Frenchman Bay Conservancy is announcing a $10 million comprehensive capital campaign to protect land, sea, and livelihoods in Downeast Maine. The campaign will raise the funds to protect 10,000 new acres of valuable land, enhance stewardship of our preserves to maximize benefits to nature and people, and expand outdoor education in our local public schools… Read more
Over the course of this season I’ve discussed quite a few FBC preserves. There are over twenty of them, after all, all primed and perfect for an afternoon in nature. But these public-facing preserves are just part of the story. Roughly 13,000 acres of land across eastern Hancock County are under FBC ownership or easement,… Read more
Conservation can often be a tricky balancing act. On the one hand, it encourages the smart and healthy utilization of natural resources. (This differentiates it from preservation, which sees the total or near-total exclusion of human influence.) On the other hand, conservation requires management and oversight – stewardship – to ensure that this balance between… Read more
Maine is a state with a lot of land. …Wait, hold on, don’t leave yet! I’m going somewhere with this, I swear. Though rather small when compared to the western states, it makes up close to half of New England’s land area. It’s larger than the country of Scotland, and is home to a single… Read more
When FBC’s 2023 Outreach & Education Intern, Michael, started his summer with us, he was expecting to see many visitors while working the Exploration Center at Tidal Falls Preserve. Perhaps even a few regulars that stopped by the preserve to watch the reversing falls. What he quickly realized is that one of his most frequent… Read more
I will be the first to admit that, in general, my writing tends to gravitate towards gravitas. Verdant coastal isles, summer colonies and railroads, isolated wildernesses–these are settings straight out of a dime novel. But for all my prattling, I have yet to dive into our state’s most bountiful and significant natural resource: our forests…. Read more
Maine is quite the endless enigma. It has the low population density and large uninhabited areas typical of a western state like Montana and Wyoming. The conifer-hardwood forests, rocky uplands and hemiboreal wildlife are nearly identical to those of the Upper Midwest. Low per capita incomes and a very rural population (the most rural in… Read more
Welcome back, folks, to the second part of this deep dive into Hancock’s Old Pond tidal salt marsh. The weather remains gray and rainy and cold, but nothing warms the heart like the histories of century-old railroads. …Right? For those who may be tuning in for the first time, I’m Michael MV, the Outreach and… Read more
Downeast Maine is a land of illusions. The lights of foxfire in the dark, island mirages hovering above the waves, the disorienting embrace of sea fog–these are things that remind us that, even in our modern world, not everything is always as it seems. Yet perhaps the greatest illusion exists not just in our present,… Read more
Sorrento, ME– When one hears the name “Frenchman Bay Conservancy”, it is hard not to think of the body of water for which it’s named. Bound by the peaks of Mount Desert Island, the Schoodic Peninsula and the jagged fingers of the Mount Desert Narrows, there are few places on the coast that can rival… Read more