Voices from the Coast: On Ecology

In celebration of Maine Coast Heritage Trust’s 50th year, people share their visions of and for the Maine coast.

e·col·o·gy /ēˈkäləjē/ 1. the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings.

Snowy Owl

by Stephen Ressel

Stephen Ressel, Snowy Owl, Sargent Mountain, Mount Desert Island, 2017

Stephen Ressel joined the faculty at College of the Atlantic in 1993 and teaches courses in the areas of vertebrate biology, herpetology, winter ecology, and photography. He also served as director of the college’s natural history museum until 2005.

Gift of Hope

By Rebecca Rockefeller Lambert

Protected land gives me hope in a world full of fear. Whether we fear economic collapse or climate change, whether we fear acts of terror, or the spread of a virus, whether our fears are real or imagined, fear is amplified by our culture, bouncing off every screen. In the face of this fear, we often shut down, tune out, and enter a downward spiral of “overwhelm” and inaction. It can feel helpless and hopeless.

There is a way out of this fear and this downward spiral: it’s outside—outside of doors and outside of culture, amongst the trees, the rocks, the open sky. Here, the sound of lapping waves calms anxieties. A drifting cloud stills the chattering mind. The smell of a fog-touched morning unfurrows the brow. We experience beauty and grace, and feel what a gift it is to be alive. In nature, we find an antidote to fear and the birthplace of hope.

When my grandmother Peggy Rockefeller cofounded Maine Coast Heritage Trust in 1970, she did so out of hope, with vision and optimism. I would venture to guess that my grandmother owed at least some of that hope to the land itself—to the quiet anchorages and pink granite that soothed her soul, to the coastal waters and pristine islands that calmed her mind.

Receiving this gift of hope from the land, she, in turn, shared it. Together with Tom Cabot, she created a pioneering organization with a mission to protect land, giving countless individuals the chance to lose themselves in evergreens and find themselves in the song of a hermit thrush. So many benefit from this vision, and what it has become—over 150,000 acres of land forever conserved, including more than 300 islands.

In these protected places, we can walk into the woods with our heads like a swarm of anxious bees: full of anger, frustration and worry. We can walk out of the woods with our minds like clear water: peaceful, calm, at ease.

We can walk out of the woods with the strength—the hope, vision, and optimism—to take a step forward in this wild world. To do whatever it is we’re called to do to make the world a better place.

What a gift to give oneself and to give others: a gift of hope.

Protected land gives me hope in a world full of fear.

Rebecca Rockefeller Lambert is an artist, philanthropist, and the mother of two young children. She has a master’s degree in environment and natural resources and a background in climate and energy planning. She guides retreats for environmentalists and others, reconnecting participants with nature and their love for the land.

Alewives

By Susan Hand Shetterly

An alewife is a beautiful fish. Its back is dark blue, its belly silver. It is laterally compressed, deep from dorsal fin to the sharp belly scales that can slice the skin on the palm of your hand, and as narrow from gill to gill as a pack of cards, a perfect shape to move up down-rushing water. Put your hand in a fast stream, your fingers pointed into the current, and feel the water part. You can’t do it with your palm catching the flow, but it is easy when you aim your fingers upstream, the way an alewife aims its snout.

In the 1970s and for generations before that, Patten Stream, in my town, supported one of the best commercial alewife runs in the state. In the old days, alewives grew to be over a foot long. They could weigh up to a pound. But today, if we see them at all, they are younger, smaller fish. They were sold to lobster cooperatives for trap bait, to companies that made fish meal, and to people who hung them in their smokehouses and made a tough pemmican for the general stores along the coast. As a child, my son loved to eat the smoked alewives that used to be stacked on the counters of every store. They were soft-boned, darkly fleshed, sweetly chewy. They tasted of salt and a hint of mold.

Alewives still gather at Patten Bay at the mouth of Patten Stream in the spring. When the ice lets go and the rains come, you can hear the stream as you drive over it on Route 172. It sounds like half a dozen people standing inside the culvert under the road practicing their kettledrums. White plumes of water pitch over boulders. Patten Stream is beautiful this time of year because it cannot contain such excess.

