Gulf of Maine Coastal Lowland

Severe drought arrived in Cumberland County in the middle of August and has not let go. On the August 4 drought map, none of the county was in severe drought. One week later, just under a third of it was, and that share has held flat at 31.59 percent for four straight weekly updates through September 7. Moderate drought or worse now covers 68.91 percent of the county, up again this week, and the whole county is at least abnormally dry. No part of it has reached extreme drought. The rain is not coming to fix it. The Portland Jetport station, four kilometers from this stretch of coast, has recorded a tenth of an inch so far in September against a 1991-2020 normal of 0.62 inches for the same days. Overnight lows there are running a couple of degrees above normal. Last summer the county came through its third-driest June-to-August on record, so this is dry ground going dry again. The place that shows it first is the small water. The Stroudwater, the Nonesuch, the Spurwink and the little Presumpscot tributaries that feed Scarborough Marsh are low-gradient, shallow streams with thin groundwater reserves. When base flow drops, they stop running and start pooling. The riffles that normally stir air into the water go dry or shrink to a trickle. The pools left behind warm faster in the afternoon sun, and warm water holds less oxygen. Brook trout, a coldwater fish recorded in South Portland this spring, run into trouble near 21 degrees Celsius and avoid water below about 4 milligrams per liter of oxygen, a number a stagnant September pool can approach. Early September adds a second load on top of the first. Leaves are beginning to drop into the channels. In a stream that is flowing, that litter gets torn apart and carried downstream by caddisflies, stoneflies and mayfly larvae, the shredders that do most of the work in a forested headwater. In a stream that has stopped moving, breakdown falls mostly to bacteria and fungi. The leaves rot in place and pull oxygen out of the same pools the heat is already squeezing. The bedrock underneath most of this lowland is old metavolcanic and metasedimentary rock with almost no limestone, so the streams have little chemical capacity to buffer anything that concentrates as the water shrinks. The trees are the other place to look. True fall color comes on gradually, at about the same time each year for a given species, and moves through the whole canopy. Drought damage looks different. It shows up weeks early, patchy, one branch or one side of the tree first, with scorched brown leaf margins and leaves dropping before they finish turning. On red maple and red oak that is browning from the leaf tips inward. On white pine it is rust-colored branch tips where needles have died. A maple that goes brown and drops in early September has not had an early autumn. It has sealed off leaves it can no longer afford to keep, and the nutrients in those leaves are lost rather than drawn back into the wood. What breaks the pattern is rain, enough of it to reconnect the pools and put the riffles back to work before the water cools on its own schedule. Until then the streams of this lowland are running a deficit that started in August and is compounding into September.

Along the Salmon Falls River corridor near the New Hampshire-Maine line, the Velcro USA facility is currently flagged by the EPA as being in Significant Non-Compliance — meaning it has failed to meet Clean Water Act permit limits badly enough to trigger the agency's most serious compliance status. Among 150 permitted facilities within 40 kilometers of this stretch of Gulf of Maine Coastal Lowland, it is the only one carrying that designation. Eleven others nearby have active violations of some kind, but none rise to this level. The compliance record pulled this week does not specify which outfall is exceeding limits or by how much, so the exact nature of the discharge problem cannot be characterized further. What is clear is the accountability gap around it: no penalties have been assessed against any facility in the area, and Velcro USA has paid nothing despite the significant non-compliance flag. The Salmon Falls River and its estuary carry a separate burden worth noting. They are already listed among Maine and New Hampshire's impaired waters requiring a pollution reduction plan, a designation from an earlier assessment cycle unrelated to this specific flag. It is a reminder that this watershed was under strain before this violation was even added to the ledger, though no water-quality data ties the two together at this point.

Autumn Meadowhawk (Sympetrum vicinum) appeared on the wing in mid-July — more than three weeks earlier than this species typically emerges. The Autumn Meadowhawk earns its name honestly: it is usually the last dragonfly standing in New England, appearing in August and flying well into October, sometimes even November, long after every other odonate has finished. Twelve-spotted Skimmers and Widow Skimmers are turning up on schedule for peak summer emergence, so the timing gap between those species and this early Autumn Meadowhawk is striking. A single record is one data point, not a trend — but it's worth watching. If more records accumulate through the rest of the month, the pattern may point to shifts in phenology worth understanding.

