Photo courtesy of North Maine WoodsThere is the north Maine woods: the vast expanse of trees and mountains and ponds that makes up a significant portion of the Pine Tree State. Then there is North Maine Woods, the organization that manages recreation on 3.5 million acres of the state owned by a variety of landowners,…
By Joe Rankin A forest, like all living things, is constantly changing. Sometimes the changes are big and abrupt and obvious and sometimes small and gradual and unnoticeable. A few years ago I started an experiment in forest succession. Primary succession, to be precise, on about an acre and a half across the road. For…
The forest — any forest, really — doesn’t just stretch out across the land like a blanket (or a washcloth if it’s a small patch of woodland). It goes up and down as well. But this vertical dimension is something we overlook, even those of us who find forests endlessly fascinating. For instance, we often…
By Joe Rankin Predominantly forested has been the steady state of Maine’s landscape for the vast majority of the last 10,000 years. In fact, Maine is the most forested state in the nation—about 90 percent. This forest has provided game, fish, and medicine to Indigenous Peoples since before recorded history. European settlers arriving to colonize…
There’s something about the winter woods — the profound silence, the sheer whiteness. Snow whispering through the branches of the firs or slanting sunlight. The, well, purity and profound timelessness of it. But that’s our human perception. Far from being a place caught out of time, the winter woods are a happening neighborhood. It may…
By JOE RANKIN There is something about big trees that stirs up a feeling of awe in us. And when those trees grow together in an old growth forest, the feeling is magnified. We drop our hubris and can see time on a different level, and the slow workings of nature. Native Americans cleared…
Brett Mitchell has a vested interest in keeping tabs on the population of spruce budworm moths — he and his son own a 45-acre Christmas tree farm — 45,000 balsam fir trees — in St. Agatha at the northern tip of Maine. So, when he heard about a program looking for would-be citizen scientists to put…
By JOE RANKIN You’re in a store, say, and you look around you at the other patrons. Can you tell who is healthy? For a few, maybe. For most, probably not. Light in the forest (Photo: Rankin file)Things are similar for a forest. Just look at the trees and it might be hard to tell…
By Joe RankinForests for Maine’s Future Writer It’s not every educator who sees a teaching opportunity in a forest-munching nondescript brownish-gray moth. But Susan Linscott does. And not just an opportunity to inform her students, but her community as well about the spruce budworm, a cyclical pest of spruce and fir trees that is now…
By JOE RANKIN Forests for Maine’s Future Writer You could tell where George Merrill was working by the muted growl of the machinery. We picked our way down the slope on a packed double-track carpeted with hemlock boughs stripped from the trees he was cutting. At the end of the trail, Merrill finished limbing and…
