In the Right Place: Rhythms

What could be more fitting? April arrived yesterday with her proverbial showers that will bring May flowers, as well as skunk cabbage leaves from this plant.

A spring rain is a good time to get booted and walk slowly through a bog, smell the wet earth and emerging flora, and listen for raindrops plinking their own targets. If you take your hands off your mental wheel there, you sometimes can imagine feeling the faint rhythms of a different life.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 1. 2023.)

March Postcards From Maine

Proverbially, March is expected to come in like a lion and leave like a lamb. This year, however, she wasn’t as threatening as a lion upon arriving nor as sweet as a lamb when she left. She didn’t seem to know what she was. Her moods swung quickly from brightly sunny to morose gray, to bouts of furious wind and rain, and interludes of snow, sometimes sprinkled delicately, sometimes heaved explosively.

Nonetheless, her sunny days were stunning:

March’s other moods often were dramatic and sometimes starkly beautiful, but always interesting. To be sure, the snow had to be plowed and the rain turned March into our “mud season,” as usual. But, the glory of the sun appearing after heavy snow or rain storms made up for the inconveniences.

Our earliest flora began to emerge in March. The pixie-hats (spathes) of the eastern skunk cabbage this year emerged from the wet bogs not only in their usual mottled colors, but sometimes in an unusual all-yellow form. The fur paws of the pussy willows appeared as well, and the sap began to run in the maple trees, where it was rerouted into the plastic tubes that maple syrup producers use to collect it.

Although we had a fair amount of snow, there was no dangerous blizzard; intervening thaws enabled the wildlife to get by without much trouble. The white-tailed deer just nosed through the snow; the dawn bobcat waited for the thaws to hunt; the male wild turkeys began their spring struts on schedule, and the Canada geese (many already paired) began migrating through.

On the working waterfront, the fishing vessels continued the winter Atlantic scallop season, sometimes getting covered in ice on cold days. The elver (“glass eel”) season opened in March here and fyke nets were strung across stream mouths to catch these highly-prized (and highly-priced) baby American eels.

One of the entertainment highlights of the month was the performance at the Ellsworth Grand Theater of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera “The Pirates of Penzance.” As you may know, this features the kind-hearted Pirate King and his inept pirates; the officious Sergeant and his cowardly constables; and the blustering Major-General and his unmarried daughters, including Mabel who carries on outrageously with Frederick, the young pirate who wants to retire.

Finally, we leave you with the March full moon appearing on one of the month’s more turbulent nights:

(All images in this post were taken in Downeast Maine during March of 2023.)

In the Right Place: The Last New Snow (Maybe)

It’s time to say goodbye to March, our most fickle month. She’s not going out like the proverbial lamb; on the other hand, she’s no longer the lion that she was earlier. Maybe she’s going out like a ram, given her cold exit temperatures, gusty winds, and yesterday morning’s tantrum of powdery snow.

That snow, shown in the image above, had melted away in the North Field by mid-afternoon yesterday, but it just might be the last new snow that we see until next winter. At the time that this image was taken, though, the temperature was only 29°F (wind chill = 19°) and the wind was gusting from the North-Northwest up to 25 miles per hour (note the white caps coming into Great Cove). On the other hand, the ice was out of the pond (partly shown on lower left) and likely will not return.

(Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 30, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Highs and Lows

Here you see the incoming tide at Conary Cove yesterday afternoon. There’s usually more than a 9-foot tide in the Cove, which is in Blue Hill Bay. That’s 9 feet of water measured vertically, not horizontally, that comes in and goes out about every 6 hours.

Yesterday was a beautiful spring day; this morning we woke to a light snowfall. (Image taken in Blue Hill, Maine, on March 29, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Wattle He Do Next

Male wild turkeys have begun to strut here, part of their highly competitive social system in which dominance displays play major roles. Doing the strut is not easy; it’s a grueling engineering and chemical feat.

The Tom’s display involves flexing an interconnected series of muscles in his skin to erect and hold steady feathers that are imbedded in his body, wings, and tail. And, he enters and holds the pose with fully flexed muscles hundreds of times a day. At the same time, he is contracting blood vessels in his head to change exposed skin colors into garish blues and reds, lengthen his beak snood, and enhance the appearance of his neck wattles.

The inflammation of the wattles on the Tom’s neck reportedly is very attractive to turkey hens when they finally get into the mood to mate (which does not appear to be now from what I’ve seen). The size and redness of the Tom’s wattles are correlated with high testosterone levels and good health – in other words, a bright, hefty wattle indicates a desirable mate to a hen. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 26, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Oh Buoy!

Here’s an opportunity to admire some Maine spring landscaping; note the distinctive use of evergreens to distract attention from the winter-scarred earth and soften the hard edges of structures.

