By Philip Conkling
Photo by Peter Ralston
From our August 2023 issue

The deeply indented Maine coastline — sliced through by dozens of rivers large and small, bathed by vigorous tides that traverse a complex variety of bottom substrates — presents an astoundingly diverse set of habitats for our coastal and offshore fisheries. More than 52 commercial species of fish, shellfish, worms, and seaweed are harvested here, with boats fishing out of more than a hundred harbors along Maine’s 5,000 miles of saltwater frontage.

Today, they’re a proud and defining characteristic of the coast, but Maine’s fisheries haven’t always been the dominant coastal activity. Until the beginning of the 20th century, lumber exports were the primary drivers of coastal wealth, with wooden shipbuilding also lucrative. Valuable cargoes of lime, granite, and ice were shipped from dozens of Maine’s harbors, adding to the coast’s economic diversity.

Beginning in the 1920s, an efficient new method of trawling with large nets greatly increased catches of cod, haddock, pollock, and hake, continuing until these resources were essentially exhausted from overfishing, by the 1980s. But, providentially, just as groundfish fleets were decimated, Maine’s lobster catch began increasing substantially — both in volume and value. Over the course of the last four decades, lobstering has become the economic underpinning for coastal communities from Kittery to Eastport.

No one knows whether the rapidly warming waters of the Gulf of Maine will spell the end of this era, when the lobster fishery dominated the Maine coast, but we do know that warming waters have resulted in the fishery’s collapse throughout southern New England. Lobster harvests have also declined along the southern Maine coast, while the center of lobster distribution has moved farther north and east.

The ecological diversity of the Gulf of Maine suggests there will always be marine resources of one species or another, new ways for us to take advantage of the legendary productivity of these waters. But it’s also likely that, in the future, more businesses along Maine’s working waterfronts will look to the potential of other resources.

In addition to its lobsters, the Gulf of Maine is a world-class wind resource. Senator Angus King once called it the “Saudi Arabia of wind.” Offshore wind developers, however, have struggled with the myriad technical challenges of developing floating platforms for Maine’s deep waters. The industry, if we can even call it that, has faced the further challenge of attracting deep-pocketed partners to invest the hundreds of millions required to finance the initial stages of development. Perhaps most dauntingly, offshore-wind proponents have confronted an increasingly bitter opposition from lobster harvesters.

Part of the passionate opposition of lobstermen to offshore wind results from the locus of lobster harvesting shifting from inshore to offshore waters. Offshore lobstering requires bigger boats, bigger gear, and higher risks for more reward. The collision between these interests is perhaps unavoidable. But to me, it is also sad. There’s such potential for Maine’s multiple maritime traditions, its men and women wedded to the sea, to play valuable roles in developing the industries of the future. Whether or not Mainers can agree if it’s in our best interests to welcome new offshore industries, one thing we know is that, for good and for ill, the winds will continue to blow. 

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By Phillip Conkling
Photo by Peter Ralston
From our July 2023 issue

Maine benefited from New England’s first energy crisis, back in the 18th century, when the residents of Boston exhausted the supply of firewood that could be readily hauled into their city by wagon. Enterprising Maine islanders responded to this market opportunity by stacking up schooners with deck loads of timber, hauling it “up” to Boston to heat the homes of an expanding urban population.

But hauling timber for firewood was cumbersome, so small-scale entrepreneurs began cutting trees on remote hillsides, from southern Maine to western Massachusetts. They buried the timber in shallow pits and set it afire to produce charcoal, and this charcoal heated homes throughout the region for more than a half century.

Then, in the 1880s, coal began to replace charcoal. It came to Maine and New England after railroads linked the coalfields of Appalachia with Virginia’s Newport News seaport, making coal exports from the region economically feasible. Steamships burning coal transformed ocean transportation, driving even the fastest clipper ships into an early grave and idling shipyards that had employed tens of thousands throughout New England — especially along Maine’s coast, where generations of skilled laborers had built internationally renowned sailing vessels. Ironically, a few shipyards hung on because their specially designed “downeasters” — four-, five-, six-, and ultimately seven-masted coal schooners — were the cheapest way to transport the huge volumes of coal needed to fuel textile mills and other manufacturing enterprises across the country. Such ships were launched from Maine boatyards for almost 30 years, until even they, the last of the wooden sailing ships, became obsolete.

The region’s coal era ended after World War II, when New Englanders began heating their homes with oil. It was plentiful, cheap, and cleaner than coal. Detroit cranked out ever-larger cars and trucks, powered by ever-greater amounts of gas and oil, which an expanding middle class eagerly paid for. Auto traffic changed Maine, of course, and during the same period, we became the state most heavily dependent on oil for home heat. Still, it was probably the easiest energy transition our region has made. Relatively few people lost jobs during the switch from coal to oil — most coal dealers transitioned into oil dealers. But I wonder if it led many of us to expect that developing new energy sources would be similarly painless.

Now, along comes wind — in particular, the effort to bring “big wind” to the Gulf of Maine, with arrays proposed for 40 or more miles offshore, where the winds are highest and most sustained. After two privileged years occupying this Room With a View, I will be winding down my tenure next month, and my final column will consider what wind power may mean for the view from my room — and some of the trade-offs Mainers will need to weigh. In 2009, Maine set a goal of installing 5,000 megawatts of wind power in the Gulf of Maine by 2030. To date, not a single watt has been sited offshore. The governor has proposed a research array, with a dozen or so large floating turbines, anchored with long cables to the seabed. Having consulted on similar demonstration projects, I’ve had a chance to hear a range of reactions. It’s the kind of large-scale undertaking on which meeting the state’s emissions goals depends — and which plenty of Mainers oppose. If Maine’s energy history shows us anything, it is this: transitions are usually wrenching.

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Greg Westrich visited more waterfalls in Maine in 2019 than most of us are likely to see in a lifetime — some 50 of them just that summer, while researching his book Hiking Waterfalls Maine: A Guide to the State’s Best Waterfall Hikes (Falcon Guides, 2020, $24.95). A prolific author of Maine outdoors guides (including the invaluable Hiking Maine, now in its 4th edition, and a brand-new one, on the 100 Mile Wilderness), he was already familiar with plenty of the state’s cataracts, but he revisits trails often and took a meticulous approach to the book: its final tally, 67 waterfalls, leaves out some roadside falls and others that can’t be reached by trail, but Westrich says it’s a pretty comprehensive list of the state’s hikeable falls. “People kind of like to collect waterfalls,” he says — and he’s no different. We asked him a cascade of questions.

