In the Right Place: Hangin’ In There

Many of our old, abandoned apple trees have lost most of their leaves, but continue to clench their fruit like misers at a fundraiser. Unlike working orchard apples, these will not be picked for the market.

The deer may get on their hind feet and eat the low-hanging fruit. But, as I understand it, most of these “wild” apples will shrivel and rot on the branch unless the tree decides to form abscission layers at the fruit stems to let gravity tear the apples away and drop.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 14, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Herding

Here’s an October view from Amen Ridge of Mount Desert Island mountains across Blue Hill Bay. As many of you know, this is one of the scenes that we monitor in all seasons for our records.

As for this image, it’s almost 4 p.m. on Thursday, and the temperature is about 57° (F). In the foreground, the summer goldenrod and fleabane in the field recently have been mowed down. In the sky, a fair southwesterly wind is herding cumulus clouds northeastward (to the left).

“MDI,” as it often is called, is the largest island in Maine and is accessible by bridge. It’s a major tourist attraction that contains most of Acadia National Park. It also has within its coastal nooks and crannies Bar Harbor, Bass Harbor, Seal Harbor, and similar picturesque places that can get tourist-clogged in the summer. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 10, 2024.) Click on the image to enlarge it.

In the Right Place: 2nd Foliage Report

We’re not yet at peak foliage, at least as measured by colorful memories of great autumns of yore. We seem to be mostly in one of those grace periods when the trees are due, but they need a few days’ forgiveness to get all the green out. When it happens, the masses of trees and bushes and blueberry fields that provide turbulent seas of color certainly are wonderous.

But the older I get, the more I seem to favor individual trees with character in the fall. I seem to be intrigued by huge wild maples that have some mightiness to them, even in periods of grace.

They can be literally awesome when they’re backlit by an intense sun or standing lonely in the midst of a green conifer party.

After writing the above, I decided to look up the origin of the term “grace period.” As you know, it usually is used to mean an amount of time after a due date when late payment may be made without penalty. It turns out that, in Middle English, “grace” meant “God’s favor or help.” (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 12 and 13, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Blinking

Here’s an October view of the red boathouse in Conary Cove that we monitor in all seasons. In this case, the sunlight was blinking on and off due to fast-moving cumulous clouds. (

Image taken in Blue Hill. Maine, on October 8, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Comin’ In

This is Fishing Vessel “Dear Abbie:” on Tuesday, late in the afternoon. One of the more enjoyable sights for some of us here is watching a well-sheered lobster boat coming in fast after a hard day of hauling traps. The boat usually appears from behind Harbor Island and arcs into Naskeag Harbor with bow high, spray rails spewing little sea clouds, and a wide wake.

Near sundown, as shown here, the low sun rays divide the boat into moving areas of flaring light and subtle shadows. The deeper the vessel gets into the Harbor, the more dramatic the shadows. As it slows to stop at the convenience raft and sell its catch, the boat settles down and its small bow wave often becomes luminescent.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 8, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Good Gourd Almighty!

This image of three types of pumpkin appears with my monthly column in the current Ellsworth American.  Click on the image to enlarge it. To read the column about the zany things Americans do with pumpkins and the increasingly popular white versions of this fruit, click here: https://www.5backroad.com/montly-column

In the Right Place: Southbound Tourists

It was a mostly gray and black morning with heavy air and occasional rain, so the discordant honks were appropriate mood music. As usual, I heard them before I saw them, a gaggle of Canada geese, mostly gray and black like the morning, headed south. These are among our (and Canada’s) largest feathered summer residents.

The geese were in one of the sloppiest migrating “Vs” I’ve seen, which indicated that the current leader was a rookie. But, still, it’s always a thrill to have these big birds pass right overhead in hoarse conversation.

Research indicates that Canada geese rotate their migration flight leaders. Honks are used by the leader to set the pace and signal direction changes. The followers reportedly use honks to coordinate aerodynamically-needed position shifts and to encourage keeping pace. It apparently can be a bit like oarsman using songs and other sounds to keep the pace set by a coxswain.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 8, 2024.)

In the Right Place: First Foliage Report

Most of our trees have not started changing into their fall attire or are only in the process of doing so. A very few, like precocious children, cannot help showing off their obvious promise. Here you see one: the locally-admired “Baptist Church Maple yesterday:

Otherwise, there are mostly scattered, warm-colored accents among the greens of the local trees. For example, a few of these colorful sprinkles competed for attention with rock-bound sunburst lichens (Xanthora lichens) at the mouth of Patten Stream yesterday:

(Images taken in N. Sedgwick and Surry, Maine, on October 8, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Opportunity

It rained yesterday, sometimes hesitantly, sometimes steadily. It was a good day for the flora and people who like to walk in a temperate rain. I was lucky to be able to grab the opportunity and see this remarkably diverse area through the enchanting prism of an October rain:

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 7, 2024.)

