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 comfortable in a t-shirt as you scan the incredibly blue skies for raptors. As evening comes, the coolness returns along with the golden sunlight as you watch for nighthawks swooping over the treetops in search of insects.

2. Lesser Black-backed Gulls – These smaller, yellow-legged cousins of the common great black-back gull, which breeds on Maine islands, reach their peak abundance in Maine in September

From September 15–19, the nation will observe Adult Education and Family Literacy Week, a time dedicated to raising awareness about the critical importance of literacy in helping individuals, families, and communities thrive. Across Maine, the week highlights urgent challenges and inspiring opportunities in addressing adult literacy, led by organizations including Literacy Volunteers Androscoggin, Literacy Volunteers of Bangor, Literacy Volunteers of Franklin & Somerset Counties, Literacy Volunteers Kennebec, Literacy Volunteers of Waldo County, and Midcoast Literacy.

According to the Barbara

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 International Baccalaureate students, maybe pick up some carpentry skills, and, of course, find time to harvest blueberries in the summer, his first vocational love.

It’s pretty cool having both brothers around again.  

Bill the Math teacher, with his impressively analytical brain; our younger brother Andy, the journalist and union leader, with sharp- sometimes acid-wit and strong political convictions; and

ROME, Maine — This year, Pine Tree Camp celebrates its significant 80th anniversary milestone. Founded on the heels of the Great Depression, two world wars, and the effects of polio, Pine Tree Camp was built on the belief that access to nature and recreation is essential for people of all abilities. It was an idea ahead of its time and one that has since shaped the lives of tens of thousands of Maine people. 

It’s remarkable that Pine Tree Camp was founded in the heart of Maine’s rustic Belgrade Lakes Region 45 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law. It’s even

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 extends across the top of the world—from the Canadian and Alaskan Arctic region south into the northern portion of the Boreal biome.

After the short northern summer, though, the birds fly south to spend the northern winter in the southern hemisphere summers of southern South America from Brazil to Argentina and occasionally to Chile.

That’s an incredibly long distance to travel. An American golden-plover nesting on Nunavut

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 were mostly completed yesterday, and Sunday afternoon football is back on. Autumn in Maine.

I was talking to a transplant from a much more populated part of the nation recently, who marveled about the fact that they find themselves talking to the cashier at the local market. Well, yeah. No one here is anonymous, everyone is your neighbor.

I got to thinking about all the characters we live amongst, and the roles we play. The gregarious, the

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife. — John Dewey

I am not focusing on the different political choices we made in the last Presidential election that’s history now.  Instead, I am turning the page and looking ahead with grave concern. I am frightened by frequent executive actions declared by President Trump, many challenging the Constitution and threatening our Democracy.

On Friday August 8, 2025, the Camden High School (CHS) Alumni Association held its 119th Annual Alumni Banquet at the Elks Club Lodge in Rockland, Maine. There were 121 alumni and guests who attended the event with classes from 1948 to 1968.

One of the highlights of the evening program was the announcement of the recipient of the CHS Alumni Association Recognition Award. This year the 2025 Camden High School Alumni Recognition Award was presented to William R. Anderson of Camden and a member of the CHS Class of 1965. He taught at Camden Hills Regional High School for 17 years in the Special

Coastal Recovery Community Center (CRCC), along with Knox County Treatment Court, sponsored a fun afternoon of grilling and conversation on the lawn of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Rockland. Ashlee Herrick, Case Manager with Reg. 6 Treatment and Recovery Court, Knox Maine Pretrial Services, Inc., reached out to CRCC’s co-founder and board president Erin Hustus, for a brainstorming session to plan for the mid-August event.

Herrick and Hustus, along with familiar volunteer faces from both nonprofits, brought an impressive-sized grill, lots of hotdogs, salads, crunchies, sweets, and drinks

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 Biddeford. It got us reminiscing and trying to remember when and where we had last seen one of these striking birds. We remembered the handful of times when we’d seen them here in Maine and at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge in upstate New York, but the exact last time and place, we could not remember.

Buff-breasted sandpipers nest in the Arctic, about a quarter of the population nesting on Alaska’s North

Most of us who have engaged in foreign relations activities over the past several decades focus on the “hard power” aspects of international affairs.  Hard power includes the military – from weapons procurement or use to arms control agreements; international economics – from international trade to sanctions and tariffs; and diplomacy in pursuit of specific U.S. policy goals. 

On Saturday, August 30, from 10 to 11 a.m., approximately 80 demonstrators gathered in Port Clyde near the summer home of  U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, according to one of the organizers, Nancy Galland.

Midcoast Maine and The Audacity, both citizen groups, had announced Aug. 29 that they would again hold a flotilla of protesters, as they had done July 19, "to bring attention to the far-right decisions by Chief Justice Roberts that have gutted laws once protecting freedoms and funding for the well-being of all populations in the USA."

The groups said in their Aug. 29 news

At an August 26 event celebrating the end of the long and tortuous Main Street construction in Searsport, Sen. Susan Collins was repeatedly interrupted by protesters who were critical of her votes to arm and finance the Israeli genocide in Gaza.  At one point Collins asked the protesters to show respect for those who came for the construction-related event.  

The problem is that Collins never holds any town halls, so her constituents that are worried — and angry — about U.S. support for the Israeli genocide, and about the steady erosion of democracy under President Trump, have no way to speak

Trigger warning, as this column contains descriptions, sanitized, of life on a small family  farm, and the steps that sometimes need to be taken to preserve the livestock and crops from the native critters.

The old Havahart trap sat in the driveway, covered in cobwebs and sawdust, having been dug out of the lower barn at the request of a neighbor, who was dealing with a skunk on their property.

The lower barn, which one upon a time housed a dairy cow, a more-or-less useless pony, and the occasional meat-critter offspring of said dairy cow, and now holds bikes and all kinds of random items

Over the weekend, we traveled to southern Maine to see if we could observe the drama of heavy surf expected from the passing of Hurricane Erin far offshore. We spent a half hour or so at Fortune’s Rocks Beach in Biddeford Pool, where the water churned foamy white as the storm waves came thundering in. It was late in the day, under beautiful sunny blue skies with light winds that gave no indication that a massive hurricane was passing hundreds of miles to the East.

Just a hundred yards offshore, behind where the waves were breaking, a group of about 30 common terns, adults and juveniles

Your town’s elected budget committee is trying something new this year. In the past we have always helped the Select Board produce the town budget during the late winter and early spring. What we discovered this past year is that this is not enough time to perform a thorough and thoughtful analysis of the proposed budget.

I write to again thank the citizens of Owls Head for including the Owls Head Village Library in the FY 2026 budget warrant. These funds help us continue to be an important part of Owls Head, and to strengthen our outreach to the community.  FY ‘25 highlights include: 

• partnering with Ash Point Community School to invite Maine author / illustrator Cassie Sano to spend three school periods interacting creatively with students
• hosting Owls Head children’s author and illustrator Annie Higbee for a reading and creative event
• distributing AIO’s free meal kit summer program for children
• welcoming

Words, those tangled things that bind us,

surround our lives like morning fog.

Even now, when the sides of buildings 

are dangling

their bombed out walls ripped apart 

dripping wires 

like some strange alphabet,

you harvest stories daily.

Listening.  Recording.

Starving children, stuck in fear

who else can hear their scattered silence?

And who can mark the endless graves

so calmly, pressed in front of a camera. 

The dead never fight against anything

that we know of.

But your words do.    

We hear you.

*In memory of Anas as-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Moamen Aliwa and