Letting in the Light

The light in these woods wants to play—in shafts and speckles that squeeze through the canopy, casting spotlights that move and shift across the wooded floor. A lattice of needles and leaves over-head dapples the world below. It is a forest, but it is also shimmering river rock, grainy super 8, a salmon’s spotted back, a child’s kaleidoscope.

In other words: it is a midsummer’s day in the Bowdoin Pines, a thirty-three-acre patch of forest on the northwest corner of the College’s campus. Off a parking lot behind the offices at 85 Federal Street, this stand of tucked-away white pine can go unnoticed by harried drivers along the busy Bath Road it sits next to. But, in fact, some of those trees have been standing head to the sky for any passerby to see for close to 150 years—hiding in plain sight in the heart of Brunswick is one of Maine’s only old-growth forests. In recent years, it has come to the College’s attention that it needs a little help.

“The forest is a living, breathing thing,” remarks Tom Doak, executive director of Maine Woodland Owners. “It’s changing all the time.” Which is why, after decades of the College allowing nature to run its course, trees began to fall—both within the Pines and from the Pines out onto Bath Road. After a series of particularly powerful storms in 2018 and 2019, it became clear that the forest had indeed changed. Trees had gotten sick; some had died of old age and some because of the aggressions of the white pine weevil, a pesky beetle that targets a tree’s leader branch, killing it off in service of its larvae and with it the tree’s future growth. Plants of concern like knotweed and periwinkle had moved into the understory, and hardwood trees like oak and maple began to win in competition with the ancestral pines.

A committee was formed to address the forest’s woes, and from the committee came a plan, which in part enlisted the expertise of Doak—a forester by training who was more than happy to help, having grown up in Maine being dazzled by trees. “I remember driving as a kid by the Bowdoin Pines and being so impressed by them,” recalls Doak. “One of the reasons I got into forestry, frankly, was the impact of the Pines.”

In theory, the plan was straightforward: return the portion of the Pines off Bath Road to white pine dominance by removing the problematic trees flagged by Doak and Harold Burnett, a forester with Two Trees Forestry, opening up the canopy and allowing for the growth of a large cohort of pine seedlings, the result of a 2023 abundance of seeds, known as a mast year.

In practice, there were many more factors than the trees to consider. “We were worried that our actions would be misinterpreted or misunderstood or outright opposed,” says Burnett, as he explains that community outreach prior to the remediation of the Pines rivaled the remediation itself in terms of importance. Beyond what the Pines meant to the campus—to current and former students and even to some of the College’s curriculum—the Brunswick community uses the one-kilometer trail that winds through those woods for dog-walking, bird-watching, and nature breaks more generally, and the sight of the heavy equipment used to clear out trees can be alarming, especially when it comes to some of these centenarian trees, Doak says.

As I walk among them, the light plays tricks along the furrowed bark of a massive trunk, luring my gaze upward. The first thing to know about the white pine: its trunk is flawlessly straight, like a vertical runway to the sky. So linear are the trunks that in the 1600s, word from the colonies made its way back to the King of England that there was a species of tree in the New World that produced perfect ship masts, and soon the king’s minions were marking pines for the taking. Maine pine would become the solution for modernity’s many needs: the wood is soft, abundant, and ideal both for framing a house and for flooring one.

Thoreau condemned the use of trees for anything other than marveling, writing in his book The Maine Woods, “strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its ever-green arms to the light—to see its perfect success, but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success!” You reckon with stories like these when you let yourself peer eighty feet from base to canopy of one of these giants, the juxtaposition of its hale trunk and its dainty, feather-like needles a contradiction worthy of Thoreau's notion of perfect success.

It’s no wonder Doak, Burnett, and the rest of the committee were worried about what some might feel when they saw machinery moving into the Pines.

But just as there is a misconception that big equipment always means destruction, there is another that caring for a forest invariably means leaving it alone.

As Doak explains, the mission of forestry falls somewhere in the middle of this spectrum of purposeful intervention and complete neglect. “You’re not playing with nature,” he says. “You’re just kind of figuring out ways to assist it.” Encouraging the Pines in one direction—white pine dominance—and away from what would happen if the woods there were left untouched also raised another important question about how to care for a forest: What would Bowdoin’s stewardship ethos be? More simply, what is stewardship in this case?

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Tony Sprague arrives at the trailhead in crisp office attire and a pair of hiking boots. Sprague, Bowdoin’s campus planner, is going to show me the results of the remediation of a section of the Pines that took place over three weeks this past June.