Is it even worth asking whether you have a fave?

I try to avoid the idea of favorites! When it comes to hiking, for example, the Maine hike I’ve done the most is up Borestone Mountain. I’ve probably hiked it 100 times, but it’s not “a” hike. There’s hiking it this day, hiking it that day, with this person, in this season, when it’s raining. Each hike is unique. That’s especially true for waterfalls, because every time you visit one, it’s going to be different. With the thin soil and granite bedrock in so much of Maine, water runs off, and then you don’t get much waterfall later in the season.

What’s the deal with old-time Mainers using “falls” to describe what’s basically just a stretch of whitewater?

You have to understand Maine jargon and how it’s different for different rivers. Roughly speaking, Maine is divided into two important watersheds, right? The Kennebec and the Penobscot. Each has a separate logging history, and it’s the loggers who named most of the falls. In the Penobscot watershed, a “falls” is a rapid. A “falls” you can run your bateau down. Whereas a “pitch” is an actual waterfall that you have to carry around, and most of the rivers around the watershed have a “Grand Pitch,” which is the big waterfall on that stretch of river. But the Kennebec watershed uses different nomenclature. I think it’s because so many loggers in the Kennebec watershed were French, but not so many in the Penobscot, and they developed different cultures and words.

The book, we noticed, doesn’t assign each falls a type or a category.

I use those identifying words — “horsetail,” “plunge,” and so on — in the descriptions, but I didn’t set out to classify each because most waterfalls don’t neatly fit into one category. For me, a lot of times, the rock is more telling and means more to me than how the water is falling. In the central highlands, for example, there are a lot of falls where the underlying rock is black slate. So you have waterfalls like Little Wilson Falls or Indian Falls, and the way that slate looks when it’s wet, with the water coming down it, makes those falls so different from, say, Tumbledown Dick Falls, which isn’t far away but goes over granite.

So you didn’t find all those falls kind of start blending together after number 25 or 30?

It’s weird, always working on a guide, because when I hike, instead of just being on the hike — which is important to me — I sometimes end up kind of writing it while I’m doing it: what I’m going to say, what’s important to mention, what wildflowers are out, what wildlife I see or see evidence of. With the waterfalls, I made the decision that I didn’t want to do what a lot of guides do and rate the waterfalls. First of all, depending on when you go, it’s going to be different. But also, maybe you like a waterfall that’s more of a ribbon, as opposed to a big surge of water — how do you rate that? It’s not fair to judge it that way. And deciding that helped me to just kind of be at each waterfall, as much as possible.

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As far as I know, the island I’m choosing to call Lyons Island does not, in fact, have a name. Among the people who, most recently, had some standing to give it one are those buried in a small cemetery on the mainland nearby, who have lent their surname to Lyons Road, a ribbon of gravel that winds up Huckins Neck, in the northwest corner of Lubec. The neck is the middle tine of a lopsided trident that juts into Straight Bay, an inner Cobscook Bay estuary. One morning last fall, I parked my car at the tip of it and followed a short trail to what the property’s current owners call Lyons Point. It was just after dawn, and as gulls cackled over the rumble of a distant engine, I peered out at a foggy panorama of spruce-topped islets scattered across the bay. Then, I slid on my gaiters, squelched across 100 feet of grassy mudflat, and clambered onto one of them.

Lyons Island is what Maine’s Coastal Island Registry refers to as a barred island — otherwise known as a tidal island or a “sometimes island,” linked to the mainland when the tide is out and surrounded by water when it’s in. The state registry notes 23 such islands among its 3,250 entries, although that list is not exhaustive. Among Maine’s best-known is Bar Island, off MDI, which is linked to Bar Harbor at low tide by an eponymous sandbar — and upon which hapless hikers lousy at timekeeping occasionally find themselves stranded.

Tidal islands aren’t rare, per se, but they’re largely limited to pockets of the globe with big tidal ranges and morphologically complex shorelines: that Maine is rich with islands one can sometimes walk to puts it in fairly exclusive company. Across the pond, Great Britain claims 43 of them, some of which draw tourists for their breathtaking castles, abbeys, and monasteries. Around the world, tidal islands often host sites of religious pilgrimage, like Mumbai’s Haji Ali Dargah or the Shrine of St. Thérèse, in Juneau, Alaska. The U.K.’s most famous tidal island, Lindisfarne, was the cradle of Celtic Christianity in the 6th century, the monks drawn to its balance of accessibility and “otherworldly spiritual refinement,” as one scholar writes, its sense of being “mutable and ambiguous, sometimes linked to the mainland and sometimes isolated, negotiating a hybrid identity of connection and retreat.”

I’m no monk, but I’ve been known to negotiate my own little hybrid identity of connection and retreat. Which is why, feeling retreat-y last October, I asked the folks from the Lubec foundation Cobscook Shores for permission to spend half a tidal cycle hanging out on little Lyons Island — walking on at low tide, watching it transform into an island, then walking off again 10 or so hours later, after it transformed back. Cobscook Shores manages the island as part of a day-use preserve called Island Coves, the only site in its network of incredible small parks, scattered around Cobscook Bay, that requires prearranged visitation.

The first thing I did on Lyons Island was lay out my sleeping bag on some spongy earth next to a big downed spruce and take a nap. After that, I made some instant coffee and had a look around. It took 140 paces to walk across the island at its widest point. On the side facing the bay, muddy cliffs plunged 10 to 20 feet onto a stretch of rockweed-covered flats (a seaward-facing sign, warning against harvesting it, was the only indicator of human presence). Slick granite ledges ringed the rest of the island, which was otherwise covered none-too-thickly in spruces, firs, and yellow birches, along with one small stand of cedar and a single majestic maple, near the island’s center. Around it, for 10 feet in every direction, the leaf litter was crimson against the rest of the island’s green — an island within an island.

