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I’ve just posted, in my Bangor Daily News blog, the sad story of a loon rescue launched in my backyard on Minnehonk Lake in Mount Vernon. Please read it and then consider this – the rest of the story.

This loon died of lead poisoning after ingesting a lead sinker used and lost by an angler. Quite a few years ago, Maine Audubon proposed and lobbied for a new law banning the sale of lead sinkers weighing one ounce or less.

On behalf of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, I successfully lobbied to reduce the weight to half an ounce or less, and the bill was enacted. It is illegal today in Maine to sell lead sinkers of one half ounce or less.

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We’ll never drive through Ellsworth again without eating at Cleonice. For decades we’ve fought our way along Route 1, turned left, and felt a sigh of relief as we put the congestion of Ellsworth behind us, enroute to Lubec and Campobello.

We knew nothing of the city’s wonderful business district or this very special – we’d even say spectacular – restaurant.

Read More.

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Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife is proposing another step to protect wild and native brook trout by banning the use of live fish as bait on 16 brook trout waters. The move is long overdue, but is expected, nevertheless, to generate significant opposition, mostly from bait dealers.

I've posted a list of the 16 waters in my Bangor Daily News blog.

Two weeks ago in this blog, I reported on a meeting of DIF&W’s new brook trout working group where participants spent most of the day arguing about the use of live fish as bait on the 267 waters that DIF&W calls the “B” list. These waters hold native and wild brook trout and have not been stocked in 25 years.

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From the map to the menu, La Bella Vita Ristorante took us back to Italy – in Rockport, Maine! The Samoset Resort’s new Italian restaurant covers one wall with a map of Italy and its menu takes you on a tour of that country’s best cuisine.

Read More.

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Award-winning outdoor reporter Roberta Scruggs will be the new Communications Director at the Maine Forest Products Council. This is a good move by the Council and a great opportunity for Roberta. The Council gets involved in all of the natural resource and forest industry issues. She’ll be busy!

Roberta earned a reputation as an outstanding reporter of outdoor news during her years at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, where she created the Telegram’s special outdoor section. She later wrote for the Lewiston Sun Journal. She created the Scruggs Report on her own website and later moved it to Down East magazine’s website where it appeared for several years. She is very well known and popular in the outdoors community.

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Ten Fallow Deer are on the loose in Nobleboro and federal officials plan to hunt them down and kill them.

The likely owner of the deer denies that they are his – probably in order to avoid liability should they be involved in an automobile or other accident. There is no way, apparently, for the state to prove ownership of the deer.

While a bunch of hunters in that area would surely love to help hunt down and harvest these animals, they are prohibited from doing so by state law. Game wardens have issued citations in the past in similar situations to hunters who shot animals that escaped from captivity.

If these Fallow Deer are still at large during the upcoming deer hunting season, Maine hunters would do well to study photographs of those deer so as to be able to tell the difference between them and a Maine whitetail.

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Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife announced on September 7 that it has been able to come up with an “accurate estimation” of the state’s moose population which they pegged at an astonishing 76,000!

I’ve just posted an interview with DIF&W moose biologist Lee Kantar, in my Bangor Daily News website blog, that may disappoint many hunters, guides, and sporting camp owners. Lee says we’ll get no more moose permits, despite the higher population estimate.