Only in Maine

Bring in Carl Spackler!!

Groundhogs digging holes around Lisbon athletic fields becoming safety issue​

‘One night (staff) filled all the holes with dirt right before a game and the next morning they were all dug out with vengeance,’ Superintendent Richard Green said.

A colony of groundhogs has infiltrated the grounds on and surrounding the athletic fields at Lisbon High School and are becoming an ongoing nuisance, according to school officials.

Holes have been found on the athletic fields and the walkways connecting the fields, including the field hockey and track facilities.

Officials said they have few options on how to deal with the varmints, in part because catching and releasing the animals on anything but town property is not allowed.

The groundhogs have become such a serious issue that Lisbon School Committee members have discussed the creatures and how to get rid of them at the past two business meetings.

“You can’t poison them, you can’t kill them,” Superintendent Richard Green said. “You can’t trap them and release them anywhere but your own property.”

On Monday, the School Committee unanimously voted to include the woodchuck issue on next year’s capital improvement plan for the schools. The cost to rid the pest from school grounds has yet to be determine.

Allen Ouellette, Lisbon’s director of Operations and Transportation, discussed the issue during the committee’s October meeting.

“We’re filling in holes. We’re persistent as they are,” Ouellette said. “We can’t trap. There are all sorts of special procedures. We keep burying the holes and throwing rocks down the holes and they dig them out.”

“I know one night (staff) filled all the holes with dirt right before a game and the next morning they were all dug out with vengeance,” Green added. “You could see where they kicked the dirt out.”

While reminiscent of the damage caused by the gopher in the classic movie “Caddyshack,” school officials say that far from a laughing matter, the holes have become a serious safety issue.

Members wondered how other school districts have dealt with a similar problem. They suggested researching possible solutions and contacting a pest company that deals in more than just common household challenges.

“It is tricky, and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on this, but when you have mice or ants or rats, there are certain things you can do, certain people you can call,” said committee member Laura Craig.

Committee member Vernon Lickfeld suggested another option: Officials could trap them and release them on town-owned property far from the athletic fields.

“Thinking outside of the box, technically the schools are on town property,” he said. “The town has all kinds of property. There’s got to be a square foot somewhere in town where we can give them a new home. If literally the thing holding us up is that it has to be on town property, we have all sorts of property. Not the waterfront. That would not be a great spot. Maybe the town has a place where they’d love to set up a groundhog motel.”

“We have hundreds of kids, hundreds of spectators walking around dealing with this,” committee Chair Margaret Galligan Schmoll said. “All it takes is one person to step in a hole, break an ankle or get bit by a groundhog.”

And it is not just the high school athletic fields. The grounds surrounding the Gartley Street School have a groundhog issue. The board was told the number of rodents on school property could be as high as 30.
 
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Give him the job. Couple days, maybe some big craters to fill, but the problem neutralized!
 
Avenger said:
You can't kill them? Why not? Are they protected or something? They're certainly not endangered.
Click to expand...
Apparently in that Town you can't kill or relocate them if they were on town property, go figure.

When Woody decided my leach field would be a nice place for some condos he met Mister 12G very quickly. No season nor limits on them, the only restriction being not hunting on Sunday...
 
The epitome of the hated invasion of PFAs, People From Away...

Mystery Fuels Unease in Maine Woods: Who Bought Burnt Jacket Mountain?​

An anonymous new owner fenced off beloved trails and put up surveillance cameras in a region with a long tradition of allowing public access on private land.

In the wilderness of northern Maine, a long tradition of allowing public access, even on privately owned lands, has shaped the region’s culture and identity since the 1800s.

So when “No Trespassing” signs showed up around Burnt Jacket Mountain, at the edge of Moosehead Lake, this summer, it did not go unnoticed. Neither did the new surveillance cameras and locked gates in the woods, nor the crews cutting a new road up the mountain who deflected questions from neighbors by citing nondisclosure agreements.

In the tiny town of Beaver Cove, which has about 100 year-round residents, and in the wider Moosehead region, the anonymous incursion stoked unease, and a fixation: Who was the mountain’s new owner?

The project, and the discomfort it has spawned, follows years of accelerating change in the North Maine Woods, a region nearly twice the size of Massachusetts. As Covid-19 pandemic transplants and other wealthy newcomers have put down roots — and in some cases, put up fences — and as housing costs and real estate taxes have ballooned, some residents feel a deepening concern.

“When we first came here, you could go anywhere, land your kayak anywhere, and you never gave it a thought,” said Donald Campbell, a retired New York City teacher who has spent 35 summers in a modest lakeside cabin near Burnt Jacket Mountain. “Now, there’s hardly a place you can land. There’s a feeling of sadness at losing something, a tradition of access, that maybe wasn’t written down but was understood.”

