In the Clint Eastwood movie, “Pale Rider,” a group of independent gold prospectors live and pan for gold in a picturesque canyon rimmed with tall fir trees in northern California.…
Columns
There is a bookshelf in my kitchen, full to bursting with cookbooks. Old standards — Fanny Farmer, The Joy of Cooking, The Silver Palate, The Betty Crocker…
A Bird's Tale
It was winter of 1996. The David Cup and McIlroy Award birding competitions were in full swing in the Ithaca, New York, area where Cornell University and its famous Lab of…
Super Bowl Sunday, the great American secular holiday. A chance to gather with friends and family and watch what is typically a pretty mediocre football game. For many of us, the game isn’t…
A Bird's Tale
Birds fly south in the winter and north in the spring. That’s probably how most people in the U.S. would describe the phenomenon of bird migration.
And it’s broadly and…
It is a balmy 8 degrees as I sit down to write this. The first of February in Lincolnville, Maine, the ground blanketed with a nice thick cover of snow. It seems like there have been too…
A Bird's Tale
Warblers, those brightly colored sprites of the bird world, are abundant here in Maine in summer. On a June day in Midcoast Maine during a morning of birding, it’s not too hard to…
A Bird's Tale
We recently wrote about the idea of which backyard bird is the toughest based on a study that pulled together observations of the victor in one-on-one encounters among different bird…
'new people means new food and new parties!'
I like to cook. There is something amazing about putting food in front of people you love — a warm soup on a cold evening, a plate of greens harvested from a summer garden, a custard full of…
That special time of year. The period in the middle of January where the temperature is suddenly above freezing for several days. Puddles appear on frozen driveways, the birds swarm the…
A Bird's Tale
(This week’s column shares Jeff’s perspective; Allison was unable to participate.)
On the pre-dawn drive over to the airport at Owls…
opinion: Phil Crossman: Out to Sea
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Vinalhaven was jumpin’. Served by one wooden ferry that only carried one big car or two small ones, it could hardly be otherwise.
…Has the town changed in the last 51 years? Of course and absolutely not
Happy New Year, Lincolnville!
One of my favorite topics to return to in this little column is what it means to live in Lincolnville. I am obviously…
With rising costs and economic uncertainty, many of us are looking to start the new year by taking more control of our finances and tackling lingering debt. But paying down what you owe takes time…
With the recent snow has come an increase in bird activity at our feeders and the small patches of open ground we’ve cleared under them. When all the birds are trying to access the…
A Bird's Tale
It’s that special time of year again, full of magical anticipation, wondrous excitement, and pure-hearted thankfulness. We are, of course, talking about Christmas Bird Count season,…
A Bird's Tale
Walking our dog on one of these recent very cold days through the snow and ice on what had been the sidewalk only a few weeks ago, we heard a familiar mewing call. It sounded like a…
From the archives: Down to the sea
My desire is to tell you a story, and you probably won't believe it. I guess I am a story teller, but I always tell the truth. This article is about my Great Aunt Mary Christmas. Yes, it is a true…
Thank you, Ken Weed, for years of fire service; Remembering Harry Crockett
When I was a child, every month my brothers and I would receive the magazine Cricket in the mail. Not sure if any of my Gen X readers remember this…
A Bird's Tale
“Is this a turkey vulture?”
