Stories about the people, places, and culture of Maine.
Stories
Places
A Village for All Seasons
For more than a century, Northeast Harbor has existed as a bond between year-round locals and a summer colony comprising some of the nation’s wealthiest families, an interaction so tightly and deeply woven that to speak of two separate communities is to oversimplify. But two devastating downtown fires have forced residents to reckon with other, more insidious losses that have occurred over the last few decades: the near extinction of the year-round population and the village anchors it supported.
Nowhere Land
To get to Estcourt Station, a speck of a village in northern Maine, you have to cross the border into Canada, then cross back into the United States. Or, you can avoid the border crossing altogether by following a bone-rattling, pothole-filled dirt road through the Maine North Woods (moose sightings are likely). Find out how a Maine village became wrapped in a Quebec neighborhood — and how 9/11 changed it forever.
Alone Together
At the turn of the 20th century, 300 of Maine’s 3,000-plus coastal islands hosted thriving year-round communities. Today there are just 15, including Great Cranberry and Islesford. Together, they're one town, Cranberry Isles, but sometimes the mile-wide channel that separates them seems as vast as the ocean.
Science & Wildlife
Where the Loons Call
If you’ve ever been out on a lake in Maine, you know loons are elusive. But on a warm summer night on Little Sebago Lake, David Evers, of the Biodiversity Research Institute, got loons to swim right up to our boat and let us grab them. Here's how he did it and why. (Since this article was published, one of the Maine chicks translocated to Assawompset Pond Complex in Lakeville, )Massachusetts, has returned as an adult and hatched a chick of its own -- the first chick to be hatched in southeastern Massachusetts in 100 years.)
A Breaking Wave
While warmer waters caused by climate change have sent lobster catches plummeting south of Cape Cod, temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have been ideal for lobsters, contributing to record-breaking catches in the 2010s. Now, however, the water here may be getting too warm. Richard Wahle and his team from University of Maine School of Marine Sciences are capturing and counting baby lobsters to see what they can tell us about the future of Maine's $1 billion industry.
Hagfish: Maine's Nastiest Little Fishery
When stressed or attacked, a single 20-inch-long hagfish spews a quart of stringy, suffocating slime in less than a second, and the stuff rapidly expands as it mixes with seawater. Slime eels, as fishermen call them, are downright disgusting, but South Korean foodies love them. For a few years, some Maine lobstermen went "eeling" in their off-season to meet the soaring demand.
