by Roland D. Hallee It has already been a month since my wife and I moved to camp for the summer. With the annual trek comes the installation of the bird feeding stations that are all around us. We get the usual local congregations of chickadees, nuthatches, gold finches, blue jays, woodpeckers and occasional wanderers […]
by Roland D. Hallee Last Thursday night my wife woke me from a sound sleep to listen to something outside our camp. Well, being somewhat groggy, I didn’t hear anything, and went back to sleep. It wasn’t long afterwards that she woke me again. “Can’t you hear that?” she inquired sounding a little frustrated – […]
by Roland D. Hallee Where are the June bugs? Although they are called that, they usually make their first appearances in May. Generally, June bugs, Phyllophaga, do make their appearance in mid- to late-May. So why are they called June bugs? It all depends on what you want to call them. They are also known […]
by Roland D. Hallee This week, this tidbit came in my email inbox. According to Smith’s Pest Management, be ready for a summer invasion of pests in Maine, following the state’s mild winter. Maine’s mild winter may have been a welcome break from the cold, but according to one pest expert, it came with a […]
by Roland D. Hallee While driving through the countryside, you may have noticed some small bodies of water that are there in the spring, but disappear as summer proceeds. These vernal pools are essential to our ecosystem. Vernal pools provide important breeding habitat for select amphibians and insects, spiders, and crustaceans. Vernal pools are typically […]
by Roland D. Hallee “It’s that time of year, again.” Probably one of the most over used phrases in the English language, and one that I loathe to hear. Why? Because when you come right down to it, everyday is that time of year for something. Anyway, here we go. It’s that time of the […]
by Roland D. Hallee Over the last several months I have been receiving emails, doing research and gathering information on the possibility of mountain lions in Maine. Of course, the first question is “are there mountain lions in Maine?” Here is an email I received and published in the September 20, 2023 issue of The […]
by Roland D. Hallee In 2024, University of Maine Cooperative Extension Tick Lab processed 4,776 tick submissions including samples from 398 towns, representing all of Maine’s 16 counties. The majority (3,650) were identified as deer ticks, also known as blacklegged ticks, while American dog ticks accounted for 1,045 samples. Laboratory testing showed that 41.5 percent […]
by Roland D. Hallee Recently, LiveSportsonTV.com sent along this statistic. It’s truly disturbing that Americans have gone to couch surfing as their national pastime. I used to participate in many sports in my younger years – softball, golf, tennis, table tennis, hockey, volleyball – to name a few. One of the more interesting games was […]
by Roland D. Hallee A couple of weeks ago a friend asked me about the songbird, Bobolink, and are there any in Maine. Well, bobolinks and other grassland birds are true agricultural allies to central Maine farmers – they eat large quantities of insects that damage crops. The Bobolink is one of the world’s most […]