Angus King makes renewed push to expand access to Maine’s national monument

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • May 1, 2024

U.S. Sen. Angus King is making a renewed effort to expand access to the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument through a proposal backed by Maine conservationists and the Penobscot Nation. King reintroduced legislation Tuesday that would give the National Park Service permission to acquire land from willing donors or sellers in order to better connect the monument to the Millinocket region and major roads. King, who chairs the Senate National Parks Subcommittee, first put forward a bill in 2022 that would have authorized the acquisition of about 42,000 acres. That legislation received a hearing in 2022 and did not advance, but King used feedback from various groups to return with this year’s proposal that would only allow the government to acquire 2,465 acres. The Trust for Public Land, which owns the majority of the potential addition, requested the significant reduction in acquired land. The trust is separately working to transfer adjacent land to the Penobscot Nation as a working forest.

Gold and diamonds may be hidden in these remote corners of Maine

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • May 1, 2024

Rumors have persisted of buried treasures out in the wilds of Maine, involving gold, diamonds and straight up cash. For instance, in 1807, Timothy Barrett moved to True’s Pond in Liberty. He would come into town to buy essentials, but with no means of income, people wondered where he got his money. Supposedly, Barrett had gold coins squirreled away, with local legends claiming the cache was worth anywhere from a few thousand dollars to up to $70,000 — about $2 million in 2024 dollars. About 200 miles north there’s another story of a hidden treasure. According to Portage Lake historian Corrine Routhier, there’s a local legend that sometime in the 1850s, a smuggler known as Buffalo trekked across the border with Canada. He supposedly buried a bag of diamonds and other gemstones with plans to come back to retrieve them, but he eventually died and the gems remained buried somewhere in the area. There are likely many more stories about legendary caches of untold wealth, hidden somewhere in the wilds of Maine. You just never know.

USDA to continue classifying potato as a vegetable, not a grain

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • May 1, 2024

The United States Department of Agriculture will keep the potato classified as a vegetable rather than a grain following a bipartisan effort from Maine’s congressional delegation to retain the potato’s current vegetable classification. In response to fears that an independent committee reviewing the dietary guidelines might move potatoes from the vegetable to the grain category, congressional leaders from around the country, including Sen. Susan Collins, Sen. Angus King, Rep. Chellie Pingree and Rep. Jared Golden, sent letters to Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra voicing their opposition to the potential reclassification.

U.S. regulators maintain fishing quota for valuable baby eels, even as Canada struggles with poaching

ASSOCIATED PRESS • May 1, 2024

U.S. regulators decided Wednesday to allow American fishermen to harvest a little less than 10,000 pounds per year through at least 2027 of valuable baby eels, even as authorities have shuttered the industry in Canada while they grapple with poaching. Baby eels, also called elvers, are harvested from rivers and streams by fishermen every spring. The tiny fish are sometimes worth more than $2,000 per pound because of their high value to Asian aquaculture companies.

Lewiston to receive grant and volunteer help to restore Veterans Memorial Park

SUN JOURNAL • May 1, 2024

The L&A Veterans Council will receive a grant and volunteer help this month to kickstart renovations to Veterans Memorial Park, which sustained heavy damage in a December flood. The park, which lies along the Androscoggin River, has sat mostly untouched since the winter storm took out several of its monuments, washed away benches and damaged the grounds. On May 14, the council will receive a $20,000 grant from the American Rental Association Foundation and the Toro Company Foundation, which will also donate volunteers and equipment to work on the park in collaboration with the council and Lewiston Public Works.

A busy spring of improvements is planned for Skowhegan area’s Lake George Regional Park

MORNING SENTINEL • May 1, 2024

A slew of improvements planned for Lake George Regional Park on the Skowhegan-Canaan line is expected to help with efforts to sustainably expand the park’s use. The work this spring is expected to include building a road on the west side of the park, turning a former social hall into an event venue and outdoor recreation base camp and renovating five aging cabins on the lake. The goal: Bring in new sources of revenue to support the park’s operations, while maintaining its natural resources and recreational opportunities for local residents. The state bought the 320-acre park in 1992. The state leases it to the towns of Skowhegan and Canaan, which rely on the Lake George Corp. to manage the park for public use.About 20,000 people visit the park each year.

