Category: Nature

Island Journal

Sears Island’s Long Industrial Courtship

It’s 3:58 p.m. on Dec. 21, and the sun is about to set over Sears Island, the forested, causeway-connected spot in upper Penobscot Bay where we’ve come to observe the Winter Solstice. It’s cold out there—20-something degrees and windy—and we’re parked with others along the road leading to the island, watching the sun dip over Mack Point to the west. The event we’re here for isn’t really the sunset but something called “Solstice by the Sea,” imagined and engineered by Friends of Sears Island, a conservation-minded group dedicated to protecting Sears Island in its current undeveloped state. SEE MORE

Island Journal

How Far Can a Fish Run?

Alewives, a sea-run fish, are a sustainable source of bait for lobster and halibut. These fish are harvested at Damariscotta Mills and then loaded into local fishermen’s trucks. It’s not rocket science. “Take a freshwater fish, put it in salt water, and you’ve killed it. Take a marine fish, put… SEE MORE

Island Journal

Fifty Years of Cleaner Water

The site of the Continental Mill in Lewiston on the Androscoggin River as seen from Auburn, the western bank. Textile mills like the ones in Lewiston as well as paper mills upstream contributed significantly to the Androscoggin’s degradation in the 1950s and 60s. PHOTO: JACK SULLIVAN Fifty years ago, Maine… SEE MORE

Island Journal

The ‘Undeclared War’ on the Reviled Cormorant

One summer morning in about 1963, I was fooling around in my 14-foot flat-bottomed punt near the beach on Mackerel Cove. Probably I was wrestling as usual with the oversized 15-horse Johnson outboard that was attached with clamps, twine, and hope to the punt’s frail transom, I can’t remember exactly.… SEE MORE

Island Journal

The Unique Environment of Island Forests

photos by Jack Sullivan Imagine being at sea for weeks, months, or years, seeing only blue, gray, and the foaming white of cresting waves. Imagine smelling only salt, minerals, fish, and then, one day, catching the faintest scent of something different, like honey mixed with cinnamon and turpentine. On the… SEE MORE

Island Journal

The Misunderstood Shark

“Bastid took m’ hook!” Carts, a wiry guy with a cockeyed green cap and gaps in his smile, looked down at me from his precarious perch on the gunnel of the boat. I was about nine years old, and taken aback by his anger about the hook. We were on… SEE MORE
two geese take flight near an island

Island Journal

All eyes on the Chesapeake

The Chesapeake Bay’s past is the stuff of legend: Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith (well, actually John Rolfe), the rockets’ red glare and the anthem it inspired, the Monitor and the Merrimack, oyster pirates and the “Oyster Navy.” The future, though, is shaping up to be the stuff of hard… SEE MORE
cropped long exposure photograph by photographer Jim Nickelson

Island Journal

Alchemy of the Night Sky

The moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun —Timon of Athens, William Shakespeare I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the window pane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff — and I Lived on, flew on, in… SEE MORE