Carolyn Ziegra hits the gas. There’s the nip of cold through my jacket, my hair blowing behind me. The smell of pine, the whoosh of snowmobile runners hitting powder. And we’re off.
It’s 15 degrees in the Maine woods this February morning. I’m wearing layers on layers, gloves on top of gloves, but there’s something comforting about being in a place where winter is still doing its thing. Maine winters have been warming over the last century, with fewer cold snaps and shorter winter seasons, but this year we’ve hit the snow jackpot. Skiers are flocking to AMC’s Maine Lodges to explore the world-class groomed backcountry trails. Snowmobiles are zooming up and down the Maine Woods’ extensive network. Just this past weekend, mushers drove in from all over the Northeast and Canada for Greenville’s Wilderness Sled Dog Race.
I’m here for a different reason: to see the Maine Woods Initiative (MWI) in action, and to spend a day behind the scenes with AMC’s Forest Manager.
AMC Forest Manager Carolyn Ziegra.
The thing about spending a day in the life of Carolyn Ziegra is that you could spend that day doing…well, anything. Carolyn oversees operations for MWI, which balances sustainable forestry, community economic development, and recreation with land conservation to permanently protect over 114,000 acres of critical forest environment.
As you can imagine, it’s a big job.
“Lots of things and many things in between,” Carolyn jokes when I ask her what she does. For starters, she manages AMC’s commercial forestry work, collaborating with partners to make sure timber harvests are in compliance with AMC’s responsible forestry practices. She oversees road work, construction, and bridge design across a nearly 400-mile network of roads. She facilitates carbon offset projects, works on fish passage restoration, and helps carry out research projects on watershed integrity, fisheries restoration, water quality, forest management, forest ecology, and more.
Today we’re heading into the Maine woods on a snowmobile to set up a wildlife camera bait site in hopes of capturing data on one of Maine’s rarest birds—the golden eagle.
Known to some as the “ghosts of the Eastern forest,” the golden eagle–which landed on Maine’s endangered species list due to habitat loss and the lingering effects of the DDT pesticide–breeds in Canada and travels as far as Alabama in the winter. AMC is supporting the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife (IFW) with their part of the Maine Golden Eagle Study—a collaborative, large-scale community science effort to better understand the presence of golden eagles in eastern North America.
Photo of a golden eagle by Frank Dürr via Flickr Commons.
What we’re doing today is way less glamorous than it sounds. Speeding ahead on the yellow snowmobile in front of us is wildlife biologist Scott McLellan, and strapped to the back of Scott’s snowmobile is a deer carcass that IFW picked up from a roadkill call. Our mission is to find the perfect site: high trees for perching, an open clearing, and two well-placed trees for fastening the bait and lashing a camera.
The snow is waist deep at the first two sites we try, which don’t yield much in the way of eagle hangout spots, but we do see some tracks: lynx, marten, moose. I ask Carolyn about the most surprising animal encounter she’s had on the job.
“Oh geez,” she says. “I’ve run into a lot of bears on foot, which is always exhilarating.” She says this calmly, like it’s no big deal, and then tells me about a pack of seven mink that passed her on the rocks when she was surveying a bridge site. I’ve heard she got chased by a bear her second day on the job, and I ask her about it. “Not chased,” she corrects me. “I turned and briskly walked away.”
Carolyn seems–to me, at least–unflappable. Even when our heavy snowmobile sinks into the unpacked powder and gets stuck, she politely asks me to hop off and then she stands up and guns it out, riding to sturdier ground. She came to AMC two and a half years ago, after working seasonal jobs out in the Pacific Northwest and attending forestry school.
“At first it was intimidating,” she says, citing AMC’s many contractors and collaborators, and all the relationships she’s had to develop and navigate. Not to mention that in Maine, just 8% of foresters are women. Carolyn presents on panels and participates in UMaine’s Supporting Women in Forestry Today (SWIFT) program, which provides mentoring to women and others who faces barriers to access in professional forestry. “I’m really fortunate to work for AMC, which is a really welcoming organization,” she says. “It’s a small community out here. Everyone looks out for each other.”
Carolyn Ziegra on a snowmobile.
We’ve got one more site to scope, and the afternoon is slipping by. Cue the real drama of the day: Scott hits a snow drift that’s obscuring a sinkhole and his snowmobile flips over on its side, deer and all.
Actually, to be clear it’s only me who finds this dramatic – for Scott and Carolyn, who spend a lot of their workdays snowmobiling through these woods, it’s just part of the job. Scott slides out from underneath his yellow Ski-doo like someone who’s done it a million times, and together they start unstrapping his cargo. In minutes we’ve hauled the snowmobile right-side up, and Scott’s heading off to scout the trail ahead. He comes back a few minutes later, breathless and triumphant. “I found it!” he says.
A short ride up the trail and a zag into the woods later, there it is: a clearing where the mountain curves into a bowl; where there are tall trees for perching and the perfect place to mount our wildlife camera.
Scott and Carolyn get to work readying the bait site, but I just stand there for a moment, taking in this place. The low, sloping mountains. The silent, snowy forest. It’s a rare thing to look at something like land conservation and feel its roundness. I’m struck by all that AMC is doing in MWI. Responsible forestry. Climate resilience. Creating local jobs; supporting the local economy. Education. Recreation. Research. Dark sky protection. Land and forest conservation. As Carolyn says: “AMC owns the land, but the land is for everybody.”
Carolyn Ziegra and Scott McLellan scope a site for the Maine Golden Eagle Study.
Later, as we’re leaving the woods, I ask Carolyn what she loves most about her job. “There’s a lot of gratitude in getting to do this,” she says. “Getting to take care of such a special place is what excites me every day.” She tells me what it feels like to be a steward of the land, to know that what she does now will matter most in the future, when she’s no longer alive to see it. “Especially with climate change and uncertainty, this will be a place that will be protected in perpetuity and will provide a refuge,” she says. “An ecologically sound area that’s left intact well into the future. Well beyond any of us.”
Support the future of MWI by donating to protect the Barnard Forest, visiting one of our Maine lodges, and becoming an AMC member.
Local to the Maine Woods? Here’s how to participate in the Maine Golden Eagle Study.