Maine

Maine is presented as a place where forest-insect control and the survival of salmon fisheries meet. Its spruce and balsam forests face the budworm, while its remaining salmon runs depend on habitat already strained by industrial pollution and log-choked streams. The contrast makes the state more than a backdrop: it is a warning landscape in which the costs of spraying could extend from treated forests into vulnerable waters.

Forests, Fisheries, and a Narrow Margin

Maine shares with eastern Canada both extensive spruce and balsam forests and the problem of controlling the budworm. It also retains salmon runs, though these are only remnants of earlier abundance. Biologists and conservationists have worked to preserve salmon habitat in streams burdened by industrial pollution and obstructed by logs, leaving the fishery little room to absorb another disturbance.

Unlike the much more extensive forest spraying described elsewhere, Maine’s budworm treatments had affected relatively small areas. They had not yet included important salmon spawning streams. That distinction offered no assurance of safety: it marked a boundary that could be crossed as the scope of spraying expanded.

The 1958 Warning in the Brooks

After spraying in 1958, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Game observed large numbers of moribund suckers in Big Goddard Brook. The fish showed symptoms identified as typical of DDT poisoning: erratic swimming, gasping at the surface, tremors, and spasms. In the first five days, 668 dead suckers were collected from Carry, Alder, and Blake Brooks.

The effects were not confined to a brief episode of visible mortality. Fish were seen drifting passively downstream, weakened and near death; blind, dying trout were found floating in the same condition more than a week after the spraying. The account makes the delay and persistence part of the evidence: the chemical’s consequences could remain apparent after the application itself had ended.

A Portent for Salmon Country

The observed fish deaths did not establish that Maine’s important salmon spawning streams had already been sprayed; the text explicitly says they had not been included in the relatively small treatment areas. Instead, the brook observations serve as a portent of what might follow if spraying reached waters on which the salmon runs depend. In a state where those runs were already a hard-won remnant, the prospect of adding chemical injury to pollution and habitat damage carried particular weight.

Maine’s significance in the book lies in that tension between a control program still limited in extent and an ecological warning already visible downstream. The fish in the brooks turn a prospective risk into a concrete local observation, while the unprotected spawning streams remain at stake. The episode thus frames the future of forest pest control as inseparable from the future of the fisheries.