Tag Archives: maine

Sandplain

Above ground: fires run through here every other year. Below ground: glacier-dumped sand, long washed of its nutriment. Between the two, plants that survive in the sandplains only with the help of fungal partners whose skinny bodies worm through the acid, root-hostile soil, scavenging minerals.

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We call the plants lowbush blueberries and little bluestem grass, growing ankle high between scorch-barked, straggly pitch pines. Other names, too: Little bluestem is “poverty grass” and blueberry fruit is harvested in poverty.

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No leanness for migrant birds, though, who pluck at sun-puckered blueberries and wind-blown grass seed. Their bodies fatten here, storing plant-captured sunlight for migratory treks from Canada to the southern US and beyond. A dozen flickers flock like sparrows, feeding low to the ground, then scattering to shelter in pines. Field sparrows and cedar waxwings rise like dust in our wake as we traverse the fields. Palm warblers scurry rabbit-like among the blueberry plants. Above this tumble of small birds: merlins, sharp-shinned hawks, kestrels. Predators, too, need their autumnal fat and frost-edged nights make the hunters flesh-hungry. A merlin and hawk lance and twist in an aerial chase, then each wings to its own corner of the fields.

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Once these sandplain communities covered large parts of coastal New England, but fire suppression has choked most with woodland. Housing development claims the rest. In a few places restoration efforts have pushed back the trees, opening habitat available nowhere else. These efforts involve controlled burns, land acquisitions, yearly mowing, signage, insurance, staffing: the poverty left by the retreat of glaciers is expensive to maintain.
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Merrymeeting

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At the confluence of six rivers and a long tidal inlet: 9000 acres of part-salted water and mud known as the Merrymeeting Bay. Forty percent of Maine’s freshwater flows to the Gulf of Maine through this inland delta. The Gulf’s waters surge into bay twice daily, pushed by oceanic tidal forces but slowed by their long passage through the rock cleft that is the lower Kennebec River. High tide here is hours later than on the coast.

For decades, the waters were so polluted that paint would peel from any building located near the bay or its upstream rivers. Great rafts of dead fish flowed out with the tides. The stink worked its ways into the growth pattern of towns. Apart from huge brick-walled mills — now shuttered or turned to self-storage units — towns and farms turned their backs on the river and bay. Only the poorest parts of town had water views. Unlike the southern Maine seacoast that is now largely encrusted with expensive houses, shores here comprise rock, poisoned mud, and a few scattered hunting lodges. This leaves room for others: Eagles are common, although their bodies are spiced with the toxic remnants of upstream industries. Signs warn humans not to consume the fish, but eagles don’t give a damn about what they read. The flow of some chemical effluent is now diverted into other rivers, other bodies, in other lands. Outsourced, to benefit America’s waters and retail outlets.

Wild rice grows in abundance on the mudflats. In late summer bobolinks flee the mown inland meadows to feast in the rice thickets and roost. Now, at the equinox, the bobolinks are winging away to try their luck in a southern continent. Ducks gather in their place to dabble at rice and aquatic insects. Below the water, endangered short-nosed and Atlantic sturgeon swim slowly upstream, nosing through a vestige.

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Ocean teenagers leaving their shed clothes everywhere

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Small horseshoe crab shells have started littering the wrack line in Middle Bay, Maine. Every high tide brings more, sometimes half a dozen shells for every meter or so of wrack.

These are not dead crabs (the May full moon mating frenzy left plenty of those), but the discarded exoskeletons of molting juveniles. Young horseshoe crabs spend the first few years of their lives in the muddy bottom of the bay, just below the lowest reach of the tide. In August they molt, crawling head-first out of their old shells, then the animals swell up and harden their new armor. The cast-off shells wash ashore. Mature horseshoe crabs don’t molt, so these shed skeletons are all from growing youngsters. I’d guess the one in the photo is about two or three years old. This year’s hatchlings are still less than an inch across.

These are good things to find. Although the species is protected in Maine, horseshoe crab populations elsewhere have been hammered over the last decades by harvesting for bait and for bleeding (to yield chemicals used in human blood tests). Seeing new generations coming along is good news for the horseshoe crabs (who’ve been around largely unchanged for >400 million years) and for the migrant birds that depend on their springtime eggs for food.

