BHHT Event & Program Calendar

Join BHHT for another Volunteer Work Day! 
 
We will be out at our Furth Talalay Sanctuary in Surry again, rebuilding and replacing bog bridging along the Talalay loop. Tasks will include assembling new bog bridging. 
 
Many hands could make quick work of this long section of bridging.
 
Please bring plenty of water, boots or closed-toe shoes (recommended) as the area we will be in will be wet, and work gloves. Blue Hill Heritage Trust will provide all the tools needed (we have spare gloves if you don’t have any), as well as extra drinks and snacks.
 
If you're interested in attending, please email Andrew at: stewardship@bluehillheritagetrust.org so we get a sense of participation numbers for the day.
 
Volunteers of all ages are welcome to come out and participate, this event is open to the public.
 
**BHHT Volunteer Days occur twice a month throughout the spring - fall seasons. Every 1st and 3rd Thursday of the month from 1-4pm (unless otherwise specified). Mark your calendars and check out postings regularly for information on up-coming dates, tasks and locations**

The black tern (Chlidonias niger) is the rarest tern in Maine, and nests in just a handful of freshwater marshes in the state.  Since 1989, IFW has closely monitored its population watching it wax and wane to its current level of only 30 nesting pairs in the state.  In 2021, IFW began marking this state Endangered species with color bands and geolocators to better understand movements between wetlands, return rates to breeding sites, and where they go during migration and winter.  Learn about the habits and habitats of black terns and other rare birds that can be found in Maine’s marshes.

Join BHHT, IHT, and presenter, Maine IFW specialist, Danielle D'Auria for our first Friends From the Field webinar of the 2025-26 season.

Register at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85935626965?pwd=a3fRxVfJk44Hwb2gHj0cIPZK7B814x.1

Danielle is Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s species expert on secretive marsh birds, colonial wading birds, common loons, and black terns. She recently moved into the Bird Group Leader position, now supervising other nongame bird species specialists. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from State University of New York at Geneseo in 1998, and in 2002, earned a Master of Science degree in Wildlife Science at New Mexico State University. Danielle’s early work experience included technician positions working with various threatened and endangered bird species in the northeast and southwest. After graduate school she first worked for the USFWS as Refuge Operations Specialist at the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge in Washington state. She first joined MDIFW as a member of the Habitat Group, managing statewide wildlife and habitat databases. In 2008, she joined the Bird Group as the Department’s Waterbird Specialist. Currently her work focuses on understanding statewide populations of waterbird species as well as land management issues affecting the wetland habitats they depend on. She conducts surveys, monitoring and research, and uses bird banding and tracking devices to understand movements of her focal species during all life stages.  Over the past 17 years, she has devoted a great deal of effort to great blue heron surveys and research, including coordination of a volunteer monitoring program called the Heron Observation Network of Maine and has used GPS transmitters to track great blue herons during breeding, migration, and wintering. In 2021, she began marking black terns with color bands and geolocators to better understand return rates, and full annual cycle movements. She has a passion for getting students of all ages involved in the field and ultimately in conservation. Her favorite outdoor activities are kayaking, hiking, and cross-country skiing.

You are invited to join us on Friday, September 26, 2025, at 6:00pm, for the second of Blue Hill Heritage Trust’s Wabanaki Speaker Series, “Discovering Penobscot Bay”, a presentation by Mark Ranco, Penobscot tribal elder.

Mark Ranco, MSW, LCSW, has been a social worker for Bangor Veteran’s Administration home based care program since 2011, and a competitive canoe racer most of his life. Introduced at the age of nine to ancestral paddling techniques by his older brother, Mike Socalexis, and tribal elder, Eugene Loring Sr., Mark has accrued many accomplishments on the water since, in the rich state of Maine and other New England waterways. In 1992, he was part of the “Sacred Canoe ‘92”: a team of Penobscot paddlers that traveled to the Yukon River in Alaska, to canoe upriver when the Yukon was at flood stage. The local Athabascans doubted this feat could be
accomplished! But the team succeeded, and a grand cultural exchange with the Athabaskan peoples followed. While the rest of the country celebrated the quincentennial, they celebrated
the determination it took to paddle against the spring flood current on the Yukon – – and 500 years of still being here as indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.

Register is required at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89257473843?pwd=qsMJAQXoruXY5YbCymQnfZGVAsBakH.1

Mark started kayaking 23 years ago as another way to explore the river systems and venture out into ocean waters. This has become a means to rekindle ancestral ties to the Blue Hill Peninsula, Penobscot Bay, and the islands, where Penobscots and other Wabanaki thrived off the marine ecosystem for thousands of years before colonization resulted in coastal access being lost.

Mark’s daughter Ann Pollard-Ranco has been instrumental in the movement to regain access, and rebuild spiritual connections to these places along the coast and islands that were so beloved by the ancestors–and where erasure of indigenous presence and history had been ongoing for centuries. It is through these efforts and those of many other Wabanaki people and their allies, that indigenous people are being welcomed back for the first time in about nine generations.

Mark will share his paddling experiences and spiritual enlightenment from this renewed relationship with the sacred waters that abound in the Penobscot River and Bay, including a
2022 canoe trip from Ellsworth to the Salt Pond in Blue Hill, retracing an ancestral canoe route that included traversing an ancient portage on Newberry Neck for the first time in centuries, thanks to the generous permissions of property owners along that portage and help making those connections by Blue Hill Heritage Trust!