In that unsettled atmosphere, a two-sentence email sent last October to Destination Moosehead Lake, the tourism center in Greenville, landed like a slap.

“I am writing on behalf of the new Owner of the property at Burnt Jacket Mountain, requesting that you remove the reference to hiking at Burnt Jacket Mountain,” it said. “As this is now private property, we’d like to deter anyone from hiking on the mountain!”

The email, with its possibly ill-chosen exclamation point, came from Karen Thomas Associates, a New York firm that manages high-end residential construction. (“We are meticulous problem solvers,” its website explains, “resolving any number of challenges that may arise in the course of a demanding, luxury construction project.”)

The tourism center promptly complied, striking mentions of the mountain’s trails from its handouts. Then word began to spread. In other places, it might have been a no-brainer: Of course a private landowner would keep the public off his or her land. But in northern Maine, where hunters, hikers, snowmobilers and other outdoor enthusiasts have long enjoyed near-unrestricted access to vast forests, the request came across as unneighborly.

“The people at Moosehead will hardly trust somebody if they come to town doing good,” said Steve Yocom, a freelance photographer who worked at the tourism center at the time. “But if you come to town and take something from them right off the bat? Good luck.”

At Greenville’s newspaper, The Moosehead Lakeshore Journal, the two people on staff — Heidi St. Jean and her daughter, Emily Patrick — threw themselves into an investigation of the construction ramping up atop the mountain. Outlined in permits, its scale was notable: a 3,750 square foot home with garages, patios, decks, parking lots and a driveway that would stretch for nearly a mile.

But the name of the owner proved elusive. The parcel — 1,400 acres of undeveloped forest with two miles of lakefront — had been purchased for $8 million in 2022 by a limited liability company that shielded the buyer’s identity.

Even the man who had sold the mountain — Hank McPherson, a retired logging magnate who had kept its trails open to the public — said he wasn’t sure who the buyer was. “I didn’t get into it,” he said in an interview. “It was handled by lawyers. And to be honest, I didn’t really care.”

Soon enough, though, a woman who used to work in Greenville’s town office said she had the answer and posted it on Facebook: The new owner of the mountain was Mark Zuckerberg.

The billionaire founder of Facebook had spent time in the Maine woods before. In 2017, for their fifth wedding anniversary, Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, had traveled not to Aspen or Cabo, but to Bangor and Millinocket, Maine, where they hiked on the Appalachian Trail and met with workers who had lost their jobs when local paper mills shut down.

“When I asked people if they would leave to pursue a better career opportunity elsewhere, not a single person said they would,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook about the trip.

He would not have been the first high-profile land buyer drawn to Moosehead Lake, nor the first to keep his purchase quiet. The lake, whose southern point is 250 miles north of Boston, tends to attract V.I.P.s seeking privacy, said Luke Muzzy, director of the Moosehead Historical Society.

Their interest can be flattering. But secrecy can also spark anxiety.

“Whenever people have secrets,” he said, “you want to know why.”

Mr. Zuckerberg’s wealth, estimated at just over $200 billion, puts him in an extreme and alien-seeming category. The median household income in Greenville hovers around $60,000.

And his spotty track record as a neighbor doesn’t help.

In Palo Alto, Calif., where Mr. Zuckerberg has purchased 11 properties in a single leafy neighborhood, some neighbors say the heavy security measures and constant construction feel like an “occupation.” In Hawaii, where he has quietly become one of the state’s top landowners, his construction of an enormous compound has worried locals whose ancestral burial grounds lie on his estate.

Such spectacle would feel out of place in northern Maine, which is known for simple pleasures: rustic hunting camps, unchanged for centuries; starry skies unmarred by light pollution; moose sightings by the lake in the morning stillness.

“In some of those dense fir and spruce woods there is hardly room for the smoke to go up,” Henry David Thoreau wrote of the region’s forests. “The trees are a standing night, and every fir and spruce which you fell is a plume plucked from night’s raven wing.”

There was little risk of overdevelopment destroying that wild beauty at Moosehead Lake, Mr. Muzzy said, or the outdoor recreation that drives the local economy. Timber companies continue to grant generous access to their land. More than half a million acres, stretching north to Mount Katahdin, have been permanently protected. With a few exceptions, “what’s green stays green,” Mr. Muzzy said.

Yet beyond the lake, there was growing trepidation. Most land was privately owned, and not conserved, making changes in ownership and access a certainty over the long term. This year, Maine’s Legislature voted to convene a working group dedicated to preserving public access.

For some residents, the closure of the hiking trails on Burnt Jacket Mountain resonated as a symbol of the broader threat.