Over 50 years ago, Wayne McGraw’s father bought a lease from the town to harvest alewives. He built a wooden footbridge above the mouth of the stream, just before the bay, and when his boys were tall enough, he taught them to lean out over the bridge and scoop up the fish in dip nets, just as Wayne taught his own sons when they were grown.

“The year before the run dropped off for good, we had the biggest catch ever,” he told me. “They came into Patten Bay so thick the bay was solid. It looked like you could walk across their backs. And I think there might have been almost as many seals out there. And the gulls were screaming so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think. Anyone who hasn’t seen it can’t imagine it: a path of fish stretching clear down this bay.”

“But they just stopped coming like they used to. For 50 years I saw them swim in by the thousands. Some years we’d land 24,000 bushels, maybe more, and every spring they’d be back.”

People in town used to time their lives to seasonal events such as the alewife run. Today, most of us hardly notice when it comes. The loss of a huge number of fish has changed the bay, the stream, and the ponds where they once spawned, where their eggs and fry fed other species of freshwater fish. And it has changed the people who live here. The alewife runs all along the coast dropped off at about the same time. Overfishing, dams, the heating up of the breeding ponds as a result of those dams and other impediments, and pollution runoff: these trespasses contributed to the bust. But there is something more, something we can’t quite read.

Here in Surry, there is no trace left of the old footbridge. Route 172 crosses the stream, and when the road was last upgraded, a big new culvert was laid down to usher the water underneath and deposit it back in its bed 50 yards before the bay. The culvert sits on a riprap of boulders, and sometimes, when the spring melt and the rains are not ample, it stands above the streambed and spews out a thin ribbon of water. It is a hung culvert. The alewives coming in from the ocean cannot reach it.

One spring, a group of neighbors and I and our children climbed down the bank with nets and five-gallon buckets and caught alewives trapped in the pools and thrashing at the lip of the culvert. We hauled them up and across the road and released them back into the stream. We worked in a haze of sweat and blackflies, but still, when we left, there were hundreds of fish schooling below.

When I drove by Patten Stream this spring, I spotted an osprey and four gulls wheeling over the maples and birches that grow along the banks. They were dropping down toward the charging water where it meets the bay. I got a quick look at the blunt heads of two seals out in the high tide, and I knew the time had come. The alewives were back.

The rains had been good and Patten was a wild and muscular surge of water. Above it, the branches of the trees crisscrossed the air with their pale unfolding leaves. I turned my car around and headed back, drove down the dirt road to the town landing, and pulled to a stop. A telephone lineman had parked his yellow truck next to the stream. He was eating a sandwich, sitting in the truck with the door open and watching the scene, in spite of the light rain.

I got out of my car for a closer look. Rain squalled across the bay. The backs of the fish pierced the surface, hugging the mouth of the stream. Three ospreys circled down and rose again as the fish sank beneath their shadows. Herring and black-backed gulls stood on the rocks screaming.

I sat down on a rock across from them. In front of me five cormorants were swiveling and diving through the fish. Cormorants have eyes with bright turquoise irises. From where I sat, I could see the color. I could see the orange gular pouches, the slack skin at their throats. One bird dove, came up wrestling a silver-bellied fish, flipped it into the air, caught it face-first, and swallowed. The two harbor seals hung in the water, their huge, black eyes keyed to the stream. No one seemed to notice me, not even the great blue heron stepping elegantly along the opposite bank as the stream foamed and pitched across the rocks and shot straight into the tide. One by one, some of the fish slipped up to rest in the dark pools by the sides of the rocks before they tried the next step.

