Living River Series

Welcome to the Living River: An Introduction to the St. George River Watershed

St. George Consulting — Living River Series

A Land Acknowledgement

The lands and waters of the St. George River watershed are the unceded territory of the Wawenock people, one of the Wabanaki nations whose deep roots in this landscape stretch back thousands of years. The Wawenock lived, fished, hunted, gathered, and built their communities along these rivers and shores long before European names were placed on maps. We offer this acknowledgement with respect for their enduring presence and their ongoing relationship with this land.

A Landscape Born of Ice

The St. George River watershed looks the way it does today because of events that began roughly 20,000 years ago, when a continental ice sheet more than a mile thick covered all of what is now Maine. That glacier scoured the bedrock, rounded the hills, deepened the lake basins, and deposited the jumbled mix of clay, sand, and gravel that underlies our soils today.

By around 14,000 years ago, the ice had begun its long retreat northward. As it melted, the land — compressed for millennia under unimaginable weight — sat low, and the sea flooded far inland. Marine clays were deposited across what are now valley fields and farmland throughout the watershed. Over thousands of years, the land slowly rebounded, streams carved their channels, and forests advanced northward behind the retreating ice: first tundra, then spruce and fir, then gradually the mixed hardwood-softwood forest we know today.

The St. George River itself rises near Montville in the hills of Waldo County and flows roughly 50 miles south through a chain of lakes and wetlands — including Lake St. George, Seven Tree Pond, and Crawford Pond — before reaching its tidal estuary at Thomaston and opening to the sea on the storied St. George Peninsula. Its watershed drains approximately 350 square miles of forest, farmland, wetland, and village, emptying ultimately into the Gulf of Maine.

Thousands of Years of Human Life

The first people arrived in what is now Maine not long after the glaciers withdrew — perhaps 12,000 to 13,000 years ago — following the retreating ice edge into a landscape of tundra, meltwater lakes, and abundant game. These Paleo-Indian peoples were the ancestors of the Wabanaki nations, and their descendants have maintained a continuous relationship with this landscape ever since.

Over thousands of years, that relationship deepened and elaborated. The Archaic and Woodland periods saw increasingly settled patterns of life along the river: seasonal camps at fish runs, shellfish harvests along the coast, burial sites, trade networks, and a rich material and ceremonial culture tied closely to the rhythms of the watershed. Salmon, eels, and alewives ran the river in numbers difficult to imagine today. The forests provided deer, moose, beaver, and bear. The marsh edges gave cattail, berries, and medicinal plants. The Wawenock people knew this place in a completeness that no map has ever captured.

European contact came in 1605, when English captain George Weymouth sailed his vessel into the river mouth and, in a moment that darkened what might have been a peaceful encounter, seized five Wawenock people and took them back to England. The river has carried his name ever since. English settlement followed fitfully through the 1700s — interrupted by wars and conflict with Wabanaki peoples defending their territory — and by the early 19th century the watershed had been transformed: forests cleared, mills built at every fall, and the distinctive lime industry of Knox County underway, fueled by the region's abundant limestone bedrock.

The Watershed Today

The St. George River watershed today is home to roughly 35,000 people living in a collection of towns that reflect the full range of Maine's Midcoast character. From the farming communities of the upper watershed — Montville, Liberty, Searsmont, Appleton, and Washington — to the mill and village towns of the middle river — Union and Warren — to the working waterfront communities of the lower watershed and peninsula — Thomaston, Cushing, South Thomaston, and St. George — the watershed is a landscape of remarkable variety. It is farmed and fished, hiked and paddled, painted and written about. It is, in the fullest sense, a living place.

The Georges River Land Trust

Since its founding, the Georges River Land Trust has worked to ensure this landscape remains wild, connected, and accessible for the people and wildlife that depend on it. The Land Trust's mission states it plainly:

"Conserve and care for the diverse ecosystems and wildlife habitats of the St. George River watershed, expand access to nature for all people, and collaborate with partners through education and the arts to inspire lasting kinship with the natural world."

Through conservation easements, land acquisition, stewardship, and community partnership, the Land Trust protects the working farms, forested ridges, wetland corridors, and riverside habitats that make this watershed what it is. Every acre protected is a decision made on behalf of the brook trout in the headwaters, the osprey on the river bend, and the children who haven't yet had the chance to discover this place.

The Maine Council of Trout Unlimited

Trout Unlimited Maine is the state council of Trout Unlimited, America's oldest and largest cold-water conservation organization. In Maine, TU chapters work to protect and restore the brook trout streams, landlocked salmon lakes, and wild Atlantic salmon rivers that define the state's watersheds. Their work includes stream habitat improvement, dam removal advocacy, riparian buffer protection, and water quality monitoring — often in direct partnership with land trusts, state agencies, and tribal communities. Maine holds the largest remaining wild brook trout population in the eastern United States, and TU Maine's mission is to keep it that way. Learn more at tumaine.org.

