We have discovered where the Abominable Snowman sleeps and where he eats his breakfast of a dozen cold, raw eggs with shell.
Don’t tell anybody. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine on January 22 [ hammock] and 24 [eggs], 2025.)
Here you see a deep-winter view of the near-mountain called Blue Hill as it rose above Blue Hill Bay yesterday. Snow flurries had just ended and the sea ice in the Bay was breaking up under the strain of a fast-rising tide:
(Images taken in Blue Hill, Maine, on January 23, 2025.)
It’s good to see this old house being fixed up, albeit slowly and perhaps mostly by only one talented person in his spare time. See the new clapboards on the old addition:
The house has good Maine character and very nice dormers have been added lately. It also is visible from the road, which makes a fix-up more important. The tree shadows on the snow in the foreground seem to be pointing at it and saying, “Look at this place!” (Images taken in Brooklin. Maine, on January 22, 2025.)
The intense, low light of sunny January afternoons enters our screened porch at an oblique angle that can create intriguing shadows and contrasts. This sometimes proves to be an irresistible metering and framing challenge for a student of photography who is stuck mostly in the house due to the cold and snow.
(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on January 15, 2025.)
Here you see a desperate American robin devouring the last of our winterberry fruits – among the bird’s least-preferred foods – as the barometer sinks. This was the day before the “Inaugural Storm” that laid down 3-4 inches of snow and made our cold spell colder.
More robins (and some other species) reportedly have been overwintering in Maine in the past few years as the winters get milder. This may be beginning to strain the availability of suitable foods for all our feathered friends during the cold months.
Robins seem to like crabapples, holly, juniper, and hawthorn best in winter when earthworms and insects are not available, but will eat low-energy foods such as winterberry and burning bush (euonymus), if those are all that’s available.
Unlike in the spring and summer, when robins are very territorial, they often feed in flocks in the winter when they’re more visible to hawks – the herd defense of more eyes and ears and a mathematically less likelihood they’ll be singled out when the predator dives. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on January 19, 2025.)
The snow storm and freezing temperatures that intruded boorishly into yesterday’s NFL Divisional Playoffs in Philadelphia and Buffalo arrived here last night in a better mood and displayed better manners. The storm gently deposited a little more than three inches of pure snow without disrupting our power or toppling any trees. After a little early morning encore, it left us alone and allowed the sun to showcase the purified landscape.
Here’s the gray end of the storm early this morning before the sun showed up with any strength:
Sunlight, tentative at first, eventually crept though the woods and illuminated fields:
Some private lanes were plowed early, some plowed after I arrived, but all town streets were well plowed early in the morning:
Residences and other structures seem to be refreshed by a snow like this:
Snowstorms are especially capable of cleaning up working harbors, even at low tide:
One of the joys of a gentle storm is getting up in the morning and walking through the house in your pajamas, looking at the different views of peaceful scenes, while being contentedly warm:
Outside artworks adopt new personalities in gentle snow storms, including one-of-a-kind handrails by blacksmith Doug Wilson of Little Deer Isle and urns and a birdbath by Lunaform’s artisans in Hancock:
Finally, the day ended with a fitting sunset:
(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on January 20, 2025.)
As you see, there still are many burning bush berries available. However, the birds are finally starting to eat them because virtually all the native winterberry and choice native fruits and their seeds have been consumed by wildlife during these cold days.
That’s a sign of the problem with one of the most popular fall-color plants, a problem that has to be reluctantly admitted: burning bush plants (Euonymus alatus) are bad actors. Burning bush plants, non-natives, are extraordinarily invasive. Not so much in well-attended back yards, but in the woods where birds deposit their berries’ seeds, complete with bird fertilizer.
Dense thickets of burning bush crowd out native plants that produce more nutritious foods that wildlife prefer and need – if they can get it. With climate warming encouraging migrating birds to stay here longer, the availability of good food for them and for the overwintering wildlife is becoming an issue.
For long flights or for enduring cold weather, energy-producing (especially fat-containing) foods are life savers. Burning bush reportedly contains very little compared to the fruits of many native plants that it is replacing. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on January 17, 2025.)
Waking up to the moon sneaking away in a blue sky and above sunlit fields and woods has been an inspiration for many artists. Here you see yesterday’s morning moon: egg-shaped, low, and about 245,075 miles to our northwest, but still visible until it “set” (disappeared over the horizon) at 9:12 a.m. My amateur understanding of the phenomenon, for what its worth, follows.
Morning moons often occur on clear days shortly after the full moon. That’s when the moon is setting later and later and becomes “high” enough to be visible in daylight. This month, for example, the moon here rose full (fully illuminated) on January 13 and set at 7:21 the following morning, but it wasn’t high enough in our view to see after daylight.
