Faith's Memorial in Maine
June 21, 2023
We flew out to Maine to spend some time with the Towle side of the family. It’s mosquito season in Maine, but this is when everyone could come, so here we are. I packed my “bug shirt”, which was a good choice as Anna and I were assigned trail-clearing duty and spent the afternoon in the woods.
My shirt and lots of bug spray kept the bitey things at bay, and we cleared about half the trail from the road up to the boulder garden that is the family resting place. The work wasn’t too bad, mostly raking several years’ worth of leaf detritus and cutting back a few branches, but I cleared out a foot-diameter fallen log that was very damp and thus very heavy.
We discovered that there’s a new beaver colony that has taken over the stream that runs through the middle of the land here, and they have created quite the pond! We were told that the creek was running really high, but nobody had really hiked around deeper in the woods before we arrived… Hiking back to the house from where we were trail clearing, we ran into what I thought was the swamp (often a favorite location for moose, but not usually very deep or large.) I spotted some large trees that the beaver had been whittling away at, and that was the clue as to why the “creek” was so large! There’s not much to be done about it; the beavers probably feel right at home in the quiet woods here.
Also discovered in the woods, were these absolutely giant holes carved out by woodpeckers; I’ve never seen woodpeckers do anything remotely like it. The holes are as much as six inches high, two inches wide, and four inches deep. I haven’t spotted one of these possibly enormous birds, but I can hear their pecking.