Harvest on the Harbor returns to Portland for its 18th year

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • September 29, 2026

Portland’s annual festival celebrating Maine’s food and beverages, Harvest on the Harbor, returns to Portland in October at Maine Studio Works. Featured events include the Maine Lobster Chef of the Year competition on Friday, Oct. 16, and two sessions of the Maine OysterFest on Oct. 17.

Maine Animal Coalition’s 21st annual Veg Fest set for Portland

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • September 29, 2026

The 21st annual Veg Fest, hosted by the Maine Animal Coalition, is slated for Oct. 24, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m, at the East End Community School in Portland. The free event allows attendees to learn about vegan lifestyles through food vendors, educational exhibits and featured speakers.

In Greenville, proposed change to moose hunting causes divide

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • September 29, 2026

Maine is considering adding another week of moose hunting near Moosehead Lake during peak fall foliage, which has ignited a debate about how to share access to the iconic animal. People have long visited that area in search of its namesake, whether with a rifle or a camera. The local chamber of commerce used to say in promotional materials that moose outnumbered people 3-to-1. Now, the region is testing the balance between a long hunting tradition and a growing emphasis on fall tourism.

With less quantity, Portland Fish Exchange keeps focus on quality

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • September 29, 2026

The Portland Fish Exchange opened on Commercial Street’s waterfront in 1986 as America’s first all-display fresh seafood auction. But since 2010, the auction has been silent, conducted by computer, with most buyers placing bids remotely from Portland and around the Northeast. The sedate auction room handles a lower volume of seafood today than in the past, about 70,000 pounds a week in the summer, 50,000 a week in the colder months. The nonprofit exchange has struggled financially over the past couple of decades. The Portland Fish Exchange tends to attract smaller boats on shorter trips, so the fish are often fresher and better quality.

Kittery kelp farmers to appear on ‘Shark Tank’

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • September x, 2026

The duo behind a Kittery-based skincare brand will be swimming with sharks on national television Wednesday. Cold Current Kelp co-founders Inga Potter and Krista Rosen are among the latest entrepreneurs to pitch their small business to a panel of billionaire investors, or “Sharks,” on ABC’s “Shark Tank.” Potter and Rosen have been running Cold Current Kelp as a small business since 2021, growing and harvesting their own seaweed from an 800-foot-long offshore farm in Kittery and turning it into skincare products. They sell their line of sugar kelp extract facial oils on their website and in dozens of shops across the Northeast.

Beyond Bucket Biology: Just Because It’s Legal, Doesn’t Mean It’s Not Harmful…

NATIVE FISH COALITION • September 29, 2026

Make no mistake about it; while warming water, droughts, floods, wildfires, development, pollution, and habitat degradation all threaten wild native fish, nonnative fish introductions are and likely always will be the number one threat. While bucket biology, anglers moving fish around, is a huge problem, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (MDIFW) moves nonnative fish around regularly and has for generations.  Although no one wants to talk about it, these legal actions have negatively impacted wild native fish in the same ways that illegal bucket biology has. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean that it is not harmful. This is especially true with regard to fish and game management, where conservation of the resource often takes a backseat to the desires of sportsmen. ~ Bob Mallard

Allowing space for nature: Rewilding to heal the earth

resilience • September 28,2026

The term, rewilding, often elicits strong emotions. Anger is provoked that farmers will be forced to waste precious cropland, letting it return to the wild, or that dangerous animals will be released into towns and cities. Elsewhere, guerrilla rewilders are secretly breeding butterflies, birds and beavers, and illegally releasing them across the countryside. Although rewilding is often thought of as keeping humans “away”, in fact, people must be integrated into much of the rewilding process, living alongside and allowing space for “wildness.”