“These weren’t the only trails — they weren’t in the top 10 trails,” said Lew-Ellyn Hughes, a manager at the Greenville tourism center whose family roots in the region go back 200 years. “That’s not why people are sad. It’s people from away coming in and shutting things down. It’s the contrast between haves and have-nots — especially when the have-nots can’t find a place to live.”

Property taxes have more than doubled this year for some residents of northern Maine, driven by record-setting prices for waterfront properties. Many of their homes are in rural territory beyond the reach of municipal government and services.

At the one-room airport in Greenville, where $1 snacks from a mini refrigerator are sold on an honor system, the only person in sight one day this fall was a private plane pilot striding across the tarmac.

“The clients I fly are always rich,” he said, “and sometimes rich and famous.”

He would say no more.

Mr. Zuckerberg had become a kind of symbol for the forces North Woods residents could not control. But was he really the mountain’s new owner? Calls from a reporter to his representatives last month yielded a long-awaited answer.

“Mark and Priscilla do not own any property in Maine, including the Burnt Jacket property,” a spokesman for the family said.

The denial would not convince everyone. Nor did it ease hurt feelings as the mystery endured.

One day this fall, on the wooded shore where he and his wife, Nancy Thorne, built their small home decades ago, Mr. Campbell, the retired teacher, stood on a carpet of soft moss, pointing out the mountain’s gentle slope across the water.

He described how his favorite trail on Burnt Jacket meandered over granite ledges fringed with lichen, and then back into the trees, birches bright against the oaks. “It’s like losing an old friend,” he said.

The way Mr. Muzzy, the historian, sees it, access to the trails had been “a privilege, not a right.”

That did not make it easier to let them go.

“We don’t own these million-dollar homes,” Ms. St. Jean, the newspaper editor, said. “But our lives are changed by them.”
 
With all the Oyster farms clogging up the estuaries along the coast, this is an Only in Maine topic that will grow in frequency!!

Unusual oyster farm heist leaves Portland couple reeling​

The equipment and oysters that went missing from the waters off Falmouth last month are valued at roughly $20,000.

Boating through familiar waters near The Brothers islands in Casco Bay, Michael Scafuro and Rachel White were excited. After two years of work, they were going to sample for the first time oysters that they had grown in their aquaculture operation. Scafuro donned a wetsuit, ready to dive in.

The Portland couple approached the mooring off Falmouth on Nov. 22 to snag the first mature oysters and sink the farm for winter. But the 14 cages that had been floating in the water were nowhere to be found.

“We pulled up and it was completely gone. There was nothing there. I mean, we were just shocked, and it felt surreal,” said White, 40. “It still does.”

They had last checked in on the farm two weeks prior. Frantically searching up and down the coast for hours, hoping the cages had just drifted away, Scafuro and White soon came to a more devastating conclusion: their oysters were stolen.

“We’re kind of in shock and kind of devastated,” said Scafuro, 38. “I mean, we were sobbing.”

Maine Marine Patrol, assisted by the anti-poaching nonprofit Maine Operation Game Thief, is investigating the possible theft of the 40,000 oysters and 14 aquaculture cages from Falmouth waters. The missing gear and shellfish are valued at nearly $20,000.

Operation Game Thief is offering a $5,000 reward to anyone who can provide information that leads to a conviction. Tips are anonymous.

The penalty for theft of property valued at over $10,000 in Maine is a maximum of 10 years in prison or $20,000 fine, or both.

Maine Marine Patrol also searched the area for the missing gear in case it simply broke free of the anchors, but found nothing. Because the anchors, buoys and ropes of the farm remained in place while the cages that held the oysters went missing, investigators suspect theft.

“This is a devastating situation for a small businessman like Mr. Scafuro, especially as we head into the holidays,” Marine Patrol Sgt. Matthew Sinclair said in a news release.

“It can take years to grow oysters to market size, so he has lost that investment of time and money in addition to his valuable equipment and the income from the sale of these oysters,” said Sinclair.

White and Scafuro, who are engaged and work non-aquaculture jobs full-time, started the 400-foot oyster farm to spend more time on the water, learn new skills and earn extra income. Investing both funds and time into the farm, they hoped to grow it into full-time venture.

“We love doing something that we feel like is beneficial for the coastal marine environment, as well as beneficial for our finances,” said Scafuro.

“It was a lifelong dream that we had just finally started, which was so exciting for us,” said White. “I’m likely a bit naive, but I never thought that this was a possibility.”

Aquaculture theft of this scale is rare in Casco Bay. Neither Falmouth Harbormaster David Young nor Falmouth’s Marine Patrol Officer Alex Hebert had ever heard of oysters being stolen from these waters before, though Marine Patrol Division Lt. Daniel White said they respond to aquaculture complaints regularly, but infrequently to incidents of such significant monetary loss.

