Transcription of Love Maine Radio #336: Hannah and Chellie Pingree and Judy Camuso
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Topsham. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com.
Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 336, airing for the first time on Sunday, February 25, 2018. Today we speak with former member of the Maine House of Representatives, Hannah Pingree, and Chellie Pingree, who currently represents Maine’s First District in Congress. Both Hannah and Chellie are active in the North Haven community and are champions of sustainable agriculture. We also speak with Judy Camuso, the Director of Wildlife for The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1: Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the heart of The Old Port at 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the work of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its newly expanded space, including Ingunn Joergensen, Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.
Lisa Belisle: After serving four terms in the Maine House of Representatives, Hannah Pingree now works as the business manager of her family’s inn, restaurant, and farm, and manages North Haven Sustainable Housing. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree represents Maine’s First District in Congress. Thank you for coming in today.
Hannah Pingree: Thanks for having us.
Chellie Pingree: Sure.
Lisa Belisle: You’re both pretty busy ladies.
Chellie Pingree: That’s true.
Lisa Belisle: Not just because of the Congress, but also because of all the work that you’re doing on North Haven.
Hannah Pingree: Yes. You live in a small town, and I also have two kids, so you get sucked into a lot of things. My mom has started a couple businesses, but she’s busy in Congress, so-
Chellie Pingree: That’s right.
Hannah Pingree: We know how to keep busy.
Lisa Belisle: Then, of course, you have your sister, who is also doing a lot of very interesting things on the island.
Hannah Pingree: Yes. She runs a restaurant. She is a landlord. She makes films. Somehow we all have an inability to focus. We like to do a lot of things.
Lisa Belisle: That’s a good thing, and then we don’t want to leave out the fact that you also have a son, Chellie.
Chellie Pingree: Yeah. That’s right. He’s a furniture builder, and he lives in Brooklyn, New York and has a child, but we always think someday he’ll move back to Maine because who doesn’t want to build furniture in Maine if you can?
Lisa Belisle: It seems like that would make sense.
Chellie Pingree: Totally makes sense. We’re working on it.
Lisa Belisle: So Turner Farm, tell me why did you originally have the interest in this place, which is beautiful? I’ve been there. I really enjoyed my visit. It seems quite idyllic, a nice, small, Maine island, but it also seems like it could require a lot of effort.
Chellie Pingree: True. Well, I mean I’ve been farming since the 1970s, and I farmed in two or three locations on North Haven. I originally came to Maine kind of when all the back-to-the-landers moved to Maine in the 1970s, and then I studied at College of the Atlantic with Eliot Coleman, who’s one of the masters of organic farming.
Hannah Pingree: She majored in composting.
Chellie Pingree: Yeah, that’s right. I was in charge of composting.
Lisa Belisle: Which I love. It’s actually one of my favorite topics. I think I told you this when I was at the farm.
Chellie Pingree: Well, I learned to compost at College of the Atlantic, and it was my work-study job. Then I ended up on North Haven, and so I just felt very fortunate back in … It was around 2008 with my previous husband who had come to the island, and this farm just happened to come onto the market. It’s one of the historic farms in the community, probably one of the oldest farms, since the original family came in 1764, and the fact that it was being sold, and we were there at that moment in time.
It’s the biggest farm I’ve ever had the chance to operate and the most serious operation, and we’ve ended up expanding it quite a bit and clearing a lot of land that had grown up. It had been abandoned from farming for many years. Today we have eight greenhouses, so we’re able to operate it year-round. We have pigs, and chickens, and cows, and run barn dinners out of our barn, and do it in collaboration with our restaurant and inn. Also something I didn’t intend to do, but we now own all these businesses, and it’s been really wonderful to be able to operate such a historic farm, but also to have it done in collaboration with a restaurant so you can have this experience of eating food that was picked that morning.
Lisa Belisle: Is this something that people are surprised to learn about each of you when you first … Well, I mean both of you have been in government for quite a while at this point, but when they first meet you, are they surprised to learn that you both have this farming background?
Hannah Pingree: It’s a better question for her. I mean I grew up on a farm, somewhat, when I was a little kid, and then she actually started a knitting business, and so I actually grew up as sort of in her small business part of her life, but she is the farmer, and she’s the farmer in Congress, and I think it’s added a lot of credibility. I mean she is one of the most involved members of Congress working on food policy and farm policy, so maybe they’re surprised, but I think it’s actually been really appreciated by the people she’s worked with that she does it, and she does it even in her spare time. When she’s not in Congress, she works on how we can make this farm work.
Personally, I am not a farmer, and we have an amazing couple that runs our farm, and they know so much more than I do. We all work on the business side of things, how we’re going to make it break even, so I’ve been deeply involved in that and how it connects to our restaurant, but I would say I don’t profess to be a farmer, but she is.
Chellie Pingree: Yeah, and it’s great for me. I mean nobody’s more fortunate than when your kids work in the same business that you do, and having Hannah have been involved in politics and now being able to do this, it’s great. I couldn’t continue to operate this farm if I didn’t have Hannah as the business manager and running everything and also the restaurant too.
It’s true, when I meet people in Congress, you don’t … People think that most politicians and members and members of Congress are lawyers. They just kind of have this idea that you went to law school, and you became a politician, and so when somebody says, “Well, what did you do in your background?” and I say, “Well, the only thing I’m really qualified to do is to be an organic farmer. It’s the only thing I ever studied, and it’s the one thing I’m technically able to do,” people are surprised.