That was the question a friend from Gardiner posed to us over Facebook with a link to a video. The clip was captured mid-morning in November by an…
The culmination of Lincolnville’s trio of town events occurred Saturday with the Beach Bonfire. I say three, because these are the ones that most resonate with my nostalgic brain, though I…
A Bird's Tale
Like many people, we traveled to spend time with family for the Thanksgiving holiday. In our case, the travel was a car ride to New York City to be with our son and his girlfriend.…
celebrate light, warmth, and joy against the darkness
It is the first…
There is a fascinating history of women’s clubs in America, rooted in a history that did not often include the role of women in society. Often relegated to auxiliary groups to established…
Where It's At
“Exploding Lobster” by Judy Nixon. At first glance I thought the subject must be a red phoenix rising from the ashes. The white floating objects floating away above the body, feathers. I was quite…
A Bird's Tale
We have recently been checking the amazing MOTUS wildlife tracking database run by Birds Canada (https://motus.org/) and have found some interesting…
opinion: ' Built from blasted rock and engineered to endure oxen, horses, and wagons piled high with limestone, it is a raised stone causeway'
I have been promising myself and others to write about the Rock Road for at least five years, but each time I start, I get so entangled and entranced by some new layer of its history that I never…
Once again, Ma has submitted a wonderful piece of writing for this week’s column:
Putting the Garden to Bed, by Diane Roesing O’Brien
The…
A Bird's Tale
A few days ago, we were walking the dog when we heard what sounded exactly like the sweet call notes of pine grosbeaks. This surprised us. It seemed too early for these northern…
I love that quiet time just before the sun rises, when some internal clock wakes me and I leave my bed to sit in the room that used to be the barn loft, and read the news. Everyone is asleep…
A Bird's Tale
There have been some very interesting rare birds spotted here in Maine over the last week or so. A MacGillivray’s warbler, the western sibling species to the mourning warbler that…
Tuesday is Election Day. 2025 being an off year, there is less to vote on then some years, most notably a couple referendum questions. There is a decent amount of buzz around these, and…
A Bird's Tale
Cool mornings, earthy smells of fallen leaves, and those first high, thin clouds that are more common in winter—it’s late fall here in Maine.
On Friday nights, in the distance…
Ah, the spooky old house. That Halloween icon — the abandoned home, once a place where a family lived, now just the dwelling of ghosts. Every neighborhood needs a haunted house.
…A Bird's Tale
The distinctive buzz and tiny, high-note sputters of the juncos are now everywhere when we walk the neighborhood. That and the high “seet” notes of the white-throated sparrows that…
On the holiday Monday, my wife and I set off to purchase a new dishwasher. Ours, only seven years old, had stopped working, defying all Tracee’s attempts to fix it. For the last several…
A Bird's Tale
Soft powder blue skies extend in all directions. The sea is shades of blue as well. Dark steel blue in the distance flecked with lines of white from barely curling wave tops sliced…
In the autumn of 1992, my father and I packed up the car for a trip out of Lincolnville. It was my senior year at Camden-Rockport High School, and I had spent the spring and summer looking…
A Bird's Tale
Sometimes we birders can be lulled into thinking that once we’ve figured out that the yellow bird on the backyard feeder is an evening grosbeak, not an American goldfinch, we know…
Ma, aka Diane Roesing O’Brien, submitted a piece she wrote in honor of the Lincolnville Historical Society’s Fiftieth Anniversary this week.
Our Historical Society…
A Bird's Tale
We were standing on top of a tall, hill-like jetty near Rockkport, Massachusetts, gazing out at the Gulf of Maine, when we heard a short rattling call from somewhere above us in the…
Where It's At
I walked into Boothbay Region Art Foundation (BRAF) last Saturday night for its annual ARTinME opening reception and awards. And, wow. Just wow. I’ll say it now (and probably later as well): This…
The late afternoon sun lit up the tops of the trees along the street. Most were still green, but the maple at the corner was already showing bright yellows and reds. A tall,…
Special Town Meeting Sept. 29
We went to the fair Sunday morning. The only fair I got to this year, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardners Association’s Common Ground Country Fair.
I’ve been attending…
A Bird's Tale
1. The Weather – How can you not love the weather of September in Maine? Mornings start crisp and fresh with dew on the grass as you watch for warblers in the shrubbery. By afternoon, you’re…
My older brother Bill recently moved back to town. He retired from his career as a high school math teacher, purchased a little place up on Masalin Road, and plans to offer tutoring for…
A Bird's Tale
There are certain birds that really capture the imagination. One of those, for us, and perhaps for many other birders, is the American golden-plover.
The breeding range…
It was a blessedly damp Sunday morning. The rain was so very welcome after an extremely dry spell.
I love a rainy weekend morning. The weekend chores…
A Bird's Tale
We saw a photo of a gorgeous juvenile buff-breasted sandpiper taken a few days ago down on the rocky beach at the Timber Point section of Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in…