→ IF YOU GO

The parklands of Cobscook Shores are open May through October. The mainland portion of Island Coves, at the end of Lyons Road, has hiking paths, a restroom, and a screened picnic pavilion. Arrange a visit online (and consult a tidal chart before you do).

Around 11:30, I settled with my lunch on a big flat rock facing the mainland, ready for the show. When the tide came in, it came fast. Three bites into my PB&J, I still could have gotten up and walked ashore. By the time I was licking the jam off my fingers, only a cordon of mud linked the island to the mainland, twin curtains of gray water lapping at it from either side, like a zipper slowly closing. By noon, I could have waded across. By 12:10, I could have paddled a kayak. By 12:20, I don’t think I could have touched bottom.

On the back end of the island, the water had swallowed up the mudflats, so the cliffs dropped straight into the bay. With the fog burned off, the water glistened to the horizon, interrupted by a messy geometry of islands, outcrops, and peninsulas. Later, when I asked Charlie Howe, Cobscook Shores parks director, why that particular parcel seemed like park material, he extolled “the views from out there, the intricacy of the shoreline, this landscape that’s a mix of water and rock and that changes totally in the span of six hours.”

With an island to myself and no agenda, I read magazines, skipped stones, admired a bald eagle and some early-arriving eiders through my binoculars, and poked for a bit at a berry-filled pile of racoon poop beneath the maple. The solitude was delicious. The peninsula that Ezra and Philena Lyons homesteaded more than a century ago was later subdivided for residential lots, but few were ever built (the island is easy to explore because its understory was cleared, prepping it for sale as a homesite). In the 2010s, the foundation behind Cobscook Shores cobbled together four lots to form Island Coves, but the deeds prohibit commercial use. That’s why, in order to visit, a would-be island-walker must first email and ask. “Having it invitation-only is so the use is of a frequency typical of residential lots,” Howe later told me. “So it’s part of the magic of Island Coves that you’re out there kind of by yourself.”

That evening, when the tide had receded and I walked off the island, part of the magic was also the astounding slanted light, tinging islands, coves, and sky a perfect golden. I paid my respects at the Lyons family cemetery, near the park entrance, then wandered along the shore, admiring the island from different angles, until the sun had set and I’d had my fill of otherworldly spiritual refinement.

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When rain falls across the middle of Maine, it slides into rocky brooks that flow into narrow creeks that meet in the Penobscot River, which eventually spills into Maine’s largest bay. Penobscot Bay is dotted with more than 200 islands, the largest of which — like Isle au Haut and the Fox Islands of Vinalhaven and North Haven — host year-round communities and welcome boatloads of summer people. 

But among the islands that are largely off the public radar is a 700-acre pancake of land nestled in the bay’s northwest corner, a stone’s throw south of Islesboro. Arctic terns and seagulls glide over neon-yellow lobster buoys that float off its shores. Sage-green lichen and spongy mosses blanket an understory of spruce and pine, where chipmunks collect their winter cache. On its surface, the island is much like vegetated piles of rock all across the Gulf of Maine. When famed Life magazine illustrator Charles Dana Gibson bought a piece of it as a summer getaway, in 1903, he was likely enticed by the classic Maine views and the access to woods, waters, and solitude. 

But he couldn’t have known that, beneath its surface, this island was unlike most any other island in Maine, with a history that transcends those woods and waters, arcing back to an era when no animals could have scurried along its shores and no plants could have sprouted there. 

Some of the tectonic activity that shaped the rocks on 700 Acre Island may have taken place during the Silurian period, roughly 444 to 419 million years ago, when what is now Maine was south of the equator and plants and animals were just beginning to live on land.

Only in the past few years have researchers confirmed that 700 Acre Island, along with a few of its neighbors, is composed of Maine’s very oldest rocks. The fieldstone with which the Gibson family built walls and walkways formed more than a billion years ago, when life consisted mostly of microbial goo. The rest of Maine’s bedrock formed much more recently, with most of it dating less than 500 million years old — still plenty ancient, but from an era when the planet was more recognizable as the place we inhabit today. 

I learned of the existence of this rare patch of rock while sifting through some of the last 50 years’ worth of geologic maps of Maine, illustrations that look a bit like paint-by-number prints, with colors assigned to different rock types and ages. It’s been more than a decade since I was a geology undergrad at Bates College, and although I’ve never pursued a career in science, I’ve maintained an interest in rocks and the stories stuck within them. I find they offer a salve to the frenetic nature of the present. They can tell us, with a plain sort of wisdom, where we came from eons ago and where we might be going eons from now. 

Which is why, last summer, photographer Jacob Hessler and I sought permission to visit 700 Acre Island from the extended family of Charles Dana Gibson’s heirs, who still make up the majority of its small seasonal population. With their blessing, we set out from Camden Harbor on a cool September afternoon, timing our trip with low tide to maximize rock exposure. 

Off the northeast tip of the island, Hessler secured his lobsterboat to a mooring, and we unloaded two sea kayaks to paddle to shore. We aimed for Spruce Island, geologically indistinct from 700 Acre Island, although it’s separated from it at high tide. We pulled onto a pebbly beach, and to my deep satisfaction, found a patch of seaweed-free bedrock just a few dozen feet away. Once I hobbled my way across the intervening sliminess to the clean, dry outcrop, I hunched over it and noticed long, parallel grooves, the depth of a fingernail, etched lengthwise across the mottled black-and-tan stone: glacial striations, evidence of a mile-thick ice sheet that had clawed over this land during the last ice age.

I looked closer. Within those striations, which formed maybe 20,000 years ago, I saw much older sand grains, all glommed together with a weathered, waxy sheen. The grains looked as if they had melted together, like a pointillist painting stared at too long. I glanced around and realized the entire rock was made up of these same types of grains. Some of the geologic maps that had led me to the island had suggested these now-metamorphosed sediments had once accumulated on an ancient beach. That beach eventually became buried, deep enough in the Earth to solidify into sedimentary rock, which later, through a series of continental collisions and other tectonic events, got pushed far into the mantle, where heat and pressure turned it into what’s called metasedimentary rock. 

