Top Stories from NCPR

Royal Canadian Mounted Police are reporting hundreds of illegal crossings into Canada in recent months. Driven by the political climate in the US, refugees are choosing to cross illegally into Canada in hopes of an easier path to refugee status.Officials say Quebec has seen the highest influx of people seeking asylum.Many are walking across on snowy, remote areas in the North Country, in places like Roxham Road. It’s just north of Plattsburgh in the town of Champlain. It offers pretty easy access. It dead-ends at the border. There’s a heavily-used path, about 15 feet through the snow into Canada. [full story]

Birdwatchers across the globe will take part in the 20th annual Great Backyard Bird Count this weekend. The citizen science project helps biologists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology create an annual snapshot of the distribution and abundance of birds. Last year, more than 18 million birds were counted, which was the largest count of global bird populations ever recorded.Larry Master, an avid birder in Keene, says it’s been an exciting winter for bird watchers in the North Country - a Ross’s Gull had birders flocking to Tupper Lake last month, and to Massena to see Great Gray Owls this week.Master says the gull sighting was a first for many birders because it's rarely seen in the continental U.S. He says they usually spend winter along the pack ice in the Arctic Ocean. This winter there were two sightings: one in California and another in Tupper Lake. Master says the Adirondacks sighting was first reported by a homeowner during renovation work. [full story]

This has already been a deadly winter for snowmobile riders. At least ten sledders have died in Upstate New York and on Lake Champlain and there have been numerous other serious injuries. [full story]

Bird songs do more just decorate the air. Dr. Curt Stager talks with Martha Foley about Eurasian jays, who "spy" on each other's sounds for clues on where they might be able to raid a little food, and about the fairy wren that teaches chicks still in the egg a "family song," preventing imposters in the nest. [full story]

Liberal activists in the North Country are pushing back against the idea that they’ve harassed or threatened the staff of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. [full story]

Some upstate lawmakers are asking the state to step in and fund refugee resettlement programs that they said have been caught up in President Donald Trump’s travel ban and the resulting chaos.The federal government funds refugee resettlement centers in upstate New York cities. But under the rules, the money for staff is based on the number of refugees coming in. When Trump’s travel ban briefly froze the entry of refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries, the funding for the resettlement centers dried up, too. [full story]

It’s been a big week for U.S.-Canada relations. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau traveled to Washington to meet with Donald Trump and shore up Canada’s trade relationship with the U.S. It’s valued at nearly $2 billion a day. But it’s not just the money: It’s also jobs that flow back and forth across the border under the North American Free Trade Agreement. [full story]

Amidst the debate about immigration in the U.S., a recently-published report prepared by several research partners, including one from the University at Buffalo, challenges the claims the immigrant are driving the crime rate higher. Researchers gathered and studied federal records from a four-decade span. [full story]

Rep. Elise Stefanik faces growing pressure to schedule public meetings with constituents, but she fired back this week threatening to call police if protests get "out of hand."A nationwide protest movement applying pressure on lawmakers to resist President Donald Trump's agenda has reached central and northern New York. The coordinated campaigns are starting to target local members of congress by pressuring them to hold town hall meetings.Nationwide, the Republican lawmakers who are hosting these meetings are being grilled by their constituents. It's part of the Indivisible movement, an online guide helping activists model their protests after the success of the Tea Party movement that started in 2009.Rep. John Katko (R-Camillus) said "This is a movement nationwide where the whole design is to get you in front of a camera with several hundred angry people and not let you talk. I’m not going to do that."To avoid the so-called political theatrics, Katko and Rep. Stefanik (R-Willsboro) are sticking to telephone town halls. [full story]

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie is pushing for a measure to stop treating 16- and 17-year-olds as adults in the state’s criminal justice system. [full story]