As part of the plan, a pocket of woods has been left entirely untouched and will serve as both a test control to compare with the managed sections and an outdoor laboratory for the College’s science programs. It is the reserve that you first walk through when you head out of the parking lot behind the offices.

Sprague leads the way through this first dense passage of the loop. “This section has transitioned further away from white pine dominance,” he says, explaining the logic of the placement of the reserve plot. “The amount of intervention that would’ve been necessary to try to restore [this space] would have been more than anybody would’ve been comfortable with.” I follow along behind Sprague, noting little orange flags stuck in the ground off the trail, indicating where student work is underway, like a study on the effect of road salts on ground cover. A gray flash of a squirrel interrupts the balayage of green. The reserve feels like typical roadside woods: oaks and evergreens intermix, while ferns unfurl at their bases. There is bittersweet— another plant of concern—and partridge berry, and if you close your eyes and listen for them, a lot of birds. Mostly pine warblers today. The light is aggressive, and so is the humidity.

“We’re not looking to come in and turn this into a park,” Sprague continues about the plan’s philosophy, and, as we turn a corner and enter into the active management section, I see exactly what he means. The shift in tree density is stark, as is the transition from greens to browns. Gone are the hardwood trees and a majority of the understory, laying bare the occasional boulder, the tree stumps of the sickened or dead trees, and at times, even the tracks of the equipment that has been used to remove all the biomass. The occasional white pine stands out in the midst of the managed area, and I can finally get a good look at one, though I am admittedly distracted by the change from just twenty feet prior. Something has clearly happened here, and it takes a second to remember that that something is in fact a good, healthy thing.

The three resources a tree needs to survive are water, nutrients, and sunlight. And in a forest, light is the limiting factor—often it is the resource a tree isn’t getting enough of because of the crowding of other trees in its vicinity. For humans caring for a forest—foresters—the options of watering or fertilizing a forest aren’t realistic, which leaves the most feasible option: manipulating the light. By moving light around, giving more sunlight here and less sunlight there, you are—via photosynthesis—choosing who gets fed, and therefore, who grows.

In removing the oak and maple, the ailing trees, and the unwelcome plants of the understory and leaving behind some of the heartier pines, Burnett and Doak were giving those trees the best shot at continuing to thrive and also opening up precious real estate in the sky for sunshine to beam down on the fledgling pines just inches out of the soil. In the active management area, light pours in, and suddenly I watch where I’m stepping. Along the path’s edge and within the tread imprinted in the loamy floor are the forest’s newest additions—white pine seedlings, nothing standing between them and the sky, little waxy pom poms bathing in the sun. Through the removal of so much vegetation, light has become available to both the old and new guard.

One of the outcomes stakeholders are hoping for is that the seedlings from the mast year can push their roots deeper into the sandy soil and their burgeoning trunks further toward the light and grow into the next generation of white pines on the Bowdoin campus.

Doak, Burnett, and others have their doubts. The seedlings must compete with a robust duff layer—a strata of leaves, pine needles, and other woody flotsam—that covers the forest floor. There’s early evidence that the leaf litter is creating obstacles for the budding pines. But if there is any tree that likes these sorts of odds, it’s the white pine, an early successional tree that doesn’t mind dry soils and is a bit of a sun worshipper, sometimes to its own detriment. A forestry friend once told me that, when it comes to sunlight, a white pine is like a child with all-you-can-eat access to candy who will make herself sick if she’s not cut off. In too much light, a pine will grow out instead of up. But for the restoration of the Bowdoin Pines, it’s fine for the seedlings to binge the light, necessary in fact.

“Over this next three- to five- to ten-year period, we want to see this cohort of young pines begin thriving,” Burnett says. “How do we keep those young pines continuing to develop ten, twenty, thirty years from now?” Burnett is one of several people who believe that for the management of the Bowdoin Pines to succeed, an institutional memory surrounding the project must be formed. Forestry is a slow practice; you might not see the results of choices you made concerning a stand of trees for seventy or even a hundred years. It’s what makes foresters conservative with their designs, and it’s why historical records matter. Prior to the committee’s initiative, work hadn’t been done in the Pines since the 1960s, and documentation of it was difficult for Burnett to track down. In deciding how to move forward, Doak and Burnett both had to piece together what had been done in decades past, which included forensic investigations of both the woods and the local historical archives.