I’ve served on the Agriculture Committee. I’m on the Agriculture Appropriations Committee. I’ve made it my number-one issue, and so I think my colleagues associate that with me, but sometimes when I talk to them about it, in some ways, people are as surprised that we live on an island and that we have to take a ferry to get home and that it’s a farm on an island. People in Maine have a certain sense of our island tradition and our coastal history, but anywhere else, and you say to someone, “Well, we ride a ferry,” or, “There’s a huge community. There are 14 year-round islands in Maine, and each of them have communities, and ours has a K through 12 school, and it’s a vibrant operating community,” I think people are very surprised.
Lisa Belisle: Hannah, when I was visiting this summer, you and I had a conversation about the fact that the summer residents really produce quite the market for fresh, well, produce, fruits, vegetables, and your farm dinners, which are very popular. Then you have a lot of visitors to the inn, but you’re a year-round farm, and you don’t have quite the same demand as the months move into the autumn and winter. How do you work with that?
Hannah Pingree: Yeah. I mean that is the most complicated challenge, and it’s … I mean it’s not different than … Most of Maine is somewhat seasonal. I mean a lot of the tourism industry, a lot of farms have significant demand in the summertime, and then you got to figure out how to be creative. We have a lot of demand in July and August, and we could sell every piece of lettuce, goat … Whatever we have, we could sell it in July and August, so we have been creative.
We have a year-round CSA where we offer winter greens. That just started a couple weeks ago, and we actually deliver them to people on North Haven and Vinalhaven, and we have built a pretty significant base of clients up on the mainland. We sell to a bunch of food co-ops, restaurants. Because we grow year-round, that is somewhat unique, especially in January. The Good Tern in Rockland is psyched for out lettuce, and our spinach, and our kale, so … But it takes hard work. I mean it’s a pain in the butt to get things on and off the island, so we try to coordinate with things going on with my sister’s business and Nebo when we’re open, so we try as much … It takes more effort, but you have to be more creative to make it work, and we’re working on it.
Chellie Pingree: We also, I mean, part of our business model is that we have eight greenhouses, which many farms in Maine are now using hoop houses to extend the season. Five of them are not heated, but three of them are heated by wood that we cut on our property. There’s a lot of waste wood on North Haven because there’s just a lot of fallen trees, so finding wood isn’t a problem, but keeping a fire going, and maintaining it, and the cost of the infrastructure was a part of it, but more and more farms are doing that in Maine because, again, it’s a way to extend your season.
Frankly, if you ever have the chance to eat spinach that’s grown in the winter in a hoop house that’s maybe gotten a little bit of frost on it, it has a whole different flavor. There’s something about the cool weather that really changes the taste. The quality of the stuff we grow in winter, some of it is as good or better than what we grow in the summer. [crosstalk 00:09:26]-
Hannah Pingree: The people in Maine need green things. In January and February, they do appreciate it.
Lisa Belisle: Well, we were just over in Rome visiting my daughter who’s studying abroad, and we noticed that there weren’t a lot of vegetables being served because, even though it’s warmer there, their local produce is shutting down this time of year. The availability of greens is something that you don’t notice that you have until it’s not there.
Hannah Pingree: In the US supermarkets, there are boxes of greens year-round. They’re a little sadder, even at Hannaford in the wintertime, but I think people do appreciate a locally-grown, organic product. I think there are more and more people who appreciate that. On North Haven, because we realized it was easier, we actually deliver people’s CSA to their houses, so it’s about as easy as it can get, and we have a very diverse group of people who are into it.
Lisa Belisle: This ability to be a business person has been really important to both of you and something that, from what I’m guessing, has taken time. It’s not something that, even if you had an MBA, which I don’t think either one of you does, it’s something that really comes with practice and really being the owner of your own business. Tell me what that was like for you, initially, as the person who studied composting, and gardening, and farming to start developing your business skills.
Chellie Pingree: Right. Well, I mean I came about it because I wanted to be a farmer, but I was lucky. At College they had a couple of business classes. Way back in the 1970s, Dan, who’s no longer with us, taught a class, and I remember that I learned double-entry bookkeeping, which doesn’t mean anything to anybody anymore because you have Quicken, and you have your computer system, and everything else, but in my first farm, I had a pencil, and a ledger. My dad was a actually an accountant, and he used to come out and visit. I was from Minnesota originally. He would come out and visit for three weeks in the fall, and he’d go over all my books and find the mistakes. It was a more complicated thing then, and I … but it was what I learned to do.
I feel like business, to me, is something I learned along the way. It was I started with my first farm and one apprentice and selling in the summer. That was way back in the 1970s when Hannah was first born. Then, over the years, I developed a yarn business, and we had a mail-order company. In the ’70s and ’80s, we sold to 1,200 accounts around the country, and we had mail-order catalogs back before there were computers. Everything I learned was a little bit along the way.
It’s been great to have Hannah who, you’re right, doesn’t have an MBA, but served in the legislature, was on the Appropriations Committee, Speaker of the House, you have to deal with budgets, and is way better at computer spreadsheets and all the things that we have to do now. We’ve just learned it along the way, but there’s a lot to it, all the rules and regulations when you’re dealing with food or restaurants. You’ve got all the food safety issues. When you have employees, which we have more than 50 at the height of the summer, you’ve got payrolls, and healthcare insurance, and everything else. I feel like we’re constantly learning and figuring out ways to do it.
Then the business model, I mean everybody who farms knows that it’s not easy to make a living on a farm. It’s not easy to make your farm work. Restaurants are even trickier sometimes and seasonal businesses, as many people have in Maine, and our season is very short. You got to pay for that infrastructure year-round, and so we’re constantly trying to look for the right way to go about doing it.