Since mid-July, tides here have been running roughly eight inches — about 0.2 meters — above predicted levels, pushing the salt marsh edges into deeper flooding than the seasonal calendar would suggest. At this time of year, Spartina grasses are in peak growing season, allocating energy to root growth and seed set rather than managing inundation stress. A persistent high-tide anomaly hits them when they are most vulnerable to it. The Stroudwater River drains into the Fore River estuary at the inland edge of this tidal zone and sits on Maine's official list of impaired waters — a designation tied to ongoing nutrient and pathogen loading with no remediation timeline in place. When above-average tides push farther inland into an already nutrient-loaded watershed, the two pressures interact in ways harder to predict than either one alone. Tidal backflow can carry estuarine water upstream into freshwater reaches already burdened by runoff, slowing the flushing that might otherwise dilute pollutants. A small anomaly in the tide gauge, but small anomalies in a stressed system have a way of compounding. The margin between ecological recovery and decline grows narrower with each overlapping stressor.

Monarchs are moving through milkweed blooms from Westbrook to Scarborough in a wave that will ripple all the way to Mexico in the fall. These are the breeding adults of the generation that makes the long migration — the population checkpoint that determines how many survive the journey south. The timing is tight: milkweed flowers opened around July 5th, and monarchs began visiting the blooms just days earlier, suggesting the plants and insects are synchronized by the same weather rhythms. Sightings this summer, from mid-June through mid-July, have scattered across the region — Westbrook, Scarborough, Portland, Buxton, York, Cape Elizabeth — reflecting how deeply the breeding cycle now depends on roadside milkweed patches. What makes this urgent: the species was listed as threatened in December 2024 after an 80-percent population collapse over recent decades. Monarchs have long relied on milkweed that Wabanaki people shaped and tended; today, those same roadsides and margins are often the only habitat left. For now, the plants are blooming and the monarchs are finding them — but the margin between recovery and further decline is narrower than any butterfly's wing.

Rugosa rose is at peak bloom along the coast this week — more than fifty sightings scattered from Old Orchard Beach through Casco Bay, with hips already swelling beneath open flowers. The plant is uncommonly vigorous this year. What makes the abundance notable is what it's displacing. This Asian import was planted decades ago as dune stabilizer and has become so successful that it now crowds out native beach plum along the very dune edges where Wabanaki people traditionally gathered wild plums for food and medicine. The same ecological niche that once supported culturally significant harvesting has been largely converted to a monoculture of an ornamental exotic. The rugosa rose is doing exactly what it was brought here to do — stabilize and colonize — but at the cost of the native diversity that was already there.

Willard Beach and the Fore River Estuary remain officially impaired waters with no cleanup plan in place — a regulatory hollow point that offers little comfort to the harvesters who watched the local clamming economy collapse before government agencies confirmed what they already knew. This stretch of coast is showing other signs of stress. Tides today ran 16 centimeters above predicted levels — not a freak event, but part of a broader signal that seven of the twenty-seven water bodies assessed nearby are officially flagged as impaired. The margins that allowed these systems to function are narrowing faster than restoration efforts can address them.