In the Right Place: He’s Still Here

I call him Ahab. He takes command of our neighbor’s winterized pier and obsessively stares out into Great Cove for hours. (I like to think that he’s vengefully looking for a great white minnow that bit him in the leg while he was fishing in the Cove this spring.) When he swoops over his fishing territory, he’s imposing:

The pending question about this Heron is: Will our inscrutable Great Cove Great Blue take the often-fatal risk of overwintering here, as a growing number of GBHs appear to be doing in Maine?

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 6, 2024; sex assumed.)

In the Right Place: Disentanglements

Here’s what our north field looked like on Thursday. That tan, bush-hogged look takes some getting-used-to at the end of summer. It’s like having your child return from camp with a shaved head or purple hair. You can’t stop staring at the change and wondering about the importance of appearances that you took for granted.

But it’s a good thing, really. The same wonder and stares arose in early June. That’s when the field spurted – seemingly overnight – into a lush green entanglement of grasses, sedges, ferns, and wildflower stalks:

Our small summer field creatures needed that then; this was their honeymoon destination, nursery, camp, and more. It’s now where many deer roam and browse slowly and the occasional bobcat and coyote stride quickly. (Images taken on October 3 and June 11, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Center Harbor and BBY Report

The tide was fairly high, the fog lifting, and the wind just the slightest of whispers when I went down to Center Harbor yesterday. Although the day was gray, the scene was delightful. There were a good number of interesting vessels still moored in the reflective fall waters. As usual, the big construction building of the renowned Brooklin Boat Yard cast the largest reflection.

BBY’s new pier, gear shed, and docking floats appeared to have been mostly restored. (As you may remember, they were virtually destroyed in last winter’s vicious storms.)

Syntax, the BBY-built Wheeler 55 that I’ve previously reported on, was still tied up out front, and the usual crowd of interesting dinghies and other access boats were nestled together like an enormous farm litter.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 4, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Passing the Buck Carefully

We looked closely and determined that one of the twin white-tailed deer fawns that we monitor is a buck. (Eagle-eyed Jim Stascavage was right.) You can see the fawn’s “buttons” in this gross enlargement of an image taken Wednesday:

Here are views of the healthy twins and their Mom, who treats her youngsters equally:

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 2, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Windjammer Watch XXV

Here you see the 130-foot ketch “Angelique” on Tuesday. She’s discharging her passengers onto the western beach of Babson Island where they likely will have an exquisite lunch and an opportunity to explore the rim of the island, climb into its wooded highlands, and roam through the fern fields at its center.

That Island commonly is called Big Babson because there is a small, private island known as Little Babson about 1000 feet to the north, which is virtually connected at low tide. Here’s a chart that includes water depths:

The waters to the east of the islands generally are considered to be Great Cove. The images of “Angelique” above were taken from the Cove shore.

Big Babson now is a public preserve being conserved by the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, which also issued the chart here. The Island was sold to the Trust in 2011 after local residents and others contributed large amounts of money to the Trust to have it preserved in perpetuity. (Photograph taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 1, 2024.)

In the Right Place: Hog Calling

Here you see Dennis Black beginning the annual mowing of our restored fields yesterday. The job often takes more than a day due to some significant slopes and other terrain irregularities. It also can be challenging when the soil is wet.

We postpone the mowing of our fallow fields until the fall to assure that their summer residents – multitudes of birds, insects, reptiles, and other animals – are no longer raising their families there.

The cutting is necessary to prevent quick-growing raspberry bushes, conifer trees, and other larger plants from reappearing and changing the density of the land cover. Many of us have created and maintained fields of wild grasses, sedges, and wildflowers because such environments are disappearing in the United States, endangering the species that breed and live in them.

For equipment buffs: Dennis is riding an AGCO Allis 5670 tractor and pulling what I think is a Woods single-spindle rotary cutter. That type of cutter (or “mower”) commonly is called a “bush hog,” which is not quite correct.

A “Bush Hog®” is a brand name that should be applied only to the field and brush-cutting machines of Bush Hog LLC, headquartered in Selma, Alabama. (That company advertises that, when it first demonstrated its invention in 1951, an amazed farmer said: “That thing eats bushes like a hog.”)

Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 1, 2024.

September Postcards From Down East Maine

This September was, with one major exception, a wonderful month here. Most days were sunny and mild with a slight chill that was more thrilling than chilling. The exception was a consequence of that type of weather: We didn’t get enough rain and fell prey to moderate drought and potential wild fire danger. But we got some good rain toward the end of the month and hope to get more in October.

As for these September postcards, we’ll start as usual with the four local vistas that we document monthly through the year. Here are the September views of clouds over the western mountains of Mount Desert Island at sunset; the virtual mountain known as Blue Hill at the end of Blue Hill Bay at high tide; the iconic red boat house in Conary Cove at low tide, and the summer house on Brooklin’s Harbor Island in a light rain:

We’ll move now to the flora of September with its fruits and warmer early fall colors. The most memorable wild fruit trees were the many abandoned apple trees that we have, both red- and green-fruited, and the orange-fruited mountain ash trees:

The most colorful of September-shaded leaves were the deep reds of viburnum, pale yellows of katsura, and merlot shades of stewartia, although a few maples began to show some reds and yellows:

Of course, it’s the September fields that capture the changing spirit of the season. The greens disappear and the yellows and browns of goldenrod, whites of daisy fleabane, and pastels of pasture asters crowd each other:

The summer colors disappeared in the region’s September gardens and flower patches, but we saw the last of the healthy roses, clematis, and gladiolas during the month:

Marshes, ponds, and woods streams didn’t go dry in the drought conditions, but pond levels dropped and streams that once flowed powerfully became weak or pooled with slow water.

