This is not the first time I’ve invited myself into the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, nor the first time I’ve written about it. It bears repeating, not only for its genuine natural beauty, but because each visit reveals changes.
A first stop along the path, for instance, explores the effects of a shift that collapsed a bank along a stream; years later, some of the effects remain, while others have long disappeared into new contours and new growth.
I should be more specific: I’m talking about the area of forest, marsh and shoreline at Wells, Maine. The Refuge now includes over 9,000 acres, stretching in bits and patches along 50 miles of the coast between Kittery and Cape Elizabeth, and it hasn’t stopped growing.
At the Wells, site, there’s a well-marked and easy walking trail that starts just off Maine Route 9, and loops through eleven numbered stations that match a trail guide available at the beginning from a holder that also asks you to return it when finished unless you want to keep it. The trail is easy enough that there are often families with strollers on it.
As much as I’ve enjoyed it over the years, in reality the refuge is for the birds. Its main reason for existence was to preserve estuaries along the coast that play an important role in bird habitats and bird migration; some species are hardly found anywhere else in the U.S., and the area is a major staging and migration area for North American shorebirds.
Appropriate, then, to be named for Rachel Carson, who first got the world to pay attention to the effect that widespread use of DDT as an insecticide was having on birds, leading to a Silent Spring, the title of her groundbreaking book that eventually led most of the world to ban the chemical.
On different visits, I’ve seen different birds, sometimes more than others. This visit, in early July, mostly had a colony of geese floating down the streams within the refuge. I followed them for a bit, but they clearly knew their way around, and soon sailed out of sight.
The seasons affect not only the birds, of course. In wetter seasons, the walk has been a great place to observe dozens of kinds of fungi, from delicate thread-like forms to mushrooms large enough to use for dinner plates. In July, none were in evidence. Plenty of ferns, though!
The waters are hidden from some spots in the wooded area; you’d not know you were near so much water and open marsh. You could imagine yourself in almost any forest.
And then, around the corner, the variety of marine and marsh views. The trail walk is actually almost a peninsula, with waters of the Merriland River to one side and Branch Brook on the other. Near the half-way mark of the walk, they join to form the ironically larger Little River.
This isn’t a carefully-groomed forest or park; things change on their own. Trees fall and lie where they fell. Occasionally, their hold on life is great enough that new shoots begin to grow upward from the base of the fallen trunk.
Visiting the Rachel Carson Refuge isn’t a large-scale piece of the day, unless you feel like it; but even an hour on the way to Portland or Mount Desert or in the opposite direction is refreshing and renewing. Well worth it.
And if you’re in a mood for something more raucous, there’s Old Orchard Beach with its amusement pier twenty minutes away, and even closer the Seashore Trolley Museum at Kennebunkport. Or, if food is on your mind, just south of where Rte 9 meets U.S. 1, there’s the Maine Diner.