Column: Tributaries

MIDCOAST BEACON • May 2024

Another excellent book, in a long parade of Maine- based books, has been pub- lished by Islandport Press in Yarmouth. “Tributaries” by Ryan Brod, filmmaker, writer and fishing guide, is a collection of fishing essays that, as the dust cover pro- claims, “explores the lines between passion and obses- sion.” I had not heard of Ryan Brod, a Smithfield Maine native, who teaches creative writ- ing at the University of New England and has been published in several national magazines. I liked his book a lot! One of the deeper themes in this book is father/son relationships. In his chapter,” Before Dark,” he laments the aging and imminent passing of his favorite fishing buddy, his father. Like many a younger son, he had always figured that he would lose his father quickly, from a heart attack, while cutting firewood or on a deer hunt. “Instead, I have witnessed his slow progression toward old age, the gradients of which...have been painful to witness.” The father “is losing his mind’s archives as his illness progressed – a lifetime of fish, tides, names, faces – gone.” ~ V. Paul Reynolds

Column: Help collect important data by monitoring plankton

TIMES RECORD • May 1, 2024

While plankton might not be bright like the bursting forsythia or fragrant like the soon-to-come lilacs, they are perhaps the most beautiful and diverse set of living things on the planet. They can be round and spiky, long chains, glowing or transparent, and some are even toxic. But most people have never seen a single one. One local organization is giving people that opportunity and also getting something in return. The Kennebec Estuary Land Trust has several community science programs, including a plankton-monitoring program. Volunteers take a water sample and utilize microscopes to look at and categorize plankton types. They are still looking for additional volunteers for this summer. ~ Susan Olcott

Column: Pinnacle moments — good feeling local

TIMES RECORD • May 1, 2024

It’s the day before Earth Day 2024. From a late-morning meet-up at Brunswick Town Hall, five of us drive 15 minutes to the parking area beneath the high point in town. Cox Pinnacle hovers. We are here as part of an Earth Day trail cleanup, joining town staff from Parks and Rec with a group of six Bowdoin College students and four of us from the town’s Conservation Commission. We trim overhanging branches, employ the bucksaw to some tilted or fallen medium trees, comb leaves and muck from a few more waterbars. Meanwhile, a nine-person crew at the pine-rich Kate Furbish preserve is finding fuller work. Branches litter the trail and a number of full-sized trees block the way. We’re all here for various experiential reasons and itches, hoping that our little work helps others to take the hundreds of little steps that get them into local wild places. ~ Sandy Stott

Golden votes to kill BLM rule, delist gray wolf, end Boundary Waters mining limits

MAINE MORNING STAR • May 1, 2024

The U.S. House approved four bills focused on natural resources and land management Tuesday, promoting a Republican message of dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s approach to conservation. The four bills would force the withdrawal of a recent Bureau of Land Management rule that would allow leases for conservation, remove mining restrictions near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, delist the gray wolf from the Endangered Species Act, and block federal bans on lead ammunition. Maine Democratic Rep. Jared Golden joined the Republican majority in each vote against conservation rules.

Column: Departures and Arrivals

BOOTHBAY REGISTER • May 1, 2024

We’ve been serenaded most mornings this week by a loud, whistled “Old Sam Peabody-Peabody-Peabody”—the sweet sound of a white-throated sparrow tuning up the song that he will soon be singing incessantly from the depths of an opening in a fragrant spruce-fir forest somewhere farther north. Over the weekend, we were delighted at Pemaquid Harbor to hear the wonderful cacophony of a newly arrived flock of laughing gulls cavorting along the shore. Across the way in a little strip of muddy shore and saltmarsh were four greater yellowlegs. We were surprised to see a number of Arctic and Boreal breeding ducks that hadn’t left their Maine coast wintering grounds yet. Brunswick blessed us with the clear, whistled song of an eastern meadowlark. While walking the dog last week we heard an exuberantly singing pine siskin. ~ Jeffrey V. Wells and Allison Childs Wells

