FORT KENT, Maine — This is a story about how covering a school budget ended up in a butterfly hunt.
Any journalist will tell you the best part of the job is its unpredictability. Sure, it can be a bit stressful at times, but overall I enjoy the randomness that is my life.
Things got wonderfully random earlier this week, when I was on my way to town to get a quick photo to illustrate a story on the School Administrative District 27 budget referendum.
Not far from the house, I saw a camper van pulled over and what appeared to be two people looking a tad lost.
Knowing that lost feeling all too well, I stopped to ask if they needed directions.
That is how I met Anne and Stephen Hammond, butterfly hunters from Woolwich.
Well, actually, Anne, 75, is the hunter. Stephen, 74, is her driver, support staff and pit crew.
One thing led to another, and by the time I was back on the road to get my photo, the Hammonds were making a U-turn back to Rusty Metal Farm, where I invited them to park their camper van for the night.
That evening, over some amazing steamed garlicky mussels — compliments of Anne and Stephen — and a bottle of white wine I purchased on a recent trip to Quebec, I learned that in addition to it being their 47th wedding anniversary, I was the first dinner guest ever in the camper.
To say the retired couple had the cool factor going on is an understatement.
That evening, I learned that Stephen bicycled up the Alaskan Highway in the 1950s on a three-speed bike and as a lad drove through South America with his parents; that Anne was an English literature major from Peekskill, New York; and that they met more than four decades earlier, when a group sailing trip had been canceled and they had to pile into one car.
“I ended up on Stephen’s lap,” Anne said.
“The rest was history,” her husband laughed.
The two eventually moved to the Bath area, where they began a successful hardware business that now mostly is in the hands of their children, leaving them time for things such as butterfly hunting.
Five years ago, after seeing a story in the newspaper, Anne joined the Maine Inland Fisheries & Wildlife Butterfly Survey, and she has been on the prowl ever since.
“I used to collect insects as a little girl,” she told me. “I collected all kinds of butterflies in my area around Peekskill.”
Anne learned about the various species of Maine butterflies, their relationship to the Maine environment and economy and the various methods of locating and collecting them.
“They give you a net,” she said. “But I did have to buy my own [guide] book.”
Net and book in hand, Anne tramps the woods and fields around the state, from April to September, locating, identifying and documenting every butterfly she comes across.
This week, she was on a sort of grail quest looking for the elusive early hairstreak, or Erora laeta, which has not been documented in Maine for at least 60 years, she said.
It was tracking the hairstreak that brought the Hammonds to northern Maine.
Early hairstreaks, Anne said, live their brief two-week adult life in the tops of healthy beech trees eating beech nuts. The couple had been looking for beech trees when I met them on the road.
I told them I was fairly certain there were beech trees on Rusty Metal Farm that had not fallen to the beech bark disease, which has wiped out most of the species in Maine.
The best chance at seeing the hairstreak is on sunny days, from May 15 to June 15, when they come down from the tree tops to sip water and minerals in open, rocky areas such as dirt roads or driveways.
Unfortunately, not only was it pouring rain the entire time the Hammonds were here, but my beech trees proved to be as elusive as the early hairstreaks.
“I know there are some here,” I kept saying as we trudged along muddy trails, getting slapped in the face by wet branches and swatting mosquitos. “At least, I think there are.”
I did not have a huge amount of time to explore and Anne was a remarkably good sport about the whole thing. She said she is getting used to coming up empty when it comes to the early hairstreak.
The couple already spent some time at Trafton Park in Limestone hanging out near a huge beech tree.
“It’s a fabulous tree that is not infected at all,” Anne said. “I was out there with my camera, but the weather and butterflies did not cooperate.”
She did get lucky on a trip a while back to Mount Greylock in Massachusetts when she joined nine other butterfly enthusiasts looking for the hairstreak.
“There were 10 of us toting our cameras down a trail to this beech tree,” she said. “We saw one hairstreak, and we all just surrounded it pointing our cameras at it.”
I am hoping she has similar or better luck when she and Stephen continue to explore northern Maine looking for pockets of healthy beech trees.
We were able to find one Fort Kent resident who said he had a stand that looked promising, and I last saw Anne and Stephen heading in that direction with plans to continue on to Allagash and into the North Maine Woods.
Anne would love to hear about any healthy beech in Maine, so if you know of any please email me here at the paper and I can pass along the information to her.
In the meantime, if you spot a brown camper van with a high lift jack hooked to the front grill, give the couple inside a wave.
Take it from me: It’s a great way to add some randomness to your life.
Julia Bayly of Fort Kent is an award winning writer and photographer, who writes part time for Bangor Daily News. Her column appears here every other Friday. She can be reached by email at jbayly@bangordailynews.com.