On the fauna front, September is when deer and red squirrels grow their thicker and grayer winter coats and the once small and speckled fawns grow large and fast enough to shed their camouflage speckles toward the end of the month:

Radical changes occur in September among our winged fauna who would rather spend their winters down south. This probably is the last full month that we’ll see our fish-eating great blue herons and ospreys. However, our loyal herring gulls and black-capped chickadees stay with us all year.

This September was a good month for sighting peril-ridden monarch butterflies and their caterpillars, but there were few chrysalises evident. What apparently was the last toad of the year also was sighted during the month.

On the waterfront, September is when the annual Windjammer Sail-In occurs in Great Cove. Seven ‘jammers visited Great Cove then and at other times during the month in varying weather:

American Eagle

Angelique

Heritage

J&E Riggin

Ladona

Lewis R. French

Stephen Taber

The working waterfront at Naskeag Harbor was very busy in September, one of the more intensive months for lobster fishing. It’s the last month of fishing for some fishermen; others will continue for a month or more. We’re told that it’s been a relatively good season with mostly steady, fair prices.

Below are images of the convenience raft in the Harbor that sells bait and fuel and buys lobsters from the fishermen, as well as images of most of our resident fishing vessels during various September days. Note that no two vessels are identical:

On the educational waterfront, the WoodenBoat School’s sailing classes ended in the first half of September. The School’s harbor staff spent the rest of the month removing the classroom fleet from Great Cove and preparing it for winter storage. When the boats leave the Cove, it looks strangely vacant until flocks of ducks and other waterfowl lay claim to the area for the fall and winter.

Sailing is not the only attraction that draws people to our waters. Some prefer to propel themselves, others to paint their beauty, and still others to cast in them for stiped bass:

In case you didn’t notice, 2024 is a Presidential election year. It became abundantly evident here in September from the lawn signs, including some that were so artistic you couldn’t read them from a moving vehicle:

The September full moon — the Harvest Moon — was a good one. It formed first as a gold crescent and then arrived as a supermoon:

Finally, late September is when you buy your pumpkins to make Jack-O’-Lanterns in October and scare away witches and politicians:

(All images in this post were taken in Down East Maine during September 2024.)

In the Right Place: Winterizing

Here you see the tide and a Tom Curry cloud slowly leaving Great Cove yesterday morning. But, you don’t see any of the many boats that give the Cove a wonderfully different – though not necessarily better – character during the summer. The winter ducks and loons are now slowly replacing them.

In the above image, you’re looking West-Northwest through the Cove to Eggemoggin Reach. That’s Little Babson Island on the left and the WoodenBoat School pier on the right. The speck in front of the island is a WBS mooring raft used to install and remove moorings; it soon will be brought in. Tom Curry (as many of you know) is a renowned Brooklin artist who often paints distinctive clouds over islands.

Actually, there still are two or three vessels in the southwestern corner of the Cove near the end of Babson Island, which are unseen here to the left of Little Babson. These late leavers soon will be brought ashore for the winter, but they still include “Frolic,” our neighbor’s beautiful Luders 16:

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on September 29, 2024.)

In the Right Place: September Blues

Here you see our September record image of Blue Hill and Blue Hill Bay. The virtual mountain and its bay patiently wait for the sun to filter through one of those worn-blanket September skies that create a premonition of winter while we still have green leaves.

(Image taken in Blue Hill, Maine, on September 21, 2024.

In the Right Place: Ending Well Department

Another poignant passing: The WoodenBoat School’s 2024 year officially ends today. All of the School’s boats are out of the water and Great Cove seems like a vacant parking lot, albeit the most beautiful one you’ll ever see.

The sights, sounds, and smells of sailing, boatbuilding, and other maritime-oriented activities are gone from the campus until June of 2025. As you see here, the grounds yesterday were littered with boats and equipment being prepared for winter storage or transportation elsewhere.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on September 27, 2024.)

In the Right Place: More of the Same, Please

Below, you’ll see our bird bath in the much-needed soaking rain that fell here yesterday.  But it probably wasn’t nearly-enough.

We were classified in yesterday’s federal U.S. Drought Monitor as experiencing “moderate drought” along the Maine coast and “abnormally dry” in much of the rest of the state:

We’re not the only eastern state to be experiencing dryness problems. The Monitor reported yesterday that, “dryness has nearly depleted topsoil moisture, which was rated 91% very short to short in Maryland, along with 90% in Delaware, 84% in New Jersey, 78% in Massachusetts, and 70% in Maine.” You can find the drought/dryness status of your area on the U.S. Drought Monitor’s website.

(Photo taken in Brooklin, Maine, on September 26, 2024.)