PETIT MANAN — This past year was a particularly bad one for the young Atlantic puffins that nest on Maine’s coastal islands. For the last 17 years, an average of 65 percent of puffin chicks would survive the season and leave the state’s seabird colonies. Those figures plummeted in 2021, according to experts. This season, …
The Nature Conservancy in Maine has acquired the approximately 13,500-acre Spring River-Narraguagus Forest property in townships 16 and 9, near Eastbrook.
“This project will enable Gouldsboro to take actions to sustain existing shore access agreements,” the grant reads. “It will also create a plan for coastal infrastructure investments over the next 20 to 30 years that will reduce vulnerability to sea-level rise, storm surges and runoff from intense storms.”
“This paper demonstrates that just as these mortalities in the Gulf of St. Lawrence are caused by humans, the reason that right whales were driven from their typical foraging habitat pre-2010 is most likely human-caused as well.”
ELLSWORTH — A proposed solar farm on Bucksport Road received final Planning Board approval on Sept. 1, and a separate preliminary application for a Nicolin Road solar farm was deemed complete. The Ellsworth ME Solar Project at 889 Bucksport Road will hold 17,000 panels on a 48.6-acre site, using the existing driveway and gravel road, …
Construction is underway on a commercial solar farm in Hancock on former blueberry barrens on the Washington Junction Road.
Both supporters of Maine’s lobster industry and conservation agencies were displeased with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s new rules, though largely for different reasons.
To help with the effort to keep local lakes free of invasive aquatic species, Hancock County Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD) is using a $6,000 grant from the Onion Foundation, a Maine nonprofit focused on the environment and the arts, to pay for courtesy boat inspections — and hoping boaters will do it themselves if an “inspector” is not on duty.
Recent COVID-19 cases have wielded an effect on local organizations, with the close contacts of those testing positive for the coronavirus placed under quarantine guidelines.
The Municipal Review Committee (MRC) announced Aug. 13 that an exclusive agreement with Delta Thermo Energy (DTE) to purchase a solid waste plant in Hampden has ended, after DTE missed several deadlines to provide financial documents. DTE was chosen from seven potential buyers of the plant on Jan. 19.
“I feel it’s going to be a great detriment to Green Lake,” Harmony Way resident Joe Kitchen told the Planning Board during an Aug. 5 meeting to review the project’s sketch plan.
The signing of a purchase contract that would reopen the shuttered waste-to-biofuel plant in Hampden has been further delayed. Prospective buyer Delta Thermo Energy Inc. (DTE) has not secured the investment funds needed to purchase the facility, the Municipal Review Committee (MRC) said on Aug. 5.