On the other hand, you may want to look at this image and think about lobster trap buoys, icons that are at the center of a controversy, a dilemma, actually.

Distinctly-colored lobster trap buoys such as these mark a fisherman’s territory. However, they also are at the center of a debate about whether lobster fishing equipment is further endangering North Atlantic right whales, an already endangered species.

The buoys are attached to ropes that descend to the sets of traps on the sea bottom. Some say that these lines hanging vertically in the ocean by the thousands present a risk of fatal entanglement for whales. I’m aware of no evidence of such entanglement in the coastal waters here, but the subject is a serious one that needs a reasonable solution. Otherwise, I fear that lobster fishing here could be throttled by new regulations and equipment expenses that would make the profession as endangered as the whales.

One proposed solution that is being tested is the so-called “on-call” buoy, which doesn’t float on the surface until summoned. It’s a buoyant spool of line attached to an anchor on the sea bottom and linked to the trap set there. To retrieve their traps, lobstermen would trigger the “on-call” buoy with a timer or acoustic signal. The buoy then would detach itself from its anchor and float to the surface while unspooling its line, which would be used to haul up its traps.

Whether on-call buoys can be made to withstand the rigors of sea life and the limits of fishermen’s budgets is yet to be shown, however. Worrisome times. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 27, 2023.)

In the Right Place: How Sweet It Is

Yesterday was the 40th annual Maine Maple Syrup Sunday and this transfusion-like plastic tubing is the only type of equipment that we found collecting the sap from local maple trees:

Such tree-to-tree tubing systems can collect sap from hundreds of trees at a time. It appears that labor-intensive collecting with buckets or cans mostly has gone the way of rotary phones locally, at least since 2017, when this image was taken:

Vermont traditionally is the leading state producer of maple syrup by far (2.5 million reported gallons in 2022), followed by New York (845 thousand gal.) and Maine (672 thousand gal.)

On Maine Maple Syrup Sunday weekends, many producers here open up their “sugarhouses” and offer syrup samples and demonstrations of how the glorious pancake enhancer is made. (Images taken in Sargentville, Maine, on March 26, 2023 [tubes], and March 19, 2017 [can].)

In the Right Place: Call of the Wild

We’re seeing quite a few flying wedges of Canada Geese lately, a perennial harbinger of spring that usually produces more honking than a New York City traffic jam. Here’s one headed north yesterday that appeared and passed over me before I could get a decent “shot”:

A better look at their winged beauty can be seen in this Leighton Archive image of them rising from as local pond:

Leighton Archives Image

The Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) is our largest goose and one of our most American birds, perhaps the best known and most widely distributed waterfowl on the North American continent. Climate warming has resulted in increasing numbers of these geese overwintering in Maine and producing young that are non-migratory. However, we still see and hear many of these loudmouths on their way north to their namesake country. (Primary image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 25, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Pregnant Paws

Here you see the fur-like catkins of the American pussy willow (Salix discolor) doing their jobs yesterday. That “fur” only appears on male pussy willows to protect their pollen from the elements.

These male flowers have no petals or scent; they’re just stamens loaded with pollen. The fur soon will disappear, and the spring winds will torment the pollen into a yellow storm that will pollinate nearby female shrubs and agitate nearby human noses.

Pussy willow catkins usually are the first sign that winter has lost its grip, although we’re never surprised by an April snowfall here. (By the way, “catkins” is a botanical term for slim flower clusters with tiny or nonexistent petals; the term is not limited to plants that have feline-sounding names.)

Of course, the common name for this furry plant, “pussy willow,” is due to the resemblance of its catkins to cat or kitten paws. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 24, 2023.)

In the Right Place: New Immigration Issues

The tide and fyke nets were slack when we arrived at the mouth of Patten Stream on Wednesday, the opening day of the elver season. Here you see one of the nets set to catch these baby American eels (Anguilla rostrata). Fyke (usually locally pronounced “fick”) nets are thin-meshed funnels with a trap and capture-container at the end; the name evolved from the old Dutch word “fuik,” meaning “fish trap.”

At this stage in their lives, the elvers also are known as glass eels because they’re transparent except for their eyes and backbone:

Leighton Archive Image

Maine reportedly is the only state with a significant eel fishery.  In fact, on a per-pound basis, elvers are Maine’s most valuable fish (yes, eels are fish), and they’re the State’s second most valuable annual fishing harvest (after lobsters, which are not fish).

The elver harvest here in 2022 reportedly was worth more than $20.1 million and their price per pound reached $2,131.00 then. They’re ultimately sold mostly to importers in Asia, who receive them live in chilled, air-shipped containers. They’re then raised to maturity and resold for sushi and other delicacies.