I pressed my finger to a few gray and beige particles and was transported back in deep time, to that original beach where those grains had first rolled around. I imagined the sloshing of a shoreline that, though it was inconceivably ancient, would have had qualities we’d recognize. Tides would have ebbed and flowed. Clouds would have floated above the waves and cast shadows on the land, just as they did that afternoon over the Gulf of Maine. 

The geology of the region was first mapped in the early 1900s and has since been remapped a handful of times.

After securing our boats on the beach, we kept walking the island’s perimeter and found more variations of rock — coarse and lustrous outcrops of gneiss, schist, quartzite, marble, and more. They all had a similar monotone color that, to the untrained eye, probably wouldn’t muster up much excitement. But knowing a bit of their narrative, that they’d formed alongside an ancient sea that existed before eyeballs, brains, or trees, was enough to give me goose bumps.

I ventured toward the edge of the woods and noticed a tiny, yellow-and-black monarch caterpillar, chewing on dried-up milkweed. Nearby, on the beach, I found a seal carcass draped over driftwood, its skin falling off its bones, its musky stench wafting over to where I stood. Beneath my feet I noticed a shell midden. It was left, I assumed, by the Penobscot people who frequented these islands for millennia before white settlers forced them away from this part of their ancestral homeland. I sat on the rocks just beyond the midden for some time, considering the layers and timescales of change that lay beneath me and the privilege of being able to sit there and have those thoughts. 

A few weeks after our trip to the island, I reached out to Doug Reusch, a geology professor at the University of Maine Farmington, who’s been working with several colleagues in recent years to better understand the rocks of the 700 Acre Island Formation and map them in closer detail. Based on data collected in the 1970s, they’d had a hunch these were probably the oldest rocks in Maine, dating at least as far back as 543 million years, to the era known as the Precambrian. But that number had come from lab instruments that have since improved. In 2014, Reusch and a colleague collected new material to date, targeting rocks that contained zircons, tiny glassy minerals with traces of radioactive uranium. Since uranium decays into lead at a known rate, they were able to back-calculate the age of the zircon, based on its ratio of uranium to lead. When they processed their samples, they were surprised to discover that some assemblages of rock off Islesboro dated as far back as 1.8 billion years. That would make them not only Maine’s oldest rocks, but potentially New England’s oldest. “We couldn’t believe it,” Reusch told me.   

That 1.8 billion years reflects the age of the parent material, some sort of igneous rock, like granite, that would have eventually eroded to form the sand that formed the beach that formed the rocks that Hessler and I visited. The age of the beach? Younger, but probably not less than a billion years.

Before those beach grains solidified into a mass of stone, Reusch suspects they tumbled around on wide, flat beaches similar to those you’d find in the Bahamas today. Quartzites, as these metamorphosed sandstones are called, of a similar age as 700 Acre’s crop up on the other side of the Atlantic, along the coast of Morocco, and there’s a possibility they were once connected on a single landmass. Geologic reconstructions suggest that, some 400 million years ago, Africa’s west coast got glommed onto North America’s east coast when a now-extinct ocean, called Iapetus, closed. That closure would eventually lead to the formation of Pangea, the planet’s most recent supercontinent, which existed until roughly 200 million years ago. 

Henry Berry, senior geologist at the Maine Geological Survey, has been mapping Maine’s geology since the 1990s and says he’s never found anything quite like this sliver of stone in Penobscot Bay. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the specifics of how it formed and what happened to it thereafter, Berry told me, but what we do know goes something like this: Once upon a time, there was a continent somewhere on Earth. We don’t know where or how big or what other rocks on the Earth’s present surface were attached to it, but we have a small fragment of it represented by the 700 Acre Island Formation. We know that the rocks formed on a continent rather than in the deep sea because they contain features of environments that we find on continents today, things like coarse sand grains and remnants of land-based volcanoes. Rocks formed in the deep sea, on the other hand, contain finer silts and clays.

Whatever and wherever this continent was, it eventually got pushed or dragged inside the Earth, as deep as 10 miles, during some sort of major tectonic event (the timing is up for debate). After melting and metamorphosing within the heat and pressure of the planet’s innards, the rocks slowly creaked back up to the surface, thanks to millennia of erosion and uplift. That’s about as much as we can know, Berry said, although Reusch and a few other colleagues are heading back to the island later this year to map it in even closer detail and look for more material to date to help fill out the story.

University of Maine Farmington geology professor Doug Reusch and his colleagues will continue to fine-tune existing maps with the field work they will conduct this year.

The geologic maps that Berry and the Maine Geological Survey create are a public resource for a variety of purposes: groundwater assessments, engineering and construction, mineral exploration, and more. But when I asked him to explain his personal take on the value of learning this sort of deep geologic history, Berry paused before responding. “There’s a connectedness that these rocks are bringing to us about time and space and places that we will not experience, except through this understanding that we have constructed,” he said. “We can know what was happening one afternoon here, at that moment in time, as this layer was being deposited.”

Taury Smith, a consulting geologist who lives on Islesboro, feels similarly drawn to the rocks of the 700 Acre Island Formation, and he has made it his mission to help map them in finer detail than they have been in the past. He spends much of his free time perusing the shores of the islands and has teamed up with Reusch and others to fill in details that older maps gloss over. It’s rare to find a place with such interesting geology that hasn’t been scrutinized in close detail, he said, and he’s thrilled to help tackle that work. “It has really lit me up and captured my imagination and got me all excited,” he said. “Like a little kid.” 

When I made my way back to the kayak that afternoon last year, the tide was still low, and my feet left impressions in the wet sand. I imagined some unknown future being discovering those prints, many millennia from now, and I felt a closeness to them, imagined how they might marvel at that mark left one afternoon in the 2020s. Then I nudged the boat off the shore, paddling into the wind and the rest of the day ahead. 

This story has been edited from its print version to reflect that the majority, not entirety, of owners on 700 Acre Island have a connection to Charles Dana Gibson’s heirs.