Yesterday, the moon was “waning” (less and less of it was being illuminated by the sun as time was going by). It was a “gibbous” moon (“GIB-us,” not “JIB-us,” from the Latin word for “hump”). That is, the moon is gibbous when the area visible to us is more than 50 percent and in the process of decreasing or increasing.
At 50 percent illumination, the moon reaches one fourth of its cycle (“first quarter moon”) or three fourths of its cycle (“third quarter moon”). At other times, as the moon’s surface is becoming more and more visible to us, it is said to be a “waxing” moon (from the Old English for “to grow”). Whether waxing or waning, the moon’s illuminated part will eventually be crescent-shaped due to the angle of sun rays; the crescent and other moon phases are not caused by the earth’s shadow (except in a relatively rare lunar eclipse).
(Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on January 17, 2025.)
Take a cold and bright January day that makes you zip up all the way; spread untrammeled snow that makes you squint; drop in naked trees that hallelujah into blue-glazed skies, and add a familiar old structure that seems to have been there forever – and let your eyes feast.
Here you see the Friend Memorial Public Library in the shadows of two immense sugar maples whose leaves shade the lawn in summer and bejewel the area in fall. The main structure (approximately the front half) of the Library was built in 1912, when the trees apparently were planted as ten-foot teenagers. The building has been extended and there are plans to further enlarge the Library.
In the first Comment space you’ll see a snow-covered lawn and a workshop amidst a crowd of wild paper birch trees: white-on-white-on-white. The shop was built in the early 1900s and reportedly was used to make wooden decoys for duck hunting, among other things.
According to the literature, sugar maples can live 300-400 years and wild paper birches can live 80-140 years. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on January 13 [shed] and 14 [Library], 2025.)
Here’s a January – very wintery – view of the classic red boat shed (boat house) at Conary Cove that travelers on Rt. 175 look forward to seeing as they approach the Cove. As many of you know, we monitor this site (and sight) regularly. Below is a slightly sunny image from the same day:
There’s an irony here – this probably is the most beloved boat shed in the area and it apparently hasn’t housed a boat for many years. I guess you don’t have to work when you’re a popular landmark.
This boat shed reportedly was built in 1924 and was painted white for many years. Old photographs reveal that It also had a pier protruding into the Cove from its north (left end) side. The property was sold to several subsequent owners, all of whom maintained the boathouse at least for the public view, according to reports. It was painted red in the 1950s and has remained so since. (Images taken in Blue Hill, Maine, on January 12, 2025.)
Here’s yesterday’s view of the western mountains on Mount Desert Island making their own weather again. As usual, this regularly-monitored view is from Brooklin’s Amen Ridge across Blue Hill and Jericho Bays.
MDI, as many of you know, is Maine’s largest island and it is accessible by bridge. About half of MDI is occupied by the very popular Acadia National Park, where Mt. Cadillac, the tallest mountain on the east coast of the U.S, rises as a landmark and seamark.
Acadia National Park is not limited to MDI. It also includes the spectacular rockbound point of Schoodic Peninsula on the nearby coast of Maine, where often-wild surf crashes onto beautiful, huge ledges of pink granite that have been cut through with black basalt dikes. In addition, the Park includes a good part of Isle au Haut out in the Atlantic Ocean, and parts of 16 smaller outlying islands. (Image taken from Brooklin, Maine, on January 14, 2025.)
We continue exploring the variability of local boat sheds (boat houses). Here you see a classically spare boat shed tucked into a stand of spruce. It’s a relatively recent construction by a neighbor to enclose a special vessel.
When the door is swung open, you see the trimaran SYZYGY sitting there contentedly like a huddled ptarmigan with her “wings” tucked in:
There’s a lot to say about this boat, so please bear with me. First, there is her name. As the star-gazers know, syzygy (““SIZZ-uh-jee“) is an English language word derived from the Greek. It means the alignment of three or more celestial bodies, such as a syzygy of the sun, moon, and earth that sometimes leads to our seeing an eclipse.
Second, as the sailors know, a trimaran is a three-hulled vessel that differs from a catamaran by having one more hull, but both names are derived from the ancient South Asian Tamil language. In that area, the south Pacific islands and landmasses were in large part first populated by exploring Polynesian sailors who came in multi-hull vessels (usually two-hulled outriggers, some huge).
Third, many (if not most) multi-hull boat owners still refer to the major parts of their vessels by using the Polynesian terms for them: The “vaka” is the main hull, an “ama” is an outrigger hull, and an “aka” is the support connecting an outrigger hull to the main hull, according to the literature.
