Native were recorded September 28 at Anomaly Road in Wharton.1 This cold-water species indicates streams with stable flows and dissolved oxygen adequate for salmonid habitat.1
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The leaves now dropping into the streams are the winter food base. In normal flow, most leaf litter is chewed up by shredding insects, stoneflies and caddisflies among them. In an experimental study published last year, low flow cut total leaf breakdown by 39 percent and shredder densities by 73 percent. Where fine sediment had settled into the channel, clogging and low oxygen also shut down the streambed refuges those insects retreat into during drought. Sandy outwash channels collect exactly that kind of fine sediment as flow drops.
On the uplands the same dryness reads as fuel. The Waterboro barrens grow pitch pine and scrub oak over as much as ninety feet of sand that sheds rain in hours, and their cured grass and dropped oak leaves respond to days of dry weather, not weeks. That barrens burned in 1947 and has not burned in wildfire since. Statewide, the 1947 fire season followed a wet spring, drought that set in during July, and ground that was dry by the end of September. Maine's Forest Service posts a daily fire danger rating by region through late November, and burn permits stop in any region rated high.
The next weekly drought map will show whether severe drought keeps spreading across York County. At the pace of the last two weeks, it has room to.
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