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Atlantic and shortnose sturgeon outlived the dinosaurs, surviving in the waters of what would become Maine, where their progeny were a critical food source for the Wabanaki. The fish’s significance is evident in Maine place names like Passagassawakeag — a Passamaquoddy-Maliseet word for “the place for spearing sturgeon by torchlight” — and Cobbosseecontee, an Abenaki reference to “many sturgeon.” But European colonists and their descendants overfished and obstructed habitat with dams. Commercial landings peaked in the mid-19th century, followed by a population crash — although sporadic fishing continued into the late 20th century. 

More recently, however, Maine’s sturgeon population has rebounded, owing largely to three factors. For starters, fishing closures on the Kennebec and Androscoggin rivers in the early ’80s — and later, a statewide ban on harvesting sturgeon — reduced fishing pressure. Because female Atlantic sturgeon take more than 15 years to reach sexual maturity, then breed just once every four years, rebuilding a breeding population has taken decades. Secondly, dam removals have allowed sturgeon to return to their historical ranges upriver. Finally, water quality has improved since passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act, championed by Maine senator Ed Muskie. And pollution reduction has brought people back to Maine’s rivers, contributing to an increase in sturgeon sightings.

Sturgeon look the part of prehistoric creatures, with bony scales, called scutes, armoring the top of their bodies. As long as they’ve been with us, though, there’s a lot we don’t know about Maine’s sturgeon — for instance, exactly why the bottom-feeding fish is prone to leaping several feet out of the water. Tagging projects by the Department of Marine Resources and the University of Maine have shed light on some mysteries, such as where each species overwinters (both move between fresh and salt water). Such research could help reduce the incidental bycatch of sturgeon in other fisheries. 

Shortnose sturgeon can grow to more than four feet long and Atlantic sturgeon up to 14 feet. It’s illegal to catch them in Maine and unwise to eat them anyway — given their taste for sediment-dwelling mussels and their long lives, they contain high levels of toxins, including forever chemicals. However, if you buy dinner, they’ll often put on a show. 

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On a hazy blue day last September, in the woods above the gently sloping beach of Bean Island, Christina Hassett knelt on what had been, until that morning, the roof of a dilapidated cabin. Clutching a power saw, her long hair tied back in a braid, the regional stewardship manager for the Maine Island Trail Association set about slicing the roof to pieces. Nearby, volunteers swung sledgehammers at collapsed wooden walls and carried the fragments down below the high-tide line to burn. 

Before it hosted a beautiful oak forest with a grassy understory, 27-acre Bean Island — at the entrance to Sullivan Harbor, in Frenchman Bay — was used in the early 1900s for grazing sheep. These days, it’s owned by the Frenchman Bay Conservancy and one of some 200 coastal islands stewarded for recreational use by the nonprofit Maine Island Trail Association. The demolition of the old cabin, a shepherd’s quarters long since fallen into disrepair, was an example of MITA’s hand-in-hand approach to its work with landowners. In this case, the conservancy provided the island; MITA brought the boats, tools, and know-how; and volunteers from both organizations showed up to help. 

Hard at work on Bean Island with MITA steward Christina Hassett .

Crumbling cabins, sagging fish houses, and other tired old structures aren’t uncommon on Maine’s islands. The decision to remove one from an island with public access typically happens for one of two reasons, Hassett says. Sometimes, a structure’s condition simply poses a danger to visitors. Other times, the language of an easement or a land trust’s mission may stipulate that an island be conserved in a “natural state.”

In the case of Bean Island, the cabin had become a target for vandalism and posed safety concerns. The conservancy, which has protected some 10,000 acres on the mainland, acquired the island in 2016. Its partnership with MITA began last summer, after conservancy leaders approached the Portland-based org about adding Bean Island to the 35-year-old recreational water trail. MITA itself doesn’t own any land. Rather, the organization supports land trusts, other private landowners, and the state in caring for Maine’s islands: stewards like Hassett, together with volunteers, maintain campsites and trails, keep islands free of trash and debris, and more. MITA also publishes an annual how-to-visit guide to the islands it tends, available only to members. A small organization, the Frenchman Bay Conservancy welcomed the help maintaining and monitoring their new property, says director Kat Deely. “MITA already has that great network, and putting Bean Island in their guidebook gave it greater exposure,” she says. “It was a perfect partnership.”

Hassett took up with MITA in 2009, after she and her sister answered an ad calling for paid island caretakers in Casco Bay. Fresh out of college, the two didn’t have much maintenance experience, but they’d grown up on Yarmouth’s Cousins Island, knew their way around boats, and shared a sense of adventure. As caretakers, they camped out on Jewell Island every summer weekend, clearing trails, maintaining campsites, and managing visitation. That winter, Hassett enrolled in an apprentice program at The Carpenter’s Boat Shop, in Bristol, which gave her a solid foundation with woodworking and power tools. She spent five more summers caretaking for MITA, on Little Chebeague, and eventually joined the organization’s stewardship team. These days, she tends to MITA sites between Mount Desert Island and Cobscook Bay, and she’s as capable fixing boats, building tent platforms, clearing trails with a chainsaw, and hauling out old fishing gear as she is demolishing buildings.

The method of removing a structure like the one on Bean Island often depends on how much material can be repurposed. In the case of the old shepherd’s cabin, most of the building was beyond salvage. So Hassett and the work crew first ripped the siding away, to reduce the shear strength. They loaded the asphalt shingles, which can’t be burned, into a couple of Lund aluminum skiffs, nine of which comprise MITA’s fleet, for the mile-long crossing to Sorrento. With the help of a sturdy tree and a come-along winch, they pulled the building down by its rafters. Once it was on the ground, the crew cut it into manageable pieces, which fueled a bonfire on the beach. After the ocean claimed the final embers, the last step was to collect any remaining metal with a giant magnet. “It was a big-push effort,” says Deely, who helped plan the project. “All that was left was two five-gallon buckets with all the nails.” 

For Hassett, the removal of a place like the shepherd’s cabin is bittersweet. On the one hand, she knows what kind of work goes into building on an island, and she feels that striving for a “pristine” look can do a disservice to the interconnected history of humans and places (“The reality,” she says, “is that humans — especially indigenous folks — have been out here using the islands for hundreds of years, evolving with these places”). On the other hand, she knows when a structure is beyond revival and believes it’s up to her, and those who love Maine’s islands, to help keep the human footprint light. “One of [MITA’s] big principles is that there’s this reciprocal relationship with the island,” she says. “You go out and leave it better than you found it.”

