Lakeville Corner Almanac

If you know where to look, you can find (and pick) a lot of cranberries around the lake. And if conditions were right that season, it's nothing to pick 5 pounds in an hour. The real problem can be finding good recipes to cook them all. The plus side is that they freeze well so you can keep using them all year long. Cranberries grow well in this part of the St. John river valley and it has become a significant crop with artificial diked bogs . The dikes are quite large and interfere with the overland flow of water during the spring freshet and change the local flooding patterns. Who knows if this made things worse for the record flooding we had in 2018?

We get beavers . Open lakes and rivers aren't the best beaver habitat but their numbers keep growing and well, everybody needs a place to sleep. Generally they like a smaller stream they can dam-up completely. When they den on a lake or river the yearly spring freshet wreaks havoc and floods them out of their home and then they become a real nuisance as they swim around gnawing on anything that looks tasty including large trees next to peoples homes and cottages. Trappers used to step in years ago and control the numbers but with the anti-fur movement, the price of pelts makes it unprofitable. So we get more beavers. As you see below they don't really welcome visitors even when they aren't trappers.

This was a rare find. The Shortnose Sturgeon almost never comes into the shallow lakes like French Lake. They mainly live in the St. John River and Grand Lake. These guys like deep, cold waters and so they are not often seen by human eyes. This unfortunate one likely came into the lake with the spring freshet , when the water was much colder and deeper. In June, the lake empties and heats up quickly. That would have meant the end was near for this fellow as he would not be able to tolerate the "bath water" temperatures of the lake by the time I found him in July.