Hannah Pingree: Yeah, I mean I would agree with all of that. My whole growing up, my mom has been a business person and in politics. Even before she ran for the state legislature, she was a school board member. I’m now on the school board. I was in the legislature. I think that we both come at business from a, at least I do, from a perspective of it’s actually something good for our community too. I mean people need jobs. The community needs diversification. Her knitting business was actually a lot about employing women on the island year-round, and at that point when she started it in the ’80s and ’90s, there were not a lot of year-round jobs for women. I think our restaurant and our farm have actually … They employ year-round people. They have brought people to the island. It’s actually sort of a joint social/business mission.
I mean I will say running a restaurant and a farm are not good ways to make money. Our goal is always break even, and if we make money, fantastic, but it’s really to keep something that we believe enhances the community sustainable. It’s important for the community because, one, you have a place to eat or buy food, but it also has provided people with employment, and it sort of adds vibrancy to any community. You need those kind of things, so that’s how we’ve … We’ve probably come at it, at times, too altruistic, and you learn hard lessons that way, but it’s, I think, especially in small towns in main, small businesses are sort of how we keep things going. It’s how people can be able to stay there, so that’s really what’s driven me to continue to put the amount of work that restaurants, and freight, and employees, and some of the hassles are … They don’t seem worth it, but then, in the big picture, they are.
Chellie Pingree: That’s how a lot of people in Maine, I think, get into business. I want to be a business person, then you find sort of the ideal business to do, but more often, it’s somebody who makes something great, who developed a product. I meet people all the time, particularly women, they’ve developed a food product or any kind of idea, and somebody says, “Well, you should sell those.” Then, before you know it, you’ve sold it at crafts fair, and then you said it to retail stores, and then you’ve got to figure out, “I’ve got employees. Now I have a facility.” You hear that story, and I’m sure you’ve heard it and written about it many, many times.
I actually saw a statistic the other day. I often talk to groups of women on businesses, and women-owned businesses are the fastest-growing segment of the entrepreneurial economy, and Maine happens to be a leader. It’s number one or two in the growth of women-owned businesses and women-started businesses. Women are also the most likely to start their business by using their credit cards because they can’t get a loan at the bank, which is something that should change, but it’s still kind of a sad statistic.
The truth is, a lot of times, in a state like Maine where there aren’t multiple big employers in every small town, where it’s a very rural economy, people get an idea. They think, “Oh, my kids are growing up,” or, “I want to supplement this and stay at home. What can I do?” You become a business person, in a sense, sort of the back way, and you learn along the way, but many times you understand the notions of business better because you’re always trying to figure out how do I add value to this product, or income for my family, or all the things that people want to do.
Lisa Belisle: I think one of the things that you just mentioned about how do I balance, I guess, having children or just a family, even if you don’t have children, how do I balance that with also making a living? I think that is very important in many of the … Specifically, women, although, increasingly, men are trying to find a way that they can do both, that they can do something that’s very fulfilling that’s not related to their families but also be available for their families. I mean the importance of family, I think, has always been utmost, but I think it’s even coming around again. Is this something that you are seeing with the people that you work with?
Hannah Pingree: I mean I actually think back to even the businesses that my mom started. I mean the farm, we were little kids just wandering around while she was farming, and then she started this yarn business. I used to get off the school bus at her yarn company and hang out and help her employees. I’m sure we were a pain in the butt, but it was so a part of our lives, and I think that, obviously, the closer you work to home, the more possible that is.
I mean, for me, my job in politics was a lot of travel, and it was being in Augusta and being away. I have young kids, two kids under four, five and six, and so I think that it’s a good time to be really in my community, and having a small business in a small town allows you to still go to the school events, and go to your school board meetings, and be involved in your kids’ lives. I mean it’s a jungle. Same as the city. I mean, in rural areas, you got to find a babysitter. There’s sometimes a childcare program and aftercare, so it’s a lot more work, and my husband and I, I was like, “Oh, my God. She’s coming off the school bus at 3:00. Who’s going to stop working to go?” I mean our kids they … maybe they don’t even know how great it is how much they see us, and if I’m on the mainland for a day or two, it’s like, “When are you coming back?” No, I think, especially for young kids, I’ve found that that has been fulfilling.
I mean it is not always easy. I mean Amanda Hallowell, who is our head chef at Nebo and really helps run Nebo, she had a newborn the second summer we were open, and she’s now 10 years old. Every summer, it’s always a juggle of trying to run a restaurant and having a kid, but I think we live in a small town where, at this point, her daughter can sort of check in, “All right, mom. I’m going to go run around town.” I mean that’s sort of what small towns in Maine are good for, and it’s obviously much easier to do that on an offshore island than it would be in Portland.
Chellie Pingree: I do think people see that as a value, though, about … I mean when you talk to people who say, “I’m moving to Maine,” or, “I just moved to Maine,” or, “I grew up in Maine, and I want to bring my family back, ” or, “I’ve decided I want to figure out a way to stay,” again, there are places where the job is right there. You know what you’re going to do, but a lot of communities, if you decide you want to stay in the town you grew up or move to a rural community, you’re thinking, “Okay, what is it I’m going to do?” Do one of you have a job that’s portable, you can still work for a company you used to work for, or can you do something online, or is there something you always wanted to do that you could turn into a business, or take over a family business?”
I feel like Maine people are, in many ways, more entrepreneurial because we don’t have the guaranteed job that you can go into, and especially as we’ve seen some of the economic changes, mills closing, and things that have really changed people’s lives. We just have a lot of people think about, “Okay, what could I do to make ends meet?” In the community like where we live or, I think, a lot of places, you find people who have multiple jobs. You just don’t go to one employer. Our community, we have a lot of fisherman. Most fisherman work in the summer, but then, in the winter, maybe they paint houses, or they work on a plumbing crew, or they fix boats. There’s just a lot of things people do, substitute school teaching, things like that. That’s a big part of, I think, the Maine economy.