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Great Duck Island is a notoriously tough place to land a boat. There’s no dock, just a steep, slippery ramp on the island’s exposed south side, which can only be approached in a Zodiac on a day when seas are under four feet. But one afternoon late last September, a pair of students from Bar Harbor’s College of the Atlantic finessed the landing and hauled hundreds of pounds of boat and passengers partway up the ramp — saving us not only from slipping but also from the dreaded “ass slapper,” a ledge where breaking waves tend to soak one’s derriere. 

Time was short on this trip to Great Duck, 10 miles south of Mount Desert. The goal was to button up the college’s field station for the winter and have one last quick look for some of the world’s most mysterious seabirds — not ducks, despite the island’s name, but Leach’s storm-petrels, diminutive and dusky cousins of the albatross. 

Few people have ever seen these starling-size seabirds, which have gunmetal plumage, white rumps, and hooked black bills topped with odd tubular nostrils. They live far out to sea and come ashore only to breed on remote northern islands, where they nest in shallow underground burrows that can wind and twist for up to six feet, excavated by the males in spruce forests and meadows. Parents travel to and from their burrows only at night, filling the air with eerie chuckles that sound like goblins doing helium.

Making storm-petrels stranger still: their distinctive aroma, which has been described as pleasantly musty. It’s a result of the oily plankton soup that adults make in their stomachs to feed chicks, combined with the musk of their nurseries’ earthen interiors. “Like rich, sun-warmed soil,” says COA senior Eleanor Gnam, who has studied petrels on Great Duck for the last two summers. “Or like very old library stacks.”

Great Duck Island hosts the eastern U.S.’s largest known breeding colony of Leach’s storm-petrels, but you’d never know it to explore the narrow, mile-long island. As Gnam and I walked a rutted track last September, there wasn’t a bird in sight besides a few gulls loafing on the ledges. But she assured me we might well be surrounded by storm-petrel chicks. During the fledgling season, hundreds if not thousands of them hunker in hidden burrows that riddle the spruce forest and meadows. I very much wanted Gnam to find one, in part for a peculiar and selfish reason: I’m an avid birder with a quirky bucket list. Not only did I want to see a petrel, I wanted to smell one too.

Gnam paused at a fist-size hole beside a thick, mossy spruce root. She lay belly-down and reached in to “grub” for a chick. Her arm disappeared up to her shoulder. No luck. She tried again at several more burrows, but the chicks had already fledged. Just as I was beginning to doubt whether we’d find one, Gnam patiently reached into yet another hole, beside a patch of ferns. Shifting to lie on her side, she reached deeper still, her cheek pressed to the forest floor. And then: “Oh!”

“It’s okay, buddy,” she murmured, and, ever so gently, she extracted a fuzzy gray powder puff the size of a baseball. The chick nestled in her cupped hands, its eyes hidden under a mop of down. She examined the young bird’s long wings. “Look at you,” she said. “You’re almost ready to fly.”

Gnam has grown fond of these enigmatic birds, whose underground domestic lives and nocturnal lifestyle make them notoriously difficult to study — censusing Leach’s storm-petrels has been called “counting the invisible.” For her COA senior thesis, she’s trying to discern how different methods of counting storm-petrels on Great Duck have led to wildly different population estimates, ranging from 800 to 27,000 pairs, over the past 50 years. Her findings will contribute to recommendations for consistent methods to estimate populations, which will help researchers gauge the health of colonies. 

Getting an accurate tally is becoming increasingly urgent. Petrels — along with other birds of their order, Procellariiformes, known as tubenoses —are among the world’s most imperiled birds. Researchers at some of the world’s largest breeding colonies, in Newfoundland and Labrador, report worrying declines in the number of Leach’s storm-petrels. Surveys by researchers at these colonies, some of which number in the millions, have reported population drops ranging from 42 to 61 percent. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the species as vulnerable, Canada’s wildlife agency classifies the petrels as threatened, and Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife lists them as a “species of special concern.” 

It’s hard to pinpoint what’s causing the declines, but the birds face numerous threats, including loss of breeding habitat to development and changes in forest cover, rising ocean temperatures that affect distribution of prey like zooplankton and small fish, and predators such as gulls, crows, otters, and mink. Light pollution from offshore drilling can disorient storm-petrels, inhibiting migration, and like many other seabirds, they sometimes mistake flecks of floating plastic for plankton and feed it to their chicks.

Top left: Landing on Great Duck. Bottom right: College of the Atlantic undergrad researcher Eleanor Gnam.

Gnam handed the chick to me. The small bird felt impossibly light, a quivering warmth in my hands. I admired the tiny, black, tube-nosed bill, the dark, intelligent eyes. Then, I brought my nose low and breathed in the chick’s odor: old books, mingled earth and ocean.

Petrels nesting on Great Duck have contended with human neighbors since at least the 1830s. As on many other Maine islands, farmers brought sheep, whose grazing denuded habitat. Settlers’ dogs and cats took a toll on both birds and their eggs. Snowshoe hares, introduced by lighthouse keepers in the mid-20th century for food, eat tree seedlings, inhibiting the forest cover that birds prefer for nesting. 

Today, Great Duck’s major landowners are the Nature Conservancy and the state, which bought up most of the island in the 1980s to establish a seabird refuge. But it’s as much a classroom as a sanctuary: the former Great Duck Island Light Station is now COA’s Alice Eno Field Research Station, and students are permitted from April through October, when the island is otherwise closed to the public. Working with ecology professor and field station director John Anderson, they study nesting seabirds that include black guillemots, eiders, herring and black-backed gulls, and Leach’s storm-petrels. Gnam, a Wisconsin native, was hooked on Great Duck from her first visit. “I think islands and seabirds — extreme places and animals of extremes — inspire humility and curiosity,” she told me. 