“This project is not an every-year type of thing,” says Sprague, as we hide out from the ferocious sun under the shade of an elderly pine. “But we are going to look at the impacts of it over time.” Data sites have been set up throughout the forest, where groups will take regular photos of the same spots and gather observations on the changing conditions.

“We want to set up the data so that people in fifteen years can know how things have gone from this plan, and then be able to determine their actions [accordingly],” he explains. Like sunlight, attention to the Pines over time is a valuable resource. The Pines are busy with activity as we finish our walk. A woman strolls with her limping yellow labrador, and a group of volunteers from the Midcoast Wood Bank collect donated cord wood from the remediation work that they will distribute to community members in need this fall. The forest is a living, breathing thing indeed, as Doak has observed, but in a place like the Bowdoin Pines, humans are just as much a part of the ecosystem as the chipmunks dashing over a downed tree trunk or a pine cone in free fall from the canopy. Sprague and I say our goodbyes, and I embrace another lesson I am learning about the Pines: a single loop on the trail is never enough—the fear of missing out on what the forest will do next is too great. I set my phone on Do Not Disturb and steer my course away from Bath Road and back into the thick woods.

It's overcast on today’s visit, but at least the heat is down. In the management area, the light isn’t so blinding as to steal attention from the pines, and now they want mine as I walk through the woods. When I was talking to Burnett, he told me, “In the aftermath of the harvesting, the remaining big trees just pop out,” and today they are particularly arresting—trunks that would take holding hands with two other people to circle, bark so sturdy as to seem geological, filigree needles by the thousands in every state of bloom and decay.

“White pines hang on to their needles for only a single winter,” explains Barry Logan, director of Bowdoin’s biochemistry program and a professor of biology who holds an occasional class in the Pines. “They grow for a year, they overwinter, and they are active for a year. Then they are shed. That’s like the minimum threshold for being an evergreen.”

I’ve asked Logan to tell me why white pines are wonderful, and he comes back with the fact that they are borderline deciduous. In late September to early October, if you head to the Pines, you will see the telltale yellows of fall among the evergreens because the white pine sheds 50 percent of its canopy during the season. A conifer impersonating an oak or a maple—trees that shed 100 percent of their canopy in autumn—that’s a reason to return for another visit after the equinox. In his book The Old Ways, Robert MacFarlane writes that “Familiarity with a place will lead not to absolute knowledge but only ever into deeper inquiry,” and this is my experience having become a regular in the Pines: Every iteration is its own new mystery.

“I’ve been at Bowdoin for twenty-seven years now, and it’s humbling for me to appreciate that I’ve been here long enough for the forest to change while I’ve lived here,” Logan reflects as we discuss the fact that forests aren’t operating on human time scales. “That to me is just an awesome—in the nineteenth-century definition of the word—thing to contemplate.”

Herein lies the opportunity. The slowness of a forest’s evolution allows for a deepening of our inquiry, as MacFarlane puts it. Attention to a place over the course of time—as a field of study and data collection, as an effort to finally create that missing historical record, as a means of enjoyment and escape—maybe that’s stewardship. Now we watch and wait and allow time to answer the questions posed by the committee and the management plan. Will the seedlings from 2023 take off, or will they need more of a human hand? Is complete removal of plants of concern feasible? What will happen in the reserve area where the intention is to just do nothing and allow the forest to move on its own?

These results will come ten, twenty, thirty years from now. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t results to be seen now. Take the pine warblers, for example. Doak got to know and love them using his birding app. “Those pine warblers are not going to be here if there are no pine trees,” he said when discussing the downstream ecological risks of doing nothing to help the Pines. “They’ll be someplace else, and that will be fine, but they won’t be here.” It’s a small thing, but ensuring the birds’ home stays intact ensures the accompaniment of their song along the trail.

Human impact on the Pines is part of their history and an essential part of their future. “We’ve entered into the history of this forest by making a decision to do something in 2025,” muses Logan. “We’re making another moment in the story. And one I feel good about.”

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Kea Krause is a Maine-based writer who was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Her piece “What’s Left Behind” was anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016, and her work has appeared in National Geographic, Wired, and many other media outlets.

Greta Rybus is a freelance photojournalist based in rural Maine. Find her work at gretarybus.com.

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This story first appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Bowdoin Magazine. Manage your subscription and see other stories from the magazine on the Bowdoin Magazine website.