Spending my summers as an employee of the Maine Department of Conservation, Bureau of Parks and Lands, at Camden Hills State Park, I have the pleasure of talking with thousands of visitors “from away” and describing to them the things that make our beloved state so special. The two questions I’m asked the most, by […]

While bicycling one recent morning, I stopped at a convenience store to buy more Vitaminwater to get me home, and a quick conversation with three men in the parking lot started me thinking — once again — about the long road to becoming a knowledgeable amateur naturalist.

Spring is a mixed bag for fishing. Sure the bugs are thick — but so are the hatches. And across Maine, biologists still report fast fishing typical of cool spring weather.

The scenic hills and farmlands of Montville are located roughly 15 miles west of Belfast and Penobscot Bay, sandwiched between Route 137 to the north and Route 3 to the south. Travel the rural roads of this quiet little community and you would never know that it contains a wealth of conservation lands and hiking trails, but it’s true.

For one of the truly outstanding paddling and mountain gazing experiences in the Northeast, consider a visit to Eagle Lake on Mount Desert Island this June. At 425 acres, Eagle Lake is the largest freshwater pond in Acadia National Park. June is a great time to visit; kids are still in school, and the notorious Acadia hordes of tourists have yet to fully engulf the park. Plus, Mother Nature is in full summer mode.

Back then, few folks hunted in spring — say for bears (legal then), woodchucks and crows. They concentrated on angling, but that changed after the successful turkey introduction in this state during the 1980s.

June always marks the beginning of summer for us in the Northern Hemisphere. That will happen at 7:09 p.m. Wednesday, June 20. The sun reaches its highest and northernmost point on the celestial sphere at that moment. That is also known as the summer solstice and will give us the longest day and shortest night of the year.

I got fooled again. My wife and I were recently looking out over Johnson Bay, a small embayment in Lubec that is a part of Cobscook Bay. Over the water I saw a long string of dark material. I thought it was a line of algal wrack, carried offshore by the powerful tides in Cobscook Bay and caught at the interface between two currents.

When trout and salmon gently sip floating insects off the surface, it often means that they are feeding on hatching aquatic insects, dead-drifting with the current or just sitting on still water, typical behavior for mayflies.

The arrival of a new season always comes with a certain amount of anticipation on the part of turkey hunters. This year’s early spring green-up seemed to increase the anxiety as hunters pondered how it might affect their success.