provide him with a sense of hope, ♪♪ that the recognition leads to solutions, from the rainforest to public schools throughout New Hampshire.

-I think it's so fun to see people get inspired and learn about these animals and it really can be so impactful.

Like, there was this, school I went to a couple weeks ago in Manchester, my hometown, and I spoke to them about, you know, local animals, orangutans.

And I told them about some ways they can help and one of the ways I said was recycling.

And these kids were so inspired, they realized, hey, we don't have a recycling program at our school.

So what they did was they reached out to the mayor of Manchester they said, hey, we don't have recycling at our school and the mayor was so impressed by these kids wanting to reach out and their initiative and he said, I'm actually going to sponsor your recycling program.

So now that school has recycling.

-He's just doing what he loves to do and following his passions and I wish that all kids would have that opportunity.

Because when we empower the youth, this is what can happen.

-You look awesome up there!

-No matter what Jack decides to do in his life, we know that he's gonna continue to inspire and educate others, so.

♪♪ I would say that's, that's what really makes us proud and all the other stuff is, is just extra.

-You know, it didn't start like this I didn't set out to become this animal activist who wins all these awards.

I was just a kid who loved orangutans and who loves making YouTube videos and writing and presenting.

The biggest thing is to just follow your passions, do what you love, and together we can make the world a better place.

♪♪ -Every year in New Hampshire, vehicles of every kind end up in our waterways.

As a result, a lot of pollutants contaminate our lakes and rivers where they rest.

There is, however, a salvage crew, who will work alongside the state's Department of Environmental Services to fix the problem.

♪♪ People bring their vehicles to New Hampshire's lakes, ponds and rivers year round.

♪♪ But what happens when the vehicle sinks out of sight?

♪♪ That's where a public private partnership between the state's Department of Environmental Services and specialized divers like Tim McDonald step in.

♪♪ [man chuckles] -We work year-round through the ice, in the winter, spring, summer, obviously summer is some of my favorites because it's a little bit warmer, but you're, you'll see us out on the lake in the middle of the winter, pulling things that fell through the ice out.

We'll recover anywhere from 30 to 40 boats this summer.

♪♪ A couple dozen cars, snowmobiles, even the occasional airplane.

Super cool recovery today.

♪♪ So a few weeks ago, Department of Environmental Services got a report from the Franklin Fire Department here in town about a 2014 Camaro that is now sitting at the bottom of the river, which, according to RSA 485 and 146-A is not allowed to be there, so we contacted the responsible party to get them to pull the car out and there's been a little bit of a delay in that.

So the state, has been put into a position to hire contractors, a diver and a, a tow company to try and pull it out of the river.

[tires crunching] ♪♪ -Morning!

-Good morning Tim!

♪♪ -A little known fact to a lot of people that the, DES is more than just a regulatory agency.

They're huge proponents for the wilderness.

It goes without saying that the lakes and ponds and rivers in New Hampshire, some of our greatest assets, and they're held in public domain, free for everybody to use.

We try to minimalize exposure to any petrochemicals or foreign body to the water, as much as we can.

♪♪ -The authority that we have, is delegated from the Clean Water Act so that is how Department of Environmental Services gets involved in this stuff.

So with petroleum, motor oil, gasoline, axle grease, that sort of thing in a vehicle, that getting into a water body can be damaging to benthic organisms on the bottom, it could be harmful to fish and also, harmful to people.

We use surface water as a drinking water source.

There are some surface water intakes down river of here that certain municipalities use as drinking water.

The good news is we haven't seen any petroleum sheen emanating from the vehicle so we don't have, like, a major environmental hazard going on.

There's just a requirement for that vehicle to be removed.

♪♪ -I mean, climate change is always a factor.

We're not seeing the cold that we did years ago.

I mean, it's funny, I think back to when I was a kid, I grew up in Mayor-- Center Harbor, Meredith area, and I'd go fishing with my father.

And I remember, you know, drilling holes in Meredith Bay ♪♪ and not having a long enough ice auger to get through all of the ice.

We'd have 1 or 2 extensions stacked.

We were talking 4-5ft of ice was very common.

And now a benchmark for Meredith Bay is, 12 to 18 inches and that's, you know, that's a really good winter.

