How many bears are too many? We may find out soon, as Maine’s bear population is at a very high level and continuing to grow.

It’s one thing to watch bears on your computer screen, compliments of Maine’s Wildlife Research Foundation’s new bear cam. It’s another experience entirely when a bruin shows up in your backyard.

Maine’s chickadee checkoff may fly away if the legislature’s Taxation Committee flushes it off the roost in the state income tax form where it’s rested since 1984.

A bill ordered up by the Taxation Committee was printed on February 16, with the support of most committee members. It repeals the chickadee and all other voluntary donations now on the Maine income tax form.

Howard Trotzky of Bangor played an historic role in cleaning up Maine’s rivers and defining the future of the North Woods. So I wasn’t surprised when they trotted Howard out on February 16 for the legislative hearing on a bill to reform the Land Use Regulation Commission (LURC), the planning and regulatory agency for the unorganized territories.

They can’t scrape together a nickel, and now, as the state’s budget slips further and further into deficit, the prospects for Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s getting any new public support from the state’s General Fund this session appear to be long gone.

Actually, this beleaguered agency has never received the public funding it needs to fulfill its mission for all the people of Maine, even when the state budget was flush. This session, the term “flush” is only relevant to where the entire state budget is going.

Strolling around the neighborhood or the woods this time of year, you see lots of bird nests, no longer hidden by foliage.

Avian Architecture will identify the birds that made those nests and give you lots of fascinating insights about how those birds design, engineer, and build the nests. And I’m not exaggerating when I use the word fascinating. I found this book, written by Peter Goodfellow and published by Princeton University Press in 2011, to be amazing.

We’ve got a lot more of Maine’s number one tourist attraction than we thought. And I’m not talking about lobsters or lighthouses. I’m talking about moose, the ugly beast that has been the subject of controversy since the moose hunt was reestablished in 1980.

Eight years before I was born, Leon Leonwood Bean published a hunting, fishing, and camping guide, sort of an all-purpose how-to book that LL predicted would take no more than 85 minutes to read.

That book has been republished this year by Down East Books for LL Bean’s 100th anniversary, with updated information from LL’s grandson, Bill Gorman. Amazingly, given how long ago this book was published, much of it remains pertinent and helpful today.