May 2: Blue

There's the blue through spruces

that is sky

and the blue that's sea.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

July 21: West Quoddy Head, on the path to the Bog

Impression on the trail
where a grouse once bathed.
Spruce, moss keep secrets well.

November 10: Forest

The devastation caused by a recent rain and wind storm became more apparent to me today when I was walking a conservation property in Lincolnville. As the landowner and I walked through one dense patch of mixed cedar and spruce forest, we came upon an ancient pine that had splintered about four feet up the trunk and toppled to the ground. This towering tree, with no apparent rot, boughs still green, had come crashing down in the storm, taking several neighboring cedars with it. We estimated the pine to be well over 100 years old. And there it lay in a giant tangle, felled by the wind.

Elsewhere in the forest we found maybe half a dozen other trees downed by the storm. Some were spruces,  their shallow root systems made all the more obvious when upended, just a flat circle of earth perpendicular to the forest floor. In the small stands of trees, the crowded trunks provide support for one another. But when one falls, it takes others down with it, a row of giant timber dominoes. Or if one happens to fall alone, it leaves the trees within the circle more vulnerable to the next big storm.

In an opening amid the trees, growing from a forest floor carpeted thick with rain-moist moss, we admired clusters of baby spruce trees, the next generation. It occurred to us that we were witnessing the entire cycle of life in this patch of woods: new trees reaching for the light, mature trees clustered around them, some dead trees still standing, fretted with woodpecker holes and studded with bracket fungi, the newly fallen trees piled in messy heaps, and the older deadfall melting back into the earth from which it came, blanketed with moss, ferns, mushrooms, forest duff, leaf litter. A rich tapestry of organic matter, the stuff of life and death.

Wind's toy, this old pine,
whose death enriches the soil,
this moss, these seedlings.

September 5: Spruces

This obviously isn't the only major distinction, but compared to Midcoast Maine, Down East Maine is very boreal. Spruce and fir are the dominant trees on the landscape, which is also marked by quite a few ancient peat bogs and blueberry barrens. A spruce forest has a different feel to it--denser, darker, impenetrable, with thick beds of moss carpeting the forest floor--wilder. It's a forest in which you can imagine gnomes or elves living. Or, if you're a birder, Bruce.

Bruce the spruce grouse is a regular on the Boot Cove Trail in Cutler.  A friend who's a professional bird guide regularly takes clients there for their lifer spruce grouse, a boreal forest specialty species. He told us this morning, when my husband and I ran into him and his wife while watching the hundreds of shorebirds at the South Lubec Sand Bar, that he has often seen Bruce within the first tenth of a mile down the trail, once even in the parking lot. Bruce apparently has a small territory, which he patrols carefully. The key was to get there first thing in the morning, before people walking dogs there had spooked Bruce further back into the trees.

So of course we were driving by the trail head just before sunset, after more great birding at Quoddy Head State Park, and decided to give it a shot anyway. We've both already seen a spruce grouse, so had no life list "must see" anxiety. This was just on a whim. With the sun low in the sky, the woods were dark and a bit spooky. In the distance we could hear the roar of waves and a ghostly-sounding fog horn that sounded like someone blowing across the top of a giant bottle. We went silently, hoping to catch Bruce foraging one last time before roosting for the night. We startled a garter snake. A red squirrel scolded us. In these primeval woods, the grouse's appearance really seemed possible-- we knew he had to be there somewhere, probably watching us from within a tangled spruce thicket.

Then a loud family with kids came up the trail, and we knew we weren't going to get lucky this time. We sat on a bench overlooking a bog as the sun dropped behind the pointed spruce horizon, and then made our way back to the car, wishing Bruce a good night as we left his woods behind.

Grouse territory--
we can feel his spirit here
though we don't see him.