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Living flypaper

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On the edge of a mountain bog in Maine, a thumbnail-sized plant grows amid the mosses:

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This is sundew, Drosera, a carnivorous plant, ready to ambush.

Darwin devoted twelve chapters of his 1875 book, Insectivorous Plants, to the anatomy, behavior, and physiology of a European species of Drosera. He writes:

During the summer of 1860, I was surprised by finding how large a number of insects were caught by the leaves of the common sun-dew (Drosera rotundifolia) on a heath in Sussex. I had heard that insects were thus caught, but knew nothing further on the subject… I gathered by chance a dozen plants, bearing fifty-six fully expanded leaves, … it was soon evident that Drosera was excellently adapted for the special purpose of catching insects, so that the subject seemed well worthy of investigation.

The results have proved highly remarkable; the more important ones being—firstly, the extraordinary sensitiveness of the glands to slight pressure and to minute doses of certain nitrogenous fluids, as shown by the movements of the so-called hairs or tentacles; secondly, the power possessed by the leaves of rendering soluble or digesting nitrogenous substances, and of afterwards absorbing them; thirdly, the changes which take place within the cells of the tentacles, when the glands are excited in various ways.

We now know that sundews are forced into a carnivorous mode of existence by the poor soils of the bogs in which they live. They are starved of nitrogen and, not being able to find any through their roots, resort to feasting on flying nitrogenous sources, aka insects. (If extra nitrogen is added to their roots, they back off from carnivory.) The “dew” on the plants’ leaves is sweet and sticky; the droplets lure and trap passing sugar-seekers. The plants’ movable hairs and leaves then draw their victims into the center of the rosette of leaves where glands digest then absorb the meal.

Insects also serve as pollinators of the sundew’s flowers. You’ll note that the flower stalks holding opening buds in the pictures above are very tall. Natural selection evidently says: don’t eat your pollinator for lunch.

My camera could not capture the full beauty of the sundew’s leaves. The following photo by “I, Petr Dlouhý” (generously shared under a Creative Commons license) gives a glimpse. The last thing a gnat sees before The End:

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Cold, cold bathing (duckling style)

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The Labrador Current carries water from northern Greenland down the Canadian coast, then swirls its iciness into the Gulf of Maine. On the Maine shore, waiting for the splash, are common eider ducklings:

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During:

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After:

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…whee that was fun, can we go swim now?

In the surf, the downy balls have no trouble. As a breaker approaches, they dive then pop back to the surface, paddling in the sea spume and froth.

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When they hatch the ducklings weigh just 70 grams. After ten weeks of growth those that have not been eaten by gulls and seals are nearly as heavy as adults, about 1600 grams. They accomplish all this while keeping their bodies at 40°C (104°F) despite the frigid water (10°C, 50°F on a good day in the early summer). Their diet must therefore be rich in protein and fat — crustaceans, and other sea animals — and their eiderdown coats tight.

Small avian endotherms have no trouble with the water. Surely I should take a dip and join them?

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I lasted a screamingly cold two minutes. The first minute was pure pain, the second was alarmingly numb. I salute you, eider ducklings.

These eiders in Maine live at the southern edge of a range that encompasses much of the northern coastline around North America and Eurasia. The species is listed as “near threatened” meaning that we have significant cause for concern about its future.

Locally, here in Maine, the situation was dire but has improved. Bradford Allen‘s review of eider biology in Maine reports that over-hunting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries reduced the population from tens or hundreds of thousands of birds to just four birds nesting on one sea island. At the time, many of Maine’s coastal islands were inhabited by people; nesting birds fared very poorly alongside hungry human settlers. By 2000, after several decades of hunting restrictions and the abandonment of Maine islands to well-fed tourists, the population had risen to 29,000 pairs nesting on over 300 islands.

Across North America, population trends are mostly unknown. Hunting continues. According to the Sea Duck Joint Venture, a collaboration among scientific and management groups:

Within North America, most sport harvest occurs along the Atlantic coast; with about 15,000 birds taken in Canada and about 23,000 in the New England states. They continue to be harvested commercially (80,000+ birds/yr) in Greenland, and this may not be sustainable.

