Whether you are a student, teacher, restoration professional, or a family member of one of those, you are well aware of how busy fall can be. Across the state, classrooms fill and settle back into school year routines while stewardship and restoration professionals scramble to finish fieldwork without interns and seasonal staff. Given our mission of engaging people in wildlife habitat conservation action, Maine Audubon is uniquely and perfectly positioned to merge the educational and experiential goals for Maine students with the ambitious conservation outcomes sought by some of our professional partners.
Nowhere was this mutually-beneficial arrangement more evident this fall than in the upper Narraguagus River watershed, where our friends at Project SHARE (Salmon Habitat and River Enhancement) have been leading and implementing numerous restoration projects focused on restoring habitat for endangered Atlantic Salmon. Its small but mighty staff spends every day connecting and diversifying instream habitat for this keystone species, meaning these actions also benefit countless other taxa and natural communities. The construction of new road crossings and engineered river features require revegetation, which necessitates more boots on the ground—a perfect environment for Maine Audubon’s conservation horticulture and student engagement chops.
From late September through the end of October, Maine Audubon, Project SHARE, and Washington Academy (an independent secondary school in East Machias) have teamed up to engage more than 50 high school and college students in planting over 500 historically native-to-Washington-County wildflowers, shrubs, and tree saplings at three different sites in the Narraguagus watershed. These plants were grown out at the nursery on campus at Washington Academy under the leadership of Community Tree Steward Holly O’Neal specifically for these restoration projects. Species included herbaceous plants such as Cardinalflower, goldenrods, asters, and milkweeds; shrubs such as dogwoods, elderberry, and bayberry; and trees such as Black Cherry, Red Oak, Red Spruce, and Basswood.
We continued what has been several years of planting on three engineered logjams near Route 9, where we were joined and assisted by classes from University of Maine at Machias (UMM), Washington Academy, and homeschoolers from the Machias area.
Stud Mill Road is a well-traveled and scenic gravel road which runs from Milford all the way to Calais. Almost halfway along that route, the outlet stream from Burnt Land Lake crosses under a new bridge which was built this summer to replace an outsized culvert. An undergraduate wetlands ecology class of mostly seniors from the University of Maine in Orono joined us for a large planting of sedge, grasses, Seaside Goldenrod, and coastal trees and shrubs, all native species well adapted to sunny, sandy, and potentially salty conditions left within this roadway construction site.
Slightly to the west and elsewhere in the upper Narraguagus watershed, we worked with Project SHARE to identify locations and conditions conducive to establishing “mother plant” populations of shrubs. Students from the class at UMM, called Atlantic Salmon Conservation Projects, joined us again for a second day to plant clumps of Silky Dogwood, Buttonbush, Red Osier Dogwood, Swamp Rose and Elderberry. We plan to return to this site to take cuttings, which will be grown on at the nursery or planted directly as live stakes at future restoration sites.
All of this activity yielded a triple victory for Maine Audubon’s and our partners’ missions. Students, most of whom were already considering or exploring varied careers in environmental conservation, gained authentic and meaningful fieldwork experience. In so doing, they contributed significant labor and assistance for what would have otherwise been four or five of us stuck with all of this critical planting and revegetation. Finally, and perhaps most importantly and long-lasting, hundreds and hundreds of beneficial plants are growing in their native habitats and promising myriad benefits to wildlife and ecosystems where we worked and, thanks to the birds and fish which migrate elsewhere, hopefully far beyond.
Many, many thanks to the students, their teachers, and our partners at Project SHARE and Washington Academy for helping with this important work!
