In the Right Place: Flexibility

This is Ray McDonald mowing our sloping North Field in Thursday’s (September 4’s) chilly mist.

The mower attached to his tractor is commonly called a “Bush Hog®,” a brand name for only one make of rotary field and brush mower. (The company says that, when it first demonstrated its product in 1951, an amazed farmer said: “That thing eats bushes like a hog.”)

The distinctive feature of these machines is their big, flexible blades; they’re on hinges and bounce away when a rock or stump is hit. Many people here keep non-agricultural fields that are mowed in late summer or fall.

The annual mowing preserves the summer wild flowers, grasses and sedges that are homes for many animals and insects. Without mowing, the field soon would return to forest and brambles. See also the image in the first Comment space. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Going to the Chapel

Artistic interpretations of the Beth Eden Chapel, including our two images here, are expected to be silent-auctioned on October 7. The proceeds will be for the benefit of that historic site, which has been on Naskeag Road since 1900. The arts and crafts will be at the Chapel from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., where the ancient reed organ will be demonstrated at 2 p.m.

Our images will be 8” x 10” in size and modestly matted and framed. This is “Insight at the Old Chapel”:

This is “In the Old Chapel”:

It’s all part of the Annual Brooklin Fall Festival, during which other interesting activities will be taking place at the Brooklin General Store, Leaf & Anna, Brooklin Inn, and Brooklin Candy Co. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Fan

Great Blue Herons are in decline here, but a good number of them are around. They seem to be staying longer each year as temperatures rise.

The one shown here was doing her fan dance and hunting in Patten Bay yesterday.

If this year is like the last few, virtually all the Great Blues will have left here by the end of October.

A few demented ones will over-winter, doomed to continually searching for fish-containing wading water that is not iced-in. They sometimes are seen on our Christmas bird counts. By mid-March, many migrating Great Blues are back. (Surry, Maine)

In the Right Place: Two Scents Worth

This Gertrude Jekyll Rose bud is smiling in the cold rain yesterday. If there’s a freeze, it may be our last rose; if not, other buds will follow for a while.

It’s a climbing heirloom flower that has the soul-satisfying fragrance of pre-preservative roses. It’s also as hardy as a Moose.

For those who skipped horticulture in school, Gertrude Jekyll was a renowned English horticulturist, garden designer, writer, photographer, and fine artist. She created over 400 major gardens before dying at the age of 89 in 1932. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Eat or Wipe

Here’s a little mushroom that has two of the strangest, most divergent common names in Fungiland.

It’s called a “Plums and Custard Mushroom” in England, apparently because it looks like that dessert. It’s called a “Variegated Mop Mushroom” in the United States, apparently because it’s genus is TricholoMOPsis. (Capitals added; two other mushrooms in that genus are also called “Mops” in the U.S.) In all places, mycologists call this dessert species by its scientific name, Tricholomopsis rutilans.

It almost always appears on dead coniferous wood, which it helps to decay.

Our thanks go to David Porter, the Maine Mushroom Maven, for identifying this little fellow. (Brooklin, Maine)

September Postcards From Maine

September is Summer in old age; it’s a time for slowly letting go of a sweet romance and for preparing for a dramatic encounter with nature. The temperatures decline faster than the water, causing sudden fog eruptions in which islands are swallowed whole. The woods are darker as the sunlight weakens and can’t fully penetrate the still-full-leafed canopy. There’s more rain to revive the summer-dry wood streams into musical whirls. But, the fields can’t be revived into their summer greens; they get browner and browner, flaked with the whites of Queen Anne’s Lace and Daisy Fleabane. Nonetheless, the sunsets do get more colorful and will continue to do so through the Winter as the sun appears increasingly lower and colder clouds coalesce.

September also is when the passengers on visiting schooners come dressed in jackets, sweaters, and long pants, instead of tee-shirts and shorts. But Summer dies hard in some of these tourists. On a late September morning of 49-degrees and a 13-mile-per-hour breeze, one decided to go for a swim in the cold waters of Great Cove.

This September, we also had an Osprey that didn’t want to let go of Summer here and make that long trip south. We also have shy resident Piliated Woodpeckers that will be going nowhere, but will be easier to see when the leaves are down. Among the many special migrating birds that give their last performances in September are the male Wood Ducks that finish their Summer molt and regain their outrageous appearance here, the Greater Yellowlegs Sandpipers that fly low and away as sillouhettes, and the occasional Bonaparte’s Gull that appears briefly like a white spirit.

For some here, “another day at the office” in September can mean a time of chilly winds and sea spray. It also can mean getting ferrying boats ready for work on the September waters.

As for the pleasure craft, September is a time when many will take their last lazy sail of the year to feel the harmonies of wind and water and sun. It’s also the time when many of us look poignantly at a troupe of pulling boats doing their last coordinated dance of the year. It’s the time when many of the summer craft are herded gently from the water and put into a dark place where they’ll sleep until June.