Along the sandy margins near South Portland, the least terns are working. You can hear them before you see them — a sharp, insistent kip-kip-kip carrying over the water, pitched higher than anything else calling from the shore. They are Maine's smallest tern, barely larger than a starling, with a yellow bill tipped in black and a white forehead patch that catches the early summer light. At this time of year, they are doing something that looks, from a distance, almost unreasonably exposed: nesting directly on bare sand and gravel, in the open, with no structure around them at all. The nest is a shallow scrape, sometimes lined with a few bits of shell or debris, sometimes nothing. The eggs sit in it and look like the ground itself, pale and speckled in shades of tan and gray. A colony may have a dozen or more of these scrapes within a short stretch of beach, each pair defending a small radius around their eggs with considerable noise and direct aerial aggression toward anything that enters. The terns fish constantly during this period, plunging into the shallows for sand lance and small silversides, then returning to trade off incubation duties. The longest days of the year give them more hours to do this, and they use them. A pair may make dozens of foraging trips in a day, each one a brief steep dive and a quick return to the colony. The colony's main vulnerability is its openness. The same bare substrate that makes the eggs hard to see from above makes the birds easy to flush from the ground. A person walking too close will lift the adults off the nest, leaving the eggs exposed to sun and, more critically, to the attention of herring gulls, which are present along this coastline in numbers and will take eggs and chicks when the opportunity is there. Crows present the same problem. The terns respond to these threats collectively — the whole colony rises and mobs the intruder — but sustained disturbance breaks that defense down. Repeated flushes during incubation can cause nest abandonment, and early summer here brings both foot traffic and the birds that follow it. Peregrine falcons hunt this coastline. A peregrine is capable of taking a tern in flight, and when one appears near a colony the response is immediate: the terns go up in a tight, fast-moving group, calling hard, and the structure of the colony dissolves temporarily into a single defensive mass. The peregrine is not focused on the colony the way a gull is — it is a fast pursuit predator, and a healthy, alert colony of small birds is not easy prey — but the disruption is real and the energetic cost of repeated alarm responses adds up across a nesting season. The terns have to balance time away from eggs against the risk of leaving them unguarded, and a persistent predator presence shifts that balance. Least terns are a threatened species in Maine, and their numbers here reflect the broader pressure on sandy beach nesting habitat along the New England coast. The beach plum along the upper margins of the shore is leafed out now, and the gray alder has filled in behind it. That vegetation line marks the edge of usable tern habitat — the birds need the open ground in front of it, and as that ground shrinks or fills with foot traffic, colonies compress or fail. What sustains the ones that do persist is the fidelity of the birds to specific sites; least terns return to the same colony locations year after year, which makes successful sites worth protecting and failed ones genuinely hard to replace. If you are near the water right now, listen for that kip-kip-kip above the low wash of the shore. The terns are small enough that you might look past them, but once you pick up the call, you will start to see the wingbeats — quick and stiff, with that distinctive hovering pause just before the dive.

European Green Crabs (Carcinus maenas) are no longer seasonal visitors to these waters—they are settling in. Forty sightings from Biddeford to Chebeague Island since February, with numbers surging in June, paint a picture of year-round establishment. The crabs are winning the race to reshape the Gulf of Maine, and the stakes are high for traditions rooted in these flats. Eelgrass beds, which anchor the coastal food web and have been harvested alongside soft-shell clams for generations, are being systematically uprooted. Soft-shell clams themselves are being crowded out on digging flats that have sustained families and towns for centuries. Green crabs are now displacing a way of life. The gulf's rapid warming has tilted conditions in their favor—they thrive where native species sicken. The crabs' year-round presence means they are not passing through. They are staying.

The air above the meadow edges near South Portland carries the sweet weight of early summer. Common milkweed stands shoulder-high now, their broad leaves catching the longest light of the year. Pink flower clusters crown each stem, dense with nectar and thick with scent. The timing is no accident. These blooms open just as the first monarch butterflies return from their southern journey, orange wings flickering through the warming air. A monarch lands on a milkweed flower head, legs gripping the tiny individual flowers that make up each rounded cluster. The butterfly probes deep with its coiled tongue, drawing nectar that will fuel egg-laying in the days ahead. But this plant offers more than food. The monarch tests the milkweed leaves with chemical sensors on its feet, reading the plant's defensive compounds. These same toxins that protect the milkweed from most herbivores will become the monarch caterpillar's shield, absorbed and concentrated in its tissues to make it unpalatable to birds and other predators. The female monarch curls her abdomen beneath a milkweed leaf and deposits a single cream-colored egg. She moves to another plant, then another, spacing her eggs across the meadow. Each caterpillar will need an entire milkweed plant to complete its growth, consuming leaves that would kill most other insects. The milkweed tolerates this specialized herbivory because monarchs are efficient pollinators, their large bodies picking up pollen as they feed and carrying it between plants. The relationship runs deeper than simple exchange. Monarch caterpillars that feed on milkweed with higher concentrations of defensive compounds become more toxic themselves, better protected as adults. The plant's chemical arsenal becomes the butterfly's inheritance. Other insects work the milkweed flowers alongside the monarchs. Milkweed beetles with their red and black warning colors feed on stems and leaves, also adapted to the plant's toxins. Bees and flies probe for nectar, their smaller bodies requiring multiple visits to gather what a monarch collects in one feeding. The invasive black locust trees blooming nearby offer abundant nectar too, but they cannot provide what the monarch needs most: a place to raise young that will survive. The milkweed's flowering peaks now, in these longest days, when monarch numbers are still climbing toward their summer height. Each plant may produce several thousand seeds by autumn, carried on white silk parachutes to new ground. But first comes this moment of abundance, pink flowers heavy with nectar under the extended light of early summer. The sweet scent drifts across the meadow, calling to orange wings that have traveled a thousand miles to find it.