Text and photos by Donna Gold
I’ve had so many experiences on Sears Island, racing up the Tower Trail on bikes, ambling down the Blue Trail to the bay, hearing the twilight song of the thrushes on the Green and Homestead trails. Daring myself to go ever farther on skis on the Tower Trail, despite exhaustion. Seeing my first yellow warbler and redstart and catbird flitting through the underbrush. Watching my grandkids rush to clamber over the downed troika tree on the Homestead Trail. And then there were the herons.
It was the spring of 2020. We were isolated from the world, but here in Maine, we could go outside. Down in New York City, our son and his partner were stuck in a two-room apartment, both working, barely leaving, their soundtrack the wail of ambulances down Broadway—including the one that parked in front of their apartment building to remove their neighbor, never to return. I was desperate to bring them home, bring them to us in Maine where we walked daily, along beaches, through forests, up mountains. We walked for our sanity, of course, but also for them, as if a mother’s immersion in beauty could transfer to a child long outside the womb, as if photos reminding him of the richness of the world he grew up in—of sunsets over Sears Island’s Long Cove, over Mack Point’s shimmering lights, the world’s yin and yang, could transport some part of him back to peace.
Then the peepers began. Like a sudden change in the weather, we came upon them on the Homestead Trail, so loud, as if to summon my son and his dear one from that tiny New York cave. And then, finally, the ban on out-of-staters was lifted and they came back.
Was that the day we saw the herons? The osprey had returned long before, the ducklings were getting large, but there were no herons. When I walked the Bucksport waterfront with my late, dear friend MaJo, she fretted, dismayed. Had the herons gone the way of so many disappeared species?
There they were. Seven herons. Seven! Old and young. Old and young. Two families hunting, dining, walking, yes, also playing in the waters. Life renewed.
A project of volunteers who care deeply about Sears Island