These elvers are thought to be migrating here from their parents’ breeding grounds in and around the Sargasso Sea, which encompasses the Bermuda Islands. It’s also thought that these babies are seeking the same freshwater streams and ponds in which their parents matured. But it’s hard to find out what is really happening in eel migrations.

At some time after maturity (usually years), many of these eels will migrate from here back to their species’ breeding grounds and die there after breeding. Thus, they are “catadromous” fish; that is, they have life cycles in both salt and fresh waters.

The 2023 elver season will end here no later than June 7, but that date could be foreshortened by Maine’s diligent wildlife regulators, if they perceive a preservation need. (Primary images taken in Surry, Maine, on March 22, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Come Hither Looks

We’re seemingly in the midst of the big spring meltdown. Most of the snow is out of the woods now and it’s time for the ice to head for the exits in the marsh ponds. These ponds usually are the last to go, often being penetrated first where feeder streams enter them, while their surfaces melt from the bottom layer up.

The ponds are exhibiting an inviting patina of snow ice on top now, as you see here in images taken yesterday.

Do not be fooled by this come-hither look and try to walk on them. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 22, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Our Mud Season

Early spring weather creates beauty in our fields, woods, and streams. But, it has the opposite effect on many of our dirt and gravel lanes and driveways.

The cycles of freezing-thawing-raining-snowing-icing-thawing, coupled with vehicular traffic, create potholes, ruts, and muddy mounds that need to be filled-in and leveled.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 18 [dumping] and 21 [grading/leveling], 2023.)

In the Right Place: As Things Go

The full carpet of snow in the woods is melting away fast, turning into tattered remnants that seemingly are strewn carelessly here and there. The beneficiaries of the melt are the small streams that gain extra speed to make louder ripple-music with their rocky bottoms and create bubble swirls in their depths.

Take a good look at the remaining snow, it may be the last significant accumulation that you’ll see until November. Then, again, we may have our largest snowstorm in May, the way things have been going lately. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 19, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Pirates Sighted in Downeast Maine

The Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Maine’s presentation of “The Pirates of Penzance” ended its run this weekend at the iconic Grand Theater in Ellsworth. And, we were there with a buccaneer-friendly camera.

The show is one of the cleverest and most loved creations of the famous British team of W.S. Gilbert (lyricist-dramatist) and Arthur Sullivan (music composer). It takes place in the port of Penzance on the west coast of England, an unlikely pirate lair.

This two-act comic opera, also called “The Slave of Duty,” premiered in New York City in 1879, the only G&S operetta to premiere in this country. It opened in London in 1880. A very condensed and inadequate summary of the opera follows.

Act I begins with the notoriously soft-hearted (therefore unsuccessful) pirates being called together by their tough-talking (but gentle-acting) “Pirate King” (Pepin Mittelhauser) at their beach in Penzance.

Frederick (Zachery Field), an “indentured pirate” who was apprenticed to the crew since his childhood, has reached 21 years of age and is about to be formally liberated from piracy, pursuant to the indenture agreement. The pirates don’t like this development.

Ruth (Debra Hangge) then makes her presence noted. She’s Frederick’s 47-year-old nursemaid-nanny who has been with him since his infancy. She’s also the only woman whom Frederick has seen closely; she wants to share Frederick’s free life with him, even romantically. After a hilarious duet about age differences and beauty, Frederick decides to play the field and find out whether other women are as beautiful as Ruth.

All of a sudden, there are sounds of laughter and a number of young woman burst onto the secluded scene. It’s then that an excited Frederick realizes that there are women who are more beautiful than Ruth.

It turns out that these women are the unmarried daughters of Major-General Stanley. The most attractive of the daughters makes a late, dramatic appearance alone. Her name is Mable (Celeste Mittelhauser). She enchants young Frederick and their hilariously indiscrete actions shock Mabel’s sisters.

The pirate crew suddenly appears. They capture the sisters and say that they intend to marry them. But, the father of the young women — the Major-General (Roland Dube) — enters authoritatively. He’s ridiculously pompous and sings one of the most famous, satiric, and difficult arias in comic opera: “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General.” He demands that the pirates let his daughters go.

The pirates refuse to free the women and capture him. Then, remembering how soft-hearted the pirates are, the General falsely pleads that he is an orphan and alone in the world, except for his daughters. That does it; the teary-eyed pirates let the women go and Act I ends with everyone happy.

Act II opens with the General being unable to sleep; his conscience bothers him due to his having lied to the pirates. He roams a ruined chapel on his estate and his daughters comfort him. Everyone is in bed clothes. The General says that he will reveal the truth and Mabel convinces the local cowardly constables and their officious Sergeant (Maurice Joseph Marshall) to protect them from the pirates.