There is a high level of small boat activity around the oyster farm. The nearby Falmouth Town Landing is the largest recreational anchorage and mooring field north of Marblehead, Massachusetts.

White said he struggles to understand what would motivate the theft of the oysters. Someone would not be able to sell them legally unless they had a state commercial aquaculture license.

“If these were taken, it was hopefully just someone who was just in a really bad place, and, you know, really needed them,” said White.

Scafuro and White plan to persist in aquaculture, restarting their farm from scratch with new gear and more precautions against losing their oysters, like tying GPS trackers to the cages.

The couple doubts their oysters will be recovered. They hope their story will motivate other oyster farms to take more precautions against theft, especially full-time farms where a theft such as this could be financially ruinous.

“The aquaculture community is just like, very tight-knit in Maine. And I think it’s just probably helpful for everyone to share these sorts of happenings with one another,” said White.

Tips for Maine Operation Game Thief can be left either online or by phone at 800-253-7887.
 

Skater rescues loon stuck on pond in Smithfield​

John Picone of South Portland was skating Sunday on East Pond and spotted the adult loon in a small pool of water surrounded by ice. He captured the rescue on video.

loonrescue1.jpg
This loon was rescued Sunday by John Picone of South Portland, who was skating on East Pond in Smithfield and spotted the adult loon in a small pool of water surrounded by ice. (Photo courtesy of John Picone)
John Picone likely saved many humans during his career as a surgeon, but the life he saved Sunday was a first.

He was skating alone on East Pond in Smithfield just after noon when he passed a rock outcropping known as Loon Island. His heart skipped a beat when he spotted a loon stuck in a tiny pool of water surrounded by ice about 800 feet from shore. He knew that time was of the essence.

Picone, 66, of South Portland, is a member of Maine and New Hampshire Skating and Ice Report, a group of skaters who watch the weather and ice conditions and share information about good places to skate, always with a focus on safety first.

Picone was clad in a dry suit and helmet and armed with safety gear, including a throw rope bag, poles for testing the ice, clamps and claws to use for traction if he fell through the ice.

But his concern Sunday was the loon, which was stuck and unable to move. The cold had moved in so quickly that the bird didn’t have time to get off the pond before it froze, and it needed some 20 feet of open water in order to take off and fly.

A retired surgeon at Redington-Fairview General Hospital in Skowhegan, Picone wasn’t about to leave the loon stranded.

“I thought ‘Oh no, no no — we’re not going to leave this little guy out here,'” he recalled in an interview.

Picone skated toward the loon and spoke gently to it as he would a child, hoping to soothe and calm it. He sat with the loon for some time so it began to trust him, despite the fact that he was cold and his cellphone was dying. He called Avian Haven, a wildlife rehabilitation center in Freedom, as well as Biodiversity Research Institute, an outfit that often rescues loons. He also called members of his skating group.

Picone began to nudge the loon with the handles of his ice poles, calmly talking to it as he moved it slowly across the ice as one would a hockey puck. Once he reached the edge of the pond, he was able to get the loon on solid ground.

Ann Dorney, also a retired Skowhegan doctor and Avian Haven transport volunteer, soon arrived.

“She had this funny little flexible laundry basket and a smaller plastic box,” he said. “She scooped it into her basket. He liked it in there.”

Skaters from his group had shown up and one had gone to Brickett Point Road to meet Dorney. Then someone from Biodiversity Research arrived. Dorney drove the loon to Avian Haven.

Picone said he was relieved and heartened. All told, he had spent three hours with the loon.

“I was kind of like on Cloud 9,” he said. “I said, ‘It’s getting dark but I’m still going to skate some more.’ I was happy.”

Avian Haven’s executive director, Barb Haney, said Monday afternoon that an initial exam was performed on the loon, radiographs taken and its blood tested. There are signs of possible frostbite to its feet, but it’s good that the bird does not have high lead levels, according to Haney.

“He’s where he needs to be, that’s for sure,” she said. “We’re all rooting for this loon.”

Earlier in the day, Laura Moore, Avian’s admissions manager, said the loon was safe and warm.

“She’s here, she’s safe and hopefully the X-rays will show no breaks, ” Moore said.

Avian Haven staff suspect that the loon was in a late-molting state, in which it couldn’t get its feathers for flying before being iced-in on the pond, she said. When loons are molting, their feathers are being replaced with stronger ones needed to fly.

“When they’re molting, they can’t fly,” Moore said.

Moore said that within the last two days, three loons had been rescued from Pleasant Pond in Turner. When the first ice-over occurs, loons can get caught in small areas of water and thus are susceptible as prey to wildlife such as eagles.

Moore praised Picone for his rescue of the loon.

“He did a wonderful job,” she said.
 

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