A Look at Maine’s Caribou Speckled Roadless Area

ENVIRONMENT MAINE • September 28, 2026

Environment Maine recently organized local environmental organizations to tour the Caribou Speckled Roadless Area in the White Mountain National Forest west of Bethel to explore the ways that the attempted rollback of federal conservation rules might impact our public lands. This 6,000-acre ring of conserved forests around the high peaks of Caribou and Speckled Mountains is breathtakingly beautiful. Since 2001, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule has protected this place — along with 58 million acres of similarly pristine national forests nationwide. Now, the U.S. Forest Service is attempting to open 45 million acres of protected, roadless national forests across the country to the heavy tracks of bulldozers and industrial logging equipment.

Censored by the Bangor Daily News: When One Door Closes Another One Opens Up

NATIVE FISH COALITION • September 28, 2026

When Native Fish Coalition Executive Director Bob Mallard submitted an article to the Bangor Daily News as a guest column, he was stunned that new Outdoor Editor, and former Maine Department fo Inland Fisheries and Wildlife employee, Susan Bard, would not run it. Believing that the piece was important, Bob posted it on the NFC blog as well as NFC’s Facebook page and his personal page. After a few weeks, he submitted it as an OpEd to the 3 largest southern Maine Newspapers. They ran it in all three. V. Paul Reynolds, publisher for the Northwoods Sporting Journal, ran the piece as well. So did Kennebec Valley Trout Unlimited. The piece rejected by the Bangor Daily News has seen exponentially more traffic than it would have had they run it.

Dispatches from the Wild: Project 2025’s assault on the wild

BIG SKY • September 28, 2026

Project 2025 was never merely a campaign document. It was a blueprint for dismantling the laws, agencies and scientific safeguards that protect America’s air, water, public lands and wildlife. Less than two years into the Trump administration, much of that blueprint has become federal policy. The damage is already spreading across landscapes and ecosystems, while some of its most dangerous proposals remain unfinished. In September 2026, the administration finalized regulatory changes that weaken how the Endangered Species Act, is implemented, including removing the regulatory definition of “harm” to distinguish between accidental and intentional killing, and revising protections for threatened plant and animal species. This administration seems to want only more profit, more extraction and more greed. At what cost? The potential tragedy of Project 2025 is not only what could be lost, but how casually loss is treated. The public won’t even notice until things are gone.~ Benjamin Alva Polley

Northern Mainers fear they can't afford heating bills this winter

MAINE PUBLIC • September 28, 2026

The community action program that serves Aroostook, Washington and Hancock Counties said it is getting up to 200 voicemails a day from residents who are anxious about how they will pay their fuel bills this winter. Some are reporting that their fuel tanks are empty. "We've had some households that have been without fuel for over a month and are just at the critical point that it's starting to become unbearable," Parent said. Heating oil prices in Maine have now topped six dollars a gallon. Maine's U.S. senators have unsuccessfully urged the Trump administration to release HEAP funds early this year.

Maine PUC staff recommends rejecting CMP's temporary rate hike

MAINE PUBLIC • September 28, 2026

Maine Public Utility Commission staff recommended that state utility regulators reject Central Maine Power's request to impose a temporary rate hike as the commission continues debating the company's request for new long-term prices. Groups that oppose CMP's proposal to raise about $189 million in long-term electric distribution rates argue it is too early in the lengthy rate negotiation process to grant any new increase. But CMP said it is facing significant financial pressure and needs a short-term cash infusion to cover investments it has already made. The company is seeking to increase customer bills about $7 a month in October to cover $69 million in costs.

Fact brief: Is releasing a pet rabbit into the wild considered animal cruelty in Maine?

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • September 28, 2026

Yes. Deliberately releasing a pet rabbit into the wild and leaving it there is considered animal cruelty under Maine law. Intentionally, knowingly or recklessly abandoning an animal is generally a Class D crime. It becomes a more serious Class C crime if the animal dies as a result, or if the offender has at least two prior animal cruelty convictions. Prosecutors may instead pursue a civil violation, carrying a fine up to $5,000 for a first offense and $10,000 for subsequent offenses.