An Invitation

This blog series — The Living River — is an invitation to meet your neighbors. Not the ones on your street, but the ones in the marsh, under the ice, in the canopy overhead, and in the leaf litter at your feet: the beaver and the otter, the trout lily and the cattail, the whirligig beetle and the American eel. Each week we'll introduce one species from the St. George River watershed — its life, its role, its story, and its place in the long human relationship with this land.

The watershed is not a backdrop. It is a community, ancient and intricate, and we are part of it. We hope these stories remind you of that — and send you outside to look.

Want to Learn More?

The Living River blog series is published by St. George Consulting in support of the Georges River Land Trust and the Maine Council of Trout Unlimited. To explore the important work these organizations are doing to conserve and restore Maine's landscapes, visit georgesriver.org and tumaine.org.

Stuart Rich Stuart Rich

Double-crested Cormorant

The River's Black Diver: Double-crested Cormorant of the St. George

St. George Consulting — Living River Series

A Bird That Looks Like It Means Business

There's something almost prehistoric about a cormorant. Standing upright on a rocky ledge or a snag jutting from the river, wings spread wide to dry in the sun, it looks like a creature that has been doing this for a very long time — and it has. The double-crested cormorant (Nannopterum auritum) is one of North America's most successful waterbirds, and along the St. George River and its tidal reaches, it is a familiar and quietly impressive presence.

Not everyone loves the cormorant. It has a reputation for eating a lot of fish, which puts it at odds with some anglers. But spend a little time watching one — watching it surface dive with improbable grace, shake the water from its feathers, and tilt its bright orange-throated face toward the sky — and it's hard not to come around.

Natural History: Designed to Go Deep

The double-crested cormorant is a large, dark waterbird — roughly the size of a small goose — with black plumage that shimmers greenish in good light, a long neck built for chasing fish, and that distinctive orange-yellow throat pouch that's always visible. The "double crests" of the name are small tufts of white or dark feathers that appear briefly on adults during breeding season and are rarely conspicuous in the field.

Unlike ducks, cormorants have only partially waterproof feathers. This sounds like a design flaw, but it's actually an advantage: reduced buoyancy makes diving easier, and cormorants can pursue fish at depths that most diving birds can't reach. The trade-off is that they have to dry their feathers afterward — which explains that iconic spread-winged posture. When you see a cormorant standing like a small, dark gargoyle with its wings held out, it's doing exactly what it needs to do.

Underwater, cormorants are remarkably agile. They propel themselves with powerful webbed feet (their wings stay folded), using their hooked bill to snatch fish with precision. They can dive to 25 feet or more and stay submerged for up to a minute. Alewives, smelt, perch, minnows, and other small schooling fish make up the bulk of their diet.

Role in the St. George River Watershed

The cormorant's connection to the St. George watershed is especially vivid during the alewife run — one of the great annual wildlife events in Midcoast Maine. Each spring, hundreds of thousands of alewives (Alosa pseudoharengus) push up from saltwater into the river's tributaries and ponds to spawn. For the cormorant, this is a feast.

Cormorants congregate at river mouths, fish passages, and tidal pools precisely when the alewives are running, diving repeatedly into the dense, silver schools. This isn't freeloading — it's an ancient ecological relationship. Cormorant predation on alewives helps thin the most abundant individuals from the run, reducing pressure on the forage fish population and keeping the school healthy. The nutrients cormorants deposit along riverbanks — in the form of guano — enrich the riparian soils, benefiting the streamside plants that in turn hold the banks together and shade the water.

Alewives also connect cormorants to larger predators. Osprey, bald eagles, striped bass, and river otters all converge on the same runs — the cormorant is one player in a whole community drawn together by the seasonal abundance of a single small fish. What happens to the alewife run matters to all of them.

Beyond fish, cormorants nest colonially on islands and rocky outcroppings in coastal areas, often in the company of great blue herons and black-crowned night herons. Their nesting activity enriches island soils dramatically, supporting distinctive plant communities adapted to high-nutrient conditions.

Seasonal Notes

Cormorants begin appearing on the lower St. George and along the Penobscot Bay coastline in April, often before the alewife run is underway. Numbers build through May and June as birds spread to feeding areas along tidal rivers and estuaries. By midsummer, post-breeding birds and young-of-the-year join adults in mixed groups that work the river's lower reaches and nearby bays.

Most cormorants have departed for the coast and points south by October, though small numbers linger into November along open saltwater. The peak window for watching cormorants on the St. George is May through August — and the best show is almost always during the alewife run.