Lisa Belisle: One of the things that I noticed about your island is that everybody seems to know everybody, and they know that you’re not from there, but they’re nice. They wave if you’re walking down the street.
Hannah Pingree: Yeah, hopefully. Yes, they usually are.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah.
Hannah Pingree: Sometimes in the end of August we’re all-
Lisa Belisle: Yeah. Well, that makes sense. I think, at the end of the tourist season, a lot of people in Maine feel that way, so it’s not just your island. I think that it also, from what I understand talking to other people from Maine islands, specifically our small towns, is that there’s a sense of keeping it real in that you have to coexist with people that may not necessarily share your philosophy, your beliefs, but you all … You need to have somebody who’s going to take care of your kids, somebody who’s going to educate your kids, somebody who’s going to plow the driveway, somebody who’s going to do different things within the community, so trying to at least understand where they’re coming from and not alienating them, is that something that we could translate into a bigger … a way of maybe helping the current political environment? I’m trying to say this in a way that makes sense.
Hannah Pingree: Yeah. No, no, I mean it’s totally … I mean she’s talked about it, and given speeches about it, written about it. I mean I think my entire childhood on the island … the island’s, I mean, it’s changed and evolved a little bit, but it’s still … There are 350 to 400 people who live on the island. I know all of them. Not everybody loves each other, but you wave to everybody. You would talk to everybody. I have good friends that I went to high school with who support Donald Trump, and I will … some of them, I’ll argue with. Some of them will joke about it, but at least I can see where they’re coming from, and we can have a civil conversation.
More importantly, I think it’s a small community. We all rely on each other for all kinds of things, in bad situations, to help plumb your house or fix your furnace when it’s broken. I think that level of small community, we all are in this together, is certainly … I mean that’s one challenge we all see going on in our country, that this … we do rely on each other and that that sense fading is pretty damaging and scary for kind of the whole concept of our country. Our government and our system of democracy is very reliant on people talking to each other and relying on each other.
I mean, for me, I feel like there are pros and cons to living in a very small town and on an island, but I completely valued … I mean I went to North Haven Community School grades kindergarten trough 12, and all my classes were very diverse, and those people are still my friends, and we don’t all have the same point of view or the same career path, but you … I think kids learn a lot growing up with people who are … We lack some diversity, but we have a real diversity of opinions and sort of places we’re coming from.
Chellie Pingree: I mean, obviously, I’ve lived there since before I had kids, and my kids grew up there. As Hannah said, it was great to have your kids grow up in school where it wasn’t sort of like everybody’s parent did a certain kind of job. I mean some kids’ parents are fishermen, some kids’ parents are schoolteachers. There is this kind of mixture of opinions and political views. I think, in a way, one of the nice things about a small town … You’re right about how does it translate into the sort of national political scene and the time that we’re in.
You kind of lead with your working relationship with each other and your life relationship with each other. You see the plumber on the street, and you say, “What kind of new faucet to you think I should get for my bathtub?” I don’t know. You’re more likely to have practical conversations with people, and you have this sort of connection with each other because of the island. Oh, the weather gets bad, I don’t think the ferry will go. You just have these things you kind of talk about, or think about, or that you can relate on, and so you don’t think about each other as a political point of view or, “Gosh, that person’s so different from me.”
Hannah mentioned it earlier. I mean we’ve been in business in a family way in most of our life, and it hasn’t always been like how do we start a business and make the most we can off of everybody? It’s part of being in a community, and the people who work for you, you don’t think about how can I squeeze them on their wages? You think about, man, if my employees don’t have healthcare, I’m going to know it that they don’t get the services that they need, or the fact that all of our kids basically go to a public school.
Being on the school board is a tough job in a small town because we all understand that it’s the one school your kids are going to go to, and everybody has strong opinions about it, and everybody went to school themselves, and everybody pays the property tax. You’re very close to the mechanics of all of it, but you also understand if you don’t have a good public school, then young people won’t want to raise their kids there. If you live in a town that finite, like an island, and young people don’t want to live there, pretty soon, everybody’s old and the place doesn’t survive.
I think you do get a more of a gut sense about how things work and a sense of we’re all in it together, which seems much harder to visualize in our political situation today. I mean I feel really lucky because I got to deal with the difficulties of Washington politics today and the incredible frustration and bad things that are going on and how constituents feel about the lack of ability of Congress to get along, but I kind of have this model of coming back to Maine, and so I’m constantly reminded that people are good, that communities can function, and that even when you go through a hard time … Small towns go through hard times. You have a fight over the school or you have a fight over the speed bumps in the road. I mean we figure out ways to fight over all kinds of things, should we build a new ferry or not? But you kind of work it out, and you got to work it out with the people who vote the same way you do, or don’t vote the same way you do, or live in a house like yours, or don’t live in a house like yours.
It’s been a really good lesson for me, and I think it makes … For me, it gives me a whole different perspective about being in Washington because I think, “No, people are really good, and we have lots of communities in Maine where people work through hard stuff and get along with each other, and they wave every day.” In our town, if you don’t wave at somebody, that’s a major offense. They’ll come up to you and say, “Why didn’t you wave at me? Are you mad at me about something?” It funny.
Lisa Belisle: Hannah, I know one of the projects you have been working on is a place for older people to live once they get to the point where they can’t take care of themselves, and it seems like that’s an important consideration for island communities. We’ve talked a lot about the importance of schools and having those available on small islands, but now really having a place where older people can be still a part of their community as they age, because sending them to the mainland doesn’t necessarily contribute to positive health.