But the other side of it, too, is we're seeing more recreational use of the waters.

You know, circa 20 years ago, it was an uncommon sight to see a truck in the middle of the lake.

Nowadays we're landing airplanes in the middle of Alton Bay all winter long.

It's great for those resources to be used, and I'm happy to see people enjoying them.

But as we are having warmer winters with less ice, you definitely want to know the ice you're on.

There's a lot of jobs you can go to every day that have challenges.

I don't know what I'm walking into on any given day.

The fun of my job is I get to show up with a trailer that's loaded with tools that most people would walk in and pick up and go, why in the world do you have three of these?

But it's a simple fact that we show up to a job, we survey what's going on, and then we work through it in steps to pull them out.

It's challenging and it's never the same.

What are we digging out?

A car.

♪♪ There is some water damage.

♪♪ It's a 91 Honda Accord, right?

I got it.

♪♪ Yeah.

We're gonna need a lot more cable than that.

♪♪ Look at that.

Saving the world right there.

You see the fish coming around, You know that the environment is ok.

Although the state is fronting the cost for the removal and the contractors involved, we just end up wrapping that into an invoice that gets sent to the responsible party.

And, you know, the vehicles impounded until that bill gets paid.

♪♪ Pirates always take booty.

Hundreds of years ago, New Hampshire's Great Bay estuary was loaded with eastern oysters.

Today, they're in trouble.

We rode along with folks from the Nature Conservancy and the University of New Hampshire to see how they are hard at work to rebuild the oysters habitat.

♪♪ It's a nice day to be out on the great Bay estuary.

We're in Durham with a crew from Boston University and the University of New Hampshire.

So I'm Wally Fulweiler, and I'm a professor at Boston University in the Department of Earth and Environment in the Department of Biology.

And for this project, we're working with the Nature Conservancy to understand how oysters help improve water quality.

Wally Fulweiler and and her colleagues are here to conduct a wellness check on an important resident.

So if you think about, if you think about it.

So obviously humans have impacted all coastal ecosystems globally.

But, oysters are the habitats that have been impacted the most.

So globally we've lost about 85% of our oyster reefs or natural oyster reefs.

So that's more than salt marshes or coral reefs.

Oyster reefs are the ones that have been impacted the most.

Oh, there it is.

So there used to be tons of acres of thriving oyster reefs all over the great Bay.

You know, there's this, anecdotal story that you used to, back in the day, be able to actually walk across the bay on top of the oyster reefs.

Brianna Group and Kelsey Meyer work for the Nature Conservancy.

They partnered with the university teams to address the rapid die off of eastern oysters.

I love oysters.

I grew up near the Chesapeake Bay.

So I already had a fond love for estuaries and for shellfish.

And I studied oysters for my master's degree out in California.

And so I was really excited to have the opportunity to continue to get to work with this animal that I just think is so incredible and so powerful.

As late as 1970, it's estimated there were a thousand acres of live oyster reef in great Bay That's the size of about a thousand football fields.

90% of those oysters are gone.

Because of overharvesting back in colonial times, diseases appearing with climate change, increased sedimentation into the bay.

You know, we've seen a huge decrease in our oyster reefs to the point where it's sometimes even hard to know how many oysters did we even actually have in great Bay?

Seven rivers flow into great Bay from surrounding communities.

Along the way, that water picks up harmful pollutants from farms, roads, and residential neighborhoods.

It's deposited here.

Oysters are, these ecosystem engineers that help improve water quality.

And so we're on a mission to quantify just how well they improve water quality.

Oysters serve a greater role than being an appetizer.

They filter water through their gills and consume many of the things that cause problems for life in our waterways, algae, metals, and nutrients are removed and then safely deposited.

Oysters are, they're like these little powerhouses.

They're amazing because one, I know there's the statistic that, like one adult oyster can filter somewhere between 30 to 50 gallons of water in a day.

When you think about that, that's an amazing capacity to clean the water.

And what they're doing is they're taking particles out of the water so they can make it more clear.

And when they transfer those particles, they can eat them, turn them into biomass and delicious food.

Or they can put them on the bottom to the sediments.

And that is like food for microbes and the microbes that we're particularly interested in do this natural filtration process called denitrification.

But see all the biofilm?