The last of the Wild Blackberries is pulled and eaten in September, when multitudes of mixed bouquets of Goldenrod and Asters appear along the roads and in the fields and Sweet Pea vines are turned gold by the early sun.

September also is when we see the last of some of Summer’s fauna delights. We haven’t seen a Painted Turtle or a Twelve-Spotted Skimmer in our pond for about two weeks, although a few Fall dragonflies remain. We do see White-Tailed Deer in our fields, if we look closely; they’re growing into their gray Winter coats, which is good camouflage in the darkening grasses.

Finally, late September is when the Harvest Moon comes to us. It rises early over Blue Hill Bay while the sky is still blue and sails out over Eggemoggin Reach and the sea.

(All images taken in September 2018 in Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Tidbits

The sailboats are leaving Great Cove, but the fishing vessels are still coming to tend to their lobster traps. Here we have Rae Baby in the Cove on a recent gray and misty day.

As usual, the opportunistic Herring Gulls swarm the boat looking for a tidbit of non-lobster "by-catch" as traps are hauled, cleared, and dropped back. The Gulls also race after the boat as she goes to another trap.

Ironically, one of the many reasons that Herring Gull populations are in decline is that commercial fishing of all sorts has become more efficient, which means less waste thrown to the birds.

(Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Vestige

Other plants are fading fast, but Montauk Daisy buds are popping open steadily, as you can see from this image taken yesterday:

Soon, they’ll be blooming in profusion and become our only vestige of summer in fall. Here’s an image of the Daisys in front of Switchback Grass in Barbara’s garden from October of last year:

These garden daisies also are named Nippon Daisies (Nipponanthemum nipponicum) because they originated in Japan. They were popularized in the United States in Montauk, Long Island (New York). The hearty Montauk plants are rabbit-proof, deer-resistant, and can withstand salty soil, stiff sea winds, and Maine winters. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Nutty News

There’s been an unprecedented surge in the Red and Gray Squirrel populations in New England this summer and fall, according to the September 25 edition pf the Boston Globe. Here’s one of our a locale Reds eating a conifer cone recently:

That population surge, unfortunately, translates into a record number of squirrel road kills. A Maine Wildlife Department official is quoted as receiving a report of 320 dead squirrels being counted one morning between Freeport and Bangor on the Maine Turnpike. A New Hampshire resident also was quoted as counting at least 100 squirrel carcasses along a short stretch of Route 125. Here’s a Gray that has survived so far:

It’s believed that last year’s extraordinarily large acorn crop in New England is the cause of the squirrel surge this year. There also has been a bountiful conifer cone crop. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Gently

This is Fiona earlier this week. She’s one of the delightful summer residents of Great Cove and a favorite of many Cat Boat sailing students at the WoodenBoat School.

But, it’s no longer summer and student sailing is over. Within an hour of this image being taken, WBS staff had approached Fiona as you would a friendly pony, put a rope on her, and led her ashore.

She went gently up the ramp on a trailer to her storage area, where she’ll sleep until June.

Other boats are being pulled out daily. Soon, there will be no sailboats in the Cove and the wonders of summer will be a vague memory.

(Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Making a Splash

Above, we see the Schooner Mary Day on Monday (September 24) in Great Cove. She soon will raise sail and depart. All of the passengers — except one — are below deck or wearing jackets or sweaters because it’s somewhere between very chilly and cold on the water this morning. The holdout is a young man in swim trunks. We watch through a big lens in disbelief as he climbs onto and dives off one of Mary’s gunwales:

Why did he do this? Perhaps the full moon that day has something to do with it; perhaps, he doesn’t believe in the most basic of climate changes – which happens when summer is over. Whatever the case, the relevant facts are as follows, according to local records: the ambient temperature when he jumped ship was 49 degrees (F), the surface water temperature was 55 (colder below), and there was a 13 mile-per-hour wind just for a little bracing effect. After the swim, Mary left the Cove on the fair wind, flying only her two mainsails and a jib:

The Mary Day is a 125-foot schooner out of Camden, Maine. She was launched in 1962.

(Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Vice

It was a clear and crisp evening last night as we watched a booming Harvest Moon come up orange-red out of Blue Hill Bay to the east, while a fading sun trailed pastel lights along Eggemoggin Reach to the west – we were in an exquisite vice.

We viewed the Bay from the Amen Farm ridge on the Naskeag Peninsula, then scooted down to Naskeag Harbor to catch the last of the sunset and the glitter path of the sailing, now silver moon.

(Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Goodbye

We’re walking in the early Fall woods yesterday morning. The September sun is lower now; the breeze wafting up the ridge from the sea is cooler; the rustling of stiffening canopy leaves is louder. We wade through dappled pools of light, taking very deep breaths of delicious, earthy-smelling air.