“Nobody owns anyone, except in memory,” John Updike wrote. I suppose that goes for owning wild migratory fish in a hometown stream as well. We can spend our lives regretful. We can watch three ospreys and want a dozen. We can hear the shattering scream of twenty gulls and know that a true cacophony is a hundred of them, each one insisting on its own insatiable hunger. We can want fish we can walk over, but those are Wayne McGraw’s memories, not ours. I would like to see what he saw, but I don’t dare miss what is here now. I was taking it all in, just like the lineman, loving the rain, these hungry birds and seals, these silver-bellied, blue-backed fish, maybe a couple of thousand of them, rushing for the deep pockets between the rocks. They will spawn in Upper and Lower Patten Ponds this year, then swim back down. Before fall settles in, their young will ride the current to the bay. The water will get them there and back for now.

The lineman stepped out of his truck and squatted on a rock next to me. Together we watched the fish leap and slide and hammer their way up.

The pitching water was so loud we couldn’t have heard each other speak even if we had wanted to. The fish, one by one, hurdled, fell back, hurdled, fell back. Then one kinked its way into a higher pool. The lineman and I saw it resting there, slowly sweeping its tail back and forth, and we turned to each other and grinned.

From Settled in the Wild by Susan Hand Shetterly. © 2010 by Susan Hand Shetterly. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. All rights reserved. Editor’s note: Since this essay was originally published in 2010, a state-of-the-art weir and pool fish passage were installed at Patten Stream.

Susan Hand Shetterly writes about wildlife, wild lands, and people who work on the land and on the inshore waters. She writes short essays for the column “Room with a View” in Down East magazine, and her newest book (2018) is Seaweed Chronicles: A World at the Water’s Edge.

Alewife

By Neil Gabrielson

Neil Gabrielson, Alewife, 2019, linocut print, 6 x 8 inches

Neil Gabrielson, 13, is an 8th grade student at Cape Elizabeth Middle School. His watercolors, pencil drawings and linocuts often drawing on themes from the natural world. When he’s not making art, Neil enjoys computer programming, playing piano, and spending time outdoors with his family.

Children’s Waters

By Anna Siegel

Photo: Courtney Mooney

What will the waters—
our connection,
our messenger,
become as time marches on?

It takes a child to answer this
question, to insist we can change our
ways, change this world, reckon
with our decisions.

A child will tell you they hope that
one day, they can dance in the rain,
canoe down the rivers,
marvel at the oceans, without
fear that it will be lost.

Anna Siegel is a current 8th grader at the Friends School of Portland in Cumberland, Maine. She’s served as a Maine State Lead from U.S. Youth Climate Strikes, a member of Maine Youth for Climate Justice, and is now building the ME Strikes team and planning Maine’s part in the next global climate strikes.

Courtney Mooney (see photograph above) is a Maine-based photographer and visual activist. She’s a twelfth-generation Mainer whose connection to her birthplace has given her a unique opportunity to give back to it. Mooney’s work is primarily concentrated on the environment.

Keep the Coast Stable

By Anna Seigel

“My favorite spot on the Maine coast is Scarborough Marsh. It’s this amazing place with a variety of habitats. I also really like Dyer Point in Cape Elizabeth. Apart from enjoying great birding there in winter, I love climbing over the rocks and being there with friends.

“In seventh grade, I learned about U.S. Youth Climate Strikes, which is the U.S.’s chapter of the global striking movement. I saw that Maine wasn’t on their striking map. I reached out to them, and they’re like, ‘Okay, great. You have all the information. You’re going to be the state lead.’ I was like, ‘Oh, okay.’ I remember it was very sudden. I remember I didn’t really know what to do. That was really the start of my climate justice activism.”

Maine’s Native Roundleaf Sundew: A Profile

By Amanda Devine

“It would be easy to miss, if you weren’t looking for it.

Rising from a mat of Sphagnum moss is a cluster of round, miniscule, bright green leaves. The surface of each leaf is covered in tiny red filaments tipped with a dewy gland. Near the leaf margin, a small fly, ensnared by filaments, suffocates in sticky mucilage. The leaf secretes a protein-digesting enzyme, rendering the insect into a nitrogen-rich slurry, which is then absorbed.

Carnage, writ small and unspectacular.

