Maine Audubon is working with experts and activists to find avenues to pesticide policy reform. Neonicotinoids, or neonics for short, are some of the most widely used and promoted pesticides on the planet. They kill insects, all of them, and are sprayed from planes, coated on seeds, and …
Clean Water
Stream Explorers Goes to School
On a beautiful fall day with 70 degree temperatures, Maine Audubon educators took our conservation program, Stream Explorers, to Sanford Middle School. The week before our visit, we went into the classroom and practiced using the nets and identifying macroinvertebrates. By sampling the stream and …
Guest blog post: Stream Explorers Opens Doors
“The door will be opened to those who are bold enough to knock.” (Tony Gaskins) My name is Aroha Walsh, and the Stream Explorers has done many things in the past few months that inspire me to be a better person. The Stream Explorers program aims to test the pollution in streams by looking at …
Recapping an Exciting and Important Legislative Session
The 130th Maine Legislature has nearly completed the work of their second session, with many conservation wins to show for it. From expanding biodiversity protection on public lands, to limiting sprawl across the state, to reducing conflict between boats and wildlife, meaningful environmental policy …
New Bill to Protect Water Quality in the Presumpscot (and Beyond)
Fifty years after the passage of the Clean Water Act, our fight to protect clean water in Maine continues. There was a public hearing on February 28 on LD 1964, a bill to reclassify certain waterways in Maine to reflect their improved status. This happens every three years, when the Maine …
Celebrate Your Watershed This Week
Maine’s watersheds provide us with incredibly rich ways to learn about our ecology, culture, economy, and the connections amongst and between them. For millennia, animals have migrated to Maine’s rivers from around the world to reproduce. For ten thousand years, Wabanaki people have understood and …
Maine Audubon Excited About Kennebec River Wildlife Recommendations
Many species of fish travel great distances during their lives, and many move between the ocean and freshwater streams and rivers in order to complete their lifecycles. Unfortunately, dams built on those streams and rivers are like locked doors keeping fish from their required habitat. For centuries …
Stream Explorers . . . explore streams!
Kick net? Check. Ice cube tray? Check. Tiny paintbrush to help pick up tiny water bugs? Check! Armed with these tools, volunteers embarked on treasure hunts as part of the Maine Stream Explorers, a community science project that Maine Audubon launched in partnership with the Maine Department of …
Notes on the 2020 Loon Count!
This year marked the thirty-seventh straight year that Maine Audubon has engaged volunteers, early in the morning on the third Saturday of July, to count loons on lakes across the state. The 2020 Maine Annual Loon Count stands out in this long-running tradition for a few reasons. Falling this …