Hannah Pingree: Yeah, yeah. We will be the fourth offshore island to develop a small assisted living facility. The ideal, again, is that, as people get to a point where they can no longer live in their homes, if they require extra care … In the past, people had to move off the island. They move off the island, and they’re in Rockland or somewhere else, and middle of the winter, maybe people visit them every couple weeks, and it’s incredibly lonely. You have an older person who’s spent couple years or their entire lives on this one island, and then they have to die somewhere else or spend their last 2 to 10 years of their lives … A group of community members has been talking about this for a long time. They’ve seen Vinalhaven, and Chebeague, and Isleboro do it.
Then we had a summer resident donate her beautiful summer home, which she couldn’t sell, to the housing organization that I work for, so I’ve been working in collaboration with this assisted living organization for a couple years to raise the funds to build more bedrooms onto this house to make a six-bed facility, and it should open sometime this spring. It’s a lot of where people are, “Another nonprofit,” and, “Do we really … How much is this going to cost?” But I think most people see. We have a community center. We have a school. We have a grocery store. We sort of have a lot of the elements that a town needs to function, but if you lose your older population or even the handful of them that are forced to leave, that just is sort of a void that doesn’t seem fair.
I think a lot of us had stories of people who we were close to having to move off and just sort of the heartbreak of that, so I’m hoping it will be very successful. It’s a lot of work to raise money for things, and build buildings, and building on islands is more complicated. Certainly, the group that will run this facility, it will be a big job, but I think it will be a really amazing additional community element to kind of keep our community cohesive and together.
Lisa Belisle: Isn’t this also an example of working with what’s a seemingly smaller population but that also has ripples into the larger community, where it’s not just the older person who has to move off the island, but it’s the family members around the older person who then need to shift to a completely different way of living, which can put a lot of strain on, not only a family, but a community?
Hannah Pingree: Yeah. Again, we’ve seen examples of people who they’re family has had … They try to take care of them at home for a while, and that’s been a situation that maybe lasted too long and led to difficult health outcomes, and then they have the family on the mainland. An older person, you’re trying to go visit your friend on the mainland, but you only get there twice a winter, and you’re heartbroken, and they’re heartbroken, so I think it should lead to some situations for multiple families that are much improved, and I actually think for the entire community. I mean we hope this is a facility where other seniors have a place to gather. Especially in the wintertime, it’s pretty lonely … and can get extra meals, or school kids can interact in a more clear way with seniors on a regular basis, so there are a lot of elements of sort of improving people’s lives other than just the six people who live there.
Chellie Pingree: There’s the situation that people get into where they’re older, they don’t want to leave the community, but it’s just very hard for them to stay in their house. Maybe it costs a lot to heat, or it’s drafty, or they can’t get around very well. Frankly, everywhere in Maine, there’s a shortage of affordable housing. There’s always a shortage of housing, so sometimes that means if that senior can move into the other facility, then that’s a house that comes back onto the market. They can sell it while there’s still some value in it, or they can turn it over to another family member who then has a place to live, and they’re in a comfortable situation that’s just right for them. I mean there’s a reason this happens in other places, and it’s just … It is a really important of a small community that lots of places are starting to recognize.
Lisa Belisle: It’s like the farm. It’s another example of pulling on a string over here and having it impact the rest of the world around it.
Hannah Pingree: Yeah, yep.
Lisa Belisle: Well, I appreciate all the work that each of you are doing, both in a practical sense and a more theoretical sense as far as government. Well, that’s also practical, I guess. I don’t want to-
Chellie Pingree: Absolutely.
Hannah Pingree: Hopefully, hopefully, some days.
Chellie Pingree: On some days, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: That’s right. I’ve been speaking with Hannah Pingree who, after serving four terms in the Maine House of Representatives, now works as the business manager of her family’s inn, restaurant, and farm, and manages North Haven Sustainable Housing, and also with Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, who represents Maine’s First District in Congress. Thank you for all your hard work, and thank you for coming in today.
Hannah Pingree: Thanks for having us.
Chellie Pingree: Sure. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is also brought to you by Aristelle, a lingerie boutique on Exchange Street in Portland’s Old Port, where every body is seen as a work of art, and beauty is celebrated from the inside out. Shop with us in person or online at aristelle.com.
Lisa Belisle: Judy Camuso is the Director of Wildlife for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. As director, Judy oversees the management, protection, and enhancement of over 500 birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians that call Maine home. Thanks for coming in.
Judy Camuso: Thanks for having me.
Lisa Belisle: 500 doesn’t seem like that much. Is that actually the number? We must have gotten it from somewhere.
Judy Camuso: Oh, so it’s probably 500 birds.
Lisa Belisle: Ah.
Judy Camuso: There’s like 60,000 invertebrates.
Lisa Belisle: Okay. All right.
Judy Camuso: So yeah, it’s a little bigger than that, but yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah. Well, thank you for clarifying because I don’t know as much about wildlife, but it seemed like that number was a little on the low side.
Judy Camuso: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Tell me how you got into this field.
Judy Camuso: That’s an interesting question, and it’s kind of a dull answer, but I was just always this way. I’m an anomaly in my family, and from the time I was a little kid, I was just always outside and interested in nature and wildlife, so it was just a natural sort of career path for me. I’ve never considered doing anything that didn’t involve animals, so I went from wanting to be a farmer to veterinarian to wildlife biologist, so it was a pretty natural progression for me.
Lisa Belisle: You say you were an anomaly in your family. What did your family do?
Judy Camuso: Oh, my family, I’m from up right outside of Boston, so they’re just much more urban folks and more interested in skiing and golfing, more traditional sort of … the boating and the stuff like that but not necessarily counting birds or amphibians or whatever.
Lisa Belisle: So when they were out on the golf course, you were hanging out in the rough and looking at the insects and things like that? Is that what you’re saying?