Fun Fact

Cormorants are remarkably sociable hunters. They've been observed working together in loose groups to herd schools of fish into tighter formations — essentially collaborating to make the catch easier for everyone. It's not the kind of sophisticated cooperative hunting you'd see in dolphins, but it's a step in that direction. The next time you see a raft of cormorants all diving in the same patch of river, they may be doing exactly this.

Learn More

The Living River blog series is published by St. George Consulting in support of the Georges River Land Trust and the Maine Council of Trout Unlimited. To explore the important work these organizations are doing to conserve and restore Maine's landscapes, visit georgesriver.org and tumaine.org.

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Stuart Rich Stuart Rich

Alewives

Every spring, one of the great spectacles of the natural world happens quietly in Maine's coastal rivers — and most people drive right past it. Alewives, small silvery fish that spent years at sea, return in great shimmering schools to the streams where they were born. When they run, nearly every predator in the St. George watershed takes notice.

Image by John Burrows

The River's Silver Messenger: The Alewife

St. George Consulting — Living River Series

Introduction

Every spring, one of the great spectacles of the natural world happens quietly in Maine's coastal rivers — and most people drive right past it. Alewives (Alosa pseudoharengus) are small, silvery fish, no bigger than your hand, that spend most of their lives in the open ocean and then return in great, shimmering schools to the freshwater streams where they were born. In Maine, they are called "river herring," and their arrival each May is as sure a sign of spring as the peepers or the returning ospreys. For the St. George River watershed, alewives are not just a seasonal visitor — they are a keystone species, a thread that connects ocean and forest, predator and prey, past and present.

Natural History

Alewives are anadromous fish, meaning they live in saltwater but spawn in freshwater — a life strategy they share with Atlantic salmon and sea-run brook trout. Adults typically spend two to five years at sea, growing on a diet of zooplankton, before an irresistible biological signal draws them back to their birth river. They navigate using the unique chemical signature of their home stream, a sense of place encoded in their biology at hatching.

Spawning occurs in slow-moving water — ponds, lake margins, and sluggish stream sections — where females release hundreds of thousands of eggs. The adults, exhausted and battered, drift back downstream to the sea. The eggs hatch quickly, and by late summer the young alewives — called "juveniles" — make their own first journey to the ocean, completing a cycle that has played out on this coast for thousands of years.

Role in the St. George River Watershed

Few species matter as much to as many others. When alewives run, nearly every predator in the watershed takes notice.

Ospreys and bald eagles wheel over the river in May, plucking fish from the surface. Great blue herons stand motionless in the shallows, waiting. River otters and mink work the stream banks. Striped bass and bluefish follow the schools into tidal reaches. Even brook trout gorge on the juveniles in late summer as they drift toward the sea.

But the alewives' contribution extends beyond what feeds on them directly. When they spawn in large numbers and die, their carcasses decompose along stream banks and in the water, releasing marine-derived nutrients — phosphorus, nitrogen — that fertilize the riparian zone. Riverside trees, shrubs, and plants along the St. George benefit from this nutrient pulse in ways that are only recently being understood by ecologists. In this sense, alewives are ocean nutrients delivered deep into the landscape.

Freshwater mussels — another species in this series — filter the water that alewife larvae develop in, and research suggests the two species benefit each other in a positive feedback loop of water quality and larval survival.

The Wabanaki people of this region understood alewives' importance intimately. They were a crucial spring food source, arriving predictably when winter stores were running low. Penobscot and other Wabanaki communities used weirs — basket-like fish traps constructed in streams — to harvest enormous quantities of alewives, which were dried and smoked for later use, rendered for oil, and used as fertilizer for crops. The right to fish for alewives was one of the most important seasonal resources tied to a community's territory. Many of Maine's traditional fishing sites remain significant to Wabanaki people today.

Seasonal Notes

The run begins in late April, with peak activity typically in May along the St. George system. Watch for rippling, crowded schools just below dams and fish passages in Thomaston and Warren — the fish visibly bunch where the passage narrows. By June, most adults have returned to the sea. The juveniles move downstream in August and September, a more subtle but no less remarkable migration. On warm late-summer afternoons, look for flickers of silver in slow pools near the river's mouth.

Fun Fact

A single female alewife can carry up to 300,000 eggs — and the schools they travel in can number in the millions. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Maine towns commonly held "alewife rights," legally managing who could harvest fish from specific streams. The fish were so economically important that towns went to court over them.

Want to Learn More?

The Living River blog series is published by St. George Consulting in support of the Georges River Land Trust and the Maine Council of Trout Unlimited. To explore the important work these organizations are doing to conserve and restore Maine's landscapes, visit georgesriver.org and tumaine.org.

Read More