Last summer, Gnam and a research assistant clambered over blowdowns and combed swaths of the forest floor to complete the most comprehensive survey to date of the island’s Leach’s storm-petrel colony. Covering a larger portion of the island than previous surveys, they sampled plots to find petrels’ well-hidden burrows. To estimate how many were in use, they applied an occupancy formula determined during a previous study, in 2021, when Gnam and others monitored burrows with game cams and set up “stick tests” — lattices of twigs and popsicle sticks placed over burrow entrances, which birds must remove to enter.

Researchers with more limited time have used the quicker method of counting along transects, tallying burrows while walking predetermined parallel lines. Whatever the survey method, researchers then extrapolate from their sample counts to estimate the number of occupied burrows on the entire island. Based on her data, Gnam puts the island’s Leach’s storm-petrel population somewhere between 6,500 and 10,000 pairs — far fewer than two recent counts by COA students and another by National Audubon Society researchers, all of which used transect surveys. This doesn’t necessarily mean the island’s petrel colony is shrinking, Gnam points out —determining that will require applying the same survey methods across enough years to see trends. 

The sun was sinking behind the spruce woods as we returned to the boat for the 90-minute ride back to Mount Desert. I handed the petrel chick back to Gnam, who set it on the ground. She gave it a gentle nudge, and we watched it totter back into the darkness of its burrow.

Left: Alice Eno Field Research Station director and professor John Anderson has been studying petrels and other seabirds on Great Duck for some 30 years. Right: Grubbing for petrel chicks.

Some night not long after, the young petrel’s parents stopped feeding it and set out for their equatorial wintering grounds, off the coast of South America or Africa. The chick crawled out of its burrow to leave this small island, flying out over the trackless ocean, a place it had never seen. It used its extraordinary sense of smell to find patches of plankton far offshore. Hovering over the waves, it pattered the surface with its black webbed feet to stir up plankton, appearing to walk on water — the reason for which it was named after the Biblical Apostle Peter. With luck, in five years or so, that bird will find a mate and a safe island for nesting. The pair will take turns incubating their single egg for 40 days and feeding their chick for another 70. With more luck, they will live 30 years or so, returning to the same island every year to continue the story of their kind. 

Back on the boat, I watched Great Duck grow smaller. From a distance, such little islands might appear unremarkable, but one never knows the secrets and strange wonders they harbor. As I raised my binoculars to watch the island fading into the distance, on my hands I caught the faintest whiff of musty old hardcovers. 

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By Phillip Conkling
Photo by Peter Ralston
From our May 2023 issue

We say that April showers bring May flowers, but there is also a coda: in nature, not all flowers are created equal. Such has been the mantra of Doug Tallamy, an author and professor of ecology at the University of Delaware. I saw Tallamy speak three years ago, at the Martinsville Grange, in St. George. He grew up loving both flowers and the insect life around him, and as a professional ecologist, he understands better than most that you cannot have one without the other: flowers depend on insects for things like pollination, while insects depend on flowers for food.

As a young scientist, Tallamy loved to plant gaudy, colorful gardens, until he began to realize that those showy nonnative plants didn’t support the showy butterflies he also loved seeing. Nor did he see as many moths — or even crawly caterpillars. He made the connection between native plants and insect abundance and diversity. And he writes today that a land without insects is a land without most forms of higher life.

So beginning in his own backyard, Tallamy eliminated alien species in favor of native ones and noticed slow but steady increases in the bees and butterflies that depend on them. With careful tending of his native trees, shrubs, and garden plantings, he saw an increase in the number of birds that depend on the proliferation of juicy moth and butterfly caterpillars. From Tallamy’s startling recognition came an even more radical idea, that the only viable strategy to increase biodiversity across large swaths of America is to restore native plants everywhere, one backyard at a time. 

My wife is a talented gardener, and I am a forester. We have been working, with mixed results, to implement Tallamy’s insights on a parcel on the mainland and another on an island. We have always been ruthless in eliminating introduced bittersweet and the tenacious introduced barberry bushes that love old fields. Surrounding one granite outcrop, we have replaced a ring of nonnative daylilies, originally planted by a beloved ancestor, with a border of stunning blue-flag irises. In our mainland flower garden, my wife — a native, unlike me — has always planted native flowers, including hydrangeas, asters, delphiniums, Solomon’s seal, and cosmos. Last summer, we were stunned to watch a great hummingbird hawk-moth use its long, straw-like feeding tube to suck nectar out of white phlox in the garden. But we also love our nonnative globe thistles and English lavender. They may be introduced from Europe, my wife points out, but they are also beloved by our native bumblebees and honeybees. 

Tallamy is also a great lover of oaks, and here we encounter another dilemma. He describes the spectacular abundance of caterpillars that oaks support, pointing out that birds also love oaks, for providing them with handy packets of protein- and fat-rich caterpillars, especially when voracious nestlings need to be fed. However, our oaks are the favored overwintering site for the pestiferous nests of brown-tail moths. When those caterpillars hatch, their nasty spiky hairs cause serious skin rashes on my favorite gardener. So we have been forced to turn a dozen of our oaks into winter firewood. We have, however, kept one old, hollow giant, which provides roosting spots for the owls we occasionally hear. 

In our garden and woods, not all natives are equally beloved, and not all nonnatives are unwelcome aliens. Among Maine trees and garden plants, as among its two-legged mammals, we can only hope to strike a careful balance.

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Last year was a good one for alewives, the small, silvery, anadromous fish that once migrated up Maine’s streams each spring by the hundreds of millions. For the first time in 50 years, they returned to spawn in all five ponds in the Blue Hill peninsula’s Bagaduce River watershed. In central Maine, they swam up Vassalboro’s Outlet Stream and into China Lake for the first time since 1783. Both recoveries were hard won, the result of years of stakeholders working together to build fish passage around, or to simply remove, the dams and culverts that have, for centuries, blocked sea-run fish from their historical spawning grounds.

Such projects are returning spring alewife runs to more and more Maine rivers and streams. After two decades of high-profile dam removals, millions of alewives now navigate the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers this time of year, where they’re prey for salmon, bass, trout, ospreys, eagles, herons, otters, mink, foxes — you name it. A state fisheries manager once branded them “Purina chow for the ecosystem,” a floor-of-the-food-chain fish that’s hot lunch for dozens of species — including humans, for whom smoked alewives were once a staple, and lobsters, as alewives have long been a spring baitfish for lobstermen. Some 40 Maine waterways have sufficiently restored populations to support limited commercial harvests, and lobstermen have even experimented with deep-freezing alewives to replace or supplement pricier bait later in the year.