Judy Camuso: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Wildlife biology, tell me about that path. How do you get from A to B when you want to become a wildlife biologist?
Judy Camuso: Yeah. I mean when I started in school, it wasn’t as common a field, particularly for women, as it is now, and there weren’t a whole lot of options or places to go, so I went to the University of Vermont. I just met some folks, some other students that were in this career or this major program, and I started taking some of their classes, and it just fit for me. It was just a really good fit. I worked for a few summers at various national wildlife refuges, and it was just like you got to be kidding me that this could be a career, this could be something that I do for my whole life. I’m, I would say, really lucky in that sort of the things I’m passionate about in life are what I get to work on, which is … It’s not that common, I don’t think.
Lisa Belisle: A day in the life of someone who is a wildlife biologist, what would that look like?
Judy Camuso: It’s totally random, varies every day, and it almost never is what you think it’s going to be. I could tell a million stories, but one day, for whatever reason, I rode my bike to work, and I had a … I’m kind of a big lister, so I had my regular list to do and was going over the list on my bike ride in. I get there, and there’s a … The other biologist that I worked with, Norm, at the time, he’s sort of clamoring around, and he’s like, “There’s a moose. We just got a call from the game warden. There’s a moose stuck out on an island in the Androscoggin River, and we need to go respond to that,” so I’m like, “All right. Let me get my bike clothes off here and change.” I go and call the game warden and start to make arrangements for that, and he’s all set, and then, within a couple minutes, there’s been some kind of eider die-off, and so now we’re heading to respond to collect eiders, and then there was a small oil spill at the same time, and then we had a minor with some of the exclosures with our piping plover program.
None of those things are on my list to do for that day but, usually, a normal day would be some kind of field work where we’re monitoring, managing, researching some kind of wildlife. There’s still a good amount of office work that isn’t as … It’s not what you think of when you picture a wildlife biologist, but we all do have to do a fair amount of report writing and that kind of thing.
Lisa Belisle: As a doctor, I find it interesting and challenging to focus just on humans, and what you’re telling me … You just mentioned a moose and an eider, which I think is a duck?
Judy Camuso: Yes. Yeah, sorry.
Lisa Belisle: That’s a duck and a-
Judy Camuso: Piping plover is a shore bird.
Lisa Belisle: Plover is a shore bird. I’ve seen the signs along the beach.
Judy Camuso: Yeah. Right, right, right, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Then we know about the amphibians that we’ve talked about and reptiles. I mean how do you know so much about all of those different species?
Judy Camuso: That’s the wonderful thing, and really, I don’t. I’m much more of a generalist. In my position now, as director, that’s ideal, so I have a kind of a broad knowledge of a lot of things but not real in-depth. The department that I work for, Maine Fish and Wildlife, has a whole suite of what we call species specialists, and so they focus on either one or two species or a small suite of species, so we have someone that focused just on reptiles and amphibians, someone that focuses just on invertebrates, someone that focuses just … Actually, moose has their own biologist. Some of our staff are divided up, and they are more generalist, and they have to deal with the whole suite of species in their region. Then we have some that focus, and the folks that focus do a little more research on those particular animals that they are responsible for.
Lisa Belisle: What are the responsibilities of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife?
Judy Camuso: We’re responsible for the management, and protection, and enhancement of wildlife resources in the state, so we oversee everything inland, so we don’t deal with the marine stuff, but everything from mayflies to moose. We’re responsible for making sure that they have healthy populations, healthy habitats. We do management for those species. We do oversee all the harvest and the bag limits for the species that are hunted, which is really just a small portion of the animals we have responsibility for. We do policy around those animals. We do all the recovery for endangered species in the state. It’s pretty broad responsibility. Then, on top of it, we try to talk to the public about it and give them some education as to what we’re doing and why.
Lisa Belisle: Last fall, you were at Maine Audubon having a conversation with the public, which I understand was a spirited discussion. People were very engaged from what I hear.
Judy Camuso: Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: What is it that people are interested in hearing about?
Judy Camuso: Oh, I mean, it varies. I would say, in my experience, people just love wildlife, and so they love hearing about all the various projects that we work on. The department has a number of initiatives that we include the public in and so that people can participate. In general, and we’ve done a number of surveys recently, of public surveys to sort of document this, the people in the state of Maine are overwhelmingly supportive and engaged with wildlife, so whether it’s just the gray squirrels in their backyard, or birds at their bird feeder, or people actively going out trying to see moose, or puffins, or whatever the case may be. It’s one of the things I love most about Maine is that people are really connected to their environment more so than, say, in Massachusetts where I grew up.
Lisa Belisle: Is your job easier, in some ways, than it would be if you were in a state with more urban settings?
Judy Camuso: Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean a lot of what we do in the department is manage human-wildlife interactions, whether it’s positive or not positive, so if there are folks that have issues, if they have raccoons or other issues, then our job is to try and help those folks deal with those situations. The more people you have interacting with wildlife, the more opportunities for conflict arise, and so we’re lucky in that we don’t have as many of those kind of conflicts or nuisance complaints, as we would call them, as many of our southern states.
Lisa Belisle: What about, I guess, the infringement of humans upon the wildlife habitat, which I would think is not as much of an issue in Jackman but probably is more of an issue in Cumberland Country.
Judy Camuso: Yeah, yeah. Certainly, that is something we deal with every day, and I would say it’s one of the more important things that the department works on, and it’s one of the lesser-known … This is sort of the less-sexy, if you will, aspects of our responsibility. We do work with our sister agency, the Department of Environmental Protection, and we oversee and we provide comments for all the development projects in the state. As part of that, we have several different habitat wildlife resources that are mapped as protected or significant, so we call them significant wildlife habitats. That includes areas for shore birds, vernal pools, areas for threatened or endangered species, and wading bird waterfall habitats.
