Blue Hill Heritage Trust: Preserving a Biodiverse Peninsula

Clammer on Northern Bay.

The Blue Hill peninsula forms the east side of Penobscot Bay and is the place where the coast of Maine bends downeast into a region still wild by east-coast standards. Here the forest comes down to the edge of saltwater, largely unbroken all the way to New Brunswick and the Bay of Fundy. Nothing like this exists any longer on the rest of the eastern seaboard.

The heart of this peninsula is the Bagaduce River watershed. The Bagaduce is not so much a river, as a long flowing estuary that cuts deep into the coast. Seven or eight miles upstream from its mouth at Castine Harbor, the river’s headwaters fall from Walker Pond less than a half mile before meeting the tide. Frost and Parker Ponds feed this section of the flowage in other short drops; Wight’s and Pierce’s Ponds flow in from the north, feeding the huge backwater of Northern Bay, which branches off the main stem of the river a quarter mile upstream from Grindle’s Eddy. The whole river ebbs and flows with the tide, back and forth into the bay.

Like all estuaries, the Bagaduce is biodiverse, and a rich source of food for people and animals alike. Lobsters, clams, mussels, oysters, as well as fish, fed Native peoples for millennia—shell middens mark their presence up and down the shoreline. Although the productivity of the Bagaduce has suffered in recent decades because of climate change, warming water, and invasive species, the sea and its life are still part of livelihoods and a shared sense of place.

A view of the Bagaduce watershed from the top of Wallamatogus Mountain, a place that the Blue Hill Heritage Trust currently is working to preserve.

The Bagaduce watershed teaches the careful observer that defining where the land ends and the sea begins is ecologically difficult in this corner of the world. The peninsula is one vast ecotone where wildlife moves from forest to shoreline at need. This is mirrored in peninsula communities where love of and access to land and water are equally important for the people who live here.

Blue Hill Heritage Trust’s mission is to protect and steward this peninsula, and to provide access and education to both year-round and seasonal residents. We envision a landscape of conserved farmland, forest, wetlands, and wildlife habitat surrounded by the water, which will sustain ecological and community health in a changing climate. We also envision that conservation will protect the sense of place upon which traditional livelihoods depend. We hope that the communities of the Blue Hill peninsula will embrace a stewardship ethic, recognizing the value of conserving land and water for its own sake, as well as valuing the recreational, economic, and quality-of-life benefits of conserved land and water.

The Blue Hill peninsula has treasured places that have been part of human communities for as long as people have walked these lands. Some of these are at risk of development and being closed to the public. We protect these places and keep them open for people and wildlife forever.  www.bluehillheritagetrust.org

This page is sponsored by the Ocean Ledges Fund of the Maine Community Foundation with the goal of supporting education and conservation.