We find one of our favorite Cinnamon Ferns. It’s dying. The sun illuminates its seeping soul. We try to imagine the radiance as a friendly goodbye: “Until next year, old man.”

(Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Spirits

A lone Bonaparte’s Gull appeared like a flickering omen in Great Cove last week, apparently migrating south. These 13-inch birds are the smallest of our gulls. They’re not common here, although not extremely rare either. They have a ghostly ability to disappear and reappear when they’re rising and falling on a silvering sea –small, soft interruptions in the water’s fabric:

When flying in a calm corner of the Cove, however, they become white spirits on the loose:

Bonapartes seem more like Terns than Gulls, given their small size, narrow black beaks, large eyes, buzzing calls, and delicate flight that’s almost moth-like at times.

The plumage of the males and females is identical: both have black heads during breeding season, but now they’re bright white and silvery gray, with a hearing-aid-like ear spot.

They’re named after Charles Bonaparte, a French zoologist who was a cousin of Napoleon. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Resurrection

Today is a time to be both wistful and hopeful here. Wistful because Summer will officially end today and the boatbuilding classes at the WoodenBoat School will soon end. The School is a place of perpetual Summer smiles; partly finished boats still grace its campus like garden statuary, but these soon will disappear and be finished elsewhere.

The students’ lively boats that played in the Summer winds of Great Cove are being dragged ashore to lifelessly undergo power-washing and storing:

On the other hand, there is the hope in seeing Great Cove resurrect itself into its wilder form. That is a time of everchanging natural beauty – extraordinary light and fog, still and rough water, increasingly brilliant sunsets, and sheltering winter wildlife. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Shabby and Shy

In response to a surprising number of inquiries, we’re happy to report that the male Wood Ducks that we’ve been monitoring in a nearby marsh pond are alive and making great progress. They’re still going through their vulnerable summer molt (“eclipse”) and continue to be shabby and shy. However, it looks like they might have their full feathered bike-racing helmets and the rest of their colorful costumes back on before October.

In the early morning, they occasionally get up their collective nerve and play Three-Musketeers-on-Parade in open water, as you can see they did above on September 17. However, more often, we just get a glimpse of one of them along the pond edge, as he senses us and paddles quickly toward a hiding place in the cat tails:

(Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Gone

We had one of those small Maine moments on Tuesday (September 18). Near dusk, there were prospects for a good sunset, so we poured a glass of red wine and waited and sipped. (Sunsets go better with red wine and vice versa.) The part of Great Cove in our view was blue and still, a lone sloop sat atop its own reflection there; Babson Island was in a spotlight of sun; thin clouds sheeted the sky here and there; the light was dimming in our tree-lined field.

Suddenly, fog appeared from nowhere and encircled Babson within minutes. That fog ring arose into a tidal wave of mist and Babson was gone; then, Eggemoggin Reach behind the Island and the sky above it were gone; then, the Cove was gone and the fog was marching steadily up the field toward us. Soon after, the field and trees were gone. And, so was our wine. But, we had a stunning two-minute fog ring to talk about at dinner. With a little more wine. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Quintet

We’ll put the image below away now and pull it out in the dead of winter. It was taken September 15, the last sunny day that the members of this classic quintet were playing together. Boats and moorings in Great Cove are now beginning to be removed for winter storage, a poignant time for Cove watchers.

This quintet consists of the following WoodenBoat School pulling/rowing boats, starting at the top: Wild Rose, a 14’ Maine Coast Dory; American Beauty, a 14’ Whitehall Tender; Shearwater, a 16’ Shearwater inspired by the Norwegian Oselver boats (and designed by Joel White); Winslow, a 13’6” Pulling Skiff; and Jesse, a 12’8” Catspaw Dinghy. Thanks to Jon Wilson for identification help.

Late summer through early fall is the time when the leaves start to turn and mooring gear appears in the grass:

(Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: On the Ball

A lot of interesting visitors come here. A couple of days ago, we met one in the form of this frisky West Highland Terrier, who was playing ball by himself with a fallen apple.

He was very friendly until we made a move for his apple, which he would grab and protect before we could lay a hand on it.

One of the most interesting things about him was his name: “Jamie Fraser.” Fans of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series will recognize that as the name of the Scottish soldier who doesn’t play ball. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Old Age

Dense morning fog has crept up the field and surrounded us now. This is the third morning in a row that we’ve awakened in a cloud, unable to see the full field and the water beyond. The fog usually burns off by mid-morning and, for a short time as it is evaporating, our world becomes a softer, lusher place.

That’s when September fields become blurred greens, yellows, and browns and the ancient apple trees show the beauty of old age.

(Brooklin, Maine)