A lot of what we have mapped are either sort of water bodies and the … It’s kind of the borders around those or riverine systems and kind of a buffer, and so the things we look at are habitat for the individual species or the individual animal, but also then connections, so making sure that the animal can get from point A to point B if it needs to. Usually, rivers and streams are excellent connectors, so those are kind of critical habitats. We work with DEP and provide comments to anybody applying for a permit to do some kind of develop, and that’s a huge portion of what we do.
We also have a suite of staff that work specifically with towns and try to help towns do long-range planning, do comprehensive planning so that they can incorporate what’s important for their town, whether it be they want open space, or they want the ball fields in the right space. Whatever the case may be, we work with those towns to help them try and achieve those goals. Of course, our angle is wildlife habitat, or fisheries and wildlife habitat, but we work with all the different towns to try and accomplish sort of mutually-beneficial goals.
Lisa Belisle: One of the things that we ask people when they come in for the radio show is a place in Maine that you love, and I have never had anybody say the Brownfield Bog, which is … It’s a beautiful spot. I believe that I canoed past there when I was on the Saco River.
Judy Camuso: Right, yeah, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: It’s unique.
Judy Camuso: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: Why do you love that spot?
Judy Camuso: That’s so funny, yeah. People probably pick more sort of well-known locations. Brownfield, for me, is a spot, ever since I’ve moved to Maine, I’ve gone there every year. It’s a fantastic birding location. The things I love about it are it’s so close to Portland, so it’s 45 minutes to get to Brownfield Bog, but once you get there, you feel like you are in kind of a vast wilderness area. There’s not really many neighbors. There’s hardly any sounds. Once you’re out in the bog, and I canoe the bog quite a bit, you can’t … There’s no houses. There’s just no noise. It’s just right in the valley of the White Mountains. You can see Mount Washington, so you have this incredible vistas. It’s totally quiet. I probably shouldn’t be talking about it on the radio because it’s totally underutilized, which is what I, personally, like. You don’t run into other people very often out there.
One of my responsibilities when I worked down in Region A was to … Every spring we do, basically, bird surveys there, so I would do two or three bird surveys every spring out there. Some of it, in order to meet our protocols for the bird surveys, I would have to leave my house at like 2:30 in the morning to get to the bog and get in my canoe. We’d get up in the tree stand by like 4:30, 4:45, so that I could be ready when the birds started being active. When you sort of visit a place so often like that, you really … at least I become sort of attached to it and intimately familiar with just the animals that are there and all the various species of wildlife, so it’s always been one of my favorite places, and it continues to be.
Plus, it has wicked cool birds. There’s birds that you can see there that are really hard to see in other parts of the state. Black-billed cuckoo, yellow-throated vireo are two kind of my … or yellow-billed cuckoo, a couple of my favorites, so I would always go there every year to try and find those birds, and … Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Do you think that we focus maybe a little too much on moose? I mean it seems as though it’s become the thing that Maine is known for. We have lobsters, and we have moose.
Judy Camuso: Right, moose, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Not to disparage moose. I like them. They’re fine, but considering all the other wildlife-
Judy Camuso: Yeah, yeah. I mean I think the thing that’s kind of compelling about moose is that they’re big, right, so they’re easier to see than a lot of species, and they, very often, don’t run off, so they allow you to watch and observe them. Most all other wildlife does kind of run off, right, other than … I mean squirrels might let you watch them, but most other animals are aware of your presence, and they prefer not to be around you. Moose, I think, are appealing to people because they let them observe them, and so there’s a sort of a passion about moose. I think people too are pretty passionate about moose. It’s certainly hard to not pay attention to the economic value that animal brings to the state and the amount of tourism, that people come into Main to see moose, but we do have a lot of other really cool species too.
Lisa Belisle: So short answer is no. You think that we are not overemphasizing the importance of moose in our state.
Judy Camuso: When I first started by career at Audubon, my number-one goal was always to try and get people to connect with nature in some fashion. It didn’t matter what it was, whether it was plants, birds, turtles, frogs, just something to get them to connect to nature. My goal was always, once people have a connection and then they become passionate, they’re willing to fight for and try and help protect those things. If it’s moose that connects someone, then great. It doesn’t matter what the kind of trigger is as long as we make those connections with people. Moose allow us to do that, but there are lots of other species, I agree, that we could probably focus a little bit more on.
Lisa Belisle: To be clear, I have nothing against moose. Anybody who’s listening, please don’t write me and say, “What do you have against them?” because I love them too. They’re great.
Judy Camuso: Right, yeah. They do get a lot of attention.
Lisa Belisle: I also understand that you were very involved with owls at one point when you were at the Audubon.
Judy Camuso: Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: We still have one of our producers, Brittany, who remembers being a child and holding an owl in her hand, so clearly, you made a huge impression upon her and probably other children.
Judy Camuso: I know. I was surprised that she remembered that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I banded northern saw-whet owls for about 20 years in my backyard. I did that sort of in addition to whatever job I had, and it was just an opportunity that I was afforded through a woman that I used to work with. It’s a tremendous privilege to have that opportunity and, as such, I was pretty adamant that we expose as many people as we could. It’s not very often you have an owl, a wild owl, in your hand.
When I was married and then after I got divorced, I continued to have people to my house, probably 10 or 15 groups a fall. Two or three nights a week, almost every single night that there was good weather, we would have at least some people over to see the process, so there probably have been a couple thousand people that have been through. I think, for a while, I would go into the grocery store, and I would see people, and they would be like, “Oh, you’re the owl lady.” I’d be like, “Well, that is one thing I do.” I like to think that some people got an exposure that they didn’t have and learned some things there.
