Upon retirement, David Thompson of Orono found he had some free time on his hands. So he drove to the town office and asked about volunteer work. It wasn’t long before he and his wife, Patricia, were set up with the Orono Land Trust, building and maintaining area hiking and biking trails.
“I had to have something to do,” he said while walking the trails of the Jeremiah Colburn Natural Area in Orono on June 10.
He paused and looked up at a tall cedar tree that was leaning over the trail. The tree was dead, broken near the bottom, and resting precariously against a nearby tree.
“I’m going to come in here and cut that down because that could fall,” he said, making a mental note before continuing his walk through the sun-dappled woods. Mosquitoes landed on his camo John Deere hat and quickly dispersed, discouraged by a layer of insect repellent.
Now, more than a decade after walking into the town office looking for “something to do,” David Thompson, 78, is the co-chief steward of the Orono Land Trust and chairman of the Orono Trail Committee. He commits between 500 and 600 hours of time to the Orono Land Trust each year and does additional work for four other Maine land trusts. He also is on the Maine Land Trust Network steering committee.
“I think the best thing about this type of work is, one, you feel like you’re accomplishing things for the environment and, two, all the interesting people you get to meet,” he said.
David Thompson has always enjoyed working in the woods.
A longtime Orono resident, he graduated from the University of Maine Forestry School to become a licensed forester. He eventually moved from the forest to a saw mill in Passadumkeag, which he managed for 15 years until he retired.
“With the land trust, I found out that I could go back to doing a lot of forestry work, which I hadn’t done in years,” he said.
“He’s indispensable,” Bucky Owen, president of the Orono Land Trust, said. “He can handle heavy equipment — he has his own backhoe and front end loader and stuff like that he brings to projects — and he’s a wonderful woodworker. He’s a jack of all trades.”
David Thompson has written three forest management plans for land trusts in recent years, balancing recreational use with preserving habitats for a variety of wildlife.
“The whole idea of ecology and the relationship between wildlife and people and the land — that wasn’t something that was taught when I went to school,” he said. “I’ve learned on my own by going to conferences and walking in the woods with people.”
When it comes to area trails, Thompson has led numerous projects to construct footbridges, map new routes, build water bars and dig culverts. He currently is involved in a project to manage beaver activity near a trail by constructing a device known as a “beaver deceiver,” which essentially is a fence that protects the opening of a culvert.
He also is working to develop the trail along the old Veazie Railroad bed, which connects several preserves and pockets of conserved land in Bangor and Orono, and he is helping to improve the Cota Trail, an access trail that leads from Forest Avenue to the trail network of the Jeremiah Colburn Natural Area.
“Trails are important because they get people out there — to see what’s out there,” he said. “And then, they might care more.”
When he leads trail projects for the Orono Land Trust, he usually draws on the trust’s roster of 50 to 60 regular volunteers.
“The whole area of volunteers and leaders is something all land trusts struggle with to some extent,” he said. “A lot of people in Orono Land Trust are older. We try to recruit younger people, but the problem is a lot of them have children or jobs and don’t have the time — and I understand. I didn’t have time when I was their age, either.”
“I was on a phone call with people from about 25 land trusts the other day,” Owen said. “And we talked about volunteers and age. Many of us are in our mid-70s, and we can see that we need a people to come in behind us. We can mentor them and show them the ropes, and they can basically carry the torch as we phase out.”
David Thompson has worked with four Boy Scouts on trail projects to achieve Eagle status and at least once a year works with UMaine students to clean the trails of invasive plants.
“This is buckthorn,” David Thompson said, grasping a leafy branch of a tall plant growing beside a trail in the Jeremiah Coburn Natural Area. “It started in the field and then moved up. I’ve watched it move through the forest over the past seven or eight years.”
Other invasive plants land trusts constantly are battling are purple loosestrife and Japanese knotweed, he said.
Coming to a bridge, David Thompson knelt down to inspect a broken plank. Seeing it was rotten, he pried it off the bridge and tossed it into the underbrush.
“It wasn’t pressure treated,” he observed. “We’ll have to fix that.”
Pressure-treated wood usually lasts 10 to 15 years as a footbridge, he said. Untreated spruce may last about five years. Untreated hemlock lasts about eight or nine years. Cedar, on the other hand, lasts about 20 to 25 years, but it’s harder to come by, he explained.
As he headed back toward the trailhead, he listed off the things that needed attention: two trees to be chopped down and two bridges to mend. Wandering off trail, he fished a plastic grocery bag out of the ferns. It was stuffed full and tied at the top.
“I don’t even want to know what’s in this,” he said, carrying the bag to his pickup and tossing it into the bed with a crushed Pepsi can he’d picked up earlier.
Done with his patrol, he climbed into his pickup to deliver several bat houses to the Bangor Land Trust.
“There are very few ‘Daves’ around who have all of the technical skills that he has — and the interest and time,” Owen said. “Lord knows how many hours he puts in a week on different projects.”
Many land trusts in Maine are looking for volunteers to do trail work and office work. To find a land trust in your area, visit the Maine Land Trust Network at mltn.org and click on the “Find a Land Trust” tab on the top bar, then sort by county.