Roundleaf sundew (Drosera rotundifolia) is common on the coast of Maine, but far from eye-catching. Its significance to humans is minor: used in Scandinavia for cheesemaking (enzymes secreted by the leaves can curdle milk), roundleaf sundew also exhibits some antibiotic properties. Like all plants, it interacts with its neighbors, and opportunistic ants sometimes make a meal of ensnared insects. This tiny plant deserves a deeper dive, however, as its nutritional predilections are…unusual.

At home in acidic environments and intolerant of any shading, roundleaf sundew enjoys the company of Sphagnum mosses, which acidify their environment and impede the growth of most other plants. The price sundew pays for freedom from competition is lack of nutrients, as bogs aren’t exactly a rich growing medium. Nature usually finds a way, however.

Botanical carnivory is one of those concepts that should probably keep you up at night. The roughly 600 species of carnivorous plants worldwide have no single common ancestor. Instead, the ability to extract nutrients from insects evolved independently at least five times over the span of evolutionary history. Sundews use sticky traps to ensnare their pray; their distant cousins use pitcher traps, hydraulic snap traps, or suctioning bladders.

As for how sundews break down their meals, it’s a matter of chemistry, subverted. If you are a gardener, you know plants and fungi rarely play well together. To defend themselves against fungal infection, many plants produce an enzyme to break down chitin, the polysaccharide that makes up the cell walls of fungi.

Insect exoskeletons are also made of chitin. Necessity, that mother, coaxed the chitin-devouring enzyme into doing double-duty as a digestive agent. Add to this the quandary of segregating reproduction from nutrient acquisition: a carnivorous plant must attract, trap, and consume some insects, and benevolently lure in others to pollinate it. It’s a complicated way to make a living.

Every creature has a story to tell and its own unique way to eke out an existence on Maine’s rocky coast.  Some have just figured out more creative ways to do it.

Amanda Devine is MCHT’s Regional Stewardship Manager for Southern Maine, and the kind of person who drives off the road to look at interesting plants. She holds a master’s degree in botany from the University of Vermont’s Field Naturalist Program and lives in Freeport with her young daughter, Lily, who also likes plants.

What Else Remains?

By Franklin Burroughs

Once the head of tide on the Kennebec River was up around Bingham. Along what we think of as the Maine coast, from Kittery to Calais, the deep and dark blue ocean rolled. The great whales and great auks fed and frolicked; gannets plummeted, porpoises tumbled. No human eye saw them. Longfellow’s “beautiful town/ That is seated by the sea,” lay far below and far ahead of them.

Europeans arrived; human and natural history began their incessantly escalating struggle.  Human history wins most of the battles, thereby accelerating its eventual loss of the war. Think of Boston’s Back Bay—Commonwealth Avenue, Beacon, Boylston, and Newbury Streets, the Boston Public Library, the Prudential Center: some of the priciest urban real estate north of Manhattan. It was tidewater a mere two centuries ago. Where commuters now creep along Storrow Drive, the Abenaki built fish weirs. Think of Portland’s Back Cove: in Longfellow’s Day, Marginal Way, lower Preble Street, outer Franklin Avenue, and a long stretch of I-295 lay within the jurisdiction of the Harbor Master, as did Baxter Boulevard.

Well south of New England, along most of the alluvial shoreline that runs from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, down to Florida, coastal development came belatedly but suddenly, to places that had beaches, and for people who had leisure. Within living memory—mine—lonely beaches and barrier islands became sleazy or upscale tourist meccas, retirement destinations, or swanky gated communities, complete with world-class golf courses.