Nonetheless, in a clever plot twist that will not to be disclosed here, the pirates find out through Frederick that the General lied to them. They attack the family. The constables flee and hide; the General cavorts hilariously in his nightgown; the constables come back to help and are defeated by the pirates, and the General and his daughters are captured.

In the zany finale, the constables point out that they were serving under Queen Victoria and ask that the successful pirates yield in her name. The soft-hearted pirates revere the Queen as do all Englishmen and, of course, they set free the General, his family, and the constables. The General and constables then “capture” the pirates and, all of a sudden, the pirates are waiving British Union Jack flags as they surrender.

But wait — Ruth (the nanny) yells that all the pirates really are “noblemen who have gone wrong.” That changes everything, of course. The General forgives the pirates and says that they may marry his daughters since they are noblemen.

Everybody is satisfied, including the audience.

In the Right Place: Common Scents

The speckled hoods (spathes) of eastern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) have been emerging from the watery bogs here for about a week, which is a little early. The cluster shown here was photographed yesterday morning.

Skunk cabbages are among the first wild plants to emerge and flower during our spring. They protect themselves from the icy conditions by generating their own heat through a process called thermogenesis. Their tiny flowers emerge inside the spathes, growing from a fleshy internal bulb called a spadix and usually not seen by humans. These flowers produce a gagging odor that smells like rotting meat to us, but apparently smells delicious to many pollinating insects that crawl into the spathes.

The large, beautiful skunk cabbage leaves usually start to mature in May here, but it looks like they may be earlier this year. Here’s a May 25, 2022, image:

You should be careful not to barge through these leaves and break them, unless you’re looking for a way to keep people at a distance. (Primary image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 18, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Shout-Out Time

We’re going through a foggy snow melt now and hoping that we’ve seen the last of the big (plowable) snowstorms. It’s time to give a shout-out to our snow-plowing neighbors who did their usual excellent job in preparing and clearing our snowy roads and driveways during the unusually heavy snowfalls throughout the first half of March.

This image of a International 4900 using her wing plow to trim the road shoulder was taken on March 1:

This image of a Ford 350 clearing our driveway was taken on March 15:

We in New England have to fight the urge to take snowplows for granted, since they go about their jobs so professionally, often in the darkness of night. A little online research reveals that the first snowplow was a horse-drawn vehicle used in 1862 in Milwaukee. These plows were difficult to maneuver and created large piles of snow that blocked sideroads and sidewalks, which is one of the reasons cities constructed underground and elevated railways.

The first motorized snowplow was used in 1913 in New York City, and was followed there and elsewhere with the use of steam shovels, cranes, and snow-loading conveyer belts that transported snow into dump trucks. From that point, equipment evolved to a variety of sophisticated vehicles with highly maneuverable plows and talented drivers. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 1 and 15, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Good Environmental News

Our streams are gorged with water from melting snow. Here you see Patten Stream flowing robustly into Patten Bay yesterday. This is good environmental news, for a change.

Unlike last year, Maine in 2023 has been free of drought problems and has had ample ground water and stream flows. At about this time last year (March 22, 2022), about half the State was experiencing either abnormally dry or moderate drought conditions. Even parts of the Downeast coast were suffering from abnormally dry conditions and low stream flows last March.

(Image taken in Surry, Maine, on March 16, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Absorbing

Our lumbering nor’easter finally departed without a goodbye sometime last night after two days of blowing fat snowflakes in every direction.

The storm’s moody presence at times seemed to absorb all sound and color and make me feel like I was watching an old, silent black-and-white Downeast documentary, until the plow showed up:

(Images taken [in color] in Brooklin, Maine, on March 15, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Benign, But Not Over

It’s snowing again this morning, after we just got plowed out from yesterday’s 3-to-4 inches of powder.

Aside from a couple of half-second power snaps that did nothing but sting the computers, it’s been a benign storm that apparently has caused no significant problem here – except, perhaps, if you’re a Wild Turkey trying to make your rounds:

But, it’s not over: “Beware the Ides of March,” the soothsayer says. By the way, March 15 also was the day that Maine became the 23rd state; it was in 1820 as part of the infamous Missouri Compromise, although our northern borders with Canada were not finalized until 1842. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 15, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Calm Before the Nor’easter

Here’s this morning’s gray calm before the predicted nor’easter that might deliver us five inches of new snow and include wind gusts of 40 or more miles per hour:

When that image was taken, it was a warm 36°F with Northeast winds of 7 mph – however, the wind gusts were already at 24 mph.

We haven’t seen a deer in the field all morning. They seem to know when to hunker down. To brighten things up a bit, however, here’s an image of one of yesterday’s white-tails:

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 13 [deer] and 14 [field], 2023.)