BirdLife International reports that:

In Europe the population size is currently declining overall at a rate of >40% over three generations…Given the strong declines in the European population and a lack of compensatory increases in the North American population the overall population trend is thought to be declining moderately rapidly.

So although eider populations have rebounded from the edge of extinction in some parts of coastal Maine, their longer term future is uncertain. Current threats include oil spills, entanglement in nets, over-hunting, disturbance from expanding industrial activity, poisoning from mercury and other pollutants, predation by gulls and eagles, and nesting site disruption by development and tourism.

Maine’s history of near annihilation followed by recovery gives us reason for hope. If we can stay out of their way, young eiders will continue their 28 million year history of salt-water life.

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New England clam preparation, gull style

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Drifts of smashed clam shells lie on the exposed rocks at the high tide mark.

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These are the leavings of aerial bombardment by herring gulls. As the tide recedes, mud flats are revealed and, buried in the gray ooze, quahog clams. These are big, heavy-shelled creatures, sometimes as large as my hand.

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Their interior surface is blushed with purple at one end. Beads made from this colored shells were used as wampam currency by some of the American Indians of this region and, later, by European settlers. In the 17th century, tuition at Harvard could be paid with “1,900 beads of purple quahog and white whelk.” The scientific name of the clam, Mercenaria mercenaria, derives from the species’ importance in human mercantile transactions.

Purple from gastropods was also highly valued on the other side of the Atlantic: Tyrian purple favored by the Imperial elites of the Mediterranean and, later, Christian bishops, came from sea snails. Lately, molluscs have fallen from favor as status symbols, a loss for human aesthetics, but a gain for clams and snails.

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As the tide falls, herring gulls gather quahogs from the mud, then fly to the rocky shore:

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Just before they reach the rocks, the birds oar their wings to gain altitude, then toss the clam from their beak toward the ground:

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The clams accelerate as they fall, but also move horizontally, carried by the forward momentum of the gulls’ flight. The birds know exactly when to release their clams, the crack of impact always falls on rock, even when birds release the clam while still winging over mud or grass. Like humans who can throw a newspaper from a moving bike and always hit the mark, gulls are well-practiced at lobbing their food at the best shell-splitting rocks. On this short stretch of coastline, the birds have three favorite sites and each one is smothered in shell remains.

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The violence of the fall is enough to break open the hard shells of the quahog clams:

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Gulls quickly consume clam’s innards, a sizeable meal for a bird (a few large quahogs are enough to make a chowder that will fill a human belly). But the clam’s afterlife continues beyond gull gizzards. Within minutes of a gull’s departure, springtails colonize leftovers, munching on protein and fat:

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Then, when the tide returns, algae colonize the leftover shells, gastropods graze over calcium-rich surfaces, and small fish and crabs take refuge under shelly eaves.

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Gulls are not the only foragers. People — “clammers” — also follow the tide, raking the mud for quahogs and soft-shelled clams.

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Clams are the third largest fishery in Maine, one rife with controversy about the right way to manage clams in the face of invasive predatory green crabs, warming waters, and pollution.

While humans fret (with good reason), herring gulls play (also, I think, with good reason). On warm days, the birds drop then re-catch clams seemingly for the joy of it. The feelings of clams about all this are, as yet, unstudied by students of animal behavior. Complete the aphorism, The unexamined clam is…

Fiddlehead gastronomy

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You know you’ve arrived in Maine when the supermarket has a fern fiddlehead special in the produce section:

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And Portland restaurants find ways of preparing the ferny curls with chard and dressing:

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And, a few weeks later, when the wild ferns have fully unfurled, the remnant kitchen fiddleheads are roasted and turned to soup:

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Ferns are well defended both mechanically (tough to chew on) and chemically (how many insects do you see munching on fern leaves?), so they seldom appear on human plates. After a long winter, though, anything green looks good to vitamin-starved mammals, so people cut the young unfurling fronds of ostrich fern — fern furls curtailed forever, very poignant — and eat them raw, lightly steamed, or roasted. Ferns can bear a small amount of harvesting, but repeated cutting will kill the plant.

Ferns are also harvested for food in Korea and Japan, always as fiddleheads. I’d be interested to know of examples from other cultures. In the non-human realm, the European woodmouse loves to chew on ferns, perhaps echoing the dietary preferences of sauropod dinosaurs?