Column: Olfactory Superpowers

DAILY BULLDOG • September 28, 2026

Black bears have an olfactory bulb that is five times larger than that in the human brain and possess 100 times more sensory tissue lining their nasal cavity – both of which account for why a black bear’s nose is some 2,000 times more powerful than our own. Coyotes, foxes, and other canids also have an exceptional sense of smell, possessing more than 50 times the number of olfactory receptors as humans. Canids can also direct their nostrils independently in order to detect smells coming from different directions. If you asked a snake to describe how it senses odor, its response would be literally tongue-in-cheek. Birds also rely on their olfactory sense in everyday life. While we primarily take in the landscape with our eyes and ears, many other animals absorb the world through their sense of smell. ~ Michael J. Caduto

Wild Blueberry Land among new additions to Maine's most endangered places list

MAINE PUBLIC • September 28, 2026

Four sites have been added to Maine's 2026 list of most endangered and at-risk places. They include Wild Blueberry Land, shaped like a giant blueberry and located on Route 1 in Columbia Falls. The dome itself is structurally sound, according to the nonprofit Maine Preservation, which compiles the annual list. But blueberry farmers Marie and Dell Emerson, who own the property, say it's time for someone else to take it on.

How to start mountain biking in Maine

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • September 28, 2026

The New England Mountain Bike Association (NEMBA) has eight chapters in Maine that often host group rides, create new trails and maintain existing ones. Their calendars and social media pages have more information about upcoming meetups, including those suited for beginners. There are also Facebook pages for mountain biking in Maine, including 207 MTB, and Maine Adaptive is another organization that has been running mountain biking and cycling programs for years. Chris White, chapter president for the Penobscot Region, also leads rides at Rose Bike in Orono. “If there’s a spot where people struggle, we stop, and we talk about it,” White said about his beginner events. “We just all keep going through it until everyone is successful.”

Waste buried in the woods shows how hard it is to rehab Maine’s abandoned factories

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • September 28, 2026

To take on costly messes at abandoned and hazardous industrial sites throughout the state, the Maine Legislature in 2022 established a land bank. Maine has at least 330 contaminated former manufacturing sites known as brownfields, nearly half of them in rural areas.

Column: Eyes on deer work differently than ours, and it mostly works to their advantage

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • September 28, 2026

Deer and many other animals have a layer on their retina called the tapetum lucidum. When light strikes the retina, some of it hits light receptive organs called rods and cones. The rest strikes the tapetum and is reflected back so that more is absorbed, then ultimately transmitted to the brain for interpretation. That’s one reason deer see better in low light, but it’s not the only reason. They have larger eyes than we do, which allow more light to reach the retina. There, cones process color while rods are sensitive to light in general, and further help with visual perception in low light. A deer’s rods are much bigger than ours, and bundled three to each nerve ending, offering still greater advantage. The deer still win far more often, but we only have to win once. ~ Bob Humphrey

A data center developer has quietly eyed Bucksport’s former mill site

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • September 28, 2026

A company recently visited the site of Bucksport’s former paper mill with interest in developing a data center there. That information was shared publicly for the first time Thursday when the Town Council considered a temporary data center ban, which was introduced as a way to buy time to update regulations around such developments before any formal proposal came in. Bucksport’s lingering infrastructure from its mill — deep water access, a power plant, a fresh water supply — and the mostly vacant site itself make the town more realistically attractive to data center developers than many other Maine communities that have adopted such bans.

Column: It’s getting harder to find good places to hunt and trap in Maine

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • September 28, 2026

It’s happening more and more these days. Large pieces of property are being bought up, posted and erased from the list of once accessible hunting grounds, forcing more and more hunters onto less and less land. Some are hunters themselves, just trying to escape a fate so many others face. Some are nonhunters who want to own a piece of our beautiful state to enjoy in peace and quiet with no interest in allowing any type of access. And when you think about it, who can blame them? It’s their land and their right, but is it right? ~ Chris Sargent