Were're talking about like what the oyster itself does.

So you can see it's like a super clean oyster, you can see all that, that brown, mossy type of stuff.

That's all biofilm.

Thier structure provides habitat for a whole wider array of different flora and fauna, all the way from from microbes up to juvenile fish.

So, interestingly, the process we're studying with the oysters is actually facilitated by microbes that live on their shell and in their tissues.

So the oyster is kind of a host for the creatures that do this process, called denitrification.

That is beautiful.

Oh, yeah.

Gorgeous.

So what does that mean?

Well, it's just as a nice, a perfectly sized core.

It has nice intact layers.

Even though it's sandy, you can still see them.

And it's even.

Which makes our lives easier just for measuring things And so what we want to do is come up with models that allow us to predict, where this is happening and how much nitrogen is being removed.

And there's a lot of reasons for that one for so we can better manage water quality, but the other is for people doing restoration or doing aquaculture.

They're providing an ecosystem benefit that needs to be quantified.

And if there's a possibility for something like a nitrogen trading credit program or something, then these, now we need these numbers to be able to do that.

All right.

Armed with knowledge about what's happening with oysters and their habitat, restoration efforts are underway.

So this is one of many deployments of shell that we're going to be doing.

We deploy huge, massive amounts of shell.

And then on top of that we add live oysters because you don't have a ton of those larger reproducing oysters in our great bay.

And so how we've done that is usually putting out spat on shell, which are it's actually it's really cute.

We get larvae from hatchery up in Maine, and then we settle it onto recycled oyster shells at the Jackson lab.

And those grow to maybe about that big about an inch in size before we put them out on the reef.

We started working with aquaculture in New Hampshire in 2019, and we purchased a lot of these, like massive oysters that were like about this big.

So these are like seven, eight, ten year old oysters that couldn't go to market.

And we were able to buy those from farmers and put them on restoration sites.

And those much bigger oysters, they're just reproducing faster.

There's more larvae going out into the system.

So these little red circles right here, and they almost have like a black dot on them.

An important piece of the restoration puzzle is volunteer work of local citizens.

It's really great how many people want to come out and help and contribute to our oyster restoration work.

My main focus is, our oyster conservationist volunteer program.

Volunteers have been busy since 2006.

They check on the health of oysters, collect data, and have raised more than 300,000 baby oysters in cages.

Some folks have the cages.

As long as they have water access, they'll kind of walk right out, into the water, which is really great.

So there's people all around in like Newcastle, Portsmouth, Dover, Newmarket, maybe even a couple Somersworth.

So they're kind of all around the Bay and all around the seacoast, which is really cool.

It's really important because all these shell and baby oysters contribute to all the restoration sites.

So without the volunteers, we definitely be missing a big piece of our oyster restoration work, so it's really great.

You know, that's kind of like a broken shell or something.

We may not see the oyster population climb back to what it was 200 years ago.

But there's evidence that it's heading in the right direction.

It really, gives me hope.

It really, you know, gives us a lot of great satisfaction that people really do care about the environment.

They want to see our waterways, our estuary, thrive.

They want to see our oysters come back, as long as we keep at it, we should be able to help our oyster reefs thrive.

I think I'm so amazed that if you look at an oyster, if they were to open this up, it looks like this blobby little bit of mucus right?

And yet out of that blobby little bit of mucus is this amazing organism that can do all of these things.

How does this filter 50 gallons of water a day?

But then they also make these pseudo feces, which they're filtering.

If they don't like it, they just turn it into a little mucus ball and put it off to the side.

Like, how does it do it?

That's amazing to me.

And I don't know.

So they do that and then they come together to build habitat and they make these reefs that are really important for a whole bunch of other organisms and fish and, and they grow a seagrasses and they stabilize the shoreline.

I mean, this little, this little organism is really magical for everything it can do.

Well, we come once again to that part of the show that I've always liked least, the time we have to say goodbye, but we do.

So I'll say goodbye.

I'm Willem Lange, thank you for watching Windows to the Wild.

Support for the production of Windows to the Wild is provided by the Alice J. Reen Charitable Trust.

The John D. McGonagle Foundation, the Bailey Charitable Foundation, Road Scholar, and viewers like you.

Thank you.

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♪♪