The Rogers book club will close out the first quarter with a trip to Beaversprite, an environmental conservation center dedicated to beavers, at 9 a.m. on March 30. (Photo from the Beaversprite Facebook page)

SHERBURNE — The Friends of Rogers Environmental Education Center has launched a new quarterly book club, which focuses on an environmental-themed book for three months at a time.

At the end of each month, the club will host a meeting to discuss the book, with the third month being a field trip to a location related to that quarter’s book.

For the first quarter, the book club will be reading “Eager: The Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter” by Ben Goldfarb.

“We’ll be learning about beavers and how they could potentially help areas in the era of climate change, [and] how people can learn to live with beavers,” said Rogers Environmental Educator Ellen Rathbone. “You still have a lot of people who are, ‘well, they flooded my property, I don’t like beavers, I want to get rid of them.’ So it’s like with all of our interactions with wildlife it’s a delicate balance between the animals, what it needs and wants, and the humans, what they need and want, and can they coexist?”

The first meeting will be held on Tuesday, January 30 at 7 p.m. and will cover the first five chapters of the book, and the second meeting will be held on February 27 at 7 p.m., and club members will be discussing chapters six through nine.

The meetings will be held in person at Rogers Environmental Education Center, located at 2721 State Route 80 in Sherburne. Club members can also attend virtually, and will receive a link to the meeting via email.

The third and final meeting for the first quarter will be a trip to Beaversprite, an environmental conservation center in Dolgeville once owned by “The Beaver Woman” Dorothy Burney Richards.

“She liked beavers, and she opened her house literally to beavers,” said Rathbone. “So she literally had beavers in her house and she was doing research with them.”

“So this was a place that helped because beavers in the mid-1900s, they had pretty much been extricated from New York State because of the fur trade, and now they were starting to come back. So she was a part of trying to figure out why beavers were important,” she added. “A lot of research has been done into beavers since then, and we realize how vital they are to ecosystems.”

Rathbone said Beaversprite was Richards’ home until she donated her home and 900-acre property to the Erdman Trust in 1966, who added to the property and opened a nature center in 1973. In 2019, the property was taken over by the Utica Zoo.

Rogers book club members will carpool to Beaversprite at 9 a.m. on Saturday, March 30.

During the second quarter of the year, the book club will be reading “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. In June, the quarter will wrap up with a trip to Onondaga Lake.

“The last section of ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ talks about the restoration work they've been doing on Onondaga Lake,” Rathbone explained. “I’ve been doing a lot of delving into this for the last week or so and they have done an amazing job with the restoration work up there.”

To join the club, contact Rathbone at 607-674-4733, or email ellen@friendsofrogers.org. Rathbone said she will need registrants’ name, phone number, and email address. Book club members are responsible for purchasing their own books.

For more information on the Friends of Rogers Environmental Education Center, visit FriendsofRogers.org or the Friends of Rogers Environmental Education Center, Inc. Facebook page.