In low-lying country, a little sea rise goes a long way. Ask citizens of Atlantic City, Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Wilmington, Charleston, or Miami about sunny day floods and king tides. People are clever and resourceful—Holland is proof of that—and these cities may well survive for quite some time, surrounded by dykes and drained by pumps. But imagine yourself flying the 500 or so miles from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, down to the bottom of North Carolina. You’d mostly see variations of one pattern: Barrier islands facing the open Atlantic, and between them and the mainland, interconnected bays and sounds—Barnegat, Rehoboth, Assawoman, Sinepuxent, Chincoteague, Currituck, Albemarle, Pamlico. The barrier islands are basically sandspits. Some remain beautifully empty. Many are anything but: Atlantic City, Ocean City, or Avalon, New Jersey; Rehoboth Beach, Delaware; Ocean City, Maryland; Chincoteague and Virginia Beach, Virginia. In North Carolina, Nag’s Head, Kitty Hawk, Corolla, Surf City, Topsail Island, and Wrightsville Beach. You see narrow strips of houses and hotels perched on sand a few feet above sea level, cut off from higher and dryer land by open water or inland swamp. The scientific consensus is that no amount of beach replenishment or fortification can save them; the data is indisputable. But not undeniable—in 2011, the political leadership of North Carolina passed HB 819, ruling the scientific consensus out of order, null and void, whenever it threatened to undermine property values.

I’ve never flown over the coast I’ve just described. But I know it by analogy to the South Carolina coast. I was lucky to grow up there. And I cannot bear going back to the beaches and inlets I knew. I can see them in my sleep, but only there.

But I have flown up the Maine coast, from Portland to Lubec, in a private plane that Bowdoin College chartered to take a few faculty to Grand Manan. We left early, on a serene June morning. We followed the coastline the whole way out to Lubec, before we turned east across the Grand Manan channel. We maintained an altitude of perhaps a thousand feet.

I know particular parts of the Maine coast intimately; so does everybody who is reading this. We can see them in our sleep. But dear God, think of the whole length of it! That string of bays, sounds, and tidal rivers; rockbound peninsulas, spruce-crowned ledges, and gently rolling salt-water farms; the orderly scatter of islands. Think of the salt-marshes, the sequestered and unspoiled little beaches: All that real estate.

This coast fosters some kind of belief in permanence. Artists have made it part of our national heritage: think of Fitz Henry Lane, Frederic Edwin Church, Winslow Homer, Rockwell Kent, John Marin, the Wyeths, Eliot Porter, and so many, many others. Or think of a single poem—Elizabeth Bishop’s “North Haven.” Or one book—Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea.

In human history, economic history, and natural history, everything connects to everything else and nothing is permanent. Southward from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and HB 819 notwithstanding, billions of dollars of investment and a lot of good memories will soon be lost: hotels and houses and skinny beachfront towns, built on sand and surrounded by water, will disappear in another fifty years. Investment writes off its losses, leaves its failures to be dealt with by people who cannot themselves leave, and moves on. Life covets coastlines, and no species is more covetous than ours. All that investment and all those people who want to live by the ocean will soon be going elsewhere. And where would that be? Northeastward from Portland. On this coast of America, what else remains?

The great American heritage of landscape painting began with the Hudson River School. The paintings still exist; the Hudson River the painters saw with their eyes and felt in their bones does not. This is not the case in Maine. We can see what the painters saw, miles and miles of it, recognize it, and still feel it in our bones. That is a rare and remarkable thing.

Any heritage, artistic or natural, is an endowment or a trust, and requires funding. The aim is simple: continuity and perpetuation. Maine Coast Heritage Trust turns fifty this year. It has continued and coordinated the efforts of many land trusts and many individuals—some local, and some “from away”—to carry into the unforeseeable, uncontrollable future a heritage that is national, regional, and local; historical, ecological, cultural, and alive.

Franklin Burroughs was born and grew up in Conway, South Carolina. He moved to Maine in 1968 to teach English at Bowdoin College, retiring in 2002. He has written numerous books and published essays. His book Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay won the John Burroughs Medal (no relation) for natural history writing in 2007.

Hum of the Sea

By Heidi Daub

Heidi Daub, Hum of the Sea, 2014, acrylic on paper, 21.5 x 21.5″

Residing and working in Maine since 1984, Heidi Daub creates paintings that reflect her involvement in various artistic disciplines and her reverence for the natural world. Exhibiting online and regionally, her paintings are housed internationally in private and corporate collections.