Finally, back to the petite SYZYGY (her on-the-hull name is in all capital letters). She’s 21’ long by 16’ wide when the amas are fully spread. She was designed and built by the famed multi-hull pioneer John Marples, who now resides in Penobscot, Maine.
(Images taken in Brookin, Maine on January 9 [open door] and 12, 2025.)
We had a gentle snowstorm over the weekend, which left a legacy of Maine coast winter scenes. Here are a few for our snowmophiles:
(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on January 13, 2025.)
We continue with the variability of boat sheds (boat houses). This handsome structure might look like an old barn to some, but it’s a relatively new private boat shed put up by a neighbor. It has solar panels on its roof and small boats in its loft, neither of which can be seen from this view.
On the ground floor, however, where the doors slide easily open, you’ll see a 1986 18’ Pete Culler cat ketch built at the Rockport Apprentice School on the left and a 1953 14’ Lyman runabout out of Camden on the right:
(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on January 9, 2025.)
Here’s the very beginning of one of those magical celestial moments. It’s the time called “the blue hour,” which is a translation of the French characterization “l’heure bleue.” Despite its name, however, the phenomenon sometimes lasts only minutes.
According to the literature (and if I’m reading it correctly), the blue hour can occur when the sun is far enough below the horizon and the ozone layer is in position to help filter and absorb the remaining radiating sunlight, so that our star’s blue wavelengths dominate what we see.
That is, the sun’s red wavelengths at that moment shoot “up” high and escape through space, while its blue light is scattered in our less clear atmosphere and seems to paint everything varying shades of the color. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on January 7, 2025.)
This crammed-in entrance is to a structure at the Brooklin Boat Yard. The shed is thought to have been part of a sardine and clam canning company that was there in the very early 1900s. It’s now a BBY storage shed for small vessels and related gear. Small boats stored in the shed are stacked three-high under hanging masts and amid piles of buoys and other marine paraphernalia:
The shed is long and narrow, with a sliding door on this shore-side end and gaited access to Center Harbor’s waters at the other for launching the boats.
(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on January 8, 2025.)
This image of a golden eagle appears with my monthly column in the current Ellsworth American. It’s an injured, captive bird. To read the column about a Christmas gift for bald eagles and a New Year’s resolution for golden eagles, click here: https://www.5backroad.com/montly-lumn
We still have plenty of winterberry bursts along the roads and woods’ edges. That’s probably a good sign, indicating a low-stress winter so far. The berries and twigs are usually a food of last resort for most wildlife.
The berries are low in fat and protein and relatively high in carbohydrates. When they first appear, their taste is unpalatable – apparently an evolved trait to assure that they are available to wildlife late in the winter, when their taste improves and feeding conditions can get difficult. (Winterberry fruits generally are considered toxic or at least not healthy for humans, especially children.)
Many winter birds will eat the winterberry fruits and seeds when times are hard, as will raccoons and some smaller rodents. Rabbits, deer, and moose reportedly will eat winterberry plant twigs as a meal of last resort. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on January 6, 2025.)
It was the gray dawn hour yesterday, before the sunlight rose and streamed over the ridge to pour onto our north field. The thermometer registered 13°F. As usual, while I dressed, I was looking out the window into the dimness for something interesting along the field’s edge. Suddenly, there appeared to be movement there.
The wary white-tailed buck that I had not seen since November emerged slowly through a curtain of spruce branches and tall grasses into the half-light, ghost-like. He had made it through the hunting season and was in excellent shape. So was his eight-point rack of antlers.
I tossed on a robe, jammed on some slippers, grabbed a camera with a long lens, and snuck out onto the upper deck. (Brrr; don’t tell Barbara.) I got off three, quick 500 mm “shots” in the twilight. He didn’t see me, but he apparently heard the shutter and eased back into the woods, like a passing thought. The day had begun with good news.
In Maine, white-tailed deer bucks shed their antlers during January through March, for the most part. Exactly when they shed them depends on a number of factors, including the following: Age (older bucks usually shed before younger); Stress (the more, the earlier shedding); Nutrition (the better, the later); Testosterone Levels (the higher, the later), and of course that wildcard, Genetics.
(Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on January 5, 2025.)
Here you see one of those blue-skies-over-blue-waters sights that can tempt you to sit down and spend an hour or so taking it all in and trying to get your mind balanced – but not yesterday, when this image was taken at Blue Hill Bay. That’s ice forming just beyond the small granite ledge.
The day had reached its maximum ambient temperature of 29° (F) with a wind chill in the teens. It would be high tide within 30 minutes and the water temperature was a recorded 41° at the time here. That is, the water was warmer than what your nose was feeling.
(Image taken in Blue Hill, Maine, on January 4, 2024.)