Opinions sought on MITA plan

“A nation behaves well if the natural resources and assets which one generation turns over to the next are increased and not impaired in value.” – Teddy Roosevelt

There’s something really disruptive about a Monday holiday, especially if you work on Sunday. The calendar says it’s Wednesday but my mind says it is Tuesday or Thursday.

Despite my dazed state, three items fell onto my desk in the past few days (not counting that nifty Teddy Roosevelt quote above) that make good column mates. One involves public meetings next week on the 10-year management plan for the 46 state-owned recreational islands, another is an announcement of a small grant to establish an office for Friends of Maine Seabird Islands and the third is a about an updated birding guide.

Let’s start on my convoluted journey with the upcoming Maine Island Trail Association’s public meetings where your opinions will be sought on the direction and content of a 10-year management plan. These islands are managed by MITA and the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands. The 10-year plan will be adopted by the state next year. Prior to that, sometime next spring, a public hearing will be scheduled on the draft of the management plan that incorporates relevant comments from next week’s sessions.

Since you and I are free to visit these islands, it’s only fair that we go to these meetings and let MITA and BPL know our concerns, thoughts, and ideas about future use and current impact on the islands. In the past, MITA has asked for comment from concerned citizens on limiting use on our islands, and from that came voluntary guidelines limiting the number of campers staying overnight on any given island, including a limit on the number of users per campsite. On Hell’s Half Acre Island near Stonington, volunteers constructed two tent platforms to help minimize the compaction of soil and campsite sprawl.

In Casco Bay, a caretaker was hired this past summer to stay on Jewell Island to monitor use and help educate the public about fragile islands. Each summer and fall, MITA volunteers go out and pick trash from these public islands as well as another 45-plus privately owned islands on the trail.

The meetings will be held over three days in three locations. They will run from 6-8 p.m. each day. The first will be held Tuesday at Governor Baxter School for the Deaf on Mackworth Island, Falmouth. The second is Wednesday at the Rockland Ferry Terminal. And the third is Thursday at Ellsworth City Hall.

If you want more information, you may contact Tania Neuschafer, education and outreach manager at MITA, by calling 761-8225.

Next, I’d like to tell you about a $2,500 grant given to Friends of Maine Seabird Islands by the Maine State Planning Office through the Maine Coastal Program to equip an office. The space will be in the Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge offices in Rockland. Friends of Maine Seabird Islands is a “recently formed group which supports the goals of acquisition, conservation, restoration and management of nationally significant seabird nesting islands in Maine, as exemplified by the work of the Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge Complex. Friends of Maine Seabird Islands is part of a growing movement of national wildlife refuge support,” according to a press release sent to me by David Cadbury, chairman of the board.

My first encounter with these folks was at a symposium on seabird conservation on Oct. 19 at the Samoset Inn in Rockport. The daylong meeting was co-sponsored by Friends of Maine Seabird Islands, Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge Complex, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Maine Coast Heritage Trust. It may sound like an erudite conglomeration – and it is – but who better to accomplish such a monumental task as preservation of numerous bird species. Their commitment is to support “Maine’s unique seabird populations by increasing public awareness, by building broad community support and by supporting funding for the purchase of additional nesting islands.”

Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge Complex ranges 200 miles from upper Casco Bay (north of Portland) to Cutler encompassing 40-plus nesting islands and three coastal parcels totaling nearly 7,000 acres. These islands and refuges provide nesting habitat for herring gulls, black-backed gulls, and laughing-gulls; common, arctic, and roseate terns; Atlantic puffins, razor-billed auks, eider ducks, cormorants, and Leaches storm petrels.

Cadbury’s e-mail to me urged anyone interested in seabird or related coastal conservation issues to contact Friends of Maine Seabird Islands to be included on their mailing list to receive a newsletter and announcements of upcoming events. Call or send your name, address, telephone number and e-mail address to: Friends of Maine Seabird Islands, P.O. Box 232, Rockport, ME 04856, 207-469-6797.

And the last stop on my magical mystery tour is the bird book I alluded to above. It’s not totally new (more than 250,000 copies have been sold), but it is improved. “All the Birds of North America” is an American Bird Conservancy field guide by Jack Griggs ($19.95, HarperResource ISBN 0060527706).

What’s different about this guide is its cover (so I guess you could say you can judge a book by its cover). Actually, it’s the inside cover that makes this guide useful. Flip it open and you get a quick reference on how to identify a bird. Each group of birds is represented by a silhouette drawing (or icon) – water birds inside the front cover, land birds inside the back cover. And each drawing is part of a key that includes a number and a color bar that correspond to those on page margins in the guide. All you need to do is match them up.

What do you see first when you spot a bird? The surroundings (its habitat) and the shape of the bird. Since we’ve been hanging around the ocean, I’ll stay inside the front cover with pelagic water birds and water birds. Pelagics forage over the open ocean, coming ashore only to nest on those remote islands we discussed above. In this group are aerialists (albatrosses, boobies, gannets, fulmars, gadfly petrels, gulls and terns, jaegers, shearwaters, skuas, tropic birds, and storm petrels) and swimmers (alcids such as razorbills and phalaropes of the Arctic regions).

Waterbirds are grouped into aerialists, swimmers, wading birds, shorebirds, and upland waterbirds. Aerialists include the brown pelican and frigatebird, gulls, skimmers, and terns. Shorebirds include avocets, oyster catchers, sandpipers, and plovers.

Say you spy a bird flying over the ocean (a water bird and an aerialist) and you think it’s a gull of some sort. Next you turn to the aerialist section identified by the light blue color bar and you get a few pages of information telling you all about gulls and (surprise) “the vast number of gull plumages and the similarity of many of them present one of birding’s most complex challenges. Adults are gray or black above, with many showing only subtle differences between species. Juveniles are mostly brown above, very different from adults, but very much like each other. Between the brown juvenile plumage and the gray adult plumage most species undergo more than half a dozen distinct plumage changes. Furthermore, some large gulls hybridize extensively, producing confusing combinations of features.”

And you thought this was going to be easy…

But the author and designers have helped you out by illustrating, in horizontal format over two pages, the various species. You’ll see detailed color drawings of each bird. The herring gull, for example is drawn in its first-, second-, and third-year plumages and how it appears in flight.

For most birds there is a map of North America showing the habitat areas, the Latin name, the bird’s size in inches, and a written description as well as a representation of its vocalization.

As an added bonus, the first few pages of the book are devoted to extinct birds (great auk, passenger pigeon, ivory-billed woodpecker, Labrador duck, Carolina parakeet, heath hen, Bachman’s warbler) and the reasons for their demise.

If you’re interested in birds, the next time you’re near a bookstore check out this 4 by 81/2 by 1-inch book.

And this just in: The Lobster Institute and the University of Maine School of Marine Sciences are presenting “In Their Own Words: A History of the Lobster Industry” at 3 p.m. Tuesday at theBuchanan Alumni House’s McIntire Maine Event Room. The presentation is narrated by Cathy Billings and special highlights include video clips and quotes from interviews with veteran lobster fishermen filmed as part of the institute’s ongoing oral history project. Admisson is free.

Jeff Strout can be reached at 990-8202 or by e-mail at jstrout@bangordailynews.net.