Sappi’s $418 million expansion of Skowhegan mill continues on schedule

MORNING SENTINEL • April 30, 2024

Sappi North America’s $418 million expansion of its Somerset Mill in Skowhegan to increase capacity on the machine to produce solid bleached sulfate paperboard products is continuing on schedule. The switch is part of the company’s efforts to reduce its reliance on other paper products. The mill employs about 754 people. The expansion will add a “modest” number of new jobs. Sappi also operates mills in Westbrook, Maine; Cloquet, Minnesota; and Matane, Quebec. Maine’s forest products industry has seen change. TimberHP brought back manufacturing to the Madison Paper Industries mill that closed in 2016. In Jay, a company that manufactures a product similar to particleboard announced in March its plans to reopen the former Androscoggin Mill, which stopped producing paper in March 2023. Later that month, ND Paper in Rumford announced it planned to temporarily shut down one of its papermaking machines.

Eight areas in the Gulf of Maine chosen as possible lease sites for commercial offshore wind

MAINE PUBLIC • April 30, 2024

The federal government is proposing eight areas in the Gulf of Maine as possible sites for commercial offshore wind farms. The proposed lease areas cover about 1 million acres and have the potential to generate 15 gigawatts of energy, enough to power five million homes, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said Tuesday. Two of the sites, encompassing nearly 254,000 acres, are off the Maine coast.

Column: Humans are right to help, but some species’ extinctions are natural

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • April 29, 2024

I was idly through the pages of a textbook on historical geology, and chanced on this passage: “The pattern we see in the fossil record is not one of continuous diversification with new species being added, but none ever removed. Instead, the average species lasts a few million years, and then vanishes forever from the face of the planet. It goes extinct.” Human beings are uncomfortable with this fact, because we feel guilty for accelerating the extinction of so many other species. It’s a much bigger deal when an entire existing ecosystem threatens to go extinct, but the first such event is now knocking at our door: the mass death of the coral reefs. ~ Gwynne Dyer

Opinion: Veto of farmworker bill thwarts the wishes of Mainers

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • April 30, 2024

Gov. Janet Mills killed two bills that would have improved the lives of farmworkers in Maine, the people who put the food on our tables. Maine’s governor chose the anniversary of his death to veto L.D. 2273, the governor’s own bill, and the product of a committee she created because she claimed to believe that farmworkers deserve a fair wage. Mills’ veto demonstrates otherwise. This marks the fourth time in a span of 27 months that Maine’s governor has vetoed bills that would have improved the lives of the people who help feed us; the fourth time that Mills has told farmworkers, with her actions, I don’t see you and I don’t care about you. ~ Former Rep. Thom Harnett

Column: The latest Allagash controversy all began with money

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • April 30, 2024

Money, especially large amounts of it, has a way of imposing change. The Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands, which has a bundle of “free” money from the Feds, is planning to construct some new storage buildings in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway and purchase a large boat with muscle outboards and some new American with Disabilities Act-compliant stations. An opposition group, Citizens for Keeping the Wild in Allagash, argue that all of this planned construction does not comply with the spirit of the mandate to keep the Waterway wild. This is a difficult issue, one rooted in the age-old conflict between progress and the natural environment. And the most difficult and delicate of all, accessibility for the disabled. ~ V. Paul Reynolds

‘Relatively cool’ year in Gulf of Maine still 5th hottest on record

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • April 29, 2024

Last year was the fifth hottest year on record in the Gulf of Maine, continuing a trend that makes it one of the fastest-warming bodies of ocean on Earth, according to the latest annual report from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Late winter and spring 2023 saw record-setting sea surface temperatures about five degrees above the climatological average. The second half of the year was relatively cool, thanks partly to the mixing effect of a passing storm, and much closer to long-term normals.

Mainers arrested in Canada on suspicion of poaching baby eels

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • April 29, 2024

Five Maine residents were arrested in Nova Scotia last week for allegedly poaching baby eels, also known as elvers, according to Canadian officials. The names of the Mainers were not included in an announcement by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the agency that regulates the country’s commercial fishing. Worth thousands of dollars per pound, elvers are caught when they migrate in the spring from oceans to freshwater upstream. Maine’s elver fishery, which is tightly regulated, legally generates roughly $20 million in annual revenue for licensed fishermen.