Western Maine
4
The Haunting Cry Of The Loon by John Murray
Maine’s oldest resident
G
eologists can only speculate what Maine looked like twenty five thousand years ago before the Laurentide Glacier pushed its way southeast. This great glacier of ice was nearly two thousand feet thick and covered most mountains in the region. Rock debris at the base of the ice scoured the entire landscape down to bedrock, and this caused previously existing rivers, streams, lakes and forests to virtually disappear. Unimaginable as it seems, the unfathomable weight of the heavy ice literally lowered the earth’s crust by hundreds of feet. The common loon that resides in Maine today was a resident of the territory thousands of years before the gla-
cier event occurred, and may be one of the few species that actually survived the cataclysmic event. During the previous Pleistocene time period, the loon shared the region with many unique species of animals that no longer exist today. Among those extinct species of animals were the saber tooth tiger, ground sloth, wooly mammoth, and the dire wolf. With certainty, none of the
animals that resided in the region were aware of the fate that would befall them. As the loon floated on the surface of a pristine lake for the final time as the ice crept near, the large bird sang its haunting cry at sunset. In the distance, a dire wolf’s soulful howl echoed off the surrounding mountains. With the strong instinctive urge to leave, the loon took to the air, and ultimately kept ahead of the encroaching glacial ice by migrating to points further south. As the earth ultimately began to experience a warming trend four thousand years later, the Laurentide Glacier slowly receded, and started to expose the barren bedrock that was previously covered by ice. Glacier ice contin-
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