But something funny has happened on the way to restoring this keystone forage fish: Mainers have increasingly come to appreciate humble alewives as wildlife, as a charismatic species worthy of observing and photographing and celebrating. They’re all over our Instagram feeds in May, schooled up in surreal shimmering masses or clutched in the talons of ospreys. They’re on T-shirts commemorating a growing number of community jubilees, including the Benton Alewife Festival, which launched in 2012; Bradley’s Alewife Day, which started in 2015; and Pembroke’s Pennamaquan Alewife Festival, which had its inaugural outing last summer. The granddaddy is the Damariscotta Mills Alewife Festival, created in 2007 to raise money to restore the town’s then-crumbling 1807 stone fish ladder.

In Westbrook, thousands of visitors flock to the Mill Brook Preserve each spring to watch alewives navigate the pools and rapids of its namesake creek, where they’ve surged back since the removal of a hydroelectric dam downstream, on the Presumpscot. Toby Jacobs, program manager for the Presumpscot Regional Land Trust, spent years leading education walks during the alewife run. “It’s one of two or three events we always need a waitlist for,” he says. “A hundred people would come if we didn’t cut it off, maybe more.” A big part of the draw, he believes, is simply the spectacle of natural abundance — in increasingly short supply here in the Anthropocene.

“When you see them in a group, it’s just pretty awesome how dense they get,” Jacobs says. “You get a glimpse of it on our trail, where you have up to 20,000 of them in this pool that’s maybe 30 to 40 feet across. It looks like just an empty sand pool most of the year, but the two to three weeks the alewives are running, you can’t even see the sandy bottom. They’re so dense in there, and then you just see these patterns swirling around.”

“I definitely think I’ve seen things changing, in terms of people’s interest in these creatures,” says Landis Hudson, executive director of the nonprofit Maine Rivers, which advocates for free-flowing rivers across the state. “I think maybe 15 years ago, you mentioned alewives to people, and they’d sort of tilt their head and say, what?” These days, there’s enough interest in the species that Maine Rivers publishes an annual Maine Alewife Trail map on its website, pointing would-be ’wife watchers to nearly 20 sites where they can observe the run — and sharing a bit of the conservation story behind each. The map was the brainchild of Dan Auclair, a board member for the nonprofit Upstream Cobbosee, which works with Maine Rivers on fish passage in the Cobbosseeconte Lake watershed.

“You still go to the average Joe, and they may not know what an alewife is, but we’re excited that more and more people do know what we’re talking about and do support restoration,” Auclair says. Among his favorite spots on the Alewife Trail is a site overlooking the Benton Falls Dam, on the Sebasticook River, where a fish lift was installed in 2006. Since the removal of a dam at the confluence with the Kennebec, in 2008, the Sebasticook has hosted the nation’s largest alewife run — and plenty of eagles, ospreys, and other wildlife that come to prey. “It’s a big dam, so you can’t get right near the water,” Auclair says, “but when you have 3 million fish in the river, it can be pretty spectacular.”

For fisheries biologist Nate Gray, who’s worked on sea-run fish passage for the Department of Marine Resources for more than 30 years, the fact that restored alewife runs are captivating onlookers comes as no surprise. “This is a humble fish. It’s not the king of fish, but I would tell you that when it comes to the ocean-freshwater interface, it’s the king of the food chain,” Gray says. “And when people see the power that alewives bring to bear on an ecosystem, it really gets right to our psyche, to our interconnectedness with the natural world.” He remembers a moment from last summer, driving alongside Outlet Stream in Vassalboro, where alewives were running for the first time since the colonial era. “I pounded on my brakes because I didn’t understand what I was seeing,” he says. “It looked like 37 bald eagles parked in one oak tree, overlooking the stream. And they weren’t there for the sunshine, I can tell you that.”

Having extirpated alewives from 96 percent of their historical range, we still have plenty of restoration work to do, Gray says. But Mainers’ burgeoning sense of wonder for the species is a step in the right direction. “I mean, back when I started, 30-odd years ago, we would literally drop our kit and stare if we saw one bald eagle,” Gray says. “So it’s just really profound when you watch people seeing something like that for the first time. There’s a serious power there, to see those interactions take place firsthand. And it really impacts people in ways that I have a hard time fathoming.”

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Adria and Loki Horn bought their 91-acre farm, in Pittston, in 2015. “Well, I should say, we bought a piece of land,” clarifies Adria, who, at the time, had just begun a three-year stint as director of the Maine Bureau of Veterans’ Services. “We’ve made it into a farm.” 

Central to that effort: the starter herd of yaks, 10 cows and two bulls, that the Horns brought to Pittston from a farmer-breeder in Pennsylvania. “They’re super multi-use animals,” Adria says. “They’re not as hard on the land as cattle. They’re super cold hardy. They’re slow to grow, but they’re meat, milk, and fiber. You can do carting or pulling. And we just thought they were kind of cool.”

Luckily, the neighbors did too, because the yaks broke through their fencing a couple of months after settling in. “And they just ran,” Adria recalls. “That’s how my husband got to know everybody on our road — going door-to-door, asking if they’d seen a yak.”

These days, the herd at Wooly & Grunts Farm is up to 40 animals, and the Horns have sold several to other Maine and New Hampshire farmers, sowing the seeds of future herds. One yak literally stands apart, though, and that’s Oreo. When he was born, two summers back, his mother couldn’t produce enough colostrum, so the Horns bottle-fed him to keep him alive. Adria says Oreo imprinted on her, and “he grew up in the mudroom and the backyard, with the dogs.” These days, Oreo (that’s him in these photos) free-roams the yard, walks with the kids to the bus stop, and sleeps on the porch. He weighs 350 pounds — bulls are considered full-grown around age eight, Adria says, when they tip the scales at 1,400 to 1,600 pounds. “He just wants to be with us — we’re his family,” she says. “We are going to have to reinforce the porch at some point.” 

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