This past Saturday Kidder Environmental Advisory Council held its seventh annual spring workshop. The topics this year were "Birds of Prey" and "Making Maple."

The 9 a.m. session was presented by Susan Gallagher, chief naturalist at the Carbon County Environmental Education Center. She spent more than an hour on the topic of locally found birds of prey.Gallagher brought three live examples for the audience to see. There was a screech owl, a great horned owl and a red tailed hawk. Each of the birds on display was injured in some way and unable to be returned to the wild."It is always our plan to return injured animals to their natural habitat if possible. When the animal is healed, but unable to survive in the wild, we may keep them for educational purposes. We frankly have a lot of mouths to feed," said Gallagher, who also works as a wildlife rehabilitator, wildlife volunteer and groundwater guardian.The second session this year was all about making maple syrup. Slate Altenburg of the Penn State Master Gardeners brought along a PowerPoint presentation as well as examples of the materials needed to gather and make maple syrup.Altenburg provided those gathered with the knowledge they would need to identify the right trees, tap the tree, collect the sap and to turn it into maple syrup. Each person present got a sample of the syrup.Altenburg was assisted by Penn State Master Gardeners Jennifer Reduzzi of Penn Forest Township and Mike Cormier of Mahoning Township.