Lisa Belisle: You mentioned that when you first started in this field there weren’t as many women that were doing this job, and that has changed, so how-
Judy Camuso: Yeah, so it’s changing.
Lisa Belisle: Or is changing. How is this happening? Why is it that more women are getting interested in this?
Judy Camuso: I know. It’s an interesting question. When I started in Region, I was the only female biologist in one of the regions, and we had several women in our Bangor office, which is more research-based, but in the regions, there was only one. I was the only female, and I don’t know exactly why, but it is changing. To be honest, I oversee a lot of the … I don’t necessarily get involved with every single one of the interview processes we do, but for a long time, there was just more men applying than women.
We did interviews just a month or two ago for a position in Strong, in our Strong office, and they brought me the list of people they were going to interview, and the folks that had reviewed the interviews and had come up with the list, they hadn’t paid attention. I looked, and I said, “This is the first time, I think, in the history of the department, that we have four men and four women. It’s equal people that we’re interviewing,” and there’d been like 100 people that had applied. Now we have quite a few women, and it’s probably … For the Wildlife Division, it’s not quite 50/50, but it’s still probably 60/40, but I mean I’m the first female director, and I hope that, as more women enter the field and more women enter leadership positions, that will encourage more women to get involved in the field.
Lisa Belisle: How do you personally stay connected with nature? You talked about canoeing in the Brownfield Bog. What other types of things do you do that are outside of the job that you have?
Judy Camuso: Yeah. I do a lot of hiking. Oh, I guess hiking might be an aggressive term. I do a lot of walking in the woods. I still love to canoe and bike. I used to do a lot of birding. I don’t do as much birding anymore, but I still do a good deal. I pay attention wherever I am to what kind of birds are around me. I garden a lot. I’m outside, if possible, most of the time in my free time.
Lisa Belisle: That must be very interesting that you have this position, which probably requires a fair amount office time and paperwork, but really, your passion is outside the office and probably not as much paperwork.
Judy Camuso: Right, right, right, yeah. This is a challenge, I think, for a lot of people in this field is that kind of as you move up in the agency, there’s less and less field time. I think I was interviewed a couple years ago, and it’s the first time it’s ever occurred to me, but the interviewer asked, “What’s your favorite thing? What’s the best thing about your job?” Without thinking, my response was, “The people I work with,” and I got into this field for wildlife, right, and to protect wildlife. My whole life, that’s all I ever thought about or focused on was protecting wildlife. Then my answer, without thinking, was the people I work with, and I said, “When did that happen? When did that switch?”
It was interesting, kind of, for me to see that, but now I really do. My job is to make sure that everybody else can do their job, and I still get to go and … In some ways, it’s one of the benefits of my job, but I can still call the moose biologist, or the bear biologist, or the shore bird biologist, and say, “Hey, I need a day in the field. Would you mind if I tag along?” They usually will accommodate me, so I try to get out as much as I can. It depends on the season but, usually, in the summer I have a little more freedom when the legislature’s not in session, so I try and get out still.
Lisa Belisle: What are some of the issues that have been important to your department in the last few years?
Judy Camuso: Well, I would say we just finished up a big-game plan, which is a 10-year plan for how we’re going to manage sort of out four big-game species, bear, moose, deer, and turkey, and so making sure that we have the tools that we need to manage species at a population level that’s healthy, and so that kind of healthy term is questionable for people because is it … it’s got to be both healthy for the animal … Our job is, or at least all of our staff, they’re primary focus is they want healthy wildlife populations. They don’t want animals that are starving to death or dying of heavy parasite loads, things like that, but then there’s the other component of it also has to be healthy for people, right, so there’s a social caring capacity and a kind of a biological caring capacity, and so our job is to make sure that one doesn’t kind of trip the other.
We could probably have more deer in southern Maine, but that would not be in the best interest of the people that live in southern Maine, so finding some of those balances and how we’re going to find a way to move forward, there’s no question. We have had two referendums on our bear hunting methods, and so that’s always kind of lingering, and making sure that we can maintain a healthy bear population that doesn’t have a lot of negative interactions with the public. We’ve been very lucky so far, and we don’t have a lot of poorly-behaved bears. That’s how I would phrase it. Some of the other states have, really, quite a bit more aggressive bears than we have, and so we want to make sure that we can maintain healthy bear populations that are able to kind of coincide with the public that they live around. I think that’s kind of always our goal.
Lisa Belisle: For an individual who is interested in getting into your field, somebody who’s maybe in high school or early in college, what’s the one thing that you could suggest to them to kind of keep them motivated to study?
Judy Camuso: Yeah. Well, it’s an awesome job. I don’t know of many other opportunities where you really do get to be outside a good portion of the year, year-round, I mean, so that’s not always a plus for everybody because the weather conditions can sometimes be a bit extreme, buy you get to be outside. You get to work with people who are passionate and help protect populations of wildlife, so it’s a pretty fantastic job. It is pretty competitive field, and there’s not … we only have 45 biologists in the department, so it’s a pretty tight competitive field, so I encourage people to … I think this is what I put is you got to figure out what you love and figure out what you’re passionate about and do that, whether it’s birds, or reptiles, or mammals, or whatever the case may be, bugs, butterflies. Figure out what you’re passionate about and just follow that.
Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Judy Camuso, who is the Director of Wildlife for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. As director, she oversees the management, protection, and enhancement of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians that call Maine home. Thank you so much for coming in today.
Judy Camuso: Thanks for having me.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 336. Our guests have included Chellie and Hannah Pingree and Judy Camuso. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as doctorlisa and see our Love Maine Radio photos on Instagram. Please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for sharing